Thinking Past Essentialism

Abstract

In the final quarter of the twentieth century, a number of signal events effectively placed Islam at the forefront of Western political consciousness and analytical attention. An explosion of academic, journalistic and popular talk about the ‘Islamic threat’ ensued, culminating in a complex set of discourses that help sustain imperial projects in the Arab world today. This essay critically examines the works of important contemporary political thinkers in search of transcending the banal liberal desire to study ‘Others’ in order to expand the terrain of tolerance, and posits instead a necessary and complex reconsideration of ethics and politics as a way to provide models for future studies of political action.