"Preserving Shell” is a project by Zallah Yasamin-Akbari, which expresses her experience of being away from her husband due to COVID -19 lockdown measures.

The term religion is generally used today as a category to designate peripheralized traditions of being, knowing, and behaving within the modern/colonial world-system. This system was born in 1492 with the defeat of the last Muslim polity in Spain, and the initial European expansion into America. Born in the Atlantic world, this system spread across the globe through a systematic and sustained effort by Western Europeans to exterminate both non-Europeans and marginalized communities in Western Europe, such as Muslims, Jews, Roma, and so-called witches. The modern/colonial age exists through the perpetual annihilation of peoples, knowledge systems, and ecosystems, designated respectively by the terms genocide, epistemicide, and ecocide. At first, the system of death euphemistically known as modernity was legitimized by the radically exclusivist ideologies within Christianity which produced the crusades and inquisitions. Roman Catholicism was weaponized against all other traditions, especially Islam. Indeed, modernity was very much born as an anti-Muslim project. Over time, secularism gradually replaced Catholicism as the hegemonic discourse of modernity. Western secular forms of thought established a hierarchy with science at the top, closely followed by Christianity, and then a descending order of so-called religions, beliefs, customs, and superstitions. Still today, science and Western European forms of Christianity are associated with people from the core of the modern/colonial world-system while all other approaches to reality are associated with peripheralized peoples. Various hierarchical subsystems—such as science, culture, class, and sexuality—overlap in a complex colonial web centred around race. Religion has become one of many markers used to racialize humans, along with language and, of course, skin colour. Global decolonization requires contesting and replacing such modern/colonial categories. Instead of conceptualizing religions revolving around and organized by secular science, we should simply acknowledge that, to approach reality, humans draw upon diverse ways of being, knowing, and behaving.