{"id":4995,"date":"2017-02-19T17:42:09","date_gmt":"2017-02-19T17:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/?p=4995"},"modified":"2023-05-30T23:58:13","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T22:58:13","slug":"are-soas-students-right-to-decolonise-their-minds-from-western-philosophers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/2017\/02\/19\/are-soas-students-right-to-decolonise-their-minds-from-western-philosophers\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Soas students right to \u2018decolonise\u2019 their minds from western philosophers?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The prestigious London University was the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas). It hit the headlines last month when journalists discovered that students, backed by many of their lecturers, have set up a campaign to \u201c<span style=\"color: #005689\">Decolonise Our Minds<\/span>\u201d by transforming the curriculum.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><!-- GUARDIAN WATERMARK --><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/education\/2017\/feb\/19\/soas-philosopy-decolonise-our-minds-enlightenment-white-european-kenan-malik\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Guardian\/Pix\/pictures\/2010\/03\/01\/poweredbyguardian.png\" alt=\"Powered by Guardian.co.uk\" width=\"140\" height=\"45\" \/>This article titled &#8220;Are Soas students right to \u2018decolonise\u2019 their minds from western philosophers?&#8221; was written by Kenan Malik, for The Observer on Sunday 19th February 2017 09.00 UTC<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cT<\/strong>hey Kant be serious!\u201d, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-4098332\/They-Kant-PC-students-demand-white-philosophers-including-Plato-Descartes-dropped-university-syllabus.html\">spluttered the <em>Daily Mail<\/em><\/a> headline in its most McEnroe-ish tone. \u201cPC students demand white philosophers including Plato and Descartes be dropped from university syllabus\u201d. \u201cGreat thinkers too male and pale, students declare\u201d, trumpeted the <em>Times<\/em>. The <em>Telegraph<\/em>, too, was outraged: \u201cThey are said to be the founding fathers of western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society. But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that figures such as Plato, Descartes and Immanuel Kant should be largely dropped from the curriculum because they are white.\u201d<\/p>\n<aside class=\"element element-pullquote element--supporting\">\n<blockquote>\n<p>Whiteness is not a useful category when talking of philosophy. When people speak, they speak ideas, not identity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n<p>The prestigious London University was the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas). It hit the headlines last month when journalists discovered that students, backed by many of their lecturers, have set up a campaign to \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/soasunion.org\/activities\/society\/8801\/\">Decolonise Our Minds<\/a>\u201d by transforming the curriculum. So shocking did the idea seem of a British university refusing to teach Plato, Locke or Kant that the story was picked up by newspapers across the globe. BBC2\u2019s <em>Newsnight<\/em> debated whether \u201cuniversities should eschew western philosophers\u201d. This predictably generated more <a href=\"http:\/\/www.express.co.uk\/news\/uk\/752279\/Kehinde-Andrews-Enlightenment-racist-BBC-Newsnight-SOAS\">outraged headlines<\/a> when one of the guests, sociologist Kehinde Andrews, denounced Soas as a \u201cwhite institution\u201d and the Enlightenment as \u201cracist\u201d. <\/p>\n<p>For academics and students at Soas, the press coverage itself is the cause of outrage. \u201cWhen the report came out that we were trying to take white men off the table, it was just bewildering because we had no intention of doing that,\u201d says Sian Hawthorne, a convenor of the undergraduate course World Philosophies, the only philosophy degree that Soas provides. \u201cOur courses are intimately engaged with European thought.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re not trying to exclude European thinkers,\u201d says a second-year doctoral student, and a member of the Decolonising Our Minds group. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to desacralise European thinkers, stopping them from being treated as unquestionable. What we are doing is quite reasonable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So what is the truth behind the headlines? Will philosophy students at Soas really not be taught Aristotle and Kant? Do the students and academics have a point that the curriculum is \u201ctoo white\u201d? And what should be the place of European philosophy, and European philosophers, in an age of globalisation and of a shifting power balance from west to east?<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image\" data-media-id=\"02f9ab15fce08be969354ae39c68ee78698e87af\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/02f9ab15fce08be969354ae39c68ee78698e87af\/0_457_6000_3172\/1000.jpg\" alt=\"A statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvaroutside the School of Oriental and African Studies\" width=\"1000\" height=\"529\" class=\"gu-image\" \/><figcaption> <span class=\"element-image__caption\">A statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar<br \/>outside the School of Oriental and African Studies.