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Radio ReOrient 13.8: Anticolonial Legacies of Bandung, with Adnan Husain, Rabab Abdulhadi, and Salman Sayyid
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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Salman Syed
Foreign.
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Chella Ward
Listeners, and welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. Your hosts today are me, Chella Ward, Claudia Radebun, Said Khan and Amina Asat Das.
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Adnan Hussain
This episode of Radio Reorient shares a conversation between Rabab Abdulhadi and Salman Saeed. Hosted by Adnan Hussain as part of the Adnan Hussein Show. It took place in the 70th anniversary year of the Bandung Conference, which brought together 29 African Asian countries, many of which had only recently emerged from decolonization.
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Rabab Abdulhadi
Rabab Abdul Hadi is the founding director and Senior scholar of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies program at San Francisco State University and is also co founding editorial board member of the Islamophobia Studies Journal. She joins Adnan Hussain and Salman Said for this conversation.
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Radio Reorient Host
Scotchman builds on the idea of the spirit of Bandung to think critically about colonialism, racism, ethnonationalism and Islamophobia. So without further ado, let's listen in.
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Adnan Hussain
Salaam. Hello. Peace to you all. I'm Adnan Hussein, historian of the medieval, Mediterranean and Islamicate world. Welcome to the program. We have a very special and collaborative edition of the program. We're going to be discussing the spirit of Bandung, the Bandung Afro Asian Conference, with a couple of guests who are also associated with projects where this episode will be in collaboration with them. And so it will appear in multiple locations, including as an audio podcast not only on my feed, but also on radio reorient for feed. And it will also appear in the Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diaspora studies programs channel. Teaching Palestine. And so I'm very excited about this collaboration. And the people who are joining me, who are representing these different projects that all have a stake and an interest in talking about the Afro Asian Conference of 1955 are Dr. Rabab Abdul Hadi, who is a founding director and senior scholar of Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diaspora studies program at San Francisco State University, is a co founding editorial board member of the Islamophobia studies journal, has been involved in so much activism, we couldn't recount it. And so many different scholarly projects and programs that have the use of knowledge both for scholarly expansion of knowledge production, but also meant to be useful for changing the world, changing society. Like the project and anthology on teaching Palestine on black liberation, abolition and reparations, and also on gender justice and Palestine, whose narrative. So we're really delighted, Rabab, that you could join us to talk about the spirit of Bandung.
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Rabab Abdulhadi
Welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. And so happy to be with you and Salman on this episode.
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Adnan Hussain
That's right, thank you. And that leads me directly to say that our other participant is Dr. Salman Syed from the University of Leeds. He's a professor of rhetoric and decolonial thought there and head of the school of sociology and social policy. And he's one of. He's the one who's pioneered a program there, Critical Muslim studies, that sponsors the reorient journal of critical Muslim studies as well as the blog and podcast. So part of a whole network, Reorient. Salman, it's wonderful to have you joining us today.
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Salman Syed
It's wonderful to be here. Just one correction. I'm no longer the head of school. So to give my uncle I've done my time. So I was let out for further. After six years, I was allowed out for good behavior.
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Adnan Hussain
Congratulations, Mabrook. That's wonderful that you're no longer having to do that.
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So anyway, I've called us all together because what we want to do is to discuss. This is the 70th anniversary. I mean, earlier this year was the exact.
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Anniversary.
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Of the Afro Asian conference that was held in bandung, Indonesia in 1955. And it involved representatives of 29 countries. Many of them had recently emerged from colonialism. So this is the era of decolonization and this is an early effort at a kind of transnational political project for the post colonial world for the global South. And interestingly, in addition to the 29 nations that had official representation and were member states of the United nations, there were also a number of anti colonial national movements that sent representatives. In fact, actually there were representatives of the ANC involved in their struggle to decolonize settler colonial apartheid South Africa. There were, for example, the fln. It was the very first conference, international conference that the Liberation, National Liberation Front of Algeria attended. They had just launched at that time their struggle to decolonize from Algeria from French settler colonial control. And so it was a very momentous time. It came right after, you know, this was the period where very recently, although the war never officially ended, the US and NATO attack on North Korea that had devastated the Korean peninsula. Of course, the French were fighting to maintain their colonial control in Indochina, but it had been dealt a devastating blow by Vietnamese national resistance at Dien Bien Phu the previous year. And so this collection of 29 nations and associated and allied national resistance anti colonial movements came together representing at the time a majority of the world's population. And so it was a very momentous occasion that gave birth to the Non Aligned Movement in some ways and to other projects of transnational solidarity. And so that's why it's worth thinking about it on the 70th anniversary. And I wanted to open it up to you all to talk a little bit about. The only other thing I would say in terms of the historical context of what was happening in that time is that this is also the era where the United States was trying to organize military, new military blocs, the Treaty Organization. So there was the Central Treaty Organization for the Middle east or West Asia, often called the Baghdad Pact. There was the Manila Pact that was being orchestrated and signed earlier that year that involved like the Philippines and Pakistan and Thailand and what's called the Manila Pact for the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. And so that's also. The military security situation was also part of the background when you look at the Declaration and the 10 points or principles that we will hopefully have a chance to talk about in more detail, that the conference ended up making as an official declaration. It includes quite a number of principles about international peace, security and cooperation to avoid military blocks, threats of war, violence, but actually to try and create a peaceful world. So it was, as I said, a very momentous and important, important kind of.
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Moment in history in which this conference took place.
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Rabab and Salman I'm just Wondering, you know.
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What features of the conference and the context and its immediate outcomes would you say were among the most important consequences of the Bandung conference and what later came to be called very consciously the Bandung spirit in global relations. Rabab, why don't we go ahead and start with you?
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Rabab Abdulhadi
Sure. Aside from the fact that I was born in the year of Bandung, so I'm the same age.
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And at the time.
