Tanzeen Rashed Doha | University of California, Davis (original) (raw)
Articles by Tanzeen Rashed Doha
Journal of World Philosophies , 2024
This essay traces the dynamic encounter between Rohingya ulama (scholars), who travel as muhajir ... more This essay traces the dynamic encounter between Rohingya ulama (scholars), who travel as muhajir (migrants), and Bangladeshi Deobandi Islamists, who re-enact the role of the ansar (helpers), as they explore godforsakenness during two waves of migration in 2016 and 2017. Bringing together theological aphasia and references to contemporary jihad, this ethnographic meditation calls into question the assumptive logics of secular historicism and liberal humanitarianism as it confronts the deathworld of the War on Terror through Islam’s founding texts and traditions. Drawing from Talal Asad’s reading of the secular as “conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism” and a formation that contains “a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities,” it highlights and unearths the secular core of liberal concepts of humanitarianism, historicity, spatiality, and geography, to specify their uses within the discourse of the War on Terror. The ulama in the border region point to the secular and identify it as a structuring coordinate within the discourse of liberal civil society. At the level of sensibility, the
interactions between the scholars and Islamists in the border region reveal a domain consisting of moods, anxieties, and perceptive qualities that runs counter to the affective life immanent to secularity.
Political Theology, 2022
This essay is a meditation on the condition of the heart (qalb) in the aftermath of the Shapla Ma... more This essay is a meditation on the condition of the heart (qalb) in the aftermath of the Shapla Massacre in Dhaka, Bangladesh (5-6 May 2013). This meditation explores the murmurs of the heartits iterations and repetitions in the shadows of translationfrom within Islamic traditions and experience, embedded in the deathworld under a War on Terror regime, as it confronts and haunts history. This is immanent muraqaba (spiritual vigilance): not practices of the self and assessment of the world in an ideal environment but a muraqaba which situates itself within the devastation of the Shapla killings. The text itself is also a form of muraqaba, a practice in which the ethnographer finds himself under the direct gaze of God, and the textdisplacing subjectivity, collapsing time, and delimiting languageconstructs itself, albeit in a disoriented state.
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
This article examines anti-Islamism in media and feminist discourse between the years of 1979-201... more This article examines anti-Islamism in media and feminist discourse between the years of 1979-2011. It argues that modern feminism requires anti-Islamism, a relation that gives rise to anti-Islamist representations in the media. I situate the confrontation between secularity and Islamism-in both The New York Times and feminist theory-within a specific historical ordering that I term "Islamist periodization. " Beginning with 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Meccan siege, the periodization examines three distinct phases: the 1980s as a time of consolidation and complexity; 1991-2001 as a period of US hegemony; and 2001-2011 as the age of perpetual war. During these periods, as the article demonstrates, there is significant ideological commonality between mainstream feminist theory and secular media.
Reviews by Tanzeen Rashed Doha
Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography , 2023
In recent panic attacks, I have discovered that even though the heart (qalb) is the starting poin... more In recent panic attacks, I have discovered that even though the heart (qalb) is the starting point for mapping sorrow, a sensation from the heart quickly travels to the legs and to the arms. The
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2021
The brand-new-flat-screen here in this Northern Thai house plays over and over the images from ex... more The brand-new-flat-screen here in this Northern Thai house plays over and over the images from exactly halfway around the world of two planes crashing into New York City, of explosions, of two tall white buildings tumbling down and lashing out with giant paws of dust. Ethnography #9 is not about Islam, but the book, the ethnography, the ethnographer, the possessed writer, and the haunted reader are all confronted by Islam in the very first instance, by its potential, its catastrophe, its capacities, and its ghosts. Not Hegel's speculative ghosts-"the Mahometans"-who advance in world-history only to fall behind Christianity (later, secularity). Not Derrida's specters, where ghosts work as metaphors. But actual spirits of/from another realm who physically, literally force the secular world to halt and look itself in the mirror.