<\/span> <span class=\"element-image__credit\">Photograph: Alamy<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<aside class=\"element element-pullquote element--supporting\">\n<blockquote>\n<p>On my course in political theory we discussed 26 thinkers. Just two were non-European<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n<p>I went to Soas to talk to students and academics. \u201cThat\u2019s the one thing,\u201d one student told me, \u201cthat no journalist has so far done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>T<\/strong>he School of Oriental and African Studies was founded in 1916 \u201cto secure the running of the British Empire\u201d, as historian Ian Brown puts it in his <a href=\"https:\/\/www.soas.ac.uk\/news\/newsitem115783.html\">history of the institution<\/a>. Its aim was to provide \u201cinstruction to colonial administrators, commercial managers, and military officers, but also to missionaries, doctors and teachers\u201d. Soas taught them the local languages as well as providing \u201can authoritative introduction to the customs, religions, laws of the people whom they were to govern\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Today, of the more than 6,000 students at Soas, almost half come from abroad, from 130 countries, and more than half are black or minority ethnic. Far from teaching students how to administer the empire, the school now helps develop independent, postcolonial societies. It sees its mission also as providing a critique of empire, and of its continuing legacies, a view that extends to the very top of Soas management. \u201cOur minds are colonised, absolutely,\u201d says Deborah Johnston. Johnston is no student, nor even a mere academic, but the pro-director of learning and teaching, one of the most senior management figures at Soas. She continues: \u2018\u2018In most UK universities there has been a dominance of European thought. That\u2019s why we need to do work to decolonise the curriculum, and our minds.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For some, such views emanating from the very top of the institution entrench the belief that, in the words of an academic at another London college, \u201cSoas is the most politicised of British universities\u201d. Others, however, see the problem not as one of an institution that is too politicised but as one that has not yet rid itself of the ghosts of empire. The curriculum, such critics claim, is still too rooted in a colonial view of the world, too stuffed with European thinkers, and too blind to African, Asian and Latin American thinkers.<\/p>\n<p>Neelam Chhara is a third-year politics student at Soas, and the Student Union officer for \u201cequality and liberation\u201d. \u201cOn my course in political theory,\u201d she says, \u201cwe discussed 26 thinkers. Just two were non-European \u2013 Frantz Fanon and Gandhi.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Such \u201cfrustrations with our curriculum\u201d led students to set up the Decolonising Our Minds group. \u201cWe thought: why not show what an alternative curriculum could look like by hosting thinkers and academics that didn\u2019t centre on Europe like our curriculum was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n<aside class=\"element element-rich-link element--thumbnail\">\n<p> <span>Related: <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2017\/jan\/10\/soas-students-study-philosophy-africa-asia-european-pc-snowflakes\">Soas students have a point. Philosophy degrees should look beyond white Europeans | Tom Whyman<\/a> <\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>Meera Sabaratnam laughs when I tell her about Chhara\u2019s reading list. \u201cThat\u2019s two more non-Europeans than when I was taught political theory in my undergraduate PPE at Oxford.\u201d Sabaratnam is a lecturer in international relations at Soas. As an institution, it is, she says, much better than most universities. For instance, 39% of academic staff are of black or minority ethnic background \u2013 more than three times the figure for British universities overall. Nevertheless, she supports the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/DecolonisingOurMinds\/\">Decolonising Our Minds campaign<\/a>. \u201cIt is necessary to talk about colonial legacies and to look at how colonialism and racism impact the institution.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The argument for a more diverse curriculum seems reasonable, indeed unquestionable. After all, philosophers and thinkers come not just from Europe. There are great non-European intellectual traditions, myriad philosophical schools from China, India, Africa and the Muslim world, many of which have shaped European philosophy. Three years ago I wrote a book on the global history of ethics, called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/243018\/the-quest-for-a-moral-compass-by-kenan-malik\/9781612194837\/\"><em>The Quest for a Moral Compass<\/em><\/a>, which drew not just on European philosophers, but also on the works of Mo Tzu and Zhu Xi, Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, Anton Wilhelm Amo and Frantz Fanon, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Fung Yu Lan. All these different thinkers, I wanted to show, can be woven into a single but complex narrative through which we can rethink global history.