ReOrient

Issue Number

Latest documents

• Elizabeth F. Thompson. How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Liberal-Islamic Alliance
• Speaking from Exile: The Struggle over Jewish Dissent
• Peter Oborne. The Fate of Abraham: Why the West Is Wrong about Islam
• Academia, Racial, and Social Justice, and Abrahamic Coexistence
• Sahar F. Aziz. The Racial Muslim. When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom
• Decentring Palestinians from Jewish Activism
• A “Crisis of Masculinity”?: The West’s Cultural Wars in the Emerging Muslim Manosphere

  This article aims to frame the emergence of a new category of thought, referred to here as “Alt-Wallah”, within the Islamicate which exists at the intersection between a supposed crisis of masculinity, the Alt Right, and Muslim men. This framing begins by looking at the various crises that abound both in Islam and in masculinity. We then introduce what Farris calls “femonationalism”, and give some reflections on the relationship between our new category of thought and this femonationalism. This new category of thought is given the name “Alt-Wallah”, and then linked to certain already existing categories of thought within the Islamicate. Other names are considered throughout the piece, as well as reasons as to why these are not adequate to describe the phenomenon in question. This is followed by an analysis of examples such as online Muslim figures Daniel Haqiqatjou, Nabeel Aziz, and others, as well as an exploration of further similarities to what is called the “fundamentalist declinist” category of thought. We then conclude with a reflection on the buffered Muslim man, and on what role the idea of the mujtahid plays in this conceptualisation of Muslim man.

• Exchanges with Atalia Omer: ReOrienting Jewishness
• Jasmin Zine. Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation
• For the Love of Islam: US Foreign Policy, Islamophilia, and the Islam Centennial 14

  This article explores the historical and lingering effects of US government involvement in defining Islam as public and foreign policy. It focuses on the Islam Centennial 14, a US program to celebrate the fourteenth centennial of Islam – and manage the US’s global image – which was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Islam Centennial 14 organized a nationally touring museum exhibit, distributed information on Islam to partners and public schools, produced a newsletter, documentaries, and speaker series on Islam. It also culminated in one of the first academic centers in the US devoted to the study of Islam. The Islam Centennial 14’s activities provided a counter-narrative to rising Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment, while the discourses that swirled around them – including their own press reports, outside conspiracy theories, and academic analyses – foreshadowed more contemporary xenophobic politics. This article presents the Islam Centennial 14 specifically as a case study through which to consider the workings and ramifications of American Islamophilia. It examines how such celebrations of Islam as part and parcel of international and national governance reinscribe both racialized representations of Islam and, however inadvertently, anti-Muslim sentiments. It argues that Islamophilia is an undertheorized corollary to more explicit anti-Muslim positions, and one whose deployment and effects more than merit sustained attention.

Featured documents

• Progressive Islam – A Rose by Any Name? American Soft Power in the War for the Hearts and Minds of Muslims

  The aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States brought into sharp relief the leading role of that country in shaping contemporary Muslim discourses to create discursive urgencies that meet its ideological needs. Reflections on a short but very intense battle for the term “Progre...

• Disintegrating the Hyphen: The “Judeo-Christian Tradition” and the Christian Colonization of Judaism

  Jewish dissent to the concept of a “Judeo-Christian Tradition” reveals it to be a political assemblage offering conditional, incomplete access to structures of white, western Christian power. While the concept offers pragmatic benefits to Jews, it does so at the expense of Jewish distinction from...

• Decolonizing the “Universal” Human Rights Regime: Questioning American Exceptionalism and Orientalism

  This article aims to decolonize the discourse of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through the lens of Critical Muslim Studies, arguing that such systems of “international norms” are Eurocentric in character and hegemonic in practice. I argue that the promotion of a Western system of human...

• Political Islam in the Aftermath of “Islamic State”

  The rapid contraction of the territorial extent of the Islamic state seems to have dented its claims to have restored the caliphate. The question that this raises is what does the end of the Islamic state mean for political Islam in general. To address this question, this article will provide an...

• A “Crisis of Masculinity”?: The West’s Cultural Wars in the Emerging Muslim Manosphere

  This article aims to frame the emergence of a new category of thought, referred to here as “Alt-Wallah”, within the Islamicate which exists at the intersection between a supposed crisis of masculinity, the Alt Right, and Muslim men. This framing begins by looking at the various crises that abound...

• From “Jewification” to “Islamization”: Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Austrian Politics Then and Now

  The content of right-wing populism is currently built largely upon Islamophobic mobilization, whereas, before the Second Republic of Austria, anti-Semitism was the principal content of populism in Austria. This article engages in a comparative discussion of the anti-Semitic propaganda deployed by...

• Intention as the Bridge Between the Ideal and Contingent: Rabea Basri and the Women of the Tablighi Jamaʿat

  The itinerant men of the Tablighi Jamaʿat, an Islamic reform movement that urges its followers to travel in the path of Allah, have drawn the attention of journalists and scholars alike. Dressed in loose trousers that expose his ankles, a...

• Multiculturalism and the Muslim Question
• From Orientalism to Islamophobia: Reflections, Confirmations, and Reservations

  While European Orientalism looks back on a long history, the rise of Islamophobia is generally found to have taken place since the 1990s. Both phenomena rely on recurrent and shifting ideas, tropes and narratives that are used when imagining and describing the Other, and tend to be based on...

• The Other Siege of Vienna and the Ottoman Threat: An Essay in Counter-Factual History

  By proposing a counter-factual history in which the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 succeeded, this essay attempts to illuminate both the parameters of Ottoman power at that time and the complexity of European politics at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. As with many attempts at counter-factu...