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (SCTIW)
Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (SCTIW)
Public Scholarship by Tanzeen Rashed Doha
Media by Tanzeen Rashed Doha
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2020
A Conversation with Carlos A. Sanchez " A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalit... more A Conversation with Carlos A. Sanchez " A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of "violence" as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that "violence" itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize "brutality" as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror-all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be."
Watch the interview here: https://www.facebook.com/milestonesjournal/videos/3303240023119311
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2020
Description : This is an educational series meant to introduce Malcolm X through historical speec... more Description : This is an educational series meant to introduce Malcolm X through historical speeches, texts and events. This work gave shape and definition to a legacy of struggle championed by Malcolm X and carried forward by his direct and indirect students. There were others who came before Malcolm. But it was his efforts, words and immense personal sacrifice, culminating in his martyrdom that established with great clarity the Islamic platform of black liberation and divine justice. This immeasurable sacrifice would be utilized by generations to come in their fight against white arrogance and black subjugation in the Western hemisphere. We are going to examine the writings and experiences of those elders, who were youth during the height of Malcolm's political career, and discuss how they advanced the avenues of struggle which he opened up as an orator, teacher and political organizer.
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2020
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2019
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2020
This is a conversation about politics and theory with Afropessimist thinker Frank B. Wilderson II... more This is a conversation about politics and theory with Afropessimist thinker Frank B. Wilderson III. The interview was conducted by Tanzeen R. Doha and Hannibal Shakur.
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2019
In this episode, Tanzeen Doha and Jalil Kochai interview renowned American Indian author Ward Chu... more In this episode, Tanzeen Doha and Jalil Kochai interview renowned American Indian author Ward Churchill to discuss his groundbreaking essay “The Ghosts of 9-1-1”, his observations on genocide in the texts A Little Matter of Genocide and Kill the Indian, Save the Man, and his foreword to Stephen Sheehi’s book on Islamophobia. The conversation not only touches upon Churchill’s astute historical analysis of Islamophobia and native genocide as foundational to Western “civilization,” it takes a spontaneous turn towards contemporary histories of struggle, and ideas for political and ethical action outside of the paradigm of settler civil society and citizenship.
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2019
Yassir Morsi moderates a live roundtable discussion with Hannibal Abdul-Shakur, Tanzeen R. Doha, ... more Yassir Morsi moderates a live roundtable discussion with Hannibal Abdul-Shakur, Tanzeen R. Doha, and Isra Ibrahim, the authors of the essay “The Wolf and The Fox: Message from the Grassroots on American-Muslim Leadership”, wherein they discuss the state of Islamic leadership in America (or the lack thereof) and the relationship between anti-blackness and the global war on Islam. Amir Abdel Malik Ali of the Oakland Islamic Community Center also joins in by phone.
An interview on Malcolm X with Bangladeshi Islamic site 'Pathchokro.' Researcher/Political analys... more An interview on Malcolm X with Bangladeshi Islamic site 'Pathchokro.' Researcher/Political analyst Nazmussakib NIrjhor conducted the interview. This is his page: https://pathchokro.com/users/nirjhor
Chintaa Magazine
Norman Finkelstein is one of the leading American critics of Israeli foreign policy. As a polit... more Norman Finkelstein is one of the leading American critics of Israeli foreign policy. As a political scientist he wrote extensively on the exploitation of the holocaust as an ideological weapon and on the crisis in Palestinian occupied territories. He received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
He has a long history of teaching political theory and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even though he clearly met publishing and teaching standards, he was denied tenure at DePaul University. He is currently an independent scholar.
Some of his influential books are: Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, A Farewell to Israel: The coming break-up of American Zionism.
Dr. Finkelstein was invited by the Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and Muslim Students Association (MSA) at University of California-Davis (UC-Davis) to give a talk on the situation in Palestine, and also to discuss some of the main ideas of his new book This Time We Went Too Far, on May 14th, 2010. We would like to thank the MSA of UC Davis for helping to arrange this interview with Dr. Finkelstein right before the speaking event.
