How could material nature conceivably account for the order and purposes of nature, and, above all, for the adaptation of living entities to their surroundings and to their requirements for survival and…
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The idea of the Muslim world: History and critique 
by
Mona Oraby
The Muslim world: Political fiction and sociological fact?
by
Mona Oraby
Big history must reckon with the specificity of human experience, even if such an orientation yields more modest conclusions. The continued popularity of the idea of the Muslim world cannot be attributed to the elite alone. Today’s public spheres are saturated with political novices and seasoned politicians, academics, curious observers, and a vast range of nominally interested pundits, all of whom, it seems, have something to say about Muslims and Islam. Comment has never been freer and more pernicious. Any and all opinions find expression through more diffuse communication technologies than ever before. There are no guarantees that the provenance of a concept confines its use within the social networks that may have once given the concept meaning. If Aydın has written the history of an idea’s emergence, to what extent must its endurance account for a wider social field?
The idea of the Muslim world: History and critique 
by
Mohamed Amer-Meziane
Strategic Muslim worlds? Race, reform, and the dialectics of essentialism
by
Mohamed Amer-Meziane
The Idea of the Muslim World demonstrates that the "Muslim world" is a modern colonial invention, a racially imagined entity articulated in the context of late nineteenth-century imperialism by Westerners and colonized Muslims alike. It is a common invention of orientalists such as Ernest Renan and of Muslim modernists who responded to him, such as Sayyid Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani. The Muslim world is an act of resistance to racialization that mirrors what it tries to challenge. Aydın's critical genealogy is an act of intellectual decolonization because it tends to undermine a discursive strategy aimed at resisting Empire by demonstrating that this strategy is dependent on imperialism itself. The idea of the "Muslim world" is produced by Europe's hegemony because even its anti-colonial affirmation makes sense in relation to the West, in the mirror and the eyes of Europe.
The idea of the Muslim world: History and critique
by
Madeleine Elfenbein
Political Islam and emancipatory politics
by
Madeleine Elfenbein
Does it matter if you are Muslim? Lately it seems to matter very much. By drawing our attention to the presumptions embedded in the term “Muslim,” Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s essay and Cemil Aydın’s book aim to help us think our way out of Islamophobic patterns of thought. As both scholars point out, these patterns run deep across the ideological spectrum. At the heart of both arguments is the concern that contemporary political discourse accords an exceptional status to Islam as a totalizing ideology (as opposed to a mere religion), and to Muslims as a transnational body of believers united in their worldview and political aims.