#139 Theology & The Story Of Modernity - Dr. Zahir Kolia

Speaker 1: As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat. between you and me, us. We wanna talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of The Malcolm Effect and joining me today is, I'm truly blessed and fortunate to be able to call this individual a friend, a brother, a comrade, a teacher. I've been trying to get them on for such a long time, but they have been avoiding me and ducking me, but they finally agreed to come on the show and bless us and grace us with their presence. So thank you so much and welcome. Long, long, long overdue to the first time on The Malcolm Effect, Professor Zaheer Kolia. How are you?

Zaheer Kolia: I'm doing well. I'm so blessed to be here. Thank you so much. I've been wanting to come on for a long time. There's so many different things I suppose we could, yeah, that we want to talk about and stuff, but I'm excited for this one.

Speaker 2: I'm really excited, and I know my listeners will be aware that I have moved into more of a series, right? Three-part series, because as much as one conversation is good, but to really dive into the issues and have a conversation, I think it requires a few conversations. So this is going to be a topic that... that both of us find dear to our research interests and dear to ourselves as individuals, as we will be discussing the questions of theology and modernity and the theological underpinnings of modernity. So before we go into the plan of the episode and I ask more substantive questions, my first question is to let our audience know So what is it about these questions that intrigue you? And how did you arrive that you find yourself researching these questions and asking these questions?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, in the broadest sense, and I'll get into it with my background, I suppose, being in post-colonial theory, which I guess the Marxist-Leninists will cringe a little bit with that, right? And then my background also being in decolonial theory, And then also gravitating towards world systems theory. The question of the theological was never really adequately taken up, really in the broadest sense, right? And 1492, which we're going to talk about, becomes really, really important to the story. And I think my interest in it was the way 1492 unfolded. was really being framed, particularly around the Americas. And so, you know, if we start in 1492 Americas, for me, and that was a lot of the emphasis with especially decolonial theory, I think what I found were really mistaking and intensification for the point at which imperialism suddenly appears. And what it seemed to me is that what appears as a sudden rupture is in fact the outward expansion of structures related to conquest already being forged within Iberia itself and what today is basically Spain and Portugal. And also back in like 2012, I did a Islamic decolonial theology course, met a lot of really cool people, and that helped me also set some of the connections to thinking about these broader questions around imperialism, modernity, and theology.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that response. And I think oftentimes, I mean, people will be familiar, obviously on this show, we talk about imperialism a lot. But I think oftentimes missing from our discussion, and I think October the 7th has been a watershed moment because we had so many people asking the question. there has to be something that keeps the Palestinians so steadfast. And I think we tell an incomplete story of modernity and how modernity unfolds when we don't reckon with the theological questions. That's why I'm really excited to have this conversation and this series. I'm not into, it's not like I'm not trying to proselytize. But I do think it's important that we talk about theology and the theological underpinnings of modernity to understand motivations, to understand how a belief in God or a particular understanding of a religion orients you in particular modalities and ways of being in the world and ways of relationality as well. So my first question for you, Professor Kolia, why start with medieval Iberia to understand imperialism?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, I think, like I mentioned, really the short answer is starting 1492 Americas, you're really going to mistake something important. And I think it's coming to thinking medieval Iberian 1492, but going a little bit earlier, opens a question to thinking about sovereignty. and asking why sovereignty is theological in its origins. And if we ask that question, it really opens up a pathway to think about, for me anyways, conquest. And sovereignty does not precede conquest, but rather it's being constituted through it. So we can think about conquest as something buried in the past, but reworking Patrick Wolfe a little bit, we can say conquest is a structure, not an event. So that means it's not just a moment that happened and happened once and just ended. It's a way of organizing life, power, economics and knowledge that continue to shape how our world works today. And when we think about conquest, I wanted to be very clear. It's not simply stating that the non-West was simply acted upon. But for me, when I think about conquest, it also includes translation. appropriation and the reorganization of knowledge and practice into imperial forms that then present themselves as being universal. So when we think about the fall of Andalusia in 1492, it marks a lot more than the end of Muslim rule in Iberia, what's today basically Spain and Portugal. What it does, for me, it signals the formation of a theological imperial structure that links Christian doctrine, imperial sovereignty, and the emergence of a global order. And these effects really do remain with us. I think to address all this, I'm hoping your listeners will be patient and you'll be patient with me, because I think before really getting into thinking about medieval Iberian 1492, I feel like working through several frameworks is important. So, you know, working through Antony Engie's work, working through ideas on sovereignty, decolonial theory, as I mentioned, and world system analysis before we really get into it. And I think from sort of that point and thinking about some of your previous episodes and thinking about Bikram's stuff around imperialism and the denial of sovereignty, I think that's maybe a good way to enter the conversation, to think about imperialism. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2: So carry on, let's go into that frameworks, right? Let's go into those frameworks. So when you are approaching this question of theology and modernity, who are your interlocutors and what are some of the theories?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, so entering into it, if we're going to pivot off the question about imperialism being about the denial of sovereignty, and folks can obviously listen to that one, I think for me, and where it brings us to the different frameworks and the lens to think about that, is that the question is, how did Europeans come to imagine sovereignty in a way that made this denial both thinkable and even necessary? And I think for a lot of folks, it's not enough just to say that Europeans simply believed that other people were inferior. And therefore, you could deny other people's sovereignty because ideas just don't fall from the sky. Like people, did they just wake up one day and decide to deny other people's sovereignty? And I don't think I'm not saying Bikram like makes this simplistic intervention. It goes obviously much deeper. But I think folks often, especially some mainstream decolonial trends, will take this as an assumption. And I don't think that's enough to really just start with the notion that Europeans believed others were inferior and therefore you deny their sovereignty. And I think to give an answer like that would be something more akin to an answer like Hegel may give, right? Like history as a pure folding of pure ideas. And that really misses a point. And I think really to understand imperialism, we have to ask what historical material and theological conditions make the denial of sovereignty really thinkable in the first place. And so getting into the frameworks, I think, It will be useful to go through Anthony Angi's work.

Speaker 2: So even before we get there, let's even have more of a basic question for the listeners. When you say theology, when you say the theological question, what do you mean?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, so typically theology will be formally thinking about the nature of God, the existence of God, God's attributes. When I'm thinking about it in this context, I'm thinking about it not so much in that formal discussion, but thinking about it maybe more slightly as a branch of political theology. So how... Religion as a concept emerges much later on, and Talal Asad's work indexes that, and it comes entwined with colonialism as well. But thinking about how theological questions, like questions about the human, the nature of even time, around the nature of the end of times, like eschatology, these things really entwine with how people are viewing political questions and different questions around human variation and Connections between folks, so you have Christians encountering Muslims, encountering multiple different types of people, and the vocabularies and the lenses they use are very much structured through Christian theology. Right. And so those questions, especially when we're looking at this particular time, we can't use a secular lens and then view backwards just to view all of these processes that unfolded from this time as just unfolding for material interest within a secular frame. Right. Or to look back at just say modern bio evolutionary notions of race. and then to read it back and to say these folks were just operating through racial categories to understand sovereignty. I think one has to really account for, again, those theological questions, those religious questions about the human, the nature of life, the nature of existence, meaning those things become the foundation through which people are viewing the world and how they encounter difference.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. So let's talk about the story of 1492, 15th century more broadly. We see there are sets and series of processes in which Europe is responding to. And then we see after that, the kind of birth of the Westphalian state, modern state system in which there is a declaration of, you know, a respect for sovereign territorial boundaries, right? But then we also understand through the work of Anthony Anghi that sovereignty or sovereign doctrine, also with Seba Grovergi, it has this kind of metamorphosis of that when it reaches the peripheries or when it reaches the third world, it becomes something else. Its actualization is only through a particular type of domination. But I think before we even talk about the encounter, Do you want to unpack a little bit for the listeners? What is taking place in Europe at this time before the kind of age of discovery?