As students interested in and influenced by anti-colonial theory we had some difficulty framing this interview, simply because of the fact that the solutions proposed by Dr. Finkelstein in this interview related to the Zionist colonization of Palestine failed to critically engage with the dominant hegemonic discourse of international law. This meant that the ball stayed in the colonizer’s court, and for the most part we discussed how the colonizer should be pressured into playing the game differently.
We want to make sure that we do not invisibilize Palestinians. The future of Palestine will have to be determined by Palestinians themselves. Outside persons and institutions can support the movement for liberation but should not guide or lead it, or decide the frame of the discourse and the means used by it. Even though we understand the stance of Dr. Finkelstein about the importance of international law, and we realize that the human rights discourse can be used to discuss and expose the occupation, torture, collective violence/punishment, and surveillance that the Palestinians are regularly subjected to by the Israeli State, we also find it necessary to investigate how political power is constituted and exerted by these same institutions of human rights and international law, and how these institutions which appear to be independent actually keep the political power in the hands of a certain social class and exclude others. Due to lack of time we were unable to investigate and discuss fully the relation between power and institutions of law.
Having said that, there is absolutely no doubt that Dr. Finkelstein is one of the most important voices to speak against Israeli domination and we appreciate his commitment and dedication. We thank him for this interview.
Chintaa Magazine
Sunera Thobani teaches at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of British C... more Sunera Thobani teaches at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. She is also past president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), Canada's largest feminist organization. The first woman of color to serve in this position, she made anti-imperialism and anti-racism central to the women's movement. Her book ‘Exalted Subjects’ places new emphasis on the question of indigenism, race and citizenship within the context of Canada, and makes it clear that modern nation-states are fundamentally based on violence and relations of power. Her article ‘White Wars’ in the journal Feminist Theory is a critique of Western modes of feminism that work within the structure of white supremacy. Dr. Thobani is very clear that wars inflicted on Muslims and Islam cannot be and should not be justified in the name of liberation and democracy (for women).
Dr. Thobani traveled to West Bank and Gaza a few months ago. She came to University of California at Berkeley to speak against the Zionist occupation of Palestine, and to participate in the conference “Decolonizing the University” that took place in February 26-27. It was an absolute honor to meet with Sunera Thobani during this time and to discuss more about her work as an activist-scholar. We thank her for supporting the work of Chintaa.
Journal of World Philosophies , 2024
This essay traces the dynamic encounter between Rohingya ulama (scholars), who travel as muhajir ... more This essay traces the dynamic encounter between Rohingya ulama (scholars), who travel as muhajir (migrants), and Bangladeshi Deobandi Islamists, who re-enact the role of the ansar (helpers), as they explore godforsakenness during two waves of migration in 2016 and 2017. Bringing together theological aphasia and references to contemporary jihad, this ethnographic meditation calls into question the assumptive logics of secular historicism and liberal humanitarianism as it confronts the deathworld of the War on Terror through Islam’s founding texts and traditions. Drawing from Talal Asad’s reading of the secular as “conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism” and a formation that contains “a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities,” it highlights and unearths the secular core of liberal concepts of humanitarianism, historicity, spatiality, and geography, to specify their uses within the discourse of the War on Terror. The ulama in the border region point to the secular and identify it as a structuring coordinate within the discourse of liberal civil society. At the level of sensibility, the
interactions between the scholars and Islamists in the border region reveal a domain consisting of moods, anxieties, and perceptive qualities that runs counter to the affective life immanent to secularity.