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It was seen as an important political event because it was heads of states. But two oppositional movements that I've studied and I was influenced by and I see myself as part of oppositional movements, not part of the official Arab regime in the Arab world. And the Palestinian movement. It was sort of looked upon a bit suspiciously. However, those who were more active in making it happen, Jamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah and well, Nehru, sort of Sukarno somewhat. But also the fact that China was also very active in making it happen. It was for third world, let's say third world countries. Africa, Asia. Africa and Asia mostly at the time. There wasn't later on when Cuba became independent in 1959, the Cuban Revolution, when it actually became joined and it was Tito also Yugoslavia joined and that's when it became more of an unaligned. But these were the countries of Africa and Asia. That's why it was also called Afro Asia wanted to come together and band together and figure out how do we formulate a path of non alignment with the quote unquote, the US NATO bloc and the Soviet Warsaw bloc and how can we develop something in there? Although there were a lot of sort of support by the Soviet Union, by the Warsaw and as well as by China, even though China was a country that was won the independence and so on. But China was a big power already moving towards much more bigger power. And as you mentioned, the Korean War was sort of like a still embroidered, not fully ended, but it was a power to be reckoned with. Now we're talking about what are these countries going to do their newly independence. And we can think about independence in the form of. Of Fanon, of the way Fanon thinks about colonial quote unquote people. Everybody says postcolonial. And Fanon would have never called himself post colonial without the parenthesis. Because coloniality in Fanon mines and Fanon's analysis is not a finished project until you kind of like finish the whole question of it. And it's an ongoing thing in any case. So they were politically decolonized from classical colonialism and they wanted to figure out something about that, how do we deal with it? And as later on Sameer Amin comes up and talks about the non capitalist path of development, it becomes a question of how do you actually even socioeconomically come out with that. And both Salman and I are sociologists, so we kind of like can talk a lot about that. But I want to actually focus a little bit about the Arab region and the role of what was going on. You mentioned the Baghdad Pact and people call it Centro, but we focus on the Baghdad Pact because it was seen as a very dangerous alliance that was again being tried in the region to undermine all the oppositional movement that were coming up. Now we're talking about a few years after the Palestinian Nakba and the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the rise of oppositional movement and revolutionary movement. Whether you're talking even among Palestinians under Israeli rule, where Israel imposed martial law from 1948 to 1966, still there were a lot of resistance going on among Palestinians who remained under Israeli military rule. You're talking about Palestinians and other Arabs who were in other parts the Arab national movement that emerges among students in the American University in Cairo. And this is the centennial of Dr. George Habash Al Hakim. August 1st was his hundred centennial. You're talking about 1952, the overthrow of King Farouk in Egypt and the Arab the Free Officers Movement of Jamal Abdel Nasser and other officers. And Jamal Abdel Nasser is taking a very, very leading role. And now we're talking a year later, 1956, when Abdel Nasser nationalizes Suez Canal and the Israeli aggression, the Israeli, French and British aggression against it, because God forbid anybody dares to challenge. So now we see the attempt of all these countries to kind of create something. And the ways in which the United States and the Western countries were so hostile because they were the ones who were colonizing Africa and Asia. I mean, and historically, if you're talking about the Soviet Union in this role, of course it has its own. It had its own geopolitical interest and so on. But we know that the October Revolution was the one who exposed the Syks Pico accord between France and Britain that showed that they were dividing the region, the Fertile Crescent in particular, between France and Britain to colonize our countries and for Britain to take over Palestine and colonize it. And then they made the Belfort Declaration to give Palestine to the Zionists to build a state there. So all of this stuff was, let's say, reflective of the colonial, the anti colonial impulses. And that's why when we talk about the spirit of Bandung, even though at the time it was countries that came together, official countries that came together, and I think even for today when we talk about that, when countries who are colonial, colonized come together and meet with each other and make declaration, we should never, ever dismiss official colonized spirits of countries that come together and places that might be official, what might come out of it. Especially because colonialism will never give up and will never give up until colonized people stand up and go against it. And I will yield to my colleague. I think I spoke enough for now.
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Salman Syed
Yeah, thanks. I think I would say, I mean, I would agree with a lot of what Roav said, but I would suggest that one way of thinking about the Bandung Conference is to see it in the family of these kinds of gatherings before Bandung, this Baku in 1920. Then there's also the first Pan African conference in 1900. There's the various conferences in 1924 organized after the abolition of the caliphate among Muslims. So there's a whole coalition and a kaleidoscope of different kinds of contending parties which when we look now, we think we are, you know, how could they be in the same kind of moment together? But if you look at the membership of the Bandung Conference, you have Japan there and you could say, well, how could Japan be there? But of course, Japan was, at least in the first part of the 20th century and the last part of the 19th century, seen by many, many colonized people all over the world as a liberatory, emancipatory force because it was working against what people perceive to be white power. So you have, for example, African American activists and intellectuals talking about and redescribing themselves as black Asians, in a sense, the Asian black man. Because they saw Japan's victories over Russia in 1905 as a victory for the, what we would now call the Global south against these colonizers. It's also interesting that at this meeting, one of the resolutions which is passed is one which is passed by Soviet Muslim group representing Soviet Muslims complaining about the Soviet colonization of Muslim groups and parties inside the Soviet Union. And of course, China is quite happy with it, gets through. So there's an idea that the conference rejects colonialism of all types, which means it doesn't just fall into this capitalist, non capitalist view. It doesn't fall into being against.
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The kind of configurations that we find really, really difficult to imagine being in the same place. You have the, the Shah of Iran also. The other thing I think is worth Pointing out how new all these countries were in the sense that if you think about it, you know, China, the People's Republic, is only declared six years before. India and Pakistan only come in 47. You know, Indonesia is only, you know, 48. So this is really, really not even one decade of freedom has gone through. And these countries, in most of these countries are still incomplete projects. The borders have not necessarily always been fixed. The constant negotiations going on about what shape that post, and I take the point that Rabat made, and it's just a chronological post independence rather than postcolonial future will have, what would it look like? So I think it's really, really important. And the other thing that I think, the third thing that I would say that strikes one is the absence of.
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So many countries from the African continent. You have Liberia, you have Ethiopia, you have Libya and you have Egypt. But people forget at that moment, Ghana doesn't become independent until 1960, 61. Most of sub Saharan Africa is still under French and British rule. And South Africa, of course, is under apartheid. So it's not invited or welcomed. So it's a very, very different world. And you have a country like Liberia, which is. Liberia and Ethiopia are the only two sub Saharan independent countries which have managed to sustain themselves for most of the period of the European scramble for Africa. So I think it's a really, really interesting configuration. It's very different than how the world shapes up later on. It is still in the making. And I think at that point you could imagine very different kinds of pathways that would have led us to different possibilities. And I think that's what really makes it exciting and interesting indeed.
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Adnan Hussain
I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why it's so fascinating to look back at this moment is because it is one of those points at which you can imagine a different world emerging than the one that has actually come into being. And that was a contested process. And there are a lot of questions. Well, you know, why did the spirit of Bandung, you know, falter? Like, what forces within and without conspire to create the world that in fact we did inherit? And that does, you know, maybe more finally emerge in the late 70s and 1980s when you're coming close to the period where there is no longer even, you know, a Soviet bloc, you know, that's already starting to perhaps be, you know, waning, but also because of the Third World debt crisis.
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You know, the responses that take place to the attempts at economic forms of resistance, continuing colonialism in West Asia with the OPEC you know, oil boycott and the way in which that is sort of dealt with. And then the coming neoliberalization, you know, and projects of liberalizing, you know, countries in the Middle east and elsewhere in the world that derail projects of national, you know, you know, sovereign development, you know, so Egypt, for example, starts to, as a result, be, you know, subjected to infita, you know, liberalizing and selling off of state companies and so on. That is all part of the same process that leads it into normalization in the Camp David Accords. These are like twin procedures. And so after a period of years, the possibilities and prospects of some kind of political project representing the global south, you know, is blocked. You know, it's being contested the whole time, but it's. It's being blocked. And it even raises the question of why it was, in fact, actually it was seen as important or necessary to have this conference, which I think is that these new nations.
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Already could see that not only did they face.
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Severe, you know, challenges of development, but that the methods by which they might be able to develop their societies were subjecting them to a new regime of, you know, neocolonialism in various ways that. That, you know. And so, in some sense, everything was still having to be kind of worked through institutions that were formed by and still controlled, even if they had a very internationalist and global kind of character at the surface that, like the, you know, these, you know, kind of financial institutions, the, you know, kind of pressures to join one of these military alliances as the price by which you might receive, you know, aid, assistance, loans for development projects. I mean, we could even think of the case that Rabab had mentioned of, you know, the Suez Crisis, as it was called, but otherwise the tripartite aggression, you know, upon Egypt, where Israel, France and Britain make an attempt to reestablish some kind of colonial control and pursue their own imperial and geopolitical and economic interests. When, you know, Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal, which of course he's doing precisely because he needs to have resources for major infrastructure and development projects and is cut off from being able to receive these, you know, without all of these kinds of restrictions. So he turns to trying to use the sovereign kinds of, you know, resources of geography, you know, that the Red Sea and the Mediterranean come through the Suez Canal, and it's like a much quicker way for shipping and global trade. And so that is a geostrategic value. He tries to use it, you know, for the own. For his, you know, for the sovereign purposes of Egypt and that, you know, has to be derailed. And this is what kind of catapults Nasser into a very direct anti imperialist sort of camp.
