Pluto Press Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances

Discourse around Muslims and Islam all too often lapses into a false dichotomy of Orientalist and fundamentalist tropes. A popular reimagining of Islam is urgently needed. Yet it is a perhaps unexpected political philosophical tradition that has the most to offer in this pursuit: anarchism. Islam and Anarchism is a highly original and interdisciplinary work, which simultaneously disrupts two commonly held beliefs - that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; and that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious and anti-spiritual. Deeply rooted in key Islamic concepts and textual sources, and drawing on radical Indigenous, Islamic anarchistic and social movement discourses, Abdou proposes 'Anarca-Islam'. Constructing a decolonial, non-authoritarian and non-capitalist Islamic anarchism, Islam and Anarchism philosophically and theologically challenges the classist, sexist, racist, ageist, queerphobic and ableist inequalities in the entwined imperial context of societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA. About the Author Mohamed Abdou is a self-identifying Muslim anarchist activist-scholar and diasporic settler of colour, living on unseeded Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. His twenty years of activist research experience centres on Palestinian, Black, and people of colour liberation, and draws on his experiences with the Mohawks of Tyendinaga, the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and participation in the Egyptian uprisings of 2011. He is a former Adjunct professor of Arab and Islamic social movements at Queen's University who completed his transnational and interdisciplinary ethnographic and historical-archival PhD on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity, Gender, Sexuality, and Politics in the Contemporary.