Political Theology, 2022
This essay is a meditation on the condition of the heart (qalb) in the aftermath of the Shapla Ma... more This essay is a meditation on the condition of the heart (qalb) in the aftermath of the Shapla Massacre in Dhaka, Bangladesh (5-6 May 2013). This meditation explores the murmurs of the heartits iterations and repetitions in the shadows of translationfrom within Islamic traditions and experience, embedded in the deathworld under a War on Terror regime, as it confronts and haunts history. This is immanent muraqaba (spiritual vigilance): not practices of the self and assessment of the world in an ideal environment but a muraqaba which situates itself within the devastation of the Shapla killings. The text itself is also a form of muraqaba, a practice in which the ethnographer finds himself under the direct gaze of God, and the textdisplacing subjectivity, collapsing time, and delimiting languageconstructs itself, albeit in a disoriented state.
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
This article examines anti-Islamism in media and feminist discourse between the years of 1979-201... more This article examines anti-Islamism in media and feminist discourse between the years of 1979-2011. It argues that modern feminism requires anti-Islamism, a relation that gives rise to anti-Islamist representations in the media. I situate the confrontation between secularity and Islamism-in both The New York Times and feminist theory-within a specific historical ordering that I term "Islamist periodization. " Beginning with 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Meccan siege, the periodization examines three distinct phases: the 1980s as a time of consolidation and complexity; 1991-2001 as a period of US hegemony; and 2001-2011 as the age of perpetual war. During these periods, as the article demonstrates, there is significant ideological commonality between mainstream feminist theory and secular media.
Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography , 2023
In recent panic attacks, I have discovered that even though the heart (qalb) is the starting poin... more In recent panic attacks, I have discovered that even though the heart (qalb) is the starting point for mapping sorrow, a sensation from the heart quickly travels to the legs and to the arms. The
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2021
The brand-new-flat-screen here in this Northern Thai house plays over and over the images from ex... more The brand-new-flat-screen here in this Northern Thai house plays over and over the images from exactly halfway around the world of two planes crashing into New York City, of explosions, of two tall white buildings tumbling down and lashing out with giant paws of dust. Ethnography #9 is not about Islam, but the book, the ethnography, the ethnographer, the possessed writer, and the haunted reader are all confronted by Islam in the very first instance, by its potential, its catastrophe, its capacities, and its ghosts. Not Hegel's speculative ghosts-"the Mahometans"-who advance in world-history only to fall behind Christianity (later, secularity). Not Derrida's specters, where ghosts work as metaphors. But actual spirits of/from another realm who physically, literally force the secular world to halt and look itself in the mirror.
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (SCTIW)
Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (SCTIW)
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2020
A Conversation with Carlos A. Sanchez " A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalit... more A Conversation with Carlos A. Sanchez " A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of "violence" as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that "violence" itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize "brutality" as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror-all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be."
Watch the interview here: https://www.facebook.com/milestonesjournal/videos/3303240023119311
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2020
Description : This is an educational series meant to introduce Malcolm X through historical speec... more Description : This is an educational series meant to introduce Malcolm X through historical speeches, texts and events. This work gave shape and definition to a legacy of struggle championed by Malcolm X and carried forward by his direct and indirect students. There were others who came before Malcolm. But it was his efforts, words and immense personal sacrifice, culminating in his martyrdom that established with great clarity the Islamic platform of black liberation and divine justice. This immeasurable sacrifice would be utilized by generations to come in their fight against white arrogance and black subjugation in the Western hemisphere. We are going to examine the writings and experiences of those elders, who were youth during the height of Malcolm's political career, and discuss how they advanced the avenues of struggle which he opened up as an orator, teacher and political organizer.
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2020
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2019
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2020
This is a conversation about politics and theory with Afropessimist thinker Frank B. Wilderson II... more This is a conversation about politics and theory with Afropessimist thinker Frank B. Wilderson III. The interview was conducted by Tanzeen R. Doha and Hannibal Shakur.
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2019
In this episode, Tanzeen Doha and Jalil Kochai interview renowned American Indian author Ward Chu... more In this episode, Tanzeen Doha and Jalil Kochai interview renowned American Indian author Ward Churchill to discuss his groundbreaking essay “The Ghosts of 9-1-1”, his observations on genocide in the texts A Little Matter of Genocide and Kill the Indian, Save the Man, and his foreword to Stephen Sheehi’s book on Islamophobia. The conversation not only touches upon Churchill’s astute historical analysis of Islamophobia and native genocide as foundational to Western “civilization,” it takes a spontaneous turn towards contemporary histories of struggle, and ideas for political and ethical action outside of the paradigm of settler civil society and citizenship.
Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World, 2019
Yassir Morsi moderates a live roundtable discussion with Hannibal Abdul-Shakur, Tanzeen R. Doha, ... more Yassir Morsi moderates a live roundtable discussion with Hannibal Abdul-Shakur, Tanzeen R. Doha, and Isra Ibrahim, the authors of the essay “The Wolf and The Fox: Message from the Grassroots on American-Muslim Leadership”, wherein they discuss the state of Islamic leadership in America (or the lack thereof) and the relationship between anti-blackness and the global war on Islam. Amir Abdel Malik Ali of the Oakland Islamic Community Center also joins in by phone.
An interview on Malcolm X with Bangladeshi Islamic site 'Pathchokro.' Researcher/Political analys... more An interview on Malcolm X with Bangladeshi Islamic site 'Pathchokro.' Researcher/Political analyst Nazmussakib NIrjhor conducted the interview. This is his page: https://pathchokro.com/users/nirjhor
Chintaa Magazine
Norman Finkelstein is one of the leading American critics of Israeli foreign policy. As a polit... more Norman Finkelstein is one of the leading American critics of Israeli foreign policy. As a political scientist he wrote extensively on the exploitation of the holocaust as an ideological weapon and on the crisis in Palestinian occupied territories. He received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
He has a long history of teaching political theory and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even though he clearly met publishing and teaching standards, he was denied tenure at DePaul University. He is currently an independent scholar.
Some of his influential books are: Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, A Farewell to Israel: The coming break-up of American Zionism.
Dr. Finkelstein was invited by the Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and Muslim Students Association (MSA) at University of California-Davis (UC-Davis) to give a talk on the situation in Palestine, and also to discuss some of the main ideas of his new book This Time We Went Too Far, on May 14th, 2010. We would like to thank the MSA of UC Davis for helping to arrange this interview with Dr. Finkelstein right before the speaking event.
As students interested in and influenced by anti-colonial theory we had some difficulty framing this interview, simply because of the fact that the solutions proposed by Dr. Finkelstein in this interview related to the Zionist colonization of Palestine failed to critically engage with the dominant hegemonic discourse of international law. This meant that the ball stayed in the colonizer’s court, and for the most part we discussed how the colonizer should be pressured into playing the game differently.
We want to make sure that we do not invisibilize Palestinians. The future of Palestine will have to be determined by Palestinians themselves. Outside persons and institutions can support the movement for liberation but should not guide or lead it, or decide the frame of the discourse and the means used by it. Even though we understand the stance of Dr. Finkelstein about the importance of international law, and we realize that the human rights discourse can be used to discuss and expose the occupation, torture, collective violence/punishment, and surveillance that the Palestinians are regularly subjected to by the Israeli State, we also find it necessary to investigate how political power is constituted and exerted by these same institutions of human rights and international law, and how these institutions which appear to be independent actually keep the political power in the hands of a certain social class and exclude others. Due to lack of time we were unable to investigate and discuss fully the relation between power and institutions of law.
Having said that, there is absolutely no doubt that Dr. Finkelstein is one of the most important voices to speak against Israeli domination and we appreciate his commitment and dedication. We thank him for this interview.
Chintaa Magazine
Sunera Thobani teaches at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of British C... more Sunera Thobani teaches at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. She is also past president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), Canada's largest feminist organization. The first woman of color to serve in this position, she made anti-imperialism and anti-racism central to the women's movement. Her book ‘Exalted Subjects’ places new emphasis on the question of indigenism, race and citizenship within the context of Canada, and makes it clear that modern nation-states are fundamentally based on violence and relations of power. Her article ‘White Wars’ in the journal Feminist Theory is a critique of Western modes of feminism that work within the structure of white supremacy. Dr. Thobani is very clear that wars inflicted on Muslims and Islam cannot be and should not be justified in the name of liberation and democracy (for women).