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, the debate about a \u201cdiverse curriculum\u201d is not as straightforward as one might imagine. Few would contest the idea that European thinkers should not be on the curriculum simply because they are European. But of the major European philosophers that often dominate reading lists \u2013 such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Arendt or Sartre \u2013 how many are there simply because they are European rather than because their ideas merit study?<\/p>\n<p>Sabaratnam acknowledges the problem. \u201cFraming a course is primarily about content: what are the issues that need to be taught, and who can speak interestingly about those issues? How many European thinkers you include and the balance between European and non-European thinkers is an academic decision. If you want to understand political theory, you can\u2019t avoid engagement with Kant, Hegel and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut,\u201d she adds, \u201cthat can\u2019t be the be-all-and- end-all.\u201d There has, she insists, \u201cto be a parallel debate about diversity and representation. There is value in having non-European thinkers and women on those reading lists.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If European thinkers should not be on reading lists simply because they are European, should non-Europeans be included just because they are non-European, solely for the value of increased diversity? Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, and last year\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/articles\/2sM4D6LTTVlFZhbMpmfYmx6\/kwame-anthony-appiah\">Reith lecturer<\/a> on Radio 4, is sceptical. He teaches a course on global ethics, which includes European, Chinese, Arab and Indian thinkers. The key question for him, however, is not \u201cIs the curriculum sufficiently diverse?\u201d but \u201cIs any particular thinker worth studying?\u201d<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image\" data-media-id=\"f02c0772c08a0b748c8d4c8367c2397f69c5dd6e\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/f02c0772c08a0b748c8d4c8367c2397f69c5dd6e\/40_0_1200_720\/1000.jpg\" alt=\"Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), the Martinique-born philosopher whose work is influential in the field of post-colonial studies.\" width=\"1000\" height=\"600\" class=\"gu-image\" \/><figcaption> <span class=\"element-image__caption\">Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), the Martinique-born philosopher whose work is influential in the field of post-colonial studies.<\/span> <span class=\"element-image__credit\">Photograph: handout\/HANDOUT<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cIf they were uninteresting or unimportant,\u201d he observes, \u201cit would not be much of a defence to say, \u2018They are Arab or Chinese and make the course more diverse.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The difficulties in thinking about a diverse curriculum can be seen in the founding statement of the Decolonising Our Minds campaign. It does not say: \u201cWe need to expand our curriculum to include philosophers from across the globe\u201d. Rather, it insists (under the heading \u201cDecolonising Soas: Confronting the White Institution\u201d) that, \u201cIf white philosophers are required, then to teach their work from a critical viewpoint.\u201d This suggests that not having white philosophers should be the default position. This might not quite be \u201cstudents demanding white philosophers be dropped from university syllabus\u201d, as the newspapers claimed, but it\u2019s not that far off.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you put it to me like that,\u201d says Sian Hawthorne, \u201cyes, I think that is problematic. However, I take a more generous reading of that statement as saying whomever is taught, whoever\u2019s work is drawn on, it must always be dealt with critically. That is one of the first principles of a university education.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The students themselves told me that they had not realised what the statement actually said, and would change it.<\/p>\n<p>Do we need to be particularly critical of white philosophers, I asked Hawthorne. Yes, she replied, because \u201cwhiteness has been engaged in perpetuating forms of oppression and marginalisation and exclusion\u201d. Does she think that all European philosophy is tainted by racism and colonialism? \u201cYes. There\u2019s plenty of evidence to demonstrate this.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But by insisting that the work of all white philosophers, from Aristotle to Arendt, from Socrates to Sartre, should be seen as tainted by racism, is she not confusing ideas and identity? Is she not falling into the same trap as racists, suggesting that because one possesses a particular identity, so one\u2019s ideas are necessarily distinct, and linked to that identity? A philosopher is white so his or her ideas are contaminated.<\/p>\n<p>Hawthorne rejects the criticism, and uses as an analogy the way that academics look upon the work of the German philosopher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2014\/mar\/13\/martin-heidegger-black-notebooks-reveal-nazi-ideology-antisemitism\">Martin Heidegger<\/a>. Heidegger was one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, having shaped the ideas of a host of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. He was also a Nazi with repulsively antisemitic views. The discovery of Heidegger\u2019s nazism and antisemitism has led to much debate about how to treat his philosophical ideas.