Zaheer Kolia: So before we have the age of discovery, yeah, I think that's, to work into that question about Europe being like a completely, like in a peripheral situation. I think getting to that place is useful maybe before that to work through the decolonial and the world systems folks. because that sets the stage to really think about that moment, and to work through Angi a bit. But I mean, it's up to you. Do you want me to think to go through that sort of material context of what was happening before 1492?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that would be good, if that's possible. I think that would be just to kind of give people context.

Zaheer Kolia: Okay, so to give people a slight context. Okay, so long before 1492, and I'll come back to this with regards to world systems analysis and decolonial theory, that we have to understand that Christian Europe, the idea of even Europe hadn't emerged, right? So we're using this term as a category to be a little bit more intelligible, but long before 1492, Christian Europe was not the center of anything. It was really like a poor crisis ridden corner of a much larger Afro-Eurasian world that was still dominated by Islamic, African and Asian powers. So late medieval Europe went through what is described as a feudal crisis. So you had population decline, you had reoccurring famines, peasant uprisings, declining feudal revenues. And so it was a world where the old agrarian and feudal arrangements were coming under just like enormous strain, right? And so Iberia sits inside of that story. And as I mentioned, Iberia is just like a geographic location, basically Spain and Portugal. And I'm going to mention Castile and Aragon, which are really important players in this. And they're two really powerful medieval kingdoms within Iberia. So today they're regions within Spain, but they're not separate kingdoms and And what we see before, well before 1492, is that Castile and Aragon, it didn't enter the 15th century as strong industrial powers. They lacked significant manufacturing capacity. So in world systems terms, they belong to the semi-periphery. They're plugged into wider trade networks, but they're dependent on wealth and institutions generated elsewhere. And this is where Andalus really matters. And so, while much of Christian Europe is basically struggling with these feudal contradictions, Andalusia was tied to Sudanic gold roots. Funneling through West Africa, you had gold through what is today like Mauritania, Algeria, and it was flowing into the Mediterranean. And that gold really sustained a vibrant Mediterranean commercial economy that linked North Africa, the Western Sudan, the Islamicate, and eventually European markets. So, Where the feudal crisis hit other regions hard, Andalus was really at least partially isolated from this. On top of that, when we think about this sort of moment where what is understood as Europe being put in these different feudal crises and decline, we have from roughly the 8th to the 11th centuries, you have really Muslim, expert Muslim horticulturists. and farmers. So we have both small and large-scale agricultural expertise. And they engineered an agricultural revolution in Iberia. And they introduced and refined irrigation systems, new crops, hydraulic technologies like animal-driven water wheels, and built really dense networks between cities and the surrounding countryside. So when the Christian kingdoms start to advance south, they're not just conquering Muslim territory in a really abstract sense. They're really trying to solve a material problem. Right. And because they're not at the center of anything, as I mentioned. And so they're really trying to target a region that has already high yield agriculture, sophisticated irrigation infrastructure, well-developed road to market networks infrastructure. and key access to gold routes that connect them to a wider set of world economies. So the conquest of Andalusia is not only about expelling Islam, it's really about seizing land and redirecting an existing infrastructure of wealth. When we think about that, the Christian monarchs at this time, when they start to conquer Andalusia in light of this wider feudal crisis that's plaguing Europe, They have three different options that they could take. And the first one is they could learn and maintain Muslim irrigation systems and mixed agriculture. Two, they can impose northern European dry farming techniques. And three, they can abandon this intensive agriculture altogether in favor of large scale sheep herding, seasonal sheep herding. And what Castile does is they really prioritize the third option. And so what they do is sheep herding becomes the really dominant mode of economic dependence in the central Meseta, which is like Spain's vast interior plateau. And so they're also their irrigated land gets converted into pasture and barns. Brodel reminds us, he says, this only makes sense in the larger context of wider European crisis. Depressed wool prices, a slowdown of English exports, and a strong Italian cloth industry that really wants raw materials. So the frontier with Andalusia becomes a way for the semi-peripheral kingdom to try to plug itself into these markets. So... The conquest of Andalusia before, when we're thinking about this, are trying to do two things, right? Internally, it's trying to transform the agrarian regime and building up a pastoral export economy. Externally, it's trying to give Iberia a way to climb out of its peripheral status by tapping into trade circuits and gold flows previously anchored in Muslim Spain. So this is where, when thinking about Andalusia in the context... through which it, why it's important. And that's in part sort of the material basis of why and what was happening beforehand.

Speaker 2: And I think that's important, right? Because I think you're situating and locating us in, you know, phenomenon does not just emerge out of thin air, right? No individual, no people are ever abstracted from history. So I appreciate laying out that context. Let's open up and work through some of these frameworks. Right. You mentioned Angi. You've mentioned the colonial theory. Let's work through them. Right. Let's start off with Angi and then we'll go to the colonial. So with Angi now. First. So I guess the question is, what how do you use Angi? How do you read Angi? And what does Angi do for your work as well?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, Angi was really like, the first thing that really stood out to me when I read Angi, and we'll get into it, is more how he humanizes Indigenous people and how he ends up at colonial violent forms of domination through humanization and not the typical story of just like constituting Indigenous peoples as subhuman, that therefore that authorizes the denial of their sovereignty and forms of violent colonialism. That was one of the first things that stood out to me. So before you carry on, why is that important for you? It was important for me in a few different ways. I think dealing and talking about some of these questions with students over the years, I think for a lot of them, when they think about colonialism, it almost has become, for a lot of these students, formulaic. And the formula they seem to have in mind is you have, okay, Europeans are characterized or dominant strands of it get characterized through white supremacy, right? That then translates into a form of understanding the other, whichever group one wants to think about as subhuman, and therefore that authorizes a form of imperialism, and they end up exploiting labor, extracting resources, and colonizing territories. And so when students approach these questions, like they often approach it with that logic, which is almost like mathematical, right? And then when students then go to a solution, and this is the important thing for Angie here in your question, is that for them, a lot of the times the solution is, okay, if the non-European is understood as subhuman, then we need to understand them as human. And I'll often have students fall on like a colorblind approach It's a really liberal set of ideas, right? That if we can just understand everyone as human, like I don't see color, I just see human beings, then we're going to actually unlock the key to forms of imperialism and Western domination. And reading Angi, I think, is important because it's like, look, if you want to start with with the question of humanizing the non-European, you can still get and land on the exact same place of like butchering violence, resource extraction, territorial expropriation. Like you get to you can get to the same thing. And I think for students, when I when I teach this. they often miss that part of it and how it can come through that vector, a moral vector of sort of humanizing the non-Western subject.

Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I do. I think that's important, actually. Okay, but I think a question that is somewhat axiomatic then is, After asking, after laying out historical context and the work that Anghi does in Undoing, there's something central to Europe and the politics of Europe that create particular forms of relationality as it pertains to sovereign. A question then is, though, we know that there are theological debates and differences, right? We know the story of Dominican and Franciscan and Vitoria as well. So I guess, yeah, how are you reading these figures and how do they sample when you're thinking about these questions?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, so let me go, and it'll tie to your previous question too, right? So thinking about Enge maybe questioning and how he calls into question the Westphalian sort of myth, and then to get into these questions that you're asking now, like what were some of the theological questions underpinnings of just a victorious thought and then how they're understanding human variation and how this impacts this notion of sovereignty and imperialism. Right. And so I think like Angie shows that the usual Westphalian story, that's to say sovereignty first, colonialism later. He's saying this framing gets it completely backwards. Right. So international law and the sovereignty doctrine didn't expand fully formed in Europe and it wasn't just applied outward. So it really managed, it emerged from Europe's attempts to classify and manage issues around human variation and really fundamentally jurisdiction. And what you get, you ultimately dominate peoples that cannot mutually recognize as equal. So sovereignty, as we know, it comes into being through the colonial encounter. And once we see that, this is for me where the theological dimension becomes unavoidable. The very distinction between who could be seen as sovereign and who could not was articulated through Christian categories of reason, salvation, law, and just war. And so Angie gives us a way to really excavate how theology, law, and imperial power crystallized together at the birth of modern international order. So when we think about this, the theological question, that becomes key. And Angie makes just like a really, I would say, simple but powerful argument. He's like, we can't understand the modern idea of sovereignty, the very foundations of international law, without looking at its colonial and, again, its theological roots. So the traditional story that we know, and this is the one that we question, international law is about creating order among already existing sovereign states. Supposedly began in Europe with the Peace of West, a failure in 1648, and then it gets extended to the colonies. And this is what you alluded to earlier. And so in that view, imperialism is just more of a side episode, something that happened after sovereignty was already established. And Angie, why he's so, I think, compelling is that Angie, he flips it. He just says, no, like international law wasn't created to manage relations among equals. It was born through the colonial encounter, through conquest and an effort to define and control equality. those who are not recognized as sovereign. And with that, he uses that dynamic of difference, this constant distinction between civilized and uncivilized is really what produces sovereignty. And for me, the thing, Vittori is so fascinating because he stands really at a historical threshold. And this will cut into your question a little bit more directly because he's a Dominican theologian. And he's really trying to understand and figure out how Christian Europe should legally and morally respond to the so-called discovery of the New World, which at this point happened about 40 years prior. So Enge doesn't really emphasize this, but what I really want to emphasize to your listeners is is that Victoria was part of the Dominican order. And this is so important. And I think completely, I think very much neglected, right? So Dominican theology, it really reshaped the grounds on which Spain could claim authority over indigenous peoples. And Dominicans, they're named after Dominic de Guzman. And it's a Christian order grounded in scholastic reason, the Salamanca school, natural law, and also the thought of Aquinas and Augustine. And so what does that mean exactly? I mean, scholastic reason is the medieval method of using Aristotelian philosophy to interpret and organize Christian theology. So what that means is that these Christian thinkers like Vittoria, They weren't just trying to use, I guess, like preaching theology and just talking about the nature of God and you just have to accept it. They're like, look, we need to actually use rigorous logic and systematic argumentation as opposed to just this method of narrating the gospel. And so this becomes really important. And this is where you get sort of that juridical focus with Vittoria that's really important. And then the School of Salamanca, it's not so much a formal school like with the Manifesto, but you can think about more of a movement. And it was really by a bunch of theologians trying to address really new political, moral, and legal challenges that arose around the time that they're living. So you have the conquest of Andalusia, which culminates in the fall of Granada in 1492. You have the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, and they're having to use legal arguments to think through that. And then, of course, the so-called discovery of the Americas. And so with that, and because Vittoria then is a Dominican, he's really fascinating in this regard. And this is where his Dominican orientation becomes really key here, because he rejects apocalyptic conquests as a legitimate source of authority. And this is really opposed to Franciscans, who I'll mention. It'll become really important in the next episode when we're talking about Columbus. And so Vittoria locates Spanish rights not so much in a divine mandate, but in universally shared natural rights, like the example of traveling, sojourning, or settling, engaging in commerce, and preaching the gospel. And Vittoria does something, like the thing that's really interesting for me too when I read him first is that he rejects papal decrees. He denies that the Pope ever had temporal jurisdiction over non-Christians using divine law. Mm-hmm. And so divine law is what governs relations between Christians and non-Christians, and that was already being put in place through the Crusades and stuff. So what Vittoria does is that he argues that imperial intervention is not justified because indigenous peoples need Christian salvation. He says it's because imperial intervention is justified because they're said to have violated universal legal norms. And so as a result, he's very different from Columbus, who is a Franciscan. And Franciscans are named after Francis of Assisi, and they're in order linked to Christian apocalyptic spirituality, which within itself is a really fascinating and important strand, I think, of Western imperialism and the theological dimensions of it, which we'll talk about later. In Franciscans, especially this figure called Joachim of Fiore, who Columbus drew from heavily, he writes a bunch of different prophecies, and conquest is really rooted in apocalyptic eschatology and what's called sacramental urgency. So meaning... mass conversion of the so-called non-Christian heathen becomes a sign of the end of times. It's part of their eschatology, their idea of the end of the world. But Dominicans, they're different, and they're rooted in the evaluation of conquest and natural law, rational capacity, and the limits of sovereign power. So Dominican theology operated with really a different set of assumptions. But the thing that's so important is that they ultimately end up endorsing Spanish imperialism. They arrived there through like a different circuit than the Franciscans and someone like Columbus. Like forced conversion is invalid. War cannot be justified to spread faith and evangelization like has to follow persuasion and not conquest. And also this is really important for understanding Las Casas because he's also Dominican. Right. So he ends up also authorizing Spanish imperialism by humanizing indigenous peoples. And he's often propped up. And in my classes, even in grad school, people would often raise him as a counterpoint. Right. To be like, well, not all Europeans were bad. You had Las Casas humanizing and defending indigenous peoples. Right. And so that's the point that I was getting to, connected to earlier too, where students often fall on this idea where like humanizing becomes the answer to opposing colonial capitalist relations, but it's not. Like you can humanize and end up in the very same place, right? You get there through a different circuit, but that's key to understand. So anyway, so with Dominicans and Franciscans, like they're two theological lineages, these two Christian orders, like really profoundly shaped early Western imperialist thought and practice. And so that sort of going into that little sidebar, which I think is so key, like when we think about Vittoria as a Dominican, like he's thinking about jurisdiction quite heavily because of the things I just mentioned. He's not just thinking, okay, they're non-Christian, they're non-Christian, therefore we have a divine mandate to Christianize and convert them and take their stuff. Right. Like he's thinking about the novelty of so-called discovery. And he's writing and sort of paraphrasing here. He's like Indians of the new world had never been known before to our world. And he's a little bit he's thinking through this, I think, in a sincere way. Right. And then for him, this is like an entirely new situation that traditional forms of divine and canon law can't handle. Right. So just for your list of like divine laws, unchanging moral principles. unchanging moral will revealed to humanity by God. And canon law is a church's changeable legal system. And he's saying these two forms of law, which have really long histories, he's like, they don't really apply here. And so partly why he's so important and fascinating, like he clears the ground for an entirely new type of law. And it's a universal natural law, again, influenced by his Dominican orientation that could apply to all humans by reason. And that's where, you know, just gentium, the law of nations. And this move is so crucial because this is where like so-called secular international law, it really emerges within a theological framework. And so Vittoria's importance here, it's that he really develops a set of ideas that shape how Western powers authorize domination right up to the present, right? And he really universalizes Western practices as a norm. If you've colonized folks like want recognition, they have to conform to European standards of law, reason, and civilization, right? And again, it's not the typical story of just dehumanizing Indigenous people, right? He humanizes them to an extent. And it's through their humanization, they claim that they have the capacity for reason, that domination becomes thinkable and actually enforceable.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, that becomes really important. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: No, absolutely. I think these are some of the, you get the liberal accounts of these stories, right? I remember growing up in school, similar. It was like, oh, you know, Europe did some bad stuff, but then William Wilberforce came along and, you know, we don't have scientific racism anymore. And, you know, but I don't think that gets into like the categories. And I think I really look forward to speaking about secularism as we go forward as well. I know that's connected as well, but bringing back to today's focus, um, Okay, so let's talk about, we mentioned Angi, you mentioned the theological differences. I think what was striking to me in that, the differences of theology still culminated in a justification of colonialism. So how do we understand that? How do we understand that they're different? Some humanize, some say they didn't have the ability to reason, but then they both justify and accept colonization of the other. Yeah.

