Liberal Imperialism?: Natives, Muslims, and Others

Political Theory

Volumn 30, Issue 5, 2002, Pages 738-745

  Dossa, Shiraz ^a  

^a ST FRANCIS XAVIER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997901898     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591702030005007     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. In his superb critical essay “Liberalism and Colonialism” in The Decolonization of Imagination, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed Books, 1995)
2. Parekh unveils the deeply rooted sense of superiority that buttresses Locke's and Mill's liberalism in its responses to non-Western cultures. For Ronald Dworkin's similar views, see his convoluted denial of the intrinsic link between imperialism and liberalism and his passionate defence of liberalism (vs. other creeds) in his essay “Liberalism” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
3. For his part, Jeremy Waldron is easily the most insolent; in his essay “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative” in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), he leaves no doubt as to his high sense of liberalism's innate superiority.
4. See also his essay “Superseding Historic Injustice,” Ethics 103, no. 1 (1992): 4–28.
5. Parekh is far too solicitous of Rushdie's rights and patronizingly dismissive of the Muslim argument against Rushdie's religious/moral insults. As I read him, Parekh fails to adequately grasp, among other things, that Rushdie's novel “comes across as history, not as fiction, as though it were the real history of Islam that Muslim leaders and believers had repressed.” Indeed, his few pages on Islam outraged many Muslims (including educated ones), not because they are outlandishly “fictional, but because they are insufficiently imaginative.” See Shiraz Dossa, “Satanic Verses: Imagination and Its Political Contexts” in Cross Currents (summer 1989): 204–12, at 208.
6. For a concurring but sharper critique of Kymlicka's overrated liberal posturing, see Shiraz Dossa, “Liberal Posturing: Multiculturalism's Discreet Charm” in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (vol. 22:5, 2001).
7. In his recent Finding Our Way (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), Kymlicka advertises himself as the fairest of all multiculturalists (as distinct from both its opponents and supporters), but proceeds to argue that the white Canadian majority has nothing to fear since it will not have to change at all. On the contrary, it is the illiberal tanned/black immigrants who will have to adjust to and adopt liberal values in multicultural Canada.
8. (In his earlier books, Liberalism, Community and Culture [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989]
9. and Multicultural Citizenship [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995], Kymlicka delivered roughly the same message.)