Why has public criticism of the German churches for their conduct during the Nazi era been disproportionately directed at the minority Catholic Church and not at the majority Protestant churches?
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In the Shadow of World Literature 
by
Avi Alpert
The contested worlds of world literature
by
Avi Alpert
Reading Michael Allan’s In the Shadow of World Literature, I thought of two competing ways to understand political impasses. On one side are those who see political opponents as irrational fools who must be persuaded with the force of reason (or just plain force) to see the truth. On the other are those who see disagreement not as epic battles of logic, but rather as the confrontation of competing and coherent—even if dangerous and violent—worldviews. This latter model has guided the research framework for two scholars who appear to have influenced Allan profoundly, and who are no strangers to readers of The Immanent Frame: Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. In what is now several decades of penetrating analyses, Asad, and later Mahmood, have questioned how secular criticism understands the world around it. They have suggested that secularism is not a mere separation of church and state, but a profound and profoundly contradictory way of organizing comportments, embodiments, and affects, and that its ways of doing so preclude its ability to understand those with different forms of life.
Islam: An American Religion 
by
Anver Emon
Islam: An American Religion and the paranoia of anti-Muslim politics
by
Anver Emon
When is a discussion, debate, polemic, or rant about Islam and Muslims not really about Islam and Muslims? If it’s not about Islam and Muslims, then what is it about? The analytic heft of Islam: An American Religion lies in part in its play on this fundamental irony that dots the United States political landscape today. In this elegantly written book, Nadia Marzouki introduces all-too-common terms like “Islam,” “mosque,” and “Sharia” as sites of a more foundational and fundamental contest about the promise of “America." Drawing upon Richard Hofstadter’s essay on the “paranoid style” of American politics, Marzouki situates today’s toxic diatribes about Islam into a larger American narrative in which Muslims today, not unlike the Illuminati of the nineteenth century, are convenient distractions from a more fundamental contest about what “America” is, who it serves, and by implication, who and what it must necessarily exclude. As a history of the present, Marzouki’s book contrasts the current furor that seeks to exclude Islam and Muslims from the political and social landscape, with the inclusive view of Muslims and Islam that (at least theoretically) informed the Founding Fathers who helped fashion the country’s origin story.
In the Shadow of World Literature
by
Mimi Winick
Future fanatics of world literature?
by
Mimi Winick
While this future world literature is hospitable—more broadly, to aspiring critics, and, in a more specialized sense, to literary scholars like myself working primarily not in “world literature” or even comparative literature, but in a single national tradition—it is also exclusive. The usual pieties of criticism would suggest that exclusivity is a bad thing; but in the context of the history Allan tells, we understand exclusivity to be a byproduct of creating any practice or forming any community. World literature will always be defined against something, but we can take Allan’s account as a prod to be more aware of the specific aspects of what gets co-opted as its foil. Being aware of one’s limits is not necessarily a guarantee of being generous or accurate in recognizing that which lies outside them; however, Allan’s book offers ways of reading—e.g., attending to the “social life” of texts—that support our perception of the details in literary and extra-literary accounts of “literacy’s other.” Just as Allan teaches us to think of world literature as a set of practices rather than a corpus of works, his own book is less a template than a portable set of tools with which to do work in literary studies now, and to construct the future of our shared discipline.
Islam: An American Religion
by
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri
On the evolution and impact of anti-Muslim polemics
by
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri
Nadia Marzouki’s Islam: An American Religion is one of the most exciting books I have read on Islam in the United States recently. It is, in my opinion, the best available piece of scholarship with which one could think about Islam in contemporary American politics. Multiple arguments run through this rich and nuanced book. But buried beneath the surface of the chronology of the chapters lies a narrative of how anti-Muslim polemics have evolved since 9/11 to shape politics in America today. Marzouki acknowledges that anti-Muslim polemics, “as absurd, burlesque, and shrill as they are,” nonetheless, “produce positive effects” that have shaped American politics, law, and culture since 9/11. Her emphasis is less on outlining their evolution and more on the way they repeat longstanding debates regarding the utility of liberalism in building a diverse political community.