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, so with Engie's work and looking at Vittoria in particular, he's saying, okay, he insists that they're human, that they possess reason. And this is precisely why they're bound by just gentium or the law of nations. And because they have reason, they have to allow the Spanish to travel, sojourn, trade, and preach the gospel. And they're reading this through, like Vittoria and others are reading this in relation to the account of Noah's Flood. The flood and Noah's Ark and the ideas that, you know, the violation, it would be a violation not at those times, not to allow others to travel and trade and sojourn. And so you're getting this, the emergence of secular international law becoming the outcome of a reconfigured set of Christian theological understandings and ideas. Right. And so what what happens? And I think the thing that's really important is like Vitoria almost sounds and I think people can misread it is it kind of sounds like promoting equality between Spaniards and indigenous peoples. Right. But what it does, it just licenses endless Spanish intrusion and expansion. And so what starts out as what seems like harmless, like a right to travel, to sojourn or settle and preach the gospel, becomes a whole system of obligations, actually, that Indigenous peoples are guaranteed to violate. And if they resist, and this is what's really important, they violate universal law. Any act of resistance becomes an act of war. And so that's where it's a no-win situation. So to give a more concrete example, Vittoria says if a community tries to keep outsiders out or expel them once they've entered, that act alone counts as war. So any indigenous attempt to resist Spanish presence, no matter how you say reasonable, automatically becomes aggression. And once resistance is framed as aggression, Spain is justifying and defending itself. So every encounter becomes a pretext for retaliation. Every act of so-called defense expands Spanish control. And this is like the parallels here with Palestine are so clear. It's like resistance gets framed as aggression, and then you have Israel justified in itself, and it becomes a moral actor in defending itself and further encroaching on Palestinian land. And this is where the ties back to these questions become so important. This is where that sovereignty doctrine takes place, right? And with that, like even the authority to declare a just war, which becomes a defining mark of sovereignty, saying like Indigenous peoples can never legitimately wage war. They can never be sovereign. And this is theological, right? And you hear it, right?

Speaker 2: How do you make an account? How do you have an account of when you hear things like Amalek, right? Those from the Zionist entity are saying things like, we must strike Amalek. We are the children of light and they are the children of darkness. And this war is in defense of quote-unquote Western civilization. And I'm saying to people, believe them when they say that. All right. Because it actually is when we say, when we're saying that they are killing anybody who is up in resistance to land being taken, this has a greater history. And that's theological as well, because again, why would you invoke the Bible in this? I'm sorry, in the Torah, right? They invoke the Torah oftentimes. So I really do appreciate you laying that out.

Zaheer Kolia: Go ahead. Go ahead. And then with that, we know in terms of what's happening in Palestine is completely underpinned and armed by the U.S. in particular with U.S. imperialism. And the ones really advancing those connections, they're framing those connections through the readings of the Bible, right? Like Christian nationalists and stuff. And they're not like... even those at the centers of power within the upper echelons of the U S state, it's just like regular, a lot of regular folks and their understanding of Christian theology and the way they'll read what's happening in Palestine. Right. Like it's, it's, it's often in support and it translates into a form of Zionism or like a confusion. Like they're not like, but it's, it's what saying like these, these are so deeply connected. And when people say, we've talked about this before, right. When people will sometimes say like, Palestine has nothing to do with religion. It's like, no, it has a lot to do with religion. And if you want to say it has nothing to do with religion, and therefore, this is not everybody, but sometimes people say, like, we have to look to international law or international legal norms to think about these questions. Like, those themselves, as Vittoria and Angie is looking at, those themselves are completely steeped in and emerged from theological forms of power. And I think that's where it's really important to say the theological or the religious and the secular are not separate. And I think this is what's really important with Talal Asad's work. And this is where he's saying the secular doesn't replace the religious, as though one worldview simply supersedes another. Really, the secular is a historical configuration of religious concepts, practices, and sensibilities into new forms of authority.

Speaker 2: And I can't wait for us to go into that more because I think that's going to be a whole episode because so many folks are talking about, you know, this question of after genocide, right? We want a quote unquote secular state. You hear this amongst activists. You hear this amongst people on the left, right? And I'm just, I clutch my pearls when I hear this. I'm thinking, no, I don't want secular state. I don't want secularism. Secularism is what you have in France. And there's no mistake why they're so harsh against the hijab and so harsh against the niqab, right? That's not like a bug in the system. That's a feature of the system, right? That is the system working, secularism working. We see what France has ushered in and other European far-right countries at least have ushered in. So let's go to... Sorry, I want to give you, do you have a last thought on Anghi before we go to the colonial thought on world systems?

Zaheer Kolia: No, no, I think, no, I think we, I think we sort of, I think we went through. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Brilliant. Okay, cool. So then now we have what is cited in the academy as the decolonial term. And I know people make a distinction between anti-imperialism, decolonization, decolonial thought. When I hear decolonial, I'm thinking of a particular emergence in the Latin American school that takes the question of 1492 seriously and talks about the kind of constitution of the modern subject, right? Yeah. And when we talk about world systems, we're talking about Gunda Frank, we're talking about Samira Min, we're talking about Arigli and Walter Rodney and others, right? And it's also important that a lot of these... And Wallerstein, right? It's also important to note that a lot of the time when they're talking about world systems, just a point of knowledge, they're looking at the world from the vantage point of Africa as well. I think that's also important just to say when you think about the kind of... what underpins and undergirds world systems and how it was made possible to emerge, right? It was from looking at history and the world from the vantage point of Africa. But for the purposes of our episode, what does, yeah, so how do you, I guess, use decolonial thought, world systems? What have you identified as the possible limitations when we're talking about the story of modernity from these perspectives? Yeah.

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, and this is where I think both traditions are really important, and I think they really help us think through these entanglements between theology, imperialism, sovereignty, and modernity. I think they're looking at the same thing through different angles and slightly different lenses. And I think both traditions really help us unpack how power really operates through long durations. I think that's really key. So how categories like the human and sovereignty get made and remade, reconstituted, and they both really help reveal why the pattern set in motion before and after, like the discussion we had in Victoria, still shaped the political order we live in today. And I think, though, at the same time, is when I read them and folks that are really deep into either one of these traditions or both is, I mean, it takes a long time to work through them. Like you listed a whole bunch of authors, right? Working through any one of these traditions, you can say- No, of course, I didn't.