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDo we deal with Heidegger?\u201d asks Hawthorne. \u201cI think we must. But we must do so in the understanding that he was a Nazi. We don\u2019t not read his texts. But we read them carefully. That should also be the case with white philosophers. Just because they\u2019re white doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re written off. But we need to be careful.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This, though, is a false analogy. What concerns many about Heidegger is not his skin colour or his identity but his political views. Asking whether Heidegger\u2019s Nazi views should affect the way that we understand his philosophical ideas is different from insisting that, because Aristotle or Kant or Arendt were white, we should be careful in the way we read their writings.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image element--supporting\" data-media-id=\"c7c324f1422355b8dd2c152e4a83c8972ad66e82\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/c7c324f1422355b8dd2c152e4a83c8972ad66e82\/0_0_2047_2571\/796.jpg\" alt=\"The Heidegger problem: do his Nazi views invalidate his philosophy?\" width=\"796\" height=\"1000\" class=\"gu-image\" \/><figcaption> <span class=\"element-image__caption\">The Heidegger problem: do his Nazi views invalidate his philosophy?<\/span> <span class=\"element-image__credit\">Photograph: AFP\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cWhiteness is not a useful category when talking of philosophy,\u201d says Appiah. \u201cWhen people speak, they speak ideas, not identity. The truth value of what you say is not indexed to your identity. If you\u2019re making a bad argument, it\u2019s a bad argument. It\u2019s not bad because of the identity of the person making it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>P<\/strong>erhaps the fiercest debate about European thought emerges in the battle over the Enlightenment, that sprawling intellectual, cultural and social movement that spread through Europe during the late 17th and 18th centuries, and was the harbinger of intellectual modernity. There is no period of history that has been more analysed, celebrated and disparaged. Unlike, say, the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment is not simply a historical moment but one through which debates about the contemporary world are played out. From the role of science to the war on terror, from free speech to racism, there are few contemporary debates that do not engage with the Enlightenment, or at least with what we imagine the Enlightenment to have been. Inevitably, then, what we imagine the Enlightenment to have been has become a historical battleground.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s become familiar to think of the Enlightenment as special,\u201d Hawthorne suggests, \u201cbecause it\u2019s a constitutive narrative for how the west understands itself.\u201d The Enlightenment, in her view, provides a myth, a creation story, that the west tells itself about what makes it more civilised and the rest of the world more barbaric.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, for much of the past two centuries, the Enlightenment was seen as central to the values of the left, and of those challenging western imperialism and injustice. As the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, \u201cAll progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it, and indeed come out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More recently, however, many on the left have argued that the Enlightenment, far from being a resource for those challenging colonialism, is itself a colonial project. Enlightenment universalism, such critics argue, is racist because it seeks to impose western ideas of rationality and objectivity on other peoples. \u201cThe universalising discourses of modern Europe and the United States.\u201d Edward Said argued in his book <em>Culture and Imperialism<\/em>, \u201cassume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world.\u201d It is an argument central to the Soas campaign.<\/p>\n<p>Soas academics and students argue that Enlightenment thinkers had a highly restricted notion of freedom; freedom as \u201cthe property of propertied white men\u201d, as Meera Sabaratnam puts it. John Locke is widely regarded as having provided the philosophical foundations of modern liberal conceptions of tolerance. Yet he was a shareholder in a slaving company. Immanuel Kant, often seen as the greatest of Enlightenment philosophers, clung to a belief in a racial hierarchy, insisting that \u201cHumanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites\u201d and that \u201cthe African and the Hindu appear to be incapable of moral maturity\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEnlightenment philosophers make arguments about knowledge and reason setting us free, and laud the values of liberty,\u201d Hawthorne observes, \u201cat the very moment that colonial enterprises and the slave trade are expanding. Those very same arguments are summoned to justify Europe\u2019s so-called civilising mission and make claims about European superiority.