Dismantling the myths that divide Islam and the West, this
cutting-edge work of critical thinking proposes new ways to reread
Islamic and world histories.
Extending from the front-page news coverage of our daily lives back
into the deepest and most revelatory histories of the last two
hundred years and earlier, Hamid Dabashi's The End of Two
Illusions is a daring, provocative, and groundbreaking work that
dismantles the most dangerous delusions manufactured between two
vastly fetishized abstractions: "Islam" and "the
West." With this book, Dabashi shows how the civilizational
divides imagined between these two cosmic binaries have defined their
entanglement—in ways that have nothing to do with the lived
experiences of either Muslims or the diverse and changing communities
scarcely held together by the myth of "the West."
Through detailed historical and contemporary analysis, The End of
Two Illusions untangles the motivations that produced this global
fiction. Dabashi demonstrates how "the West" was an
ideological commodity and civilizational mantra invented during the
European Enlightenment, serving as an epicenter for the rise of
globalized capitalist modernity. In turn, Orientalist ideologues went
around the world manufacturing equally illusory abstractions in the
form of inferior civilizations in India, China, Africa, Latin
America, and the Islamic world. The result was the projection of
"Islam and the West" as the prototype of a civilizational
hostility that has given false explanations and flawed prognoses of
our contemporary history, with weaponized Islamophobia on one side
and militant Islamism on the other as its most palpable
manifestations. Dabashi argues it is long past time to dismantle this
dangerous liaison, expose and overcome its perilous delusions, and
reimagine the world beyond its shimmering mirage. The End of Two
Illusions is the most iconoclastic work of critical thought and
scholarship to emerge in recent memory, clearing the way toward a far
more liberating imaginative geography of the world we share.