Zed Books The Muslim Speaks

The Muslim Speaks reimagines Islam as a strategy for investigating the modern condition. Rather than imagining it as an issue external to a discrete West, Khurram Hussain constructs Islam as internal to the elaboration and expansion of the West. In doing so he reveals three discursive traps - that of 'freedom', 'reason' and 'culture' - that inhibit the availability of Islam as a feasible, critical interlocutor in Western deliberations about moral, intellectual and political concerns.Through close examination of this inhibition, Hussain posits that while Islamophobia is clearly a moral wrong, 'depoliticization' more accurately describes the problems associated with the lived experience of Muslims in the West and elsewhere. Weaving together his conclusions in the hope of a common world, Khurram Hussain boldy and quite radically deems that what Islam needs is not depoliticization, but infact repoliticization. Review In this wide-ranging and thought-provoking work, Hussain boldly asks, "What would it mean to imagine Islam as an immanent critique of the West?" In answering this question, he teases out for his readers just how Muslim voices - past and present - play an integral role in investigating the modern condition. --Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester From the Author “I have no interest in feeding into what is already a deluge of talk fixated on the eithers and ors of Islam’s compatibility with the West or with this or that version of what counts as modernity. Or, for that matter, in tedious enumerations and analyses of ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘reform’. I believe that a chronic reliance on ever-evolving tropes of Western vintage to evaluate and explain Islam forecloses any possibility of critical novelty from Muslims and sieves these discussions into the restrictive either/or of Islam’s familiarity or difference with the West.” About the Author Khurram Hussain is an Assistant Professor in the Religion Studies department at Lehigh University, USA, where he teaches modern Islamic thought, philosophy of religion and religious ethics. He received his PhD in 2012 from Yale University. Before joining the faculty, Hussain was the recipient of a pre-doctoral fellowship funded by the Mellon Foundation through the Center of Global Islamic Studies at Lehigh University.