ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the relationship between race and modernity is best understood by grasping the racialisation of religion before, during and since modernity. What this means is that the category of race was not only co-constituted with religion, but pre-constitued with religion. The resurrection of this genealogically profoundly implicates the formation of race in the racialisation of religious subjects. To this end the discussion engages with what is sometimes characterised as the standard account of how modernity generated categories of race, which the chapter challenges by examining the historical status of Islam and Muslims European racial thought. In the opening sections it maintains that in actual fact the rise of modernity curates a particular category or race that relies itself on the prior racialisation of religious subjects. This argument is then drawn out at length through a historicised reading which does not seek to refute the standard account, but instead to invite readers to think more critically, and indeed historically, about the form and content of religion in processes of race making. The implications of this argument are not hermetically sealed to a discussion race, but as the chapter shows, is in fact are to linked to the constitution of modernity too
