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Weaponized Mysticism and the Sexual Politics of Empire: The Colonial Afterlife in the Global South Woman

 

 Also, here.

 

The following is an augmented essay form of our podcast and vlog entitled The Recruited Subaltern Female Mystic as Weapon: When Trauma Becomes a Tool of Empire.[1]

With that said, imperial strategies never ended. It simply mutated. What was once enforced through gunboats, flags, and treaties is now orchestrated through NGOs, online spiritual movements, and the seductive language of healing and empowerment. In the 21st century, empire no longer only colonizes territory. It colonizes trauma. And perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the figure of the traumatized mystic-turned-native-informer: the woman from the Global South who has survived gendered violence, been rejected by her own traditions, and re-emerges as a tool of empire in the name of liberation.

This essay draws from the works of Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Anne McClintock, Ranjana Khanna, Malek Alloula, Gloria Wekker, and others to explore how sexual exploitation, psychological operations, and spiritual bypassing converge in the figure of the colonized woman weaponized by Western systems. We apply these insights directly to the current cultural and geopolitical moment, especially within Western Muslim diasporas and specifically in Australia.

 

The White Devil’s Desire: Race, Sex, and Subjugation

As Anne McClintock showed in Imperial Leather (New York: 1995), colonial conquest was never just economic or political. It was deeply erotic. The land was feminized, the native woman exoticized, and her sexual availability became the metaphor through which domination was fantasized and justified. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: 1986) demonstrates this literally: French colonial postcards depicted Algerian women in staged, fabricated harems meant to titillate the French gaze while simultaneously proving the ‘primitiveness’ of Muslim societies. That logic persists today.

Under neoliberalism, the Global South woman is no longer openly enslaved—she is ‘liberated.’ But this liberation often masks a deeper capture: her pain is curated, platformed, and monetized so long as it confirms the West’s narrative of dysfunction in the Global South. Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence (Durham: 2016) shows how sexual liberalism functions as a disguise for racial and sexual supremacy—where tolerance of the exotic other is predicated on her submission to white norms. Note how Charles W. Mills already signalled much of Gloria Wekker’s main thesis in his The Racial Contract (New York: 1999).

 

Spirituality as Soft Power: The Mystic as Trojan Horse

Now, even with Empire’s forever wars, in a digital and psychologized age, direct military conquest is usually unsustainable over a longterm. But the colonizer has found a new method: the mystic masquerade. Ranjana Khanna’s Dark Continents (Durham: 2003) and Marion Goldman’s The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege (New York: 2012) both detail how colonial and new religious movements instrumentalize women's trauma for spiritual authority. These figures are often charismatic, wounded, and seemingly radical—yet become useful agents of the very system they claim to transcend.

This phenomenon is playing out right now in various spiritual scenes across the West. One archetype—especially familiar in Muslim and Arab diasporas—is the woman who was once religious, perhaps abused, now mystical and “post-tradition.” She speaks the language of Gurdjieff, Jung, Sufism, or tantra. She often claims to be a healer. But what she performs is not healing—it is ideological infiltration.

These women are courted by NGOs, spiritual institutions, and even intelligence-linked think tanks. As Gayatri Spivak warned in Can the Subaltern Speak? (Urbana: 1988), these are not simply liberated voices—they are curated ones, chosen because they say what Empire wants to hear.

 

The Intelligence-Industrial-Intimacy Complex

Within Western Muslim immigrant communities—particularly in settler states like Australia—the problem intensifies. Western governments, as Inderpal Grewal argues in Saving the Security State (Durham: 2017), use exceptional figures (often Muslim women) to narrate pathology within their own cultures, thus reinforcing national security agendas. These women, often with unresolved trauma, are offered platforms, grants, even covert protection—not for healing, but for condemnation.

This dynamic is particularly visible when women are weaponized to attack Arab or Muslim men under the guise of feminism or mysticism. As seen in recent personal events involving diaspora ‘Alawite communities in Australia, women who claim mystical insight or healing power have been used—either knowingly or unconsciously—to infiltrate, monitor, and destabilize radical or traditionalist men. What appears as a relationship or spiritual collaboration is, in reality, a psychological operation cloaked in intimacy.

As Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth (reprint: 2017), the most dangerous colonized subject is not the collaborator with a gun. It is the moralist who believes they have transcended their culture and now uses Western morality to judge it. In Black Skin, White Masks (reprint: 2017), he warns of the colonized subject who flees from their own pain by embracing the colonizer’s worldview. Today, that flight often occurs through spiritual language and “healing” culture.

 

The Sexual Trapdoor of Liberation

There is a dark, unspoken truth behind many of these mystic-native informers: they are sexually exploited. As Global Woman (London: 2002), edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, shows, the global care economy is built on the backs—and wombs—of Global South women. Spiritual spaces are no exception. Many of these women are seduced by white men in positions of power—mentors, gurus, therapists, partners—who offer enlightenment but deliver trauma. The erotic economy of colonialism continues, now cloaked in “tantric bonding,” “kundalini awakening,” or “sacred union.”

These relationships are often transactional, asymmetrical, and ultimately discardable. As the original Nation of Islam bluntly put it: the white devil wants the Black or Brown woman for one reason—to conquer her body as a terrain of colonial dominion. And when she is no longer useful, she is thrown away! Nevertheless what makes this figure especially dangerous is that she often believes she is doing good. She speaks in the name of liberation, healing, or justice. She attends interfaith panels, gives TED-style talks, writes memoirs. But behind her words is a geopolitical function: to justify the surveillance, pacification, or even military assault on her own people.

She is not simply a mystic. She is a tool and a brainwashed cultural traitor ultimately enabling the predation, murder and destruction of her own people by Empire, the white devil.

 

The Afterlife of Empire and the Liberation of Woman

We are witnessing not just spiritual confusion, but a systemic grooming pipeline—designed to seek out traumatized, spiritually-inclined women of the Global South, and turn them into tools of imperial power. Their mysticism becomes a mask—one that hides both unresolved personal trauma and the geopolitical purpose they now serve.

Let us be clear: pain that is not transmuted will be transmitted. And empire is always scanning for pain to weaponize. Muslim immigrant communities must remain vigilant, because not all mystics are healers. Some are Trojan horses where not all spiritual insight is pure. Some are programmed like robots, and those following the Gurdjieffian Work and Fourth Way are amongst these, because not all liberation is liberation. Some are merely forms of capture.

As Fanon, Spivak, McClintock, and Wekker have shown, the white devil is a shapeshifter. He now comes bearing crystals, therapy degrees, and ‘sacred masculine’ workshops. But his mission remains the same: to conquer, to exploit, to fuck and to destroy! The liberation of woman cannot come through empire’s tools. It must come through radical self-knowledge, deep decolonial healing, and solidarity with the very traditions empire seeks to erase. Only then can the cycle of capture be broken.

Additionally, as a word of caution and advice to Global South actors: decolonization must liberate the female on her own cultural terms even as a preemption against infiltration and colonization by this white Western devil. The mullahs of Iran, the Taliban, and similar haven’t grasped this truism, hence why they will continue to be easily undermined by Empire. Perhaps they should heed the saying that ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ much more seriously than they otherwise have, because it may prove the difference between war and peace, security and chaos, stability and death!

 

 


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