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The British historian Jonathan Israel, now professor of modern European history at Princeton university, is perhaps the most important contemporary scholar of the Enlightenment. Over the past decade he has published an extraordinary trilogy of books, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.theguardian.com\/radical-enlightenment.html\"><em>Radical Enlightenment<\/em><\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.theguardian.com\/enlightenment-contested.html\"><em>Enlightenment Contested<\/em><\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.theguardian.com\/democratic-enlightenment.html\"><em>Democratic Enlightenment<\/em><\/a>. The size of Israel\u2019s labours is eye-catching. Each work in the trilogy runs to almost 1,000 pages; in total there must be close to 2m words here. There are few who better understand the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image element--supporting\" data-media-id=\"ab372d8ed3efef098a98a2fcf79a3a0f6e0a4508\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/ab372d8ed3efef098a98a2fcf79a3a0f6e0a4508\/0_0_1866_2690\/694.jpg\" alt=\"Supremacist: Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, said that \u2018humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites\u2019.\" width=\"694\" height=\"1000\" class=\"gu-image\" \/><figcaption> <span class=\"element-image__caption\">Supremacist: Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, said that \u2018humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites\u2019.<\/span> <span class=\"element-image__credit\">Photograph: Alamy<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Like many before him, Israel lauds the Enlightenment as that transformative period when Europe shifted from being a culture \u201cbased on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority\u201d to one in which \u201ceverything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophical reason\u201d. Yet, Israel is also deeply critical. At the heart of his argument is the insistence that there were actually two Enlightenments. The mainstream Enlightenment of Locke, Voltaire, Kant and Hume is the one of which we know, and of which most historians have written. But it was the Radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as d\u2019Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and, in particular, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, that provided the Enlightenment\u2019s heart and soul.<\/p>\n<p>The two Enlightenments, Israel suggests, divided on the question of whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the Radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition \u2013 the view of the mainstream. The mainstream\u2019s intellectual timidity constrained its critique of old social forms and beliefs. By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment \u201crejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely\u201d. <\/p>\n<p>I talked to Israel about the Soas debate. The argument that the Enlightenment is racist, he suggests, comes from a one-eyed view, the selective picking and choosing of certain individuals and quotes. Such critics see only the more conservative mainstream figures, such as Locke, Kant and Hume, and ignore the thinkers of the Radical Enlightenment, an approach that Israel calls \u201cseriously obtuse\u201d. The Radical Enlightenment, he observes, \u201cwas condemned by all European governments and by all churches, because in principle it insisted on the universal and equal rights of men and the full emancipation of the black population\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In 1770 a remarkable polemic against colonialism and slavery called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Histoire_des_deux_Indes\"><em>Histoire philosophique des deux Indes<\/em><\/a> (<em>The Philosophical History of the Two Indies<\/em>) was published. Written by a number of Radical thinkers including Raynal, Diderot and d\u2019Holbach, it was both a study of Europe\u2019s relations with the East Indies and the New World and an encyclopedia of anti-colonialism. Arguing that \u201cnatural liberty is the right which nature has given to everyone to dispose of himself according to his will\u201d, the book both prophesied and defended the revolutionary overthrow of slavery: \u201cThe negroes only want a chief, sufficiently courageous to lead them to vengeance and slaughter\u2026 Where is the new Spartacus?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Histoire<\/em> was astonishingly successful, published in more than 50 editions in at least five languages over the following 30 years. But it was only one of many such radical tracts, including d\u2019Holbach\u2019s <em>Syst\u00e8me sociale<\/em>, Tom Paine\u2019s <em>Rights of Man<\/em>, and the works of Condorcet and Diderot. \u201cThis current,\u201d Israel argues, \u201cwas totally at odds with all forms of imperialism, colonialism and racial discrimination or prejudice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Radical Enlightenment was \u201cwithout question the starting point for the anti-colonialism of our time\u201d. In Israel\u2019s view, what he calls the \u201cpackage of basic values\u201d that defines modernity \u2013 toleration, personal freedom, democracy, racial equality, sexual emancipation and the universal right to knowledge \u2013 derives principally from the claims of the Radical Enlightenment.<\/p>\n<p>Israel is sympathetic to the demand that university curricula be diversified. \u201cThere is a strong case for studying non-European traditions as an essential part of any philosophy teaching course.