Contemporary Islam

Abstract

At a time when careless opportunism blurs the line separating the hatespeech, race-baiting, and xenophobia that we condemn and the misleadingexpedience of “tolerating” others, the need to change how Muslims engagethe hatred facing them has become most apparent. Threatened by Frenchpoliticians with state-enforced settlement camps and neoconservative socialengineering schemes that erect 10-meter highwalls in theWestBank, BelAir,and Baghdad, it is critical that Muslims demonstrate the ability to resist theirwholesale criminalization with dignity and passion. Unfortunately, the overwhelmingmajority of those who publicly “stand-up” for “reason” are non-Muslim, western-based academics speaking for “Islam” as a non-westernphenomenon that nevertheless “needs to be tolerated.”When “Muslims” are given the rare chance of having a forum throughwhich to communicate, the message has more often confirmed the reductionistassumptions of xenophobic racists advocating their legal exclusionfrom “Christian” Europe. How often has it been noted that those Muslimsmost frequently given access to the mainstream media are the fanatical andpatently violent characters depicted in media stereotypes who actually haveno right to “speak” for Islam in the first place?Contemporary Islam: Dynamic, Not Static challenges these prevailingcurrents in scholarship by actually engaging the audience in a fashion thatdoes not concede Islam’s centrality to a larger human experience ...