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So I think, you know, that's sort of the context and a real, you know, kind of question of like there's so much promise and possibility that is announced in the spirit of Bandung with the declaration, you know, about having south south relations and collaborations to sort of break the cycle of subordination where you may achieve certain kind of political independence and be recognized as a nation state. But practically speaking, the global system and the global order and you know, the kind of way in which economic and military kind of relations are organized undermine the possibilities of using that sovereignty to actually develop your society and your, your country. And so, you know, one of the important legacies it seems for me is that is for example, like unctad, you know, the attempt at the UN to get all of the developing nations of the Global south to collaborate together in some kind of.
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Organized political campaign to redirect the terms and conditions of the global economy. This of course a promise is constantly being subverted. It leads to, for example, the announcing of the new international economic order. A really wonderful, from the like early 1970s, I think 1973.
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Kind of massive documents studying like development and dependency theory and other things and saying, hey, you know, this global order, this economic system is, you know, going to continually produce the results of underdevelopment and de development of the global south and we need a new economic order. Again, neoliberalism and responses, you know, to these organized efforts ended up derailing some of these, you know, projects. But one question I have for all of you and of course feel free to go in any tangents and directions. There's so much actually to talk about. But one question that I had is that it seems despite the great diversity of different countries that, you know, participated that might have been, you know, in various kinds of affiliations, you know, you know, regimes that might have been in part of Western alliances versus those that had emerged, you know, the Shah of Iran, Iran had not been subjected to direct colonialism. Turkey, Turkey had not been subjected to direct colonialism and was by this time already a NATO member.
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The Philippines, very close sort of ally, John Koto Lala, very, you know, Western oriented kind of leader. And yet you also had leaders who had come on the back of popular national movements of against colonialism, like Sukarno, like Nehru and others. Despite what we would think of in some ways a rather diverse ideological mix and orientation of different histories and experiences and alliances, nonetheless Something like a coherent, you know, it had its limitations, but it was still something like a coherent political project is envisioned and imagined out of this conference that, you know, understood the problem as dealing with Euro, North American and, you know, white supremacist power and the legacies of that. To the extent that, you know, the US was saying, well, why isn't, you know, the US was very worried about this conference, you know, like John Foster Dulles said, you know, Asia is like going down the wrong path. China is having a malign influence. This conference could be a real, you know, kind of broadcasting of the grievances against, you know, the west and the former colonial powers. And this isn't going to work to our benefit. It was. They were very nervous about it. So they tried to say things like, well, you know, South Africa is part of Africa. Why aren't you inviting them? You know, I mean, why isn't Israel like, you know, being invited? Why isn't Australia, they're close to Asia and New Zealand. And it was very clear, however, by the organizers of the conference what the problem was, racism, colonialism. And they articulated, still a kind of coherent project. And I think, think that seems to me something that is lacking today, you know, there, where maybe there's more of a kind of economic, kind of capacity in the global south. But at this point in time, there isn't a political vision that brings together and unites countries of the global South. So I'm wondering what you, what you make of that situation and particular of the way in which. Why was there a coherent.
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Political project, you know, capable of being articulated at that, at that moment, with all of its limitations, you know, but nonetheless, there was.
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Something like an integral political declaration here and a vision of a, of a world order that was different.
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Marshall Po
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Salman Syed
I think it's really important to.
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Make a point again that the issue at this point in the conference wasn't about sovereignty. There's a certain kind of romance of bonding that comes out that in fact Rubandung's significance lies more after the event in the way that it becomes romanticized as this assertion of the Third World when you have, for example, Japan or when you have countries like Sudan or on the Gold coast which are not really formally.
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Properly independent the way we think they are. So you have a very mixed notion of what is actually what are these countries for the most part, because they haven't really. The process of decolonization is hardly.
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Begun. They've got flags and they don't even have crick football teams yet. But they don't really. It hasn't been really worked through in many cases. You still have, for example, the previous powers.
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Previously powers, running the militaries of these countries, I mean, either directly or indirectly. And the question of actual sovereignty is still an aspiration rather than an achievement. And so one of the ways that I would think about the Bandung Conference is two things which I think are common to it. One, nearly everyone there has some experience of the colonial and they see themselves against it. If you think about it, Japan has just finished its occupation under America only three years before it was under American, direct American occupation.
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If you think, you know, you're right, that Iran and Turkey didn't really experience. I mean, Iran was occupied during.
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The First World War, sorry, in the Second World War and the First World War. But they were living under rule which was ideologically west of a kind, which was ideologically committed to that kind of ethos, that Westernization was the way to actually bring about liberation.
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So I think this general sense of a colonial racial order which had reshaped the world and the resistance to that, whether it was implicit or explicit, is perhaps the only frontier that I would see. The only main common thread running through these things. And I would say it's very, very embryonic. And you have all kinds of. And within any kind of international gathering, you will always have various kinds of accommodations, ploys, etc, going along with it. So, you know, what are the specific manifestations or specific power plays that individual actors and their reasons for being there? Is it to be a spoiler? Is it to be.
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To project their own sense of power and achievement, et cetera. So I think it's a mixed bag of rationalities which is going to be there, which is then romanticized. And the other thing with Bandung is that I don't think it escapes that notion of still being parasitic on the infrastructure that was created by the European colonial racial enterprise. So like the conferences, for example, in Baku or the first African conference, they are still in those kind of connections and those kind of infrastructures that have been created and they're moving around that. And I think what you see in Bandung is perhaps the last vestiges of that because things are still unclear. I mean, you know, if you think about it for a minute, you have both north and South Vietnam being there. Why is South Vietnam and North Vietnam in the same time in that same conference there? So I think it's a really complex picture. I think it's easy for us to romanticize it and see this as an assertion of anti colonial sovereignty. Whereas I think it's probably something which is being animated by the anti colonial. And the question you ask how that hasn't developed, I would argue that it hasn't developed because the investment on the anti colonial front that has, which later on starts fleshing out these things, I think that became dissipated in a way. You could argue that anti colonialism ends with the end of apartheid as a way of unifying people around. It's the last kind of thing. And you can see the limits of that because when we have a genocide amongst our myths, it's very difficult even though to reanimate that frontier. And in fact it has taken a live stream genocide to even bring some of those connections back into play. But they don't have the same kind of resolve, I argue the same kind of confidence, the same kind of intellectual energy and political energy to actually do much about it. If you think about the responses to the regimes surrounding Gaza, and not just literally, but in the general area, you would say that these are the regimes that have done very little and their animation of that kind of solid, drastic link is completely missing. Whereas if you look at for example, the regimes who supported the anti Apartheid struggle in South Africa when it led to their actual devastation, consistently. So I think when you look at those scales, I think there's no doubt there's a fragmentation of that. I think there is a romance of Bamdung. But I think at the heart of Bandung, which was lost, is that kind of underdeveloped sense that there was something anti colonial about it. But it wasn't articulated at that moment as it came to be articulated later on. And we are living with that consequence. So bounding spirit is the possibility that perhaps wasn't taken up at that moment, but became something that in subsequent years became stronger in relation to some of these issues.
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Adnan Hussain
Well, perhaps, I mean, I want to bring Rabab in for a moment, but just on that. I mean, it is true that it takes until 1960, for example, so five years later for the UN to make an explicit declaration of the Prince principle of decolonization, you know, that no country should be, no people should be under colonialism. And so in some sense it's true. You don't find something that kind of clear and articulated in the context of the Dasa Sila, you know, the, the 10 points of the Declaration of Bandung. But it does become more explicit and more conscious as of course there are anti colonial struggles being waged, especially in the African, you know, continent during, during this, this period and of course also in North Africa as well. But Rabab, did you have any other, you know, remarks on this?
