The Location of Anticolonialism; or, Al-Afghānī, Qāsim Amīn, and Sayyid Quṭb at the Peripheries

Abstract

Abstract Recent decades have seen a turn toward colonialism and anticolonial thought in the discipline of political theory. This turn has done the crucial work of bringing questions of dispossession, racialization, and the critical imaginaries of marginalized bodies of thought into the mainstream of the discipline. The expansion, however, has been marked by a tendency to typecast the archive of anticolonial thought with a handful of figures. This article examines the edge of the archive, or three thinkers who are only at its margins. They are Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, Qāsim Amīn, and Sayyid Quṭb, each of whom occupies a central place in the archive of modern Islamic thought. The article reads the peripheries of their works, tracing the arcs formed by their incidental references to places around the world, and, ultimately, probing their location in anticolonialism and contemporary critical thought. The article calls this double method of selection and interpretation periphereia.