Newsflash: The foreign policy of Western powers like the US and Canada do not give a rats derriere if Muslim-majority countries are led by fundamentalist regimes or secularist ones as long as the world-system is not threatened. In other words, you can forbid women from driving or girls from going to school if you like, but don’t get serious about things like minimum wages, trade union activism, and protection of important resources. Just open your borders to rapacious investors from more powerful countries and everything will be ok. Guess what, whether you like Mubarak or Morsi is not a problem. It’s Nasser they are worried about. That is why the regimes in Libya, Iraq had to change and that Syria (not to mention North Korea and Venezuela) are worrisome to the West while Saudi Arabia isn't. I am not defending leftist regimes that are tyrannical and corrupt. But that is not particular to the left. It is the norm outside the West, where regimes are so weak that they are perpetually in an existential crisis. Human rights are the first thing to be thrown out the window by any regime that feels threatened. The 1970 October Crisis in Canada is a clear example of that! A few home-made explosives and two kidnappings were all it took to turn democracy into an unaffordable luxury.

Of course, there are two sides to every story, despite what the mainstream Western chattering class would have us believe when discussing North Korea. Let me be clear: I am not endorsing the North Korean regime (not that it would matter to them anyway). But the caricatures we are presented daily by our media outlets and political leaders need to be nuanced. That is why other information sources are useful. Here are two interesting opinion pieces from Al Jazeera English that dare to consider the situation from the North Korean viewpoint:
Nuclear Orientalism by Tarak Barkawi
and
Korea: B2 bombers offering a path to peace? by Pepe Escobar

Suite à la conference du 4 avril, présentant une analyse décoloniale soufie de l'interdisciplnarité, certains participants m'ont demandé de mettre la bibliographie de la conférence en ligne. La voici donc :

Al-Burhânî, Muḥammad 'Uthmân 'Abduh. 1970. Intiṣâr awliyâ' al-Raḥmân 'alâ awliyâ' al-Shayṭân (La victoire des saints de Dieu sur les saints Satan). Khartoum: Tariqa Burhaniya Disuqiya Shadhuliya.

Césaire, Aimé. 1955. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence africaine.

Dussel, Enrique. 1996. The Underside of Modernity : Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.

 ---1995. The invention of the Americas:  Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum.

Elyas, Amal. 2005. Arwah Abiya from the Arabian Peninsula: A Narrative Inquiry of Seven Women with Fiery Resistor Spirits University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada.

Geoffroy, Éric. 2009. Le soufisme : voie intérieure de l'islam. Paris:  Points.

Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2011 - "Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality." Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (1) http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq. 

---2010 - "Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 8: 29-38.

 ---2006 - "The Long-Durée: Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern-Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System." Human  Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge V(1):Fall. 

2006 - "Les implications des altérités épistémiques dans la redéfinition du capitalisme global." Multitudes
(3): 51-74.

Geoffroy, Éric. 2010. Abd el-Kader, un spirituel dans la modernite. Beyrouth: Dar Albouraq.

Morin, Edgar, Basarab Nicolescu, er Lima de Freitas. Charte de la Transdisciplinarité. Centre International de
Recherches et Études Transdisciplinaires 1994 [http://basarab.nicolescu.perso.sfr.fr/ciret/chartfr.htm. 

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth : The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition. New York: HarperOne.

Nishitani, Osamu, 2006. "Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of." Translation, biopolitics, colonial difference no. 4.

Schimmel, Annemarie. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Tariqa Burhaniya, 2012 - Discours annuels du Cheikh de la Tariqa http://www.Burhaniya.org/speechs.htm (en arabe), http://www.burhaniya.info/intranet/french/discours.html  (en français) et http://burhaniya.info/intranet/I_welc_e.htm (en anglais) 

Tlostanova, Madina et Walter Mignolo. 2012. Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Ohio State University Press.