\u201d But, he points out, such a global view began in the Radical Enlightenment itself. \u201cMany radical enlighteners believed their anti-Christian naturalism had powerful roots in medieval Islamic philosophy. They also had strong affinities with Chinese Confucianism. They were free of the Eurocentrism that marked the mainstream Enlightenment of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume and Smith.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image\" data-media-id=\"0985e979acd5bc1ae791176985397b35e3139998\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/0985e979acd5bc1ae791176985397b35e3139998\/0_0_1192_846\/1000.jpg\" alt=\"Jonathan Israel\" width=\"1000\" height=\"710\" class=\"gu-image\" \/><figcaption> <span class=\"element-image__caption\">\u2018Perhaps the most important scholar on the Enlightenment\u2019: Jonathan Israel.<\/span> <span class=\"element-image__credit\">Photograph: Claudia Kamergorod<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cI wouldn\u2019t want to go up against Jonathan Israel,\u201d laughs Sian Hawthorne. \u201cHe is probably the foremost thinker on the Enlightenment. All I would say in response is that there is no single thing that you can point to and say \u2018That\u2019s the Enlightenment\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That, however, is a view that fits more comfortably with Israel\u2019s notions of the two Enlightenments, the mainstream and the Radical, than it does with the claim that \u201cthe Enlightenment is racist\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Hawthorne is right, however, to point to Locke\u2019s failure to challenge slavery and to Kant\u2019s racial anthropology. Such views do seem shocking today. But they seem shocking because of the transformation in consciousness brought about in large part by the Enlightenment itself. In most societies and traditions, European and non-European, the kind of ethnocentrism expressed by many mainstream Enlightenment thinkers was the norm. The Enlightenment helped change that. \u201cI don\u2019t know where you\u2019d get the powerful tools for criticising European colonialism if you did not have the Enlightenment,\u201d observes Appiah. \u201cThe modern idea of equality, the modern critique of inequality \u2013 much of the materials for that idea and for that critique come from that period.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One does not have to rely on historians like Israel or philosophers like Appiah to make that point. It was made also by the very people who suffered under the yoke of European colonialism and sought to cast it off.<\/p>\n<p>Today, most people know of the French and American revolutions, two great social tumults whose reverberations we still feel. Few know of the other great revolution of the 18th century \u2013 the one in Haiti that began in 1791 and culminated with independence in 1804.<\/p>\n<p>In 1791, a mass insurrection broke out among Haiti\u2019s slaves, upon whose labour France had transformed Saint-Domingue, as it called its colony, into the richest island in the world. It was an insurrection that turned into a revolution, a revolution that defeated the three greatest armies of the age \u2013 the French, British and Spanish \u2013 to become the first successful slave revolt in history, a revolution that was to shape history almost as deeply as those of 1776 and 1789.<\/p>\n<p>The slaves were led by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.historywiz.com\/toussaint.htm\">Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture<\/a>, a self-educated former slave, deeply read, highly politicised and possessed of a genius in military tactics and strategy. He was the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2004\/jan\/31\/featuresreviews.guardianreview35\">Spartacus<\/a>\u201d for which the European radicals who wrote the <em>Histoire philosophique des deux Indes<\/em> had pined.<\/p>\n<p>Toussaint\u2019s greatest gift, perhaps, was his ability to see that while Europe was responsible for the enslavement of blacks, nevertheless within European culture lay also the political and moral ideas with which to shatter the bonds of enslavement. The French bourgeoisie might have tried to deny the mass of humanity the ideals embodied in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But Toussaint recognised in those ideals a weapon more powerful than any sword or musket or cannon.<\/p>\n<p>From Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture to Nelson Mandela, for two centuries those battling against European power and racial oppression looked to the Enlightenment ideals as the fuel for their struggles. Today, most of those struggles and movements have disappeared. As a result the meanings of \u201cradicalism\u201d and \u201cdecolonisation\u201d have withered, and come to mean something very different and much more tame than they did half a century or a century ago. Shorn of the social movements that gave Enlightenment values their radical edge, those values have lost much of their meaning. That today so many should so easily dismiss the Enlightenment in the name of \u201cdecolonisation\u201d tells us more about the shaky foundations of contemporary radicalism than it does about the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n<p><strong>T<\/strong>he one word that Sian Hawthorne returns to again and again is \u201cdialogue\u201d. \u201cWe\u2019re not used to seeing the world as the world. We keep cutting things up and segmenting them. Too often we don\u2019t see the entanglements between European and non-European philosophies. What\u2019s missing is dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDialogue\u201d is one of those words, like \u201cdiversity\u201d, that can mean all things to all people. It is often used to define shallow, skating-on-the-surface conversations which give the impression of an exchange but which touch upon nothing substantive. It can also mean proper, dig-deep contestations through which we test each other\u2019s ideas and in which we show ourselves willing to be uncomfortable as we ourselves are tested. In universities, and in society at large, there is today too little of the latter and too much of the former; too little real engagement and too great a desire to stay within our comfort zones.