Speaker 2: I've never said to, yeah, we can never, that could be a whole encyclopedia, right? Working through all these people. But I think just to kind of, I guess, point it down a little bit or bring it down to our discussion or- So how does it kind of feature in your work, and how do you use these figures in trying to tell the story?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, and I think part of what you said was useful, and listing all the different, the range and the wide spectrum of them, and then try to maybe boil it down to some of the key features. And I think through my time working through them, my confusion working through them for a lot of times, I kept thinking, well, how do these theological sorts of conversations questions and forms of power impact these processes right and i never thought i didn't think either of them really took them sort of properly into account so let me let's let's start with them this is this is what you uh like sort of were asking right so let decolonial thought we can start with that and so in its broadest sense the tradition looks at how colonialism didn't just seize land It reorganized knowledge itself. The knowledge question, or what's called the epistemic question, becomes really important to decolonial folks. And one of the key figures for me is Anibal Keanu, and he called this the colonial matrix of power. So the notion of coloniality that he emphasizes is that there's no modernity without the colonial matrix of power, or what's called the CMP matrix. And that corresponds to a global epistemic hierarchy. So that means like the privileging of Western ways of knowing, being and governing while making everything else seem local and particular. And so a concrete example of this would be like, you know, Malcolm's work and Fanon's work may be located in the black study section of a library, but not in the philosophy section. Right. It's seen as particular. Yeah. It's not seen to be universal in the same way that you'd see Hegel or Locke or Plato. You wouldn't see them in a very particular strict section necessarily. They'd be in philosophy, but seen as completely universal. And that's part of what decolonial folks are trying to think about. Like, how do different forms of thought get particularized? And how do others and other worldviews, in particular Europe, their worldview comes to stand in for the universal? And so another important figure here is Enrique Dussel. There's many others, but Dussault is important. In his book, Inventions of the Americas, he argues that 1492, the so-called discovery of the new world, and you alluded to this, it doesn't just mark the rise of European colonialism, but the birth of modern subjectivity itself. And so he shows how a Western man comes to see himself as the center of the world, economically, politically, even spiritually, through the colonization of the Americas. And so when he says that 1492 is not a discovery but an invention, he's making, I think, a really important point. Like the modern European I, the self that says, I think, I reason, I rule, was born through conquest. It's through the colonial encounter. And we need to remember that before 1492, like we mentioned, it wasn't the center of the world. It was marginal, late-coming culture. And it was within a larger Mediterranean world, really still shaped by Islam, Africa, Asia, right? And Latin Christianity was really learning from others, right? It's really through the conquest of the Americas and the conquest of Andalusia and the enslavement of indigenous and African peoples that the balance really shifts. And so what Dussault calls the European ego, this modern sense of self emerged from moving from the margins to the center through domination. So Europe doesn't simply expand outward. It reinvents itself as a world's new axis of power and center of meaning. And Dussault traces this. through three main figures. So you'll trace it in his book through Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, where we get the word America from, and Hernán Cortés. And for him, it's essentially like each stage reveals how Europe remade the world in itself. And just to put it really succinctly for your listeners, Columbus invented, Vespucci discovers, and Cortés conquers. And they all together sort of form the hidden underside, what Mignola would call it, the underside of the modern world. So when we speak about modern subjectivity of the European eye that grounds modern thought, we're really talking about a self-forging conquest. And so, I mean, for me, I think that's incredibly useful and important. And what struck me, and I'm curious to know what you think as well, is that I think most decolonial thinkers really focus their story in 1492 with the Americas, right? And how, at least for me, a lot of mainstream decolonial folks that I've encountered often will focus on how the non-West has acted upon. And just to be fair, Dussel wants to talk about what he calls a planetary approach to examine how non-Western forms of thought were appropriated. But that's often neglected. And so for me, I really wanted to know what made 1492 possible in the first place. And when I did, I really came back to Andalusia. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: So that was, okay, that's the decolonial times. And now let's talk about world systems.

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah. So to really understand then again, like how 1492 becomes possible and how Europe really shifts from a marginal zone to the center of a global order, I think world systems analysis, I understand is another tool, a really important tool. And I think in some senses it's broader and it centralizes the materiality of imperialism with a really strong analysis of capitalism. And I think decolonial thought, at least I think it's how it was developed and taken up, it really focuses more on the question of how coloniality reorganizes knowledge. They really focus on the epistemic question and often issues around representation, which I think frustrates a lot of folks who are more oriented toward a materialist analysis and more oriented towards world systems analysis, right? And so world systems analysis for me, I don't see it as being a necessary in opposition to decolonial thought, but I think it helped me zoom out in a really a better way to capture the material question of imperialism. So world system thinkers, and you alluded to them like Arrighi, like Wallerstein, like really remind us that societies don't exist in isolation. I think that's one of the keys or simple but key insights that they provide. And they suggest that societies are part of, really, it's like larger networks of trade, power, and exchange that stretch across regions, and it also stretches across centuries, right? So instead of treating Iberia or Africa, Asia, and the Americas as separate stories, world systems analysis really helps us see how they're always already connected long before Europe imagined itself as universal. And then that brings you really back into zooming out, and it can be a bit overwhelming, right? But I think to really, for your listeners to understand what world systems analysis is fundamentally about, I think there's two key ideas that really fundamentally underpin it. And so the first is that history moves through cycles, okay? So long ways of expansion and contraction. And Arrighi, he takes Marx's general formula of capital and he uses it to describe not only how individual capitalists invest, but how capitalism develops across centuries, right? And that's where he takes Marx's general formula of capital, like MCM prime. And then he applies it at like more of like a world systemic scale. And so he argues that each major epoch of capitalism begins with this long phase of material expansion. So you have large amounts of capital flow into trade, production, commerce, and sets more and more commodities into motion. But then that when that phase begins to contract or runs into crisis, another phase emerges and you get financial expansion. So here capital sets itself free. as it were from commodities and it seeks profit through credit speculation and financial deals. And so for Rigi, this financial movement really marks the maturity and typically the decline of a dominant capitalist power. And then this eventually gives way to a new cycle of accumulation, but led by a different center. So together you get these sort of systemic cycles of accumulation. And I think for me, that's really useful as having the sort of larger framework to understand a lot of these world historical processes. Right. And then I think the second part that's important here is that these cycles are structured by hierarchy. So core regions enrich themselves by exploiting peripheral ones. And over time, what happens is that these different powers rise and fall through these systemic cycles of accumulation that Arrighi lays out. And then what you have is that these patterns emerge where you have capital power and violence really migrate from one center to another. And he starts with the Italian city states. For me, I think the Iberian empires are really important. Then he also moves to the Dutch, to the British, and later to the Americans. And so through this lens, I think world systems analysis just really makes the important claim that Christian Europe in the medieval period, again, it wasn't a world empire. As I mentioned, the decolonial folks really take that up as well, right, to see that. And so I guess just to really put it maybe a little bit simply to bring these two together, is that what you have is decolonial thought really helps us see how modernity or coloniality not only sees land, but extracted resources and exploited labor. Like it didn't only serve that function, but it reorganized knowledge. And it really sought to erase or particularize other ways of knowing and being. World systems analysis, I think, can work with it to show how colonialism and imperialism really organized power and economic circuits across regions and centuries through cycles. But for me, I mean, it took a long time to work through these different frameworks. And then when I came out the other end, and this is where my research currently lies, is I think the theological question is really obscured or neglected. And that's why I wanted to, I don't know if I'm on an island here, but this is what I feel. I'm not sure if you have the same experience with that.

