From Ego-Politics to Rūḥ-Politics

This article probes the Moroccan philosopher Abderrahmane Taha’s concept of izʿāj—literally agitation/disturbance—as an Islamic decolonial option. Reading it through his notion of al-majāl al-tadāwulī (the pragmatic discursive field), this study shows how izʿāj redirects Walter Mignolo’s “body-politics” of epistemic disobedience toward an insurgent rūḥ-politics, relocating agency in divine trusteeship (amānah) and innate human disposition (fiṭrah). Against both religionist quietism and secular activist models, Taha’s rūḥ-centred critique refuses any split between inner purification (tazkiyah) and outward struggle: al-zāʿij—the epistemoral agitator—fuses ethical sincerity (ikhlāṣ) with justice, and spiritual renewal with social liberation. Anchored in amānah (trusteeship) and animated by the logic of khilāfah (stewardship), Taha’ian resistance seeks to ‘insurgify’ political life by recalibratingworldly power through ethical responsibility. Thus, this intervention recasts decolonial resistance as a covenantal ethic that redefines the telos of resistant disobedience itself. To illustrate izʿāj in action, the discussion closes with a reading of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1961), tracing how communal ritual, personal defiance, and interior crisis each unsettle the materialist and epistemic regimes of colonial modernity. This framework demonstrates that true liberation requires ethical insurgency, resisting the reduction of ethics to private piety. Izʿāj thus emerges as an Islamically grounded and morally integrated Islamic decolonial option.