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Rabab Abdulhadi
I. I'll just add a couple of things about One is the Salman, you alluded to sovereignty. I want to also kind of like what the whole question of what is, what is, is a nation state a form to do it and what kind of a nation state they wanted because they were all quote, unquote nation states or states. The second thing is that, yeah, the relationship with colonialism, the remnants of colonialism, what was happening. I think the other biggest point is that colonial powers were never going to give up.
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They were never going to give up unless they are made to give up. And this is what you mentioned, Adnan, about Egypt. You went into infitah, the so called openness. But that was by Sadat, that wasn't by Jamal Abdel Nasser. Jamal Abdel Nasser. What happened, what Sadat did, was reversal of everything that Abdel Nasser ruled, which is Nasserite, which is nationalism. It was anti colonial nationalism. And some people might want to say socialist nationalism or nationalist socialism. Abdel Nasser might also agree with that because he actually called Egypt at one point Jumhuri Al Ishtirakiya, the Arab socialists, but not socialists like Soviet Union. There was a very, very clear emphasis again and again and again that it wasn't the same. And it was actually the Syrian Ba'ath that also.
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Torpedoed the unity between Egypt.
- [41:45]
And Syria. So Nasser was also for Arab UN, kind of like Arab unity, somewhat utopian, but it wasn't all utopian. It was also about economic, it was about pride, it was about anti colonialism. He was very strong around Palestine. I mean Algeria, Yemen. There was very invested in the liberation of Yemen. I mean there is certain things about not Nasser alone, Nasser and the free officers, but Nasser was sort of like the main figure there in that. And we can also have a discussion about that. Whether what is collective, what is individual and so on. That's a very, very big discussion that I don't know if we have even time or space to discuss here. But I think this is that rule. Let's say the Nasser period was actually a period of nationalization after the corrupt rule of King Farouk that actually depleted.
- [42:40]
Egypt and worsened, worsened all the his, even the history of Egypt and the state, which was like the first state in the region. Nasadat came and little by little depleted everything of Egypt, opened it and opened it for all the companies to come in. And all of this neoliberalism, let's say at that what we might call today economically neoliberalism opened and also privatized all the affairs of Egyptian state. It that now we see nothing in Egypt is controlled by the state and thus by the people. Everything is privatized. It's even worse and worse and worse. And so Camp David, as a political result of these, let's say socioeconomic developments should not be surprising. I mean, of course it was a huge shock, but it was happening, it was developing little by little was a huge shock to the Arab world. Because who dared after the Three Nose of Khartoum summit in 1967, who would dare to actually have a peace treaty with Israel, even though there were underground things going on. So I think that's kind of like this is a very socioeconomic issues. But also the other thing is what were they going to do about the structure, the economic development and so on when nobody agreed upon that. So I'm not going to add to what Salman said, because Salman already explain that. But I think the most and then the international bodies, the United nations, the imf, the World bank and so on, these are colonial structures that come again, get rebuilt again in order for them to have a cover international Cover to have a neo colonial way to exploit and engage in that. I just want to say something about Gaza and the anti apartheid movement. I do agree with you, Salman, that it is the failure of the. But let's say the surrounding governments, the surrounding states governments and I think this is where we talk about Bandung as governments and what the spirit of Bandung later on comes to exemplify when there are more, let's say revolutionary governments that are involved in Bandung. And what does it mean to actually have Afro Asia, Latin America or Third World is a. The spirit of Third Worldism, let's say kind of gets around to fight against white supremacy and colonialism and capitalism and imperialism. Kind of think about these things connected with each other. But I think so the government's definitely corrupt. But there is a huge support, let's say for Gaza. Yemen has been destroyed again and again and again. And Yemen has made it impossible for any commerce, any shipping, anything to go through the Red Sea to Israel. Anything. Complete, complete, complete sanctions and boycott completely. I mean with Nasser, the whole nationalization of the Suez Canal, this is something that is going on. The Lebanese resistance, the Iraqis, which are their capital, the streets of the Arab world. How many people are imprisoned, tortured throughout the Arab world? The government definitely are corrupt. What happened with the southern Africa for many, many, many years the countries surrounding South Africa were also corrupt anywhere. I mean the country was called Rhodesia. But there is the pressure also of the world that comes in that makes it also harder to live with something called apartheid than to live with something called Zionism. Precisely because of the historical legacies of the Holocaust, because of the historical legacies around that and because of the historical legacies of enslavement and so on, I think. But I think it also took a very long time, it is shameful for the whole world to do that. But I think there are different ideas and maybe. And also. And if you. The last thing I would say about the declaration is that it looked like sort of reflection of whatever they agreed upon and leaving away things that they didn't agree upon. It's kind of like till the last minute, the final minute, they're sitting there figuring out, well, this is what we're going to say about Yemen. This is what we're going to say about Palestine. This is what we're going to say about. This is what we're going to say about that. Because also the interests of the countries that were there reflected their own interests and their alliances were calling on the Netherlands government. What do you mean you're calling on the Netherlands government, you should condemn and boycott and kick them out. So this is also. Some countries were much more, let's say their population and their leaders were much more out to confront colonialism. And some were less. And we see that also when countries were attacked, where were they? I mean, like, what was sort of support that was going on for Algeria when it's 1954, the last stage of the war of liberation begins. It's been 130 years. What was going on. Palestine, China does this and so on, but it's not everywhere the same way. So I'm going to start.
- [48:03]
Salman Syed
I think it's just really important. What you just said, and I would just add one thing to it, is that there is a way in which the spirit of Bandung, which Adnan, you mentioned several times is probably to be found more among the people than in the regimes. I think we can say that, and I use the word regime because it's not just the government, it's also people who, a grouping of people who support whatever the government takes, whatever position takes. Now, what is curious is how that position of those the west toxicated has become completely turned upside down since Bandung and away way, because at that moment you had a notion of a particular kind of left which would have supported Bandung, which would have been in the forefront of that and would have seen itself aligned with the people. You then reach a point in which many of those who the past would have been aligned with the people are now often among the ones who call on the military to crush the people, especially in sort of Islamic aid context, because they think if you have the people, you will then have a desecularization or you will have some kind of Muslim influence. Yes, you'll have the, you know, you have the behind the people. You'll see the brothers literally and figuratively coming in. And therefore we would rather have tyranny than have people. But the point that Rabat Meghan is really, really poignant, that we have throughout two types of regimes. Now, those are regimes which are accountable in some shape, way or form. And there you will see the support for the Palestinians, however, and Palestinian justice, however compromised, however insufficient, exists in a way that is unthinkable in other regimes which are absolutist regimes, where there is no possibility of the people being able to influence directly their rulers. So in a way, what you see in this conflict.
- [50:17]
And I mean the conflict in a larger context, separate from the genocide, I mean, I think it's important that we don't see the Genocide as a conflict per se, but is the genocide has actually created a global Palestinianization in two ways. When people talk about Palestinianization, especially the kind of securocrats, they see it as a way of coping with unruly population. If you think about the techniques and tactics used by police everywhere, or if you think about the way that the countering violent extremism programs globalized, say these are the exemplars, you can clearly see that direct imprint influence in all kinds of ways. And you know, there's a parlor game that we can all play where you read out the statements of.