Speaker 2: No, no, I think, no, I agree with you. And I think that this is the importance of the work that you're doing, right? Because I do think the question of theology, and I think it's important because it's also back on the table again. I think after October the 7th, we're having these questions of theology again. And we're having about, you know, these notions that we call like, okay, if we were to bring about a socialist revolution, there's certain... Ideology is certain practices, certain forms of relationality that have to be informed by something else that's not capital and neoliberalism. So that's why I think even, I think sometimes we can have a conversation about theology and people think it's like, you know, it's just theory or it's just abstract or it's just ideal. But I think what I'm hearing the argument you're making is that no, like they are material processes and material impacts. Theology has a materiality to it as well. And I think that's important that we kind of ground that in this discussion. But then you've worked through this and then theology is missing. So why is theology missing in these accounts?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, I think in part, I think there's something larger structuring. And this is what I think there's a core thesis that runs throughout a lot of decolonial word systems analysis. I mean, some people may disagree, but I think there's the religious decline thesis. And I think this is really like a core assumption. And I think this way of thinking really assumes that Christian or religious and secular ideas belong to separate worlds, that they're incompatible. And that modernity develops, as modernity develops, the secular naturally pushes religion out of public life, out of how we produce knowledge about life, governance, and economy. And so it often just becomes understood as like a moral justification or a moral veneer. And that's never been very satisfying for me, right? And so... What I found is that folks who do questions of epistemology really well, they don't focus on the material questions so much, and they don't typically have the strongest analysis of capitalism. In a sense, they feel like the material question may subordinate the knowledge question or an analysis of subject formation by focusing on the material question. And then in there, there's some room to think about theology, but I think it becomes captured by that religious decline thesis I mentioned. The idea is time goes on, like the secular just sort of pushes it out of the way instead of thinking about it, how Tawal Asad thinks about it, where the secular emerges through the reconfiguration of religious and theological discourses. And then with that, I think folks that do Marxist critiques of capitalism really well, they often don't do the question of epistemology maybe so well, but I think it's deeper. They actually see this focus on epistemology as really obscuring the material question with the focus on identity and representation. And I think that's fair. but a different discussion. And I know when I do talk to folks that are more into like the epistemic question, like they really do want to engage with the material question, but it is also a confusing terrain to work through as well, right? But I think, again, anyways, like bringing these two together, I don't think they completely adequately decolonial and world system analysis. They don't necessarily see theology as a major force that really shaped the trajectories of imperialism, right? And I'm not saying they don't take it up at all, because you have like Mignolo talking about the spiritual option, Dussel, I mean, he has a book, The Theological Metaphors of Marx, and he does think about theology like Wallerstein to an extent as well. But they haven't taken it up in a way that I see it being understood as really a constitutive force in shaping these dominant colonial capitalist relations. And then when you do, I think there's different questions that begin to get posed that may get sidelined, right? And yeah, that's where I would fall on that.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. No, absolutely. I think it's, again, we're trying to tell a complete picture of... of modernity. And I think if you don't focus or ground yourself in the theological, I think you have an incomplete analysis, if I'm being honest. So I do appreciate. So we're speaking about Al-Andalus, 1492, the expulsion of Muslims, right? And oftentimes when this is spoken about, we hear of this as the reconquista, right? Europe taking what is rightfully theirs from these Saracens and these heathens, Muslims, right? And I know in your work and how you understand it, this is an invented term, right, that comes quite later. So I guess my question is, why, two questions. Why is Reconquista historically false? And how does dismantling this myth change our understanding of Spain?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, yeah, that's such a key question. I think whenever anyone hears the term Reconquista, you need to challenge that term directly. Like it was invented in the 19th century to create a nationalist myth of Spain as eternally Christian. So it's really part of a nationalist discourse. And what it does is directly linked to Islam because it imagines Islam as a foreign occupation, a real dark interruption between Visigothic Christianity and modern Spain. And that's not at all what happened, right? And when you reframe it and take it and contest the Reconquista framework, you get a different telling of the story, right? So what actually happens when we look at this through a different lens is that for three centuries after Rome's collapse, the Iberian Peninsula was ruled by Visigothic tribes, which basically plundered through Europe from Germany and settled into the region, right? And in 589, the ruling elite, this is really important, they abandoned Arian Christianity. And Arian Christianity is a Unitarian theology that denied the Trinity. And so when King Riccardo embraced the Nicene Creed and imposed Trinitarianism and formed a Christian kingdom with Toledo in its capital, it was really huge because what it did, it aligned the Visigothic kingdom more closely with the broader Latin Christian community. And so when like going back to that nationalist myth that emerges in like the 19th century, what's being done is an attempt to link this Western Latin Christian tradition with the Visigoths and with that their incursion into the Iberian Peninsula. Right. And again, when they were Unitarian Christians to begin with. Right. And the thing that's important, too, in the theological valency of this is that, like, there was already Jewish communities living within the Iberian Peninsula, right? And the Visigoths, like, they were brutal. Like, they denied their religious rights. Tens of thousands were forcibly converted to Christianity, and those who didn't were sometimes sold into slavery or with young children. I think usually, like, around seven years old would be raised as Christians. And you have a series of different edicts in the 690s that articulate some of these things. And there's reports, too, of the Jewish communities revolting around 17 years before the Muslims even arrived. And so with this, yeah, go ahead, Mamadou, sorry.

Speaker 2: No, no, no, I was just agreeing with you. I was just saying that, yeah, please carry on.

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, so when Tariq ibn Ziyad and his Berber army crossed the narrow strait in 7-11 from Morocco, they didn't come in and wipe out a civilization. There's a fundamental transformation. So this is where, again, contesting the notion of reconquista, because it assumes that when the Muslims came in 7-11 that this was within itself a conquest. And this is where questioning that becomes really important. And what we see from the historical record is that really Islam spread through gradual conversion and political integration. It wasn't through mass invasion or forced conversion. So Andalusia was really a fusion between Arab, Berber, Visigothic, Jewish, and Hispano-Roman peoples. And it became one of the most important centers of knowledge at the time. You had paved roads, hospitals, libraries, irrigation systems, translation schools. You had expert farmers and horticulturalists that I mentioned before, like the Moore's as they were known, introduced novel agricultural techniques, introduced new crops like sugar, rice, lemon, silk, and coffee. And under the later Cordovan Caliphate, under Jewish communities, they experienced a remarkable flourishing. This is the time when you have like the Jewish enlightenment. And so many Jewish people had like prominent roles in Muslim courts, including Samuel Haneget. And he was a poet and influential vizier of Granada. And David Wasserstein points out that the greatest Hebrew poets of the Middle Ages, Judah HaLevi, Ibn Gabriel, Moses Ibn Ezra, They're all Iberian. And major Jewish thinkers such as Yehuda Halevi, and he's the author of the Kuzari, and Maimonides, who wrote The Guide for the Perplexed, they produced some of the most important works of Jewish philosophy in this period, in the Iberian period under Muslim rule. So when people talk about the so-called reconquest or reconquista, it's like a deliberate erasure of this truly multicultural Islamic past. It's a real theological rewriting of history to claim purity and continuity. Right. And Charles Herskin, he wrote like an interesting book on the feeling of history. He's talking about the Iberian Peninsula. He was a student also to Al-Assad. And he talks about this as a myth of reconquest. And so what it does, it binds Spain's national unity to a really militant Catholicism. And it turns the expulsion of Muslims and Jews into a divine mandate, like a type of internal crusade. And that is, that logic is what really travels later on to the Americas, right? And this is where, like, if you just focus on America's 1492, if you just focus on that, you're really gonna, you miss, again, what's leading up to it, right? Which is so key, like what's happening in Andalusia. Yep.

