A special project of The Immanent Frame to mark its tenth anniversary. Co-curated by Courtney Bender and Nancy Levene.
Latest posts
After the “Muslim world”: Beyond strategic essentialism

Only after freeing the concept of the ummah from the formation of narratives about modern geopolitics, can we perhaps re-read it in a decolonizing and emancipatory mode. This was exactly the set of concerns that initially inspired my study. Thus, if do not want to leave the baby, namely emancipatory Muslim political traditions, with the bathwater of imperial and Cold War geopolitics, we need go and find it a better, warmer tub in our decolonial critique that might not rely only on Muslim intellectual and spiritual traditions but on a shared human heritage. There have been successful examples of this path, in the tradition of Muslim feminism and in other forms of justice-oriented Muslim legal and theological reinterpretation of texts and traditions. Yet, those who try to rescue an emancipatory tradition of thought and faith cannot achieve this goal unless they destroy the geopolitical and racial myths about Muslim unity that were given canonical authenticity in the last two centuries.
The Idea of the Muslim World and the global politics of religion
The idea of the Muslim world enables narratives in which Islam “causes” people to do things.
More immanence, more Gods

The apparent battlefield is an old one, and the separation of philosophy from theology has a long history. Philosophy, in this battle, gets immanence and self-sufficient subjectivity, while theology remains stuck in transcendence and hierarchy. What I want to insist on in this post is that the tension between philosophy and theology cannot be made equivalent to the tension between immanence and transcendence, either in the contemporary moment, or historically; the tradition of immanent philosophy, as I will briefly indicate below, cuts across the former division, and would have to include religious as well as “irreligious” thinkers.
Releasing the umma from geopolitics
Read as a work of care, Cemil Aydın’s book releases the umma-concept from its geopolitical formation. This leaves the umma remaining to be read.
When was the monist century?
Why study the immanentist tradition?