ReOrient

Issue Number

Latest documents

• Mourad Wahba. Fundamentalism and Secularization
• ReOrient
• Elizabeth F. Thompson. How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Liberal-Islamic Alliance
• Decentring Palestinians from Jewish Activism
• 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.

• Speaking from Exile: The Struggle over Jewish Dissent
• Inventing Islam(ism): De-Islamization under Secular Authoritarianism in Bangladesh

  The presence of Islamism in Muslimistan necessitates a secular age, as only in a secular age does it become possible to be for or against Islam due to the decentering of Islam as the default organizing premise of Muslim societies. Within this fundamental de-Islamization or secularization of Muslim societies, further de-Islamization is made possible by secular power’s ability to dictate and even produce Islam, which continues to perpetually shift the meanings of secularism and Islamism in accordance with the European Enlightenment’s notion of progress. The banality and universality of secularism, and markedness and provinciality of Islam(ism), ensure that only the (perceived) absence of secularism and (perceived) presence of Islamism are felt – never the other way around. Bangladesh’s recent authoritarian turn, its social engineering during secular authoritarianism, and the recent calls for democratization – all point towards the secularist politics of de-Islamization which invents Islam(ism) in de-Islamization, and which then explains the failings of secularism through the regime and Bangladesh’s “Islamist character”. The implications include a never-ending de-Islamization process, spelling the end of the post-Islamism thesis, as post-Islamism becomes an impossible state. Secular power invents in post-Islamism a new Islamism, delaying the post-Islamist moment ad infinitum.

• Academia, Racial, and Social Justice, and Abrahamic Coexistence
• Contents
• Exchanges with Atalia Omer: ReOrienting Jewishness

Featured documents

• Turbans, Veils, and Villainy on Television: Stargate SG1 and Merlin

  In this article I investigate why two shows from different television genres in two different countries resort to nearly identical costume choices to convey villainy. I argue that that the directors, writers, and costume designers for the US science fiction show Stargate SG1 and BBC's Merlin use...

• Translation and the Colonial Encounter: Conversation Between Yuval Evri and Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani on Bi-National Team Translation
• 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...

• Inventing Islam(ism): De-Islamization under Secular Authoritarianism in Bangladesh

  The presence of Islamism in Muslimistan necessitates a secular age, as only in a secular age does it become possible to be for or against Islam due to the decentering of Islam as the default organizing premise of Muslim societies. Within this fundamental de-Islamization or secularization of Muslim...

• 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...

• Revisiting the History and Historiography of Mughal Pluralism

  The concept of ṣulḥ-i kull is well known as a core feature of the Mughal Empire's state ideology, one that made it, comparatively speaking, arguably the most tolerant and inclusive state in the entire early modern world. Often translated as “peace with all,” the term has become almost synonymous in ...

• “Remembering Semitism” or “On the Prospect of Re-Membering the Semites”

  Today, a growing number of French Jews embrace the far-right French Front National party, which has a long history of anti-Semitism – how did we get here? How is it that Jews turn to the French authorities for protection against so-called Muslim anti-Semitic violence? How is it that we see a...

• Authorship, Reception, and Memory in Early Modern Bengal: Songs Attributed to Saiyad Sultān

  This article examines issues of authorial memory and reception pertaining to thirteen Bangla songs (padāvalī) ascribed to the seventeenth-century Bengali Sufi poet, Saiyad Sultān. This author is best known for the Nabīvaṃśa (“The Prophet's Lineage”)—a universal history of the Prophet Muhammad. A...

• Caliphate as Transnational Metaphor: A Decolonial Analysis of Caliphate Struggles

  Framed in a Critical Muslim Studies approach, this essay will present a decolonial reconceptualisation of the concept of the Caliphate by analysing the narratives on the Khilafat movement and the Mappila rebellion (1921-1922) in India and presenting them as decolonial disruptive movements....

• Displaced Ornaments: Naiza Khan's Critique of Sexual Difference in Muslim South Asia

  This article brings together a Muslim theologian from colonial India and a contemporary artist from postcolonial Pakistan, namely Ashraf 'Alī Thānvī and Naiza Khan, respectively. In their different yet related ways, Thānvī and Khan both repurpose the idea of “ornamental femininity.” Khan's artworks ...