Speaker 2: And yeah, and to be fair, we've spoken on this podcast with Zuba, actually, Zubaira Wai, Professor Zubaira Wai, on this question of what, what do you foreclose when you focus on 1492? And I think that's important that you raise that. So we also know that the figure of Alfonso X figures quite significantly in our thinking when thinking about these questions. But I guess for people who might not be familiar, I think people might have heard this name. They might have heard La Casas. They might have heard Victoria, et cetera. And I think it's nice that we're actually laying out, okay, we're putting theory, ideas, knowledges to these figures. So I think in a similar vein, Yeah, tell me about Alfonso X. What ideological world did Alfonso construct? And how do legal and theological codes intertwine?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, Alfonso is a really fascinating character. And what it does, it's like really centuries before the final conquest of Granada. Christian rulers in Iberia, they really were working hard in this connection or discussion we just had, like really, really working to affirm the idea that only Visigothic Christians had a legitimate right to rule the peninsula. And what they had to do is, like, they have this crusading mindset. This is shaped, again, already by long traditions of anti-Muslim polemics. It was already really well established, right? And so by the 13th century, this sort of theology of hostility had been taken up maybe most aggressively by Alfonso, known as El Sabo or the Wise. And he was the king of Castile and Leon from 1252 to 1284, right? And this idea, we see again, just to make that quick parallel again to Palestine, the enormous amount of cultural productions that are put into trying to advance a Zionist narrative. right, at a cultural level. And we know, obviously, at the military, like material level. And this is like a parallel thing happening at the time when they're just doing everything they can to suggest that the Visigoths were the only rightful rulers and that, therefore, they should expel the Muslims and Jews, right? So what Alfonso does is he very openly frames Islam as heretical, as a heretical affront to God. And he produces texts that become quite popular. And one of the texts produced under his patronage, he writes... Something to the effect, like the Moors are people who believe in Muhammad and that he was a prophet, a messenger of God. But he says, actually, the acts he performed didn't show the sanctity required of such a calling of a prophet. And his religion is essentially an insult to God. So he's very forthright. in his really aggressive casting of Islam, right? So the political project is really clear. Like his strategy is to say, if Islam is illegitimate, then Muslim rule in Iberia must also be legitimate. And so he builds like an entire ideological program around the central claim. And that's where he commissions these really big works. The Historia de España, which is like a really big sweeping historical narrative. And then he also has like a book of laws called the Seven Divisions. And it's an enormous legal code that shaped Castilian law really for centuries. So he's working at like a cultural level with producing a history and then producing and articulating these ideas right into law itself. And within his historical account, he personally supervises this narrative and he weaves together Roman and Visigothic history in order to really justify his own authority. And he traces Spanish history from Noah's time to our own. And so this is what he's suggesting. He's recounting the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Visigoths, and then finally the Arabs. And the crucial move that he makes in his Historia de España is that he says only two of these dynasties Only two, the Romans and the Visigoths, are presented as legitimate rulers. All the others, especially the Carthaginians and the Arabs, are treated as invaders from Africa, as foreign intruders who violated the divine order by seizing Christian lands. And here, Alfonso inserts himself into the story, and he portrays himself as a living embodiment of both Roman emperor and Gothic king. He's the rightful heir to Iberia. By contrast, Islamic rule is cast not only as foreign, but morally abject, heretical, and demonic. And then what ends up happening with this, it reflects a broader Christian imperialist imagination. And the way this particular form of Christian imperialism, I suppose, interpreted other religions, It's like Nelson Maldonado Torres, he says, like, Christianity often reduces Judaism to rigid legalism, right? And then Islam is reduced to pure violence. So what happens, you flatten out these traditions into these really one-dimensional characters, and he calls this a misguided phenomenology of religious experience, right? So in medieval Castilian thought, Judaism and Islam are not seen as rival traditions, but as corruptions and, like, even religious pollutants. And so he really, what he does is he directs just an incredible amount of vitriol, particularly at Prophet Muhammad. And then what he tries to describe is death in humiliating fashion. He says he was obsessed with power and sensuality, and he's contrasting this with the Christ figure who scorns worldly temptation. And so what this does is that he's trying to say if Muhammad is a fraud, then Islamic rule in Spain is fraudulent too.

Speaker 2: And it's not only at a, yeah, like at a cultural level.

Zaheer Kolia: And you can see the strategy, right Mamadou? Like where he's, the way he's attacking it in a very particular way to create a particular cultural narrative around it, right?

Speaker 2: But what he does, he goes even deeper.

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, and he goes deeper, right? Because then in his book of laws, he takes those larger discursive or cultural ideas around Islam, and then he codifies it as both a type of military danger and like bioreligious threat. And so what it does, it ends up really culminating into laws around conversion and apostasy. And so five out of the ten laws in this section deal with Christians who convert to Islam. And they could lose their property. They could be put to death. And then even after their death, they could still be accused five years later. up to five years later. And for those who convert to Islam and repent and return to Christianity, they face permanent civil disabilities. They can't testify in court, they can't hold public office, they can't inherit property. And then sexual relations was another massive concern for him. So the idea is if a Muslim man slept with a Christian virgin or a widow, he would be stoned to death, and then she would lose half her possessions. If she was married, they would both be stoned to death. They'd both be executed. Yeah, but if a Christian man slept with a Muslim woman, there was no penalties. So the absence of legal punishment signals that such relations were tolerated, if not encouraged. There's a clear asymmetry here. And what you have in this particular set of laws and ideas is that Christian women's bodies are guarded as the boundary of the community, what he's setting up, and Muslim women's bodies are not, right? And so what you have is Islam being defined as an existential, like, enemy and positioned Christian Castile as the agent of divine restoration, right? So the idea where it comes out of cultural, then into a legal language, becomes important. His idea of, like, invasion by diabolical Africans, especially, like, sets the stage for the triumphant return of Christian kings and the conversion of mosques back into, or masjids back into churches. And this becomes a really important symbolic reversal of Islamic rule, which I saw when I was in Granada, like in that Decolonial Islamic Theology summer course in Granada around 2012. Like you go into all these different churches and there's these really, like very violent histories, right? Where they're built off the ruins of masjids and stuff, right?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think that was brilliantly said, actually. Thank you for that. So we speak about different theories and understandings that privilege and place primacy on 1492 as inaugurating a particular modern world system. That's how it's taken up, at least. My question is to you, and I know it's quite broad, so you can take it in any direction you want. And the final question for today would be, What does 1492 signify for you and what does it, has it featured in your work and what goes into or what constitutes or precipitates 1492?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah, so when I think about 1492, I think about the fall of Granada in particular. And it's like in the same year where you have the fall of Granada and then you have Columbus, which we'll talk about next time. So, I mean, maybe, yeah, to unpack that a little bit with the fall of Granada because it's so key, right? Yeah. Once Castile and Aragon decide that the Iberian Peninsula can never be whole while Granada remained Muslim, what happens? The conquest takes on a really different urgency and intensification. So by the mid-15th century or so, it had become really like a political, military, and deeply theological project. And then the two figures, Ferdinand and Isabel in particular, They frame it as a divine mission, something that will restore Spain, unify Christendom, and cleanse the land of what they described as the last remnants of Islamic rule. And so they go full throttle. And the final war begins really in 1482 with the capture of Alhama. And so for your listeners, Alhama was a key fortified town near Granada that controlled key routes into the kingdom. And when they captured in 1482, this really cuts off Granada from really the rest of the different principalities. And it was a sign that things were quite irreversible. And what ends up happening is that you have a simultaneous set of different things happening. Like you have a crusade. You have a strategy for territorial expansion and plunder and a wave of popular Christian migrations into formerly Islamic lands. And so all these processes really reshape the emerging Spanish state. And that's like 1492 indexing sort of the emergence of the Spanish state in this way becomes really important for me as well. And so with that, the rise of these different armies and the rise of a nascent state, there's a real huge push also for religious reform. And this is where I think a lot of listeners would be at least aware of things like the Inquisition. And a central figure here, he's a Franciscan as opposed to a Dominican. He's a Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros. And he was Archbishop of Toledo. He was the Inquisitor General. And he really embodied sort of how theology and power fused together in late medieval Spain. And what he does, he really intensifies conversion and doctrinal purity, and he really targets Jews and Muslims through new catechisms, surveillance, coercion. And this is really fascinating for many different reasons, because it has like an interesting backstory, because for centuries in particular, Jews in Spain, they held really important roles in finance, commerce, and administration, right? And what happens around the 13th and 14th century and onward is that their status really declines really sharply. And part of this was tied to economic crisis. Right. But much of it grew out of Christian anxieties around money lending. So the church and a lot of people don't know is that the church really banned Christians from charging interest, which is something fundamental, like in the Islamic tradition. Right. And they rooted this interpretation in parts of Luke, and it was reinforced in church councils. And so what happened is that a lot of Christians were really relying on Jewish moneylenders. And this is where you get this, like, partly all these stereotypes emerging around Jews, right, in Europe in particular. And you get, like, this first caricature of, like, the stereotypical Jewish person with a hook nose showing up in like 13th century in an English tax receipt, I believe, right? So it was the Christians like using them in this way, right? But what it did is that their dependence on them because Christians were using them as money lenders because it was theologically sanctioned in their eyes, it turned into like deep resentment and violence, right? And so by the 13th and 14th century, you have like massive riots and forced conversions spread across Castile, You have synagogues destroyed, and you have these things happening. And then what you have is they force them to convert, and these converts are known as conversos. And they often rose in really high political and even ecclesiastical positions in the church. And this is going to be really important when we think about Las Casas. There's this fear in the air about these false converts, that people just converted just to save their own skins, but they're working against... They're working against the dominant sort of political order. And so the Muslims, they end up facing something very similar. And so there is the same thing. What you have is this deep suspicion and fear of Muslims already nurtured, like I mentioned, through years, Crusades, Alfonso, etc. And what you have after 1480 is you get the Spanish Inquisition. And they really turned their attention to conversos, which are the Jews that converted and moriscos, Muslims who converted. And they accused them of secretly practicing Islam and Judaism. And so the thing that's important, I think, to clarify is the jurisdiction of the Inquisition was really reserved for Christians. And it punished heresy and apostasy. But it's real. Its main function was to go after these what we call the crypto Muslims and crypto Jews. And they also even went after some Catholic mystic orders. So when they're when they're doing this, a lot of decolonial folks will often read. around this moment. So like the doctrine of purity of blood or Limpizia de Sangre is that you have this purity of blood discourse. And so some decolonial folks would be like, this is the origins of modern bio-racism. And I don't think it was. Like what it really was, was to distinguish old Christians from those with like Muslim and Jewish ancestry. So it wasn't racial in a modern biological sense. It was like genealogical, linking Christian identity to the Visigoths and their Latin heritage, right? But it just, it had really, really, really brutal consequences. And so just sort of to round out the importance of some of these things that were happening, when Ferdinand and Isabella enter Granada, this is ending nearly eight centuries, like 800 years of Muslim rule in the city. And that same year, They issued the edict of expulsion, ordering all Jews to convert or leave Spain. And so you have maybe like 150,000 to 200,000 Jews were expelled, more were converted. And those who fled, and this is really important, they were welcomed in the Ottoman Empire. And the sultans recognized her economic and intellectual value. And others dispersed across North Africa and Southern Europe. And the ones that went into Southern Europe, they just faced continued expulsions and forced baptisms as opposed to what they faced in Ottoman Muslim lands. The thing that's really interesting, too, is Jacques Derrida. He traces his lineage to Andalus, where his family eventually ends up in Algeria. And this really shapes the method of post-structuralism, which... has come to have, like, a really huge influence on post-colonial theory. And then a lot of decolonial Marxist folks, like, love to hate post-structuralism in particular. But, like, it has this really interesting backstory, right, to it.

