Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“ The oil world I inhabited brought together geopolitics and the everyday. It was material and dirty, and bloody and wracked by wars, coups d’état and revolutions. It was a world wrought by political struggle on the streets and at the diplomatic table. Corporations, universities and security apparatuses all had a finger in the pie. And along with the people who worked the oilfields and filled the streets during demonstrations they changed the world in perceptible ways, sometimes suddenly and monumentally, as when Middle East and Latin American leaders negotiated better oil deals for their countries; sometimes gradually, through a series of unintended consequences.” A review of Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson Laleh Khalili’s critique highlights good missing points in Thompsons’ book. However, Khalili never mentions capital and profit and their role in shaping geopolitics. We blitzed it Related Carbon Democracy

 The Role of the Rentier Intellectuals Under colonial duress, Muslim public intellectuals were thus the principal agents of changing their own ancestral faith into an unrecognizable site of ideological contestation with what they categorically identified as “the West”—the self-designated code with which the hegemony of colonial modernity faced and stared down the world at large. Factual relation of power between colonial modernity and Islam eventually gave rise to fictive terms of opposition between European colonial ideologues and Muslim public intellectuals. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, and in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic events of 9/11, enough remnants of this binary supposition were resuscitated for us to see the psychopathological origin of its formulation, and the political potency of its appeal. To see how this dialectic of generating and sustaining a fabricated hostility between “Islam and the West” has worked over the last two hundred years, ...

“The last Muslim intellectual”