<\/p>\n<p>There is much on which I disagree with the Decolonising Our Minds approach. I disagree with its concept of \u201cwhiteness\u201d, with the characterisation of the Enlightenment as \u201cracist\u201d, with the understanding of what \u201cEuropean thought\u201d constitutes, with what it means to \u201cdecolonise\u201d. What I admire, though, is the openness to have this debate, and to engage in the kinds of conversations I had with both students and academics. I spent an afternoon discussing, debating and disagreeing with Meera Sabaratnam. At the end, she said: \u201cThe discussion that we\u2019re having now is exactly the kind of discussion that it should be possible to have at universities.\u201d On that, I could not agree more.<\/p>\n<h2>A different philosophy: six key texts<\/h2>\n<figure class=\"element element-image element--thumbnail\" data-media-id=\"69b8fe1998cde2f56a86c59b3aea426adbd707f0\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/69b8fe1998cde2f56a86c59b3aea426adbd707f0\/0_0_323_499\/323.jpg\" alt=\"Mo Tzu cover\" width=\"323\" height=\"499\" class=\"gu-image\" \/> <\/figure>\n<p><strong>1. Mo Tzu, Basic Writings<\/strong><br \/>(Columbia University Press)<br \/>Most people know of Confucius. They should know of Mo Tzu. Though he lived a century after Confucius, he has a claim to be China\u2019s first true philosopher. Unlike Confucius, Mo Tzu engaged in an explicit reflective search for moral standards and gave tightly reasoned arguments for his views. He defended a universalist vision, arguing that the moral interests of strangers are as important as those of our tribe. He proposed a form of what we now call \u201cconsequentialism\u201d, the idea that an act should be judged primarily by its effects, which was remarkably sophisticated for its time. The conservatism of Confucianism, and its cultivation of the moral character necessary to rule, to administer and to follow, won the favour of the Chinese state. The radicalism of Mo Tzu was forgotten and suppressed. Only fragments of his writing remain.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image element--thumbnail\" data-media-id=\"b0f6b00d71706fc22f8fa0320e28a70879f48371\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/b0f6b00d71706fc22f8fa0320e28a70879f48371\/0_0_626_835\/375.jpg\" alt=\"Ibn Rushd, The Decisive Treatise University of Chicago press\" width=\"375\" height=\"500\" class=\"gu-image\" \/> <\/figure>\n<p><strong>2. Ibn Rushd, The Decisive Treatise<\/strong><br \/>(University of Chicago Press)<br \/>The Andalusian Muslim Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), often known in the west as Averroes, was the last of the great classical Islamic philosophers. Through his commentaries on Aristotle, he became more influential on western philosophy than on Islamic thought. Central to Ibn Rushd\u2019s work was the relationship between philosophy and religion and the insistence on the compatibility of reason and faith. Perhaps his two most important works are <em>The Incoherence of the Incoherence<\/em> and <em>The Decisive Treatise<\/em>. The first is a response to the great theologian al-Ghazali and his attack on reason in his book <em>The Incoherence of the Philosophers<\/em>. The second is a defence of the role of reason in a community of faith, in which Ibn Rushd argues that it is God who commands humans to employ reason and not just faith.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image element--thumbnail\" data-media-id=\"d4a4380a92079609f0af8f0a4d374715660c0f2a\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/d4a4380a92079609f0af8f0a4d374715660c0f2a\/0_0_350_500\/350.jpg\" alt=\"Book of al-Ma\u2019arri \" width=\"350\" height=\"500\" class=\"gu-image\" \/> <\/figure>\n<p><strong>3. Abu\u2019l \u2018Ala al-Ma\u2019arri, The Book of al-Ma\u2019arri<\/strong><br \/> (New Humanity Books, 2015)<br \/>Today, we have become used to thinking of the Islamic world as insular, hostile to reason and freethinking and with a single, unquestioned view of God and the Qur\u2019an. But in the first half-millennium of its existence, especially during the Abbasid period (750-1258), there was within the Islamic empire an extraordinary flourishing of philosophical debate and of freethinking. The most important of the freethinkers was Abu\u2019l \u2019Ala al-Ma\u2019arri, an 11th-century Syrian poet and philosopher, renowned for his unflinching religious scepticism:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey all err \u2013 Muslims, Jews,<br \/>Christians, and Zoroastrians:<br \/>Humanity follows two world-wide sects:<br \/>One, man intelligent without religion,<br \/>The second, religious without intellect.