On the one hand, the story of modern Islam across multiple disciplines has for decades been organized by a figure of crisis survived or undergone: the disparate practices of contemporary Muslim life are what survive of Islam after colonialism, after the consolidation of the nation-state, after the demise of local community, after the codification of Islamic law, after the domestication of sufi charisma, after the globalization of the world. According to this utterly dominant academic historiography, Islam today is marked by historical rupture, and the task of social science is to account for the fate of Muslims in its wake. On the other hand, psychoanalysis approaching postcolonial Islam works in a resolutely diagnostic mode. In Fethi Benslama’s paradigmatic (if frequently insightful) version of this analysis, the psychoanalyst reveals and redresses a traumatic caesura in the modern Muslim subject now bereft of the cultural institutions that once maintained the theological economy of the drives. In the absence of such institutions, only a “torment of origin” and mass despair remain. But conditions and oppositions internal to Islam allowed for this mutation, the psychoanalyst comments. Knot of the Soul refuses both these powerful modes of writing Islam.