Contemporary Islam

Abstract

At a time when careless opportunism blurs the line separating the hate speech, race-baiting, and xenophobia that we condemn and the misleading expedience of “tolerating” others, the need to change how Muslims engage the hatred facing them has become most apparent. Threatened by French politicians with state-enforced settlement camps and neoconservative social engineering schemes that erect 10-meter highwalls in theWestBank, BelAir, and Baghdad, it is critical that Muslims demonstrate the ability to resist their wholesale criminalization with dignity and passion. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of those who publicly “stand-up” for “reason” are non- Muslim, western-based academics speaking for “Islam” as a non-western phenomenon that nevertheless “needs to be tolerated.” When “Muslims” are given the rare chance of having a forum through which to communicate, the message has more often confirmed the reductionist assumptions of xenophobic racists advocating their legal exclusion from “Christian” Europe. How often has it been noted that those Muslims most frequently given access to the mainstream media are the fanatical and patently violent characters depicted in media stereotypes who actually have no right to “speak” for Islam in the first place? Contemporary Islam: Dynamic, Not Static challenges these prevailing currents in scholarship by actually engaging the audience in a fashion that does not concede Islam’s centrality to a larger human experience ...