- [51:09]
Security ministers or secure crats from either China or India or you know, the occupied territories over the world kind of thing. And you can work out they're almost saying the identical things, whether it's the suppression of the Rohingya or the Uyghurs or, or the Kashmiris or the Palestinians, et cetera. So there's a convergence around that. So there's that kind of Palestinianization. But I think what Gaza has forced us to do is to also think about Palestinianization as actually indomitable resistance. So when people demonstrate in whatever means they can, they are actually showing that Palestinianization isn't just subjugation, it's the resistance to that subjugation. So if you want to think about the animation of the Bandung spirit, it is carried in when, for example, last year the Prime Minister, the pro Indian Prime Minister of Hasina, was overthrown by students demonstrations in Bangladesh, led mainly by students, the two flags they were carrying was the Bangladesh flag, which makes sense, and the Palestinian flag flag. So the signifier of the Palestinian flag exceeds Palestine and has now become a flag which I would say animates or captures or symbolizes that aspirational element of Bantu, that anti colonial element of the Bantu. And what it does is.
- [52:42]
Make that.
- [52:45]
Division between the rulers and the ruled much more, more extreme, much more tense and intensifies that because one can see this very, very clearly even in large parts of Western Europe where if you look at various polling evidence, etc. And then you look at the actions of governments where governments are willing to break their own commitment for last things like hundreds of years, but even 50 years or whatever, to liberal rights to erode civil rights to maintain not their own repression, but the repression of their own proxy elsewhere. This is a remarkable thing. It's almost franchising repression. And I think that is really where the tension comes in. And this is why I think Andong remains important both as an educative thing to See, the world could have been different and there are kind of things that we can learn from that. But also to see that the romance of Bandung is really, really important. And you can see it when governments in Latin America break off relationships with a country carrying out genocide, with a regime carrying out genocide. So I think these are really important moments. And the final point I would say about this is that one thing that and Rabab mentioned, the nationalist kind of thing, and this is the irony, one way of, of maybe what killed Bandung was the growth of ethno nationalism. Because one of the things that actually we see is this, the trying to build transnational solidarities. And when your focus is only on the kind of ethno nationalist facade, then the transnational solidarities become weakened and they become blocked. And that is one of the challenges we face in trying to mount resistance to global injustices.
- [54:38]
Rabab Abdulhadi
Let's just jump in. Can I just jump in? I actually, I was told I was we. This also would require much more. I've actually had a very big debate and final conference with not too big, but somewhat with Louis Gordon about the whole question of what nationalism. So my issue is about when I say anti anti colonial national liberation movements. It is not. The goal is not necessarily really to create a national identity or ethno nationalism.
- [55:15]
The goal is liberation, not really a state. And that's a very big. I mean in the Palestinian history of the Palestinian resistance and the movement, there is very few periods when there was. The goal was state.
- [55:31]
And even when you were talking about Salman, the flag, the Palestinian flag, even today we see the Palestinian flag is raised by people who are on the grassroots raising the flag to support Palestinian resistance to genocide, to the Zionist settler colonial regime. And it's not necessarily the same as what's happening to the recognition of the Palestinian state by different countries. Although the recognition by different countries are of the Palestinian statehood is not necessarily recognition of the Palestinian Authority. So I think even all of these levels, given that Palestine, all of it is now colonized by the Zionist settler colonial regime and for Palestine to be free and liberated, not necessarily to be replaced by statehood and liberation, I don't think it should be the same leading to statehood.
- [56:25]
Salman Syed
Unless idealistic than Yoruba, unless you're Serbian. I think, I think a state is really, really important. But I don't think a state can be conf. Does have to be configured in the way that has been configured. It can be different kinds of states. I think the problem here is the articulation of the state in its ethno nationalist form. That I think is the main problem because in the one way the state is, if you think about it, even in the kind of, you know, crass, barbarian sense, it is simply a institution which has a monopoly over some kind of lawmaking and a monopoly which is most important over lethal violence. And if you live in conditions where there is no monopoly over lethal violence, at least I think life becomes very, very dangerous and problematic. So I think the idea, and this is where Mary Bandung would have been interesting because like you said, there are possibilities of imagining different kinds of states rather than trying to create nation states. And I understood completely, Rahab. I think anti colonial nationalism isn't ethno nationalism. In fact, nearly every single ethno anticolonial project that I know of was not based primarily on ethno nationalism. They were trying to. Because what they were fighting was the colonial state, which was an ethno nationalist state, but except the ethno national that was privileged was of course the white minority. That was the difference. So I don't think instinctively that was the case. Now what's happened, life is life and history is history and things fall all over the world.
- [58:07]
Rabab Abdulhadi
So are you advocating state? Because.
- [58:11]
I'm not saying one state, two state, I'm saying liberation. And then we think whatever form is going to happen. I am not wedded to the idea of one state as opposed. I'm not for two states. I don't think it works at all and I'm against it. But I don't necessarily buy into the idea of one state either.
- [58:33]
Salman Syed
I mean, I feel that it's not in my place to advocate anything. I think it's up to the people who are involved in it. But I think in terms of a principle, one thing I would say to you is that.
- [58:48]
At the minimum, the kind of state that I would imagine, if you think about it, has the capacity, it should be accountable to its people. It should have a poorest notion of what the people are and it should be able to protect them. And I think if you look at, for example, the Rohingya, if you look at the Uyghurs, Kashmiris now, if they had the protection of a state they call their own, whether it's their own or some larger amalgamation or whatever, that's not important. I think the question for me was be there, that you need some kind of way of having some kind of organization that can protect the people in the name of the people. And, and they have to be accountable to the people. Now how that what the permutations of that may be, I think where, you know, it could be debated and there would be depend on the situations at hand. But I wouldn't want to think about, for me, it's not the question about dismantling all.
- [59:48]
You know, any sort of principal institutions. Yeah. Or state like institutions. That's, I think what I would say to you. But you know, whether you. But there are different ways of configuring.
- [59:58]
Rabab Abdulhadi
That I don't know.
- [59:59]
Salman Syed
My enemy is ethno nationalism. Let's make it.
- [60:01]
Adnan Hussain
Yeah, I mean that's, that's. I think the key point is that there is an ethnonationalism that the colonial order promotes and that's what the Fanonian kind of national liberation was in dialectical relation to. But it itself wasn't necessarily the goal. I think in the anti colonial envisioning of the state. What it meant to be an Algerian for someone like Fanon was something that included somebody like him who was there, you know, and who was fighting for liberation, for accountability, for development, for protection of, you know, people, et cetera. So the, I think the problem is, is that we are in a stage of political history where the nation state is seen as the only mode in which a kind of state set of institutions, of governance, of the organization of power, you know, has legitimacy. And that's really the problem is that that has never been a. Under which the peoples of the global south in their long histories of states have ever been organized. And it's not to say that, you know, imperial or, you know, large land based empires of the past are some sort of ideal, but at least to point out that there have been multiple different ways in which, you know, political organization could take shape and form. But the ethnonational idea is, I think, an enemy to the anti colonial order. I mean, Fanon himself did in fact actually say that the Bandung, you know, pact, as he said, almost, you know, counterposing it to other pacts, you know, you know, optimistically, you know, hoping that the 10 principles would lead to some genuine political kind of project as an anti colonial, transnational kind of collective project. You know, he himself said that it symbolized the historic commitment of the oppressed to help one another and to impose a definitive setback upon the forces of exploitation. That was the Bandung spirit. And I think the most important legacy, whether one wants to call it romantic or not, is not that one that was based around the glamour of these, you know, nothing wrong with romance. Absolutely. I think the romance is wonderful. I love the spirit of Bandung, and I wish we had more of it, because really what it was, even as it was observed at that time by peoples of the global south around the world, was of transnational solidarity, of some connection with one another, that their fates in history were tied together and that they should work together in order to create a better future for all of them rather than just a particular nation, et cetera. And that's why somebody like, for example, I think one of the other very important legacies is the inspiring of anti racism movements in the first world as well, that also saw itself or themselves as anti colonial movements of their own kind and connected with the spirit of Bandung, Somebody like Malcolm X, even when he was in the Nation of Islam before, he had his more transnational experience of anti colonial movements in Africa and the Middle east in the later part of his life. But Even in the 50s, he was talking routinely about Bandung and about the collective solidarity of all the darker peoples of the world, all the black peoples of the world. That is an encompassing vision that was trying to reframe the politics of anti racism in the United States away from civil rights, away from the idea that we are a small minority within this oppressive white supremacist nation, but actually to affiliate their cause and their struggle as part of the majority of the world's struggle for freedom and anti colonialism and anti racism. And so I think the biggest legacy really, historically speaking, has been that idea of transnational solidarity and resistance to racism and the colonial sort of order. And that's why the first organization that really actually crystallizes this outside of the, you know, kind of say UN UNAD or the non Aligned Movement of states within the UN system was the Afro Asian people Solidarity.
