Islam and Anarchism Book Launch and Discussion

Date

Tuesday October 4, 2022
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Location

Mac-Corry Hall, Room B201
Event Category

Join us for the Book Launch for  (Pluto Press, 2022) and discussion with author Dr. Mohamed Abdou.

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 'Anarcha-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 both post- and neo-colonial societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA.

Mohamed Abdou is a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist activist-scholar.  He is currently a Visiting Scholar and Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Racial Justice at the Einaudi Center at Cornell University.

book cover

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