"Dabashi makes a compelling claim in the epistemic violence created by “The West and Islam” that fits suitably in the ongoing work of decolonial scholarship."
Reading Religion
"The precise and thoughtful interdisciplinary approach in <i>The End of Two Illusions</i> offers a vital contribution to perspectives on international relations, conflict, and dialogue. This text should be read by anyone involved or interested in understanding the reality of global political and cultural relationships in the twenty-first century."
Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
"Dabashi, a prolific and respected scholar, smashes this illusory binary in his impressive but challenging book."
CHOICE
Extending from the front-page news coverage of our daily lives back into the deepest and most revelatory histories of the last two hundred years and earlier, Hamid Dabashi's The End of Two Illusions is a daring, provocative, and groundbreaking work that dismantles the most dangerous delusions manufactured between two vastly fetishized abstractions: "Islam" and "the West." With this book, Dabashi shows how the civilizational divides imagined between these two cosmic binaries have defined their entanglement—in ways that have nothing to do with the lived experiences of either Muslims or the diverse and changing communities scarcely held together by the myth of "the West."
Through detailed historical and contemporary analysis, The End of Two Illusions untangles the motivations that produced this global fiction. Dabashi demonstrates how "the West" was an ideological commodity and civilizational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicenter for the rise of globalized capitalist modernity. In turn, Orientalist ideologues went around the world manufacturing equally illusory abstractions in the form of inferior civilizations in India, China, Africa, Latin America, and the Islamic world. The result was the projection of "Islam and the West" as the prototype of a civilizational hostility that has given false explanations and flawed prognoses of our contemporary history, with weaponized Islamophobia on one side and militant Islamism on the other as its most palpable manifestations. Dabashi argues it is long past time to dismantle this dangerous liaison, expose and overcome its perilous delusions, and reimagine the world beyond its shimmering mirage. The End of Two Illusions is the most iconoclastic work of critical thought and scholarship to emerge in recent memory, clearing the way toward a far more liberating imaginative geography of the world we share.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Future of Two Illusions
I · The Colonial Catalyst
1 Islam in the World
2 “The West”
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of an Illusion
3 The West and the Rest
Condition of Coloniality
II · The Return of the Repressed
4 What’s in a Name?
5 The Monologue of Civilizations
III · Where the Twain Have Met
6 Gendering the Difference
From Metaphoric to Metamorphic
7 De-racing Civilizations
8 Nations beyond Borders
Conclusion
“The Inverted Consciousness of the World”
Epilogue
2021: After Gaza and Afghanistan
Notes
Index
"'Islam and the West' is a gnoseological invention (not a 'representation') cast in the binary logic undergirding the idea of Western Civilization. Dabashi's convincing and powerful argument is the call to extricate ourselves from this and all binary illusions that shatter thinking in order to manage subjective and intersubjective relations."—Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations
"Dabashi, with all the erudition of a distinguished scholar, takes on and demolishes a fiction that has long been accepted as truth: that something called the 'West' and 'Islam' actually exist. This book both pushes back against mainstream and right-wing authors and takes on scholarly work that falls into the trap of creating an essentialized West. It then draws on millennia of history to expose the limitations of the 'Islam and the West' framework. This brilliant book is an important intervention at this historical moment when the empire of capital has assumed new forms to legitimate itself."—Deepa Kumar, Professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University and author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years after 9/11
"In this gripping text, Dabashi advances a new materialist, post-Saidian perspective to dismantle the ideological foundation of the all-too-familiar binary 'Islam and the West.' The End of Two Illusions is a powerful antidote to Samuel Huntington and the epistemological apparatus of the 'clash of civilizations.'"—Asef Bayat, Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Dabashi draws on his probing and erudite oeuvre to chart an emancipatory path beyond the illusory West-Islam binary."—Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, author of Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates