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Are we always already determined?

The insight that we are “always already” in something or other leads people to a kind of determinism and a belief in an invisible boundary beyond which exist forces that control us in ways that we cannot ever actually know. We are produced by a structure from which there is no escape, no getting on…

Muslims are not Racialized

(This is an addendum to my article “Muslims Are Not a Race”. I would recommend reading that first in order to fully understand this post. I discuss “racialization” there, but am expanding on it here.) Every justification for defining Islamophobia as a type of racism depends on the concept of “racialization.” But the defenders of…

The incoherence of “Islam” as a “discursive tradition” (excerpt from a work in progress)

Some people might be interested in this excerpt from a short book I’m working on about the “conceptualization of Islam”. This section is about the logical problems of Talal Asad’s conceptualization of Islam as a “discursive tradition”. Just the text, no footnotes. Very much a draft. Islam as a “discursive tradition” The other major conceptualization…

Thread(s) on Academic Islamic Studies

For those who are interested, here are the three relevant threads from me (originally posted on Twitter in late May 2020): FIRST THREAD: Advice to young academics: Too much “Islamic studies” today is 3rd-rate postmodern cultural critique — lazy riffing about Muslims as a variegated bundle of racial/gender/sexual groups with “Islam” as a symbolic cultural…


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