\u201d<br \/><em>[from <\/em>The Two Universal Sects<em>]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>There are very few English translations of his work. There is NYU Press\u2019s recently published edition of his <em>Epistle of Forgiveness<\/em> (sometimes compared to Dante\u2019s<em> Inferno<\/em>) and this short selection of his poetry.<\/p>\n<p><strong>4. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment<\/strong><br \/> (Oxford University Press)<br \/>A <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.theguardian.com\/radical-enlightenment.html\">groundbreaking study<\/a> of the \u201cother Enlightenment\u201d, not the Enlightenment of Locke, Hume, Voltaire and Kant, but that of Spinoza, Pascal, d\u2019Holbach and Diderot, a half-underground movement whose radicalism, according to Israel, has deeply shaped modern conceptions of freedom, liberty, equality and tolerance.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image element--thumbnail\" data-media-id=\"48e1d0fa91330282b832591d0f91165764b3c7ce\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/48e1d0fa91330282b832591d0f91165764b3c7ce\/0_0_595_906\/328.jpg\" alt=\"Black Jacobins book cover\" width=\"328\" height=\"500\" class=\"gu-image\" \/> <\/figure>\n<p><strong>5. CLR James, The Black Jacobins<\/strong><br \/>(Penguin)<br \/>Trinidadian CLR James was one of those towering figures of the 20th century who is all too rarely recognised as such. Novelist and orator, philosopher and cricket lover, historian and revolutionary, Pan-Africanist and Trotskyist \u2013 few modern figures can match his intellectual depth, cultural breadth or sheer political contrariness. <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.theguardian.com\/black-jacobins.html\"><em>The Black Jacobins<\/em><\/a> tells the story of the Haitian revolution and of its tragically flawed leader, Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture. Decades before historians such as EP Thompson began producing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2013\/dec\/31\/history-under-attack-ep-thompson\">\u201chistory from below\u201d<\/a>, CLR James told of how the slaves of Haiti had not been passive victims of their oppression but active agents in their own emancipation. It is a work of biography and social history, not of philosophy, but central to the narrative is the importance of ideas, especially the ideas of the Enlightenment, as weapons for social transformation.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"element element-image element--thumbnail\" data-media-id=\"7bfb13563a1fb1a9fefbcc5bbf13e14b86cc7222\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/7bfb13563a1fb1a9fefbcc5bbf13e14b86cc7222\/0_0_1521_2342\/649.jpg\" alt=\"The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon bookcover\" width=\"649\" height=\"1000\" class=\"gu-image\" \/> <\/figure>\n<p><strong>6. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth<\/strong><br \/>(Penguin Modern Classics)<br \/>A classic of the anti-colonial struggle, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.theguardian.com\/wretched-of-the-earth.html\"><em>The Wretched of the Earth<\/em><\/a> has since become the bible of postcolonial literature. Fanon\u2019s admirers see him as giving succour to the view that European thought is destructive of non-European peoples and cultures. His critics focus on his celebration of violence as redemptive. Fanon\u2019s work is in fact more subtle than either allow. Born in Martinique, Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist and revolutionary and a key figure in the Algerian struggle for independence. <em>The Wretched of the Earth<\/em> was written when he was dying of leukaemia and is a searing indictment of the dehumanising trauma of colonialism on the colonised individual, culture and nation. <strong>KM<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u2022 This article was amended on 19 February 2017. Soas is the School of Oriental and African Studies, not the School of Oriental and Asian Studies as an earlier version said.<\/p>\n<p>guardian.co.uk &#169; Guardian News &amp; Media Limited 2010<\/p>\n<p>Published via the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/open-platform\/news-feed-wordpress-plugin\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Guardian plugin page\" rel=\"noopener\">Guardian News Feed<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/extend\/plugins\/the-guardian-news-feed\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Wordress plugin page\" rel=\"noopener\">plugin<\/a> for WordPress.<\/p>\n<p><!-- END GUARDIAN WATERMARK --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Outraged headlines erupted when students launched a campaign to challenge the great western philosophers. We went to the source of dissent \u2013 London\u2019s School of Oriental and African Studies \u2013 to investigate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10220698900476085_349663338397715":"","twitter_1370559253_1370559253":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[61,351,352,29,96,348,353,355,346,808,349,347,350,354,135],"class_list":["post-4995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-article","tag-british-empire","tag-colonialism","tag-education","tag-features","tag-higher-education","tag-kenan-malik","tag-observer-new-review","tag-philosophy","tag-race","tag-race-in-education","tag-soas","tag-students","tag-the-new-review","tag-the-observer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcpdt.org.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}