Murad Idris, Ph.D.

Project

Islam in Theory: Scripts of Unfreedom, Fanaticism, and Violence

What lies beneath Euro-American discourses about what Islam “means” or what it “needs”? What if these discourses’ persistent terms are keys that unlock critical questions about modernity, global order, and contemporary ideals? Islam in Theory begins from the observation that three common tropes frame Muslims as a problem in modernity. They are the translation of Islam as submission, the idea that Islam needs a reformation to fight fanaticism, and the claim that Muslims need to disavow violence and embrace jihad as a spiritual struggle. Islam in Theory analyzes the productivity and long histories of the three tropes for constructions of Islam. It uses them to reframe the genealogies of freedom, toleration, and violence in political theory and in global histories of political thought. The project makes three arguments. First, the three scripts have been productive of the idea that freedom, toleration, and peace are problems for Muslims. The recurrent claims are scripts, or popular formulas that instantiate racialized assumptions, sedimented through repetition, that order what and how people think while erasing their own tracks. Second, the broader place of submission, reformation, and jihad in the history of political thought is underappreciated. Recovering the three concepts’ genealogies restores critiques and frameworks that discourses of freedom, toleration, and peace have obscured. Third, beyond discourses about Islam versus modern ideals, 20th-century anticolonial Muslim thinkers connect these terms to violent hierarchies that accompany modernity. They outline a counterview of an unreformed world order and global injustice. The project brings a political theory lens to bear on the long histories of discourses about Islam, modern ideals, and their intersections. It dissects the unacknowledged assumptions enclosed in such discourses, and it carves out space for narrating global political theory from marginal perspectives and archives.

Recommended Reading

Idris, Murad. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Jenco, Leigh K., Murad Idris, and Megan C. Thomas, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Idris, Murad. “The Kazanistan Papers: Reading the Muslim Question in the John Rawls Archives.” Perspectives on Politics 19, no.1 (2021): 110–130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759272000239X.