‘Islam is Magic; Magic is Science; Science is Empire’
Dec 20, 2024 6:00 pm
By Robert Spencer
18 Comments
New in PJ Media:
What are your tuition dollars buying these days? Well, let’s see. At the University of South Carolina, you can learn all about how “Islamic Magic” can be used both as a weapon against the evil Western world and a remedy for the damage it has done. Yes, this is the kind of thinking that gets formerly ordinary kids joining Antifa and living in pup-tents for Hamas.
Matthew Melvin-Koushki is “Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of South Carolina.” He “specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the wider Persianate world to the nineteenth century.” He has a couple of books in the works about Islam and the occult, and he is “also cofounder of the international working group Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise (IOSOTR).”
A busy academic, Melvin-Koushki is also a canny self-promoter, saying in his bio that his work “constitutes a new analytical framework for the study of early modern Persianate societies specifically and Western early modernities generally—one that retrieves Islamic Magic as ultimate stumblingblock and hence weapon and pharmakon against the violently colonialist yet still endemic story of the Rise of the West.”
Got that? “Islamic Magic” is a “weapon” against the evil colonialist “story of the Rise of the West,” which is “still endemic.” Apparently Matthew Melvin-Koushki means by this that the West, where he makes a comfortable living as a professor, is still “violently colonialist,” and that “Islamic Magic” can still be used as a weapon against this violent colonialism. If he has any plans to move to place where a practitioner of “Islamic Magic” might be more comfortable, he has not disclosed them. Apparently, he intends to continue living right in the belly of the beast.
His bio goes on to explain how the Islamic world was far superior to the “much smaller and rabidly insular Latin Christian Far West” by the sixteenth century, but that “radically disproportionate, eurocentric, orientalist and occultophobic historiography of early modern science” maintains the hegemony of the inferior West.
Spanning fully two-thirds of the human race by the sixteenth century, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, the Islamic world was committed to Western, Neoplatonic-Neopythagorean cosmology as philosophical-imperial technology to a degree unparalleled by the much smaller and rabidly insular Latin Christian Far West, as Melvin-Koushki has shown. Yet the latter remains hegemonic in the radically disproportionate, eurocentric, orientalist and occultophobic historiography of early modern science, teleological touchstone for all other human (and nonhuman) ways of knowing and doing in the world. To break this colonialist curse, he has found several counterspells to be especially effective: Magic and the Weird, Persian Pythagoreanism and the Occult-Scientific Revolution, Occult Humanism and Islam-as-the-Greater-West, Cosmic Philology and the Superhumanities….
There is more. Read the rest here. |
