Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

244This brings one, finally, to Anouar Majid’s argument in Unveiling Traditions:Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World 71 that there is a strong affinity between secularism andcapitalism. Secularism, a post-Enlightenment ideology, reduces religious thought tofundamentalism, which is the excess the system wants to eradicate. The hegemony ofmodernization and secularism precludes any plausible understanding of the Orient and other non-Western societies. Majid states that “the project of demonizing Muslim others meets variousinterwoven ideological needs, including the control of third world resources and persuadingcitizens of Western societies, through manipulated differentiation and consent, that they aremembers of a superior civilization” (138). Melville’s modernization program, however, is part ofa larger program that tries to tame the Orient and redefine Islam.Majid argues that Orientalism and Enlightenment ideals are all formulated in aEurocentric paradigm which is ideologically and historically associated with capitalism. He positsthat “postcolonial theory has been particularly inattentive to the question of Islam in the globaleconomy” (19). Secularism and utopian cosmopolitanism as advocated by Said are, according toMajid, idealistic concepts that cannot withstand the capitalist system. He thinks that “the status[Said] confers on the migrant or the exile as the best situated intellectual and contrapuntal readerof culture in the age of global capitalism” is not convincing since postcolonial intellectuals, whoare inside capital and outside the realm of the outsider looking in, are but products of Westernimperialism. When the postcolonial intellectual does not put into question his/her secularassumptions, s/he cannot speak for and in terms of his/her society. Staging this inability to speakas a missed encounter, Orientalism portrays this failed encounter as discontinuity, subscribing tothe Foucauldian conception of the individual as an effect of power relations.