- [64:34]
Rabab Abdulhadi
Cairo.
- [64:35]
Adnan Hussain
Yeah, yeah. And then later that had the shape of the tricontinental, when Latin America and Cuba, you know, enter it as well, is basically to say that there is a people solidarity that needs to be kind of mobilized. And if we could tap into that. I think that is the reason why the Palestinian flag is now really carrying the spirit of Bandung because it is at the forefront of any anti colonial movement, you know, or struggle for justice right now as the symbol of that.
- [65:07]
Rabab Abdulhadi
I wanted to actually like go back to earlier to the question of you talked about Fanon and the whole. I think one is that Fanon did not live long enough to finish his project, to continue. Let's not say finish, because the project is not finished. And I always raise the question, why was he at an early age, all of a sudden Died of leukemia in a CIA hospital in the United States. We don't know at one point the archives will open, maybe somebody will break the cells and find them like Kuntelpro or the Pentagon Papers or something like this. I don't put anything beyond the. And it's not a conspiracy. These things become happen. But in any case, I think very interesting question for Fano and this is something that people always kind of like think about today, get obsessed about today. That has been sort of addressed and resolved so many long. And you are. You referred to it Adnan in terms of like you talked about Fanon, you talk about Fanon, Malcolm X and the Tri Continental. Fanon was obsessed is that he is an Algerian and it was only his own obsession. Algerians did not care that he was Martiniquin. He was part and parcel of the Algerian revolution. He represented Algeria at the United Nations. Him and a Kabal Ahmad, a Pakistani. They didn't. They had no problem. The liberation front of Algeria. It wasn't the Palestinians. If you go to the cemetery of the martyrs of the PLO in Shatila, in Lebanon, in Beirut, you'll see graves of Palestinians and Japanese and Bangladeshi. All people from all over the world bury Italians next to each other because they've all died with each other. You think people think ok, Che Guevara, Che Guevara fought for all sorts of people around the world.
- [67:01]
Salman Syed
Word.
- [67:02]
Rabab Abdulhadi
Everywhere. Everywhere people fought with each other. And then people keep saying I am this, I am that. And are you a true this? Are you a true that? It's this obsession with identification which is very individualistic, I think obsession a psychological individual problem within the west. And maybe it's kind of like individualism takes away from the collective. I think one thing, the other issue that I think is really important that you refer to about Malcolm X is the ways in which he basically refused to succumb and accept the assimilationist approach of US racism and white supremacy and the US settler colonial state that sought to de genocide. The indigenous people engaged in enslavement, engaged in exclusion, engaged in all and continues actually even today with viciousness and nakedness and pride even doing it. So he kind of like talked about, and I would say in the past it used to be called internationalism and because people don't want to say international because it's a bit, you know, kind of like affiliated with the communism and socialism and the left, but it was. It was inter or social or transnational, however you want to call it. It is anyway something that addresses and dissolves the borders. The Colonial borders that the colonial world imposed upon our people and divided us. So he refused to do that. And even in the 50s, didn't he write the Zionist logic in the Egyptian Gazette? I mean, Malcolm X wrote about that. And when he went and visited Gaza, this is not even something. This is something that. It was around the same time as Bandung. I mean, it wasn't like he went there and then immediately, but it took, it took. It's. It's a. It's a. It's a. He. He was already growing, he was already developing. He was already speaking about. About it as a Muslim, as a. As a human, as somebody who has very high level of consciousness of the place of the people, black people and oppressed people, not just only black people. Because he speaks. Because he, when he visited the. The. I think it was. Has Chinese embassy in one of the African countries and speaks about the South African, speaks about everybody. He's already conscious of the position of oppressed people in the world. So it's kind of like this thing about the whole question of oppression. And he also spoke about capitalism, spoke about imperialism. He was very conscious of all. And this is why we need to read and understand what all these people, or also they have the centennial, both Fanon and Malcolm X and Patrice Sonoma and several other people, which is also an occasion for us to commemorate these occasions, for us to use these occasions in order for us to transmit the knowledge we have to younger generation, where it is actually being all erased from the curriculum and eliminated. And if we don't have programs like this, if we don't discuss with each other, all of the stuff gets deleted. And the younger generation who are organizing and so. And if we don't have these spaces to talk with each other, they don't even know about it. It because as Salman talked about, with the globalization of Palestine, globalization of resistance and so on, if those spaces don't exist, where else people are going to be able to pass on the knowledge and be able to continue resisting these systems of suppression and surveillance that trying to crush and prevent people from liberating themselves.
- [70:41]
Salman Syed
I think it's really important to pick up on one point that both of you made. And I think firstly, obviously it's worth going even before looking at the Nation of Islam. So, for example, the idea of the Asian black man, it's not just Malcolm X, actually, even the Nation of Islam and its foundation, the way it looks upon Japan in terms of its own iconography, as I've already said, so there's a kind of a Trend even in things, in what may look like much more narrower organizations or movements to transcend this moment. And I think this is really important. That's something that, I mean, you know, I do my work now is not to be allowed to be seduced into this distinction between colonial and racial. And I think they need to be hyphenated because every colonial empire was a racial state and all racial states are basically working through colonial governmentalities. So and the kind of tragedy or the kind of.
- [71:42]
Difficulty is that when the articulation of anti colonialism and anti racism was broken or disarticulated, that's when you saw the restoration of white power. And when it was articulated together, you actually saw the most reverses of white power. So we talk about Malcolm X. Quite right. But look at Martin Luther King, who was concerned, remember in this iconography, he's supposed to be the moderate. Well, what does this moderate talk about? He talks about the Vietnam War, he talks about social issues. He has told several times, look, if you do, please don't mention the Vietnam War. And it will make things easier for you in relation to what you want to get domestically. He refuses. So I think when we see these different. How many of the Black Panther end up in Algeria? Why do they go to Algeria? I think about the point that you made about the exactly one that you made about the different kind of shaheed from different places in the Palestinian struggle. The point is that we are always. There's a kind of projection that goes on that tries to save that. What the anti colonialist forces incarnate is something narrower, when in fact what they call incarnate is something much broader, something which transcends those kind of ethnonationalist confines. And whenever colonialism or the anti colonial struggle becomes weaker, it is when it becomes more and more ethnonationalist. And when you see it at its weakest is when the anti racial and the anti colonial are split off. And I think it's important that we in our work continue to use them as hyphenated.