Dr. Thobani traveled to West Bank and Gaza a few months ago. She came to University of California at Berkeley to speak against the Zionist occupation of Palestine, and to participate in the conference “Decolonizing the University” that took place in February 26-27. It was an absolute honor to meet with Sunera Thobani during this time and to discuss more about her work as an activist-scholar. We thank her for supporting the work of Chintaa.
Columbia University, 2023
PARISA VAZIRI IN CONVERSATION WITH TANZEEN RASHED DOHA
In this paper, I examine what I call the “poetic archives” of the May 5-6, 2013 massacre in Dhaka... more In this paper, I examine what I call the “poetic archives” of the May 5-6, 2013 massacre in Dhaka, Bangladesh. While in my larger dissertation I examine written memories, reflections, poems, novellas, videos, other literary and non-literary artifacts related to the massacre, for this particular paper, I will focus on one poem, passages from a novella – translated by me from Bengali to English - and one ethnographic interview conducted in the summer of 2015. I ask: How is the massacre memorialized in this living archive? Are the materials of the archive a form of immanent critique of secular time? Does this archive in the Islamic counterpublic challenge the concept of archive itself? In response to these questions, my interlocutors and I recapture Sayyid Qutb’s works – both his earlier writings on literature and his later works Milestones and In the Shade of the Qur’an - to interrogate the relation between death, sovereignty, and the concept of Man.
In this paper, I examine the May 2013 massacre of Islamist bodies in Dhaka, Bangladesh by identif... more In this paper, I examine the May 2013 massacre of Islamist bodies in Dhaka, Bangladesh by identifying the spatial coordinates of the “secular” and “religious.” The question of Islam, vis-à-vis secularism and constitutional arrangements founded immediately after the 1971 Liberation War underwent a fundamental shift on May 5-6. The mass killing of traditional Qawmi madrassa-based Islamist bodies unaffiliated with any political party signified a historic break that disrupted the established bourgeois Bengali nationalist narrative, which conceptualized secularism and Islam as binary opposites, and linked political-religion to the war crimes of 1971. The long march by the formerly quietist religious masses from non-urban spaces towards the capital Dhaka, and their takeover of the public sphere – resulting in their mass death – does not necessarily show fidelity to the reified history of Bangladesh itself. Rather, this new Islamic awakening demonstrates its fidelity to anti-colonialism proper, by specifying a two-way political-temporal structure. First, this new phenomenon revives a specific genealogy of political-Islam that struggled against British colonial rule in the subcontinent. And, second, through the embodied political practice of religion and appearing in the public sphere to struggle against the internalized logic of the “War on Terror” of a repressive regime, it asserts itself as a vehicle for anti-imperialist politics in the contemporary moment. In this paper, I interrogate what I call the spatial death of Islam: a structural narrowing of religious practices in the public sphere, and systematic disciplining of the capacities and desires of specific bodies within a larger urban political-economy of terror.
The transition from God to State has a direct relation to Hegel’s dialectical conceptualization o... more The transition from God to State has a direct relation to Hegel’s dialectical conceptualization of God ending in a concrete form within modern history. For Hegel, this end culminates in a material God, Absolute Knowledge, and the State. Hegel's history ends there, until he stands on his feet again with Marx’s help to think specifically about the material history of capitalism. Although this shift represents a crucial aspect of Hegel's recuperation, this account misses a step, and might benefit from a detour. Might we conceptualize the materiality of thought itself? Prior to the moment of transition from Hegel’s speculative philosophy to the practical materialism of the real social world, might we consider whether Hegel's observations on Islam were correct from within his own systematicity? And whether, if within his immanent teleology or directional structure, we must take the detour back to religion via Islam’s abstract worship, to open up a moment of thought beyond the consideration of the State-capital form? Perhaps the spectral presence of Islam in Nietzsche and other modern philosophers’ works is in need of a materially inverted re-founding. In other words, we should pull the brakes of history, as Walter Benjamin suggests in his 'Thesis on Philosophy of History' (1940), to think about not only the anticipating powers of a specific theology, but the possibility of thought itself, which becomes crucial within the immanent process of history – particularly within what Giovanni Arrighi refers to as 'terminal crisis’ (1994). We might examine why exactly such questions are relevant in this historical moment and ask, what is the material foundation that allows or forces us to have these sorts of mental conceptions? Is there a need to think through religion once more, and conceptualize the movement of spirit in a renewed fashion? May we regard the movement of Islam as prophetic anticipation of a different society’s emergence – a process that is not theological, but concrete, real, and dialectically informed by theology?
