The Day after Decoloniality: Spiritual Note-Taking in Disenchanted Realms

In calls to decolonize academic curricula and knowledge paradigms, “epistemic diversity, in its varied domestic and international permutations, is embraced as a matter of both principle and intellectual imperative (Harrison, 2016, 163).” Including indigenous knowledge traditions across the globe in order to pursue a more democratized praxis of knowledge construction has thus been hailed by a variety of thinkers as an important demand, with Achille Mbembe (2016) coining the term pluriversity - “celebrating the co-presence of different ways of knowing as intrinsically good and self-emancipatory” (Moll, 2023, 748). As Yasmin Moll (2023) points out however, these decolonial aspirations are quite often still underpinned by the secular knowledge traditions, in which secular epistemological considerations are considered to be the only valid form of perspective, theory of knowledge, and pedagogy.

In paying heed to these calls of challenging the inherent secular disposition in social sciences, including demands to decolonize, I seek to explore, situate, and reflect on the role and importance of dreams and imagination in the spiritual development of diasporic Muslims in the Netherlands and Belgium by using Moroccan, Senegalese, and Kenyan Islamic notions on the importance of imaginations and dreams in the construction of one’s subjectivity. For Muslims, it is not other humans who are the orientation of their life on earth – it is God (thence Allahu Akbar, God is the greatest), in relation to His creations, both animate and inanimate. Starting from the idea that unlike secular imaginaries, dreams and imaginations are Islamically not located in the individual but are part and parcel of an in-between realm where the corporeal meets the ethereal, I attempt to “write God in”, to pay heed to the Muslim positionality not only in name, but in content, worldview, and dialectic.