Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"With ... entrenched notions as background, the United states began to waiver on the Huntingtonian notion of clash of civilisation and adopted a new project of pluralizing the one Islam identified by Huntington and his culturalist predecessors while maintaining Christianity as singular. This pluralization of Islam, as Islams, would allow the US to support the emergence of a new 'Islam,' a liberal form of Islam, that is more in tune with US imperial designs, and which would approximate modern Western notions of religions and religious subjectivities, as well as Western liberal citizenship, so as not to be incompatible with the rhetoric of democracy, while at the same time allowing the US to wage war against that other 'Islam' which continues to resist the Western (neo)liberal order."  Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism , 2015, p. 59

Islams and Modernities By Aziz Al-Azmeh

Olivier Roy on "Islamic radicalism" Some good points, but the title of this interview smells bad. I think Roy dealt with some areas of the subject. "The root causes are still there". I don't think he has elaborated on these root causes. "Radicalism", it seems, does not apply to the "Western" states. There are a few  political, economic and cultural features which characterise some Western states as "radicals". I wonder what Roy thinks of the structural violence of the state (Karen Armstrong).  I am a "radicalised" person, but not for the reasons he thinks. Was it just that one day, I got up and wanted radicalism as Roy says? That's nonsense, I'm afraid, and he would make a very bad doctor.

"Why has the Iranian public remained silent on Syria?"

"Rocking the foundations of Islam" The title is ridiculous. Yes, it is reductionist to say that one man, the narrator Bukhari, means Islam. It is also reductionist to imply, through the title of the article, that a book refuting al-Bukhari rocks the foundations of "Islam". 

by Khaled El-Rouayheb, University of Chicago Press 2005 Excerpts "My central contention is that Arab-Islamic culture on the eve of modernity lacked the concept of 'homosexuality,' and that writings from the period [1500-1800] do not evince the same attitude toward all aspects of what we might be inclined to call homosexuality today. The Arab literature of the early Ottoman period (1516-1798) is replete with casual and sometimes sympathetic references to homosexual love." p. 1 "Homosexuality is condemned and forbidden by the holy law of Islam, but there are times and places in Islamic history when the ban on homosexual love seems no stronger than the ban on adultery in, say, Renaissance Italy or seventeenth-century France. Some [classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish] poems are openly homosexual; some poets, in their collected poems, even have separate sections for love poems addressed to males and females." — Bernard Lewis, Music from a Distant Drum,

Revisiting the Idea of an Anthropology of Islam 

What is required is a Foucaultian investigation into the conditions of possibility for truth statements about "Islam." Instead of assuming and seeking to uncover the machanisms by which something called sexuality operates inside the category Islam, scholars must begin with the "positive mechanisms" that generate this Western will to know. Folowing Foucault, "we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation ... we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge." The outcome of this kind of approach will reveal much about how Western scholarship on sexuality not only constitutes something it calls "Islam" but also how it constitutes "Europe," the "West," as an always already racialized normativity." The question to ask then is not what is the nature of "sexuality," its operations, repressions, manifestations, and productions in Islam, but rather in a specific

The invention of sexual indentity and its imposition on the Other. "American and European missionaries of liberalism, that is, those who imagine that the global community of the future will be led by a secular cleric, [have sought] to proselytize their value system and model of social and political order to all Muslims whom they seek to save and rescu e from their despotic system of rule, failing which, the missionaries would at least want to rescue Muslim women and increasingly male (and female, though less attention is paid to the latter) Muslim 'homosexuals' from Islam's misogyny, homophobia, and intolerance. This act of proselytization aims to convert Muslims and Islam to Western liberalism and its value system as the only just and sane system to which the entire planet must be converted. As Talal Asad put it, the liberal mission is to have the Islamic tradition 'remade in the image of liberal Protestant Chiristianity.' Muslim resistance to this benev

Very good! I recommend it to "Westerners" and non-Westerners.

The political economy of oil, empire, Saudi Arabia, "Jihad", global forces of capital, "Islam", "democracy", etc. Some interesting stuff here. I don't think though that the figure regarding the numbers of the Iraqi deaths due to sactions is accurate. Recent studies have the put the number of deaths around 200,000. I also think that Mitchell should have put both words Islam and democracy in inverted commas. "McJihad: Islam and Empire"

Is there room for critical thinking in Islam? That's in addition to the history of atheism in Islam , the Qarmatians , the feminist movement (esp. in early 20th century). Those who don't see the role of colonialism, the Victorian morality that accompanied it, dictatorship and dependency, the failure of the nationalist-led modernization project (including 'secularism' from above) and the subsequent rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the stalinization of most the official left and repression, impeiralist domination, etc. do not see the diversity and history of Islam from Dakar to Bali.

"Je pense que le monde est devenu un petit village. Dans le monde musulman, une nouvelle génération a vu le jour, depuis presque 4 décennies. Cette génération a compris que le monde musulman a connu, depuis le XIXe siècle, une chute suite à la domination de l'Occident. Les colonisateurs sont retournés chez eux, mais n'ont pas cessé d'intervenir sur les affaires des pays musulmans. Cette génération de musulmans croit que les pays musulmans sont dépourvus de la civilisation et de la force militaire." Entretien avec Hichem Djaït

Essential Readings on Morocco

Sayyid Qutb was a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s until his execution by Nasser. He was born "to a smallholding family on the outskirts of Asyut in Upper Egypt. Repulsed at a young age by local clerics who failed to 'simplify religion for the public', Qutb snubbed Azhar [University] and embarked on the path of secular education. Qutb graduated to become a primary schoolteacher on 1933, and assumed a few bureaucratic posts at the Ministry of Education between 1940 and 1952. Unlike the vigorous-looking and socially engaging [Hassan] Banna, [the founder of the the Muslim Brotherhood], Qutb was plangued by poor health, always appearing pale and heavy-eyed, and leading the life of a chronically depressed introvert in the then-desolate district of Helwan, outside the capital [Cairo]. He found solace not in religion, but in literature and sensual poetry, and was quickly drawn to a circle of European-inspired intellectualls, patronized by the tow

The Russian Revolution 100 years on Uneven and Combined Development (Part 1) The full analysis   (91 pages) My reading for this week-end 

The Arab poet who worshipped wine and fornication with women and boys.

The NYT ties religion to Harvey-Weinstein-type of criminal behaviour

Turkey: Atatürk statues attacked

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