In this paper, I use Fanonian psychoanalysis and ethnographic sociology to interrogate the histor... more In this paper, I use Fanonian psychoanalysis and ethnographic sociology to interrogate the history of Islamophobia within the historical specificity of South Asia. Instead of using a positivist historical method, I consider the massacre of Islamic clerics and students on May 6, 2013 in Bangladesh to trace the discourse of anti-Islamism in a retrospective manner, and identify the coordinates of modern secularity and its objective fetishism of the Islamist body that both precedes and exceeds the ‘War on Terror’. The figure of the mullah represents a fundamental obstacle for the phenotype-mutation (Fanon 1952) of the vulgar secular petite bourgeois subject. Islamic figures have to be obliterated within the political episteme of neoliberalism - including radical leftist practices within it - or, if given a chance to live a dispossessed life, they must be consistently dishonored within the secular public sphere. In this paper, I examine not only the actual deaths of Islamists within the particular constitutional arrangement of a secularist regime, but also the life-world of these religious subjects for the purposes of tracing slips, metaphors, remembrances, dreams, distortions and other responses that signify petite bourgeois secular anxiety towards them.
Even after the formal end of colonialism, the desires and dreams of the colonized subject remain consistent with the structure of the unconscious developed within colonial history. While there are few explicit references to race within the local discourse of the postcolony after the foreigners have left, the differential structure of expectations with regards to the colonialist and the colonized are re-inscribed within the appearance of a new logic, in which petite bourgeois secular subjects articulate their identities in opposition to Islamist clerics. Practicing Islamic bodies remain a nagging reminder for the petite bourgeois urban subject who tries to “free” herself from the shackles of a backward religion. Such attempts at secularization are the direct outcome of modern colonialism, and its fundamental antagonism with Islam as a theoretical-political form.
The history of Islamism is often represented as a system of ethico-political life emerging from w... more The history of Islamism is often represented as a system of ethico-political life emerging from within the structure of modern colonial processes. While some scholars have written empirical histories and biographies about the life-world of Muslim slaves, the theoretico-political question of Islamism as an anti-plantation political project concerned with the categories of race and religion within the master-slave relation remains under-examined. The body of the slave, because of its internal condition and ontological non-status in modernity, is the most immediately concrete figure in structural antagonism with white supremacist secularity. In this sense, the millions of enslaved Muslims from Africa were evacuated out of not only the geography of their own bodies and lands, but also the ontological map within which these bodies once moved and asserted a totality. The concept of totality in religious history emerges from within the coordinates of monotheism, and Islam in the history of modernity- for various sets of geopolitical, intellectual, and social reasons- may be classified as the monotheism of non-Europe. Europe’s emergence in world history would be impossible without the necessary demise of Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, and one can sense that there is a specific hauntology that comes with this antagonistic adjacency of Islam with the unfolding of European modernity. Because of this history of Islam in Europe, the figure of the Moor allows us to trace the discourse of Islamophobia in Western thought. But with a non-Eurocentric conceptualization of history it is possible to trace anti-Islamism in modernity by focusing on the figure of the Muslim slave who acted against American plantations with a specific mode of being, an ethical life that conceptualized the plantation as a structure of domination in fundamental antagonism with the notion of abstract worship in Islam. In this paper, I place the figure of Malcolm X within the specific history of subjugation originating in chattel slavery as a historical-conceptual persona to trace the social genealogy of fundamentalist fanaticism against white-supremacist secularity.
