Continuing to reinforce the centrality of white Protestant capitalist culture to American identity sometimes requires Americans to turn their hostile…
India in the American imagination: Historicizing the politics of representation
Islam
Alfred Stepan’s legacy
Instead of separation of state and religion, Al drew on the history of established religions in Europe to advocate the…
Secular, sacred, Yiddish, Jewish
In considering immanentism, it is difficult not to imagine it in religious terms. This is all the more so when…
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…
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.
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…
The Muslim world: Political fiction and sociological fact?
Big history must reckon with the specificity of human experience, even if such an orientation yields more modest conclusions. The…
Strategic Muslim worlds? Race, reform, and the dialectics of essentialism
The Idea of the Muslim World demonstrates that the "Muslim world" is a modern colonial invention, a racially imagined entity…
Political Islam and emancipatory politics
Does it matter if you are Muslim? Lately it seems to matter very much. By drawing our attention to the…
“Whither a Muslim world?”
What is the “Muslim world?” Is it solely a descriptive term employed in the social sciences and humanities to name…