- [73:38]
Phenomena because they were not separate. The question we have to ask ourselves, and also the category of racism first emerges in 1930s in Germany to describe what is happening to the Jews and the Roma and in Germany. But if you look at what is happening in the 1930s, there is no different than what is happening to the subjugated people living under French rule, British rule, Dutch rule. So why do we have these two different categories? Why don't we call it colonialism? We call it racism partly to Preserve that distinction between the west and the rest. And we think about racism as something that happens in the interior of these countries and colonialism is something in the exterior. Well, what the whole history of the European colonial enterprise and the resistance to that is that that distinction between the domestic and the international is not something that is helpful and it needs to be eroded and is always eroded in moments of popular rupture and popular demands for justice.
- [74:46]
Rabab Abdulhadi
Justice pick up on a couple of things. One is that yes, definitely. And I think the whole attempt to divide quote unquote domestic from international or foreign is an attempt to actually divide and rule and tell people who are quote unquote. And people call it interior, colonies or whatever, which I hate. All of this sort of attempt to contain people from resisting. I think this is what it is really. And so I think that. And then the other issue and you I was going to jump on it, but I don't want to interrupt is the whole question in which the colonial world, the separation between racism and colonialism and try to classify each one. Is this colonial, is this racism, is this capitalist, is this imperialist? And when and when all these systems co constitute each other and if you want to actually separate one from the other, it doesn't really work. I mean, you can try to do it in order to do classification and have a chart and a table and so on, but doesn't work in the real world and it has never worked in the real world. And you're always like find any case, any multiple cases, multiple populations that don't fit. So why you're trying to cut the people to fit them into tables rather than thinking about the world and thinking about it. So for example, historically colonialism, colonialist, racist, settler, colonial world, which is also violent, violence is inherent. It's part and parcel of it. It's a DNA of it always tries to separate people by religion. I mean, look at one of the things that, that one of the byproducts of Gaza that we don't even talk about a lot in what I'm arguing about revolutionary optimism. Okay? One of the things is that the sectarian thing between Shia, Sunni and all of this is disappeared. You can't keep talking about it. No matter how much you try to put it on top of each. It doesn't work. It doesn't work when the people who are resisting come from different brands and different brands of religious religiosity. When Ziyad Rahbani died and how can you make him Muslim? You cannot. George Abbas. George, you can't make him.
- [77:13]
This is like when you say that this is a human universal resistance, you're not universal to dilute it and make it liberal, but this is a resistance issue. This is about people. And when you say this colonialism, Israel tried to do it, the United States tried again and again and again in our region and other regions to try to seed, to plant the seeds of sectarianism and keep building them. And people when they fight again and again and it's happening in Bangladesh, in India, in Kashmir, it's not real. It's very real. But to try to always build these things in order to divide and rule and we need to fight against it. And I'm not talking about eliminating Islamophobia, but to really fight because this is one of the tools also. And I think we need to be able, and I know that we're running out of time, but yeah, so I think we need to actually delegate a whole discussion about how do we talk about this also within the context of Islam. Mahavouri. I'm sorry.
- [78:18]
Adnan Hussain
And I think, you know, as we're wrapping up that actually a future conversation that I would love to invite you and perhaps one or two others into is in fact actually, actually talking about the role of Islamophobia in the current kind environment. This sectarianism I think is a very significant and serious issue in the way that it has been deployed. And frankly, we do still, we do have to ask, you know, like, why is all the resistance apart from that in Palestine, but the solidarity to Palestinians really within the Shia, what is going on in Sunni Islam and how have these kind of the societies been co opted somehow into emphasizing and fearing and being subject to this kind of propagandistic idea that you know, you know, the Irani, you know, influence in the region is somehow malign and, and so on. So there is a kind of colonial use of sectarian ecocycling. Well, of course, but it does also remind me, just going back to something Salman said about the racial colonial and that like in a way it's sort of redundant in a way to name the racial, but rather to understand it as some variety within the colonial, you know, colonial governmentality, you know, and that it's constitutive of colonialism is always that it as a, you know, racial state and it's, it's racial violence and colonial violence is always racial violence. It reminded me of, of the wonderful passage at the beginning of a Cesaire's 1955 discourse on colonialism. So the very year of the Bandung Conference Aime Cesaire, the great Caribbean poet and anti colonial thinker and you know, in some ways inspire of Negritude and African diasporic and Africa relations in a kind of wider sense of Pan Africanism, which is again I think something that is part of the spirit of Bandung. Africa was still predominantly under colonialism, but the ideals of the Bandung spirit was not that we should create a whole bunch of small, fragmented, you know, competing nations, but really the Pan Africanist kind of ideal of uplifting the peoples of the continent who had been subject, subjected to colonialism. But he says, Amy says that in calling out Nazism and racism and Nazism as this kind of racial ideology, he says, like the violence, the only reason why it's so scandalous to you is that it was done in Europe, you know, but this is exactly what colonialism has done. Holocaust after holocaust in the rest of the global south upon black and brown, you know, and Asian bodies. Right. So I think that's one thing that it reminds me of and just also about the Algiers, you know, is like Algiers, why did the Black Panthers go to Algeria is because they had a project in their post, you know, in, in after liberating themselves is that they saw themselves as in solidarity. They had received solidarity, you know, during the period of their liberation war against settler or French settler colonialism. And you know, they've. They believed that they needed to be participating in a collective project of anti colonial resistance and liberation. And so I had a. I just want listeners.
- [82:02]
Rabab Abdulhadi
Can I just say one thing? I'm sorry, we can go a little bit over, but you know, Ahmed Bin Bella, the first president of Algeria, actually tried to do the Bandung conference in Algeria.
- [82:14]
Adnan Hussain
Yes.
- [82:16]
Rabab Abdulhadi
But he was overthrown and so he wasn't able to do that. And that's when kind of like it moved to Cuba and it became the Tri Continental Conference. So yeah, so the Algerians were very welcoming of everybody, of anc, of the Palestinians, of the Black Panthers.
- [82:33]
Adnan Hussain
Yes, and that's a great point. And I just want listeners to know that look out, out for an upcoming episode, if it isn't already out of my discussion with Elaine Muhtafi about her autobiographical book Algiers Third World Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers. She's 96 and still has the vivid memories of her participation in working with the FLN in New York to get a declaration of the recognition of, of Algerian independence and lived in Algeria in the immediate aftermath of the Evian, you know, accords in building the state and was there and hosted basically was the one who hosted the Black Panthers, who don't seem to have been able to survive there without somebody like her who was involved in those things. And it just is redolent of that era of recognizing, you know, these kinds of transnational solidarities that emerge in anti colonial resources resistance, in global anti colonial resistance. And that there were some states that did in those initial years. You're absolutely right, Rabab, that things did change after, you know, in the course of time. But that in these first few years Algeria was a capital of the third world and was a place where, you know, these resistance movements could get training, they could get credentials, they could get passports, you know, when they were being isolated in, you know, the kind of global system because often many of were exiles from the settler colonial colonies they were fighting against like the South Africans like zanu, PF and others in, in, in then Rhodesia, et cetera. They could come to Algeria and receive genuine material support as well as solidarity where they could, you know, develop their kind of media propaganda, get the word out. And, and so these were like such important kinds of senses of solidarity of that time. And the last, last sort of episode that I do want to mention because we talked so much about Palestine and the governments around, I mean I just did an episode with Issa Blumi about Yemen and the history of Yemen, in trying to understand what are the sources and roots historically, ideologically that have enabled this remarkable and unique in some ways commitment to an anti imperialist, anti colonial politics of solidarity with the people of Gaza against this genocide. I know, Salman, you wanted to have a final word as well.