In this paper, I dwell on the question of death in order to examine the concrete social-experient... more In this paper, I dwell on the question of death in order to examine the concrete social-experiential dimension of the world we find ourselves in, as bodies under erasure within the logic of the War on Terror inside a world that is permanently troubled by sets of political and economic crises. Capitalism as an absolute totalizing system of social relations penetrates the third world in a differentiating manner, producing a different rhythm, content, and structure of suffering. Therefore, it is imperative that we try to understand the effects of the moving contradictions and antagonisms within the specific concrete social experience of pain, disappearance, and death in the third world. The contemporary moment appears starkly economic in its demeanor, but it has produced explicit political consequences for Islamist bodies. This political-economic structure of the world- that requires the interdependence of State and capitalism and determines strategies of war as an immanent part of the system’s rationality of expansion and domination- materially evacuates and denigrates social bodies and modes of life in the Islamic third world. We know about the causal relation this structure of denigration has with its economic foundation. But to grasp the truth of this social suffering, one must slow down prior to accepting reductions, and be patient in elucidating the texture of violence and the bodily substance of death. One must refer to the originary violence of colonialism for the purposes of understanding how the articulation of bodies in that first instance is re-articulated and re-inscribed in dark frames in a new historical plane. I use two contemporary massacres-one of madrassa students and Islamic protesters in Dhaka, Bangladesh on May 6 and the other of largely Muslim Brotherhood supporters who participated in a sit-in protesting the military coup in Cairo, Egypt on August 14 -to examine how secular power inflicts pain and distributes death on practicing bodies of political-religion, and how the desecration of the flesh of Muslims is predicated upon a structure of dishonor.
In this paper, I show the limits of the foundationalist reading of Islam by thinking through ques... more In this paper, I show the limits of the foundationalist reading of Islam by thinking through questions of ontology, teleology, and universality. How should we think about the historical ontology of Islam, by also keeping a close eye on what Marx calls the "invisible essence" of capitalism, i.e., value? And, if we ask ontological questions within our current mode of colonialist-capitalism, then how are we to think about Islam, particularly from within the appearance of the so called "war on terror"? I am coming at the question of Islam not from the supposed beginning, with a clear reference to the origin that needs to assume a hermeneutic stability, but from the present, by exposing the gaps, ruptures and discontinuities, and allowing for an orientation that necessarily is a political description. My intention is to suggest that it is not tradition or foundation that Muslims use to describe Islam, it is the ontological historicity of Islam itself as a response to the given order that places the question of the political at its very center. In this paper, I critique the postmodern bias in anthropology that looks at Islam as merely a heterogeneous and relative set of traditions, and argue for the return of an antifoundational ontological grounding, emerging from within the unfolding of history itself.
Political Theology, May 10, 2022
In this paper, I trace historical developments in Islamist politics and mainstream feminism in re... more In this paper, I trace historical developments in Islamist politics and mainstream feminism in relation to media representations of Muslim women. By examining articles in The New York Times (NYT) published between 1979 and 2011, I suggest that secular representations of Islam, both in the media and feminist discourse, propagate what I call ‘anti-Islamism.’ By constructing a periodization based on signature events within contemporary Islamist history (what I term an ‘Islamist periodization’), I identify tactical shifts within the larger, global strategy of anti-Islamism. As a conceptual frame, anti-Islamism moves beyond articulations that either conceptualize Islamophobia as a behavioral-psychological disposition created through misinformation, or as a structural form of racial bigotry. Instead, anti-Islamism describes a consistent effort to counter and negate Islam’s world-making aspirations. Ultimately, I deduce that feminism as a political and epistemic project (with three major e...