Speaker 2: That will be another episode in which we discuss post-structuralism.

Zaheer Kolia: Oh, I can't wait.

Speaker 2: That'll be another one. We'll do one on post-structuralism. I think the way you explain it is, I think you were describing me that I have a bit of an antagonistic relationship to it. But when I've heard it from you, I think you might have semi-converted me. Yeah, sometimes I'll bring it up for fun too.

Zaheer Kolia: Like with some Marxists, I know I'm like, oh, do you want to hear about post-structuralism? And I'll see their face literally like cringe up.

Speaker 2: No, but sorry, I cut you off. Please finish your point. And then please, I want to, yeah, in the last couple minutes that we have left, please finish your point. And also, if you want to leave listeners with like three or four things that you take from this episode, what would they be?

Zaheer Kolia: Yeah. Okay, cool. So talking about you have this, what happened to Jewish folks in Iberia, and then they get expelled. So thinking about what happened to Muslims, right? So Cisneros, this figure that I talked about, he was really frustrated with what he saw as slow voluntary conversion. So he orchestrates mass forced baptisms, and he boasts of converting thousands in a single day. thousands of Muslims in a single day. And then those who resisted faced exile, their dispossession or the Inquisition. And so by the end of the 15th century, the Muslim population was about like over 5 million in earlier centuries. And it had been reduced to a few hundred thousand by that time. This is like millions and millions of people forced to be converted, killed, exiled, right? And so in regions like Aragon, Morisco's made up over 90% of those targeted by the Inquisition. So when we talk about the fall of Granada, we're talking about much more than a military victory. It was really like a multi-century project. There's a theological purification of Iberia, the consolidation and emergence of state power, and then really a violent restructuring of society through conversion, exile, and surveillance. All of these would really create the ideological, discursive, and administrative machinery of It basically like the blueprint that Spain would really carry into the Americas. Right. So 1492, what happens is like it's not the end of one history. It is really the blueprint for what comes next in the Americas. Right. And that's where when I say like reading decolonial folks and the way in which it just like America's just sort of pops in as this key moment, which it is. I was like, I don't think you could really quite grasp the importance, the theological character of it as well without really understanding what was happening beforehand. Right. And then I guess just like really briefly, there's a few other things like three months after Granada Fall. So this is in 1492. This is in April. The crown signs the capitulations of Santa Fe, granting Columbus these extraordinary privileges for a westward voyage. And a few months later, he sets sail in October, he lands in what would be known as the Americas, and what he called the Indies. So for Spain, this is not a break of the past. This is an extension of a sort of crusading imagination. And the thing that's really interesting is that Spain was actually going to go What they wanted to do is they wanted to push their crusade across into North Africa. And their goal initially actually was to outflank Islam and secure the southern flank of Iberia and extend Christian rule into the Mediterranean, like into Morocco and North Africa. That was what they were going to do. And they actually launched a whole bunch of different expeditions. And it looked like in a moment in history that North Africa was going to be Spain's next frontier. And then that changed like dramatically because once the news of Columbus came back to the crown, their entire geopolitical horizon completely shifted. Like the so-called new world promised like so much, I guess, more like North Africa for them. It promised prestige, but not that much wealth. The Americas, right, the so-called New World, like it promised like silver, land, and essentially souls, right? And so America became a much more fruitful field of like empire, like a place where Spain could continue its crusade, accumulate wealth, and spread the gospel. And what really emerges from this is that you get like conversion, conquest, and capital become fused in this system, right? And this is where Columbus sort of becomes a hinge, right? And so that's really key to thinking about some of these processes and what could have happened at one point historically, right? And so for your final question, Mamadou, sorry, like I don't want to ramble on too much in each section.

Speaker 2: Don't apologize. No, no, no, no, no, please. This is a masterclass, guys. Listen, guys, surround yourselves with people who are smarter than you. You see what you get? So carry on, please.

Zaheer Kolia: No, thank you. Thank you, bro. So what we get, I think some of the main takeaways, right? It's like, look, the conquest of Andalus, it was not a reconquest. And it was not just a chapter in medieval history. It's really the blueprint, I think, for Western imperialism. It taught really like Europe how to conquer in God's name and how to fuse salvation with sovereignty. And that logic, it really didn't stop in Granada. When we're talking about the fall of Andalusia and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain, it's deeply theological. And when they expelled particularly the Muslims from Spain, they expelled all of their expert agricultural expertise. And that's what Dussel and other writers and also Wallerstein say, like Spain completely... I guess short short circuited its ability to develop as an industrial power. And we'll talk about that sort of next time in the next podcast, because the expulsion of these different communities, it wasn't just like in terms of its its its anti-Islamic and anti-Jewish character. Like it did something like fundamental to its economy. Right. And it's placed within the emerging world, world economy, world colonial capitalist economy, because Spain ends up completely falling behind. Right. So we'll talk like all the consequences of this are quite profound and major. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Well, I think this is a great introduction. I know it's, for the listeners, I know it's a longer than usual episode, but I think given the kind of complex nature of these histories that we're marshalling, that Professor Zaheer Kohli has marshalled, required this length of episode. But I will end it here. I know we have number two and three, but I think you laid out a brilliant introductory episode to our topic. So guys... I would highly recommend engaging with Professor Zahir Kohliya's work, which you will, and I get to know him. I'll send, please check him out online, check what he's written as well. And then you'll be hearing more from him. So thank you once again, Professor. I look forward to speaking to you again and take care.

Zaheer Kolia: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.