- [85:15]
Salman Syed
Well, maybe not, I'll say. I'm sure other people can have a final word. I'm not demanding a final word, but what I would say, something that we haven't really talked about though we've talked around it is about Orientalism and one of the ways that it continues to shape our analysis. So for example, when we talk about the situation that we currently all face and we talk about it in sectarian terms, even to deny the sectarian terms, we talk about, for example, why is it the Shia doing this and not the Sunnis. Leaving aside that Hamas of course is Sunni, whatever that means. But also look at in the 70s where you had Iran supporting in many ways Tel Aviv. So I think so the issue here isn't about. About Mazabs as so much the fact that Iran had a revolution in 79 and from that things flowed and the fact that it is others orders in many parts of the Muslim world. You do not have A popular stake in those governance. When, for example, Saddam invades Kuwait, the what happens to the people of Kuwait. So I think we keep on making that association between societies and being represented by their governments in many cases. And I think the Palestinian issue has shown that this chasm exists throughout. And we can't read from the actions of tyrants, the will. Will of the people. And nor should we read those in sort of Orientalist terms where we look for other meanings rather than fact that there's been historical developments like for example, a revolution and other forces going into it at different points. In the 80s, if you remember, it was all about the Shia. Why the Shia? That's problem. And then in the 90s, it all became about the Sunnis, the Shia very quiet. And then we get into this. And then there was also the Sufis. But we need good Sufis because Sufis don't do anything until they go to Chechnya. So the point is this, that we've always been in a situation where there's been an attempt to try and depoliticize Muslimness. And rather than see that in its own terms, fighting injustice in whatever situation it finds itself, we try and find these kind of. The moderate formations of Muslimness can go from the Maliki to the Shafi to Sufis to whatever iteration they want. And I think it's important for us to hold on to the fact that what we're dealing with, if anything, is a Muslimness which is at least trans. Ms. Be, which is at least transnational and which actually cannot be contained in the architecture of the nation state. And that is what makes it problematic globally at this moment in time, that that is what the issue is. And every single Islamophobic project is always a project of ethnonationalism, whether it takes place in. In. In. In. In Turkey or it takes place in. In.
- [88:26]
You know, in Riyadh, or it takes place in Austria or in France or in China. It always, at the end of it is trying to create at the. A national, ethno national version of the Islam or to remove Islam. But that is, I think so one of the strongest manifestations of Islamophobia is ethno nationalism, both epistemologically, politically, economically, culturally.
- [88:53]
Adnan Hussain
Well said. But maybe you've forestalled the need to have the episode and discussion that I was hoping we might have and propose about Islamophobia, ethnonationalism. And in fact, actually the whole point I was in the episode about Yemen is in fact, this is because Ansar Allah is a popular social movement that reflects the will of the Yemeni people, unlike all of the other regimes in the region. And that, of course, is exactly the case as well, that Iran had its, its revolution. And people can also check out my, my conversation in office hours with David Yagoubian, a scholar of Iran. We're talking, we will have talked about by the time this comes out. We will have talked about revolution and resistance and trying to understand. So that's what I was hoping also that we might do with a sectarianism. Islamophobia is unpack and undermine this kind of idea of these ecstatic identities that somehow determine rather than looking at the political, social and economic circumstances as they change in history.
- [90:06]
Because otherwise, yes, we're ready to fall into, you know, Islamophobic and Orientalist sorts of perspectives on explaining and discussing politics in the region. But I want to thank you both so much for a vibrant discussion that has gone in a number of different directions and opened up threads and lines of inquiry that I hope are of value and interest to listeners and watchers, and also hopefully will be the basis for some future conversations and collaborations on this channel with Reorient, Radio Reorient, and with Ahmed and Teaching Palestine. Until next time, everyone, peace and solidarity. But of course, no peace without justice.
- [90:55]
Salman Syed
You're listening to Radio Reorient, the Decolonial podcast in partnership with the New Books Network. This is Radio Reorient exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post Western.
- [91:04]
Adnan Hussain
How should we study the things that.
- [91:05]
Salman Syed
We study after the critique of Orientalism? Now let's discuss what we've heard with.
- [91:10]
Adnan Hussain
Claudia, Radovan, Chella, Ward, Insai Khan and Hizamiya.
- [91:15]
Chella Ward
That was a lengthy and informative episode about that history of, of the Bandung conference. So I think we won't talk too much over the ground that that has been discussed between the speakers in this episode. But I do just want to point out that this whole question that this episode is asking, the idea of seeing that Bandung conference really as a moment when the world post decolonization, although that sounds optimistic to say it that way now, but when that world was still in the process of being figured out, when the borders were not yet drawn, when it wasn't clear what kinds of alliances there were going to be, what different states, what form different states were going to take. You know, that moment seems like a really interesting moment for thinking about the question of potential histories. It's one of those moments in the history of the world where history could have gone another way. And I'M really struck by the importance of this. This question of potential histories and those moments that when history could have gone a different way. I'm struck by the importance of those moments to the whole Reorient project. You know, right at the very beginning of the Reorient Journal, the very first edition of the Reorient Journal had an editorial where the authors of that editorial mentioned the need for a new history of the world, a history that could deal with Muslimness appropriately in a way that Eurocentric, you know, or Westernese histories of the world have not always been able to deal with. The politics of Muslimness especially. And this is still a question, you know, that Reorient and, you know, historians who are interested in the question of historiography or the writing of history are still dealing with. We've just had this week, as we're recording this episode, we've just had the first annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Past, a new subject organization aimed at doing history in solidarity with the occupied and the oppressed. And, you know, reorient have played a huge part in that organization precisely because it was asking these questions around how do we think beyond ethno nationalism? You know, how do we imagine a world beyond Islamophobia? And this episode, for me, was a really good reminder that those questions are historiographical questions, first and foremost.
- [93:36]
Adnan Hussain
Absolutely. And I think there's a great deal to reflect on, not least in the conversations about how momentous Bandung was. And obviously that drew on how there were events before that in Baku, for example. And I think it makes us consider a lot about the import and the impact of particular events throughout history and how they're written from the viewpoint of different societies. And I think that made me consider a great deal about the recent ceasefire agreement, which comes after two years of genocide, of violence, of ruthless dialogue about what constitutes self defense, what constitutes terrorism, and so on. And now we are in a position historically where we're looking at ceasefire having a new meaning, because no sooner has, as the ink dried and world leaders are patting themselves on the back, some, a great deal more than others, then Israel has murdered six people very recently. And I think it just goes back to that idea of how people write history in particular ways.
- [94:47]
Rabab Abdulhadi
Well, I mean, on that point about how do people write history, Bandung has to be then assessed as either being a particular moment in history that was contextualized by, of course, the binary of the Cold War and lessons to be learned about Bandung with the risk of then replicating it into perhaps a new paradigm that doesn't really exist. I'm really struck by, for example, recently China's pledge of support to bring Palestine into brics. And then wondering, is BRICS essentially the love child of Dan Dune and the ideas that were spawned from that? And if so, does that mean that BRICS is a third space, as Bandung was trying to create amidst the binary of the Cold War? Or is it in fact part of the binary itself? And so looking at the architecture of Bandung and what it meant is, I think, still a very interesting and important exercise to continue when we look at the future as much as looking at recreating new histories.
- [95:59]
Radio Reorient Host
Indeed, I would agree. I think Bunduing and this episode really gives us a sense of the importance of who is telling history and the lessons that we can learn from that going forward. But given that we've been talking about this for quite some time and I'd like to wrap up, remind you you've been listening to Radio Reorient, been joined by your hosts, Chella Ward, Claudia Radovan, Saeed Khan and myself. Thank you very.
- [96:39]
Salman Syed
Much, Sam.