Sufi Tradition and the Postcolonial Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Abstract

The legitimacy of this report derives from the hypothesis that in spite of
Edward Said’s phenomenal Orientalism (1978) and the consequent
discipline of postcolonial studies that it initiated, knowledge continues
to be manufactured and centered in the West. Such centralization
implies that knowledge must be seen and mean the same to a non-
Western observer as it does to a Western one. The findings of this
report question this assumption by showing a vantage point from where
knowledge appears differently than it does from the present, supposedly
only position. More importantly, the crisis which has plagued the social
sciences since the later decades of the twentieth century seems to be the
specific condition of the established perception of knowledge.1
Looking from the other, the other’s, or the alternative perspective what
we immediately become aware of is that the Western hegemony was
imposed on the non-Western world by reducing the latter into an
ignorant, almost non-literate entity. The disempowerment of the
colonized, that is, was realized by a contempt for and obliteration of its
knowledge from the world of being and truth. The postcolonial
condition, however, is realized not in turning the wheel of time back but
in reconciliation, or creating a new equation between the two
apparently contradictory perceptions of knowledge or ways of seeing
the world.
In so far as this is a narrative of the knowledge that was banished from
the conscious life of the human in the last few centuries, and at the
same time it aims to construct a condition that does not yet exist, it may
be taken as a work of fiction. Hence it must be an aesthetic project.2