While I was scrolling through Instagram, I came across a reel in which a Muslim content creator was discussing the failure of liberal intellectuals, pointing out how people were rejoicing in the ongoing attack against Iran by the US and Israel rather than condemning it. What caught me was not the argument itself, but what was missing from it.
The creator spoke at length about American aggression and European colonialism, but said nothing about Iran’s own history. How a civilisation with one of the world’s oldest and richest cultures, the birthplace of Zoroastrianism, had been so completely transformed that its own government today enforces mandatory hijab at gunpoint while its population protests on the streets.
And so, the question that stayed with me was simple: why does the discourse on colonialism always begin with European colonialism, and never with what came before it?
In earlier academic frameworks, colonialism was primarily understood as maritime overseas expansion and the extraction of wealth from colonised territories for the benefit of the coloniser. This definition was built specifically around European colonialism and, as a result, excluded land-based conquest, religious and cultural replacement for which Islam stands. So, the ignorance.
But now, Patrick Wolfe, with his framework of settler colonialism, has expanded the reign for us. Wolfe’s framework says that settler colonialism is a ‘structure, not an event’. That operates through a logic of elimination, where the primary goal is not just the exploitation of native labour, but the systematic replacement of the indigenous culture and religion by way of forced conversion and various other ways to establish the settlers as the new, rightful inhabitants. Something very similar to turning Dar ul Harb (region under non-Islamic rule) into Dar ul Islam (region under Islamic rule).
Further, the historians, particularly from the Marxist school of thought, during discussions of the history of the Indic region (the broader civilisational sphere encompassing present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan), have never considered the ‘Islamic invasion’ of this region as ‘Islamic colonialism’, and called it as ‘political conquest’ or ‘empire building’.
Senior Advocate J Sai Deepak has also written in his book India that is Bharat that the postcolonial school, while rejecting the tall claims of European colonialism, has actively obstructed any honest analysis of Middle Eastern colonialism and its coloniality, thereby allowing it to thrive in Bharat.
Now, if you ask me to define the main reason for not recognising the Islamic invasion as Islamic colonialism. Then, I would say that it is because of the ‘victim paradox’.
I believe: in Christian colonialism, somehow the victims survived to tell their story, but in Islamic colonialism, the victims were converted into the victor’s religion, and therefore, they no longer viewed themselves as victims.
This is precisely because of how Islam has been framed. Like Shahada (the Islamic declaration of faith), which reads like: ‘La ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah’, meaning There is no god but Allah, and the (one who can’t be named) is the messenger of Allah. When the foundational testimony says this, how can one even view himself/herself as victim? And we very well know what awaits a being who leaves Islam – death. So, the victims have no way to recognise the colonisation.
In the Indic periphery, regions like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and in some parts of India, we can see that there has been a total decimation of the indigenous social, religious and cultural landscape. It has been achieved by what scholars call ‘epistemicide’, the systematic destruction of indigenous people’s knowledge systems, traditional ways of knowing, and ancestral languages.
Invaders, whom I call colonisers, by destroying native centres of learning and sacred sites of various lands, effectively overwrote indigenous history with their own myths and identity. This resulted in the colonisation of the mind, creating a psychological rupture that persists across generations till now.
That for the converted population, the holy lands, the history, and the language of the conqueror became their primary frame of reference, leading them to reject their own indigenous past. The most concrete example of this is Pakistan’s own national curriculum, which claims that Pakistan came into existence when the Arabs, under Muhammad bin Qasim, occupied Sindh and Multan. In this, thousands of years of Indic civilisational history were erased entirely. This identity shift was the ultimate achievement of settler colonialism.
This psychological rupture was not accidental but a result of power dynamics within Islamic rule itself. When Indian converts were not considered equal to the Arab, Turkish, Afghan, and Persian Muslims, they only had two choices: either reject the system or prove themselves worthy of it. The lot chose the latter.
Basically, Islamic colonialism acted as a ‘transformer’. It didn’t just rule the territory. It aimed for total engulfment by way of any means, replacing indigenous languages, laws, and foundational myths.
In the Indic sphere, this was evidenced by the replacement of native administrative languages with Persian. When under the rule of the Delhi Sultanate, Sanskrit and Prakrit were replaced by Persian as the official language of court, law and governance, effectively depriving the indigenous population of their own literary and intellectual heritage.
Here, the paradox deepened; instead of resisting, they became more zealous, more devout, more rigidly orthodox than the original colonisers themselves, in a desperate attempt to prove their Muslim credentials.
In recent times, we can trace the deepening of the paradox by going back a few years, when Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman began liberalising socially, allowing women to drive, opening cinemas and restricting the powers of the religious police. Pakistani and South Asian Muslim groups were among the most vocal critics, denouncing these reforms as un-Islamic, even though Saudi Arabia is the very heartland of Islam. Similarly, when Khamenei was assassinated on February 28, the Indian Muslims came out on the roads crying and chest thumping for him. All this happened because of the very paradox.
From all this, we can confidently say that when a section of a civilisation is completely converted, the memory of what has been lost disappears because the descendants of those who were converted start identifying themselves with the conqueror. This is not some historical accident, but sociologically and anthropologically speaking, a form of structural amnesia, a collective social forgetting that is required to build a stable new identity.
What makes the structural amnesia insidious is that the converts produced from this are simultaneously a victim and a defender of the system that brought them down to their toes. Interestingly, their descendants also do not identify themselves as colonised, but as believers and righteous, sometimes even more than the oppressor in the oppressor’s culture and religion. This is the biggest achievement of transformer colonialism. It does not just silence the victim; it actively recruits them. Recruits in a way that ISIS also doesn’t remain far.
India stands as a unique exception to the victim paradox, as there is still a Hindu population left to argue the case for Islamic colonialism. It is a rare example of a society that has faced centuries of transformer colonialism but refused to fully forget it.
This refusal to forget completely is why India has become the primary battleground for this competing ideology today. The stakes of this intellectual debate are not limited to academic disagreement but have a far-reaching impact on the indigenous culture. Conversions, love jihad, bomb blasts – to name some.
Reclaiming this history is not an act of revanchism or communal score-settling. It is a precondition for intellectual honesty. If decoloniality as a framework is to mean anything beyond a selective critique of some selective forms of power, it must be willing to follow its own logic wherever it leads. Even when it implicates cultures that today position themselves as the victim.
Acknowledging Islamic invasion as Islamic colonialism will help those whose indigenous culture still survives, to remind them of what was lost, how cultural erasure happens, and what remains at stake. A discourse that mourns the erasure of indigenous cultures by Christian colonialism, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the erasure done by Islamic colonialism, does not dismantle the hierarchy of victims; it merely rearranges it for the worse. So, acknowledge Islamic colonialism.
