Muslim Question Research Articles

‘The right to fall in love and kiss without consequences’: on racialized Muslim women, ‘mixed’ intimacies, and Dutch sexual exceptionalism

ABSTRACT What does political concern with ‘mixed’ intimacies articulate about the nation? This article unpacks this question by analysing a Dutch poster campaign on self-determination, organized by the Rotterdam municipality and a feminist NGO, that visualized ‘mixed’ couples intimately kissing. It uses a visual analysis of the posters, combined with a post-structural policy analysis of a variety of documents that were essential to the production of this campaign. First, the article argues that the campaign centred on the racialized figure of the Muslim woman, problematizing her self-determination through a framework of liberal-secular notions of freedom and agency. Then, by historicizing the Dutch preoccupation with ‘mixed’ intimacies as a mode of (colonial) governance, the article accounts for how the campaign engages with particular kinds of ‘mixing’ to underscore Dutch sexual exceptionalism. The article argues the campaign can be seen as part of the contemporary configuration of the Dutch ‘Muslim Question’, mobilizing the intimate lives of racialized Muslim women to problematize Muslims as deviant populations. Overall, this article explores how representations of, and discourses on ‘mixed’ intimacies can be used as prisms to study the gendered and racialized state management of population, as well as (shifting) imaginaries of the nation in the Netherlands.

Caste, Religion and Otherness: Probing the Aporia of the Dalit–Muslim Question in Omprakash Valmiki’s Short Story ‘Salaam’ and Mohandas Naimishraya’s Autobiography Apne Apne Pinjare (Cages of Our Own)

Dalit texts generally foreground the question of marginality in the context of caste-based discrimination, exclusion and violence. Interestingly, Mohan Das Naimishraya’s Apne Apne Pinjare ( Cages of Our Own) and Omprakash Valmiki’s ‘Salaam’ go beyond the scope of exploring the dialectics of dominance and resistance by probing the complexity of otherness. The appropriation of the Dalit subject by the neo-Brahmanical forces us to rethink the notion of marginality. The aversion and hatred of Dalits against Muslims and the identification of Dalits as Hindus by Muslims obfuscate the power dynamics in a communal and casteist socius. The complex Dalit–Muslim relationship re-configures the power relations underpinning untouchability and propels us to re-interpret the troubled category of the ‘Other’. This article explores the epistemological and ontological uncertainty about the marginal categories which entail the historical experience of violence, disenfranchisement and oppression. The two Dalit texts problematize the identity of the Dalit as an ‘Other’ vis-a-vis the Muslim subject and thus highlight the liminality of the subaltern subject. This article seeks to decode the aporia of Dalit–Muslim question in the casteist and communally fractured social order.

The solution by the authorities of the Russian Empire of the “Muslim question” among the Kazakhs

The article deals with the evolution of the imperial Russian government and regional policy on the so-called Muslim issue among the Kazakhs. An attempt was made to periodize from the rejection of Kazakh Islam, to its use as a tool for incorporating Kazakhs into imperial structures with the help of, first of all, Tatar mullahs and specially created bodies, primarily the muftiate, to the emergence of two parallel lines in the policy of the Orenburg and West Siberian authorities to wary attitude on the part of the government, which noticed in Kazakh Islam elements of politicization and the threat of the development of separatist tendencies. At the same time, issues of education using elements of Islamic education, expanding the penetration of Islam into the Kazakh environment by changing the number of cultists, and attempts by the authorities to use Islamic institutions as official positions in the grassroots colonial administration are considered. The issues of the evolution of the perception of Kazakh and Central Asian Islam by the administration, travelers, researchers are also considered; as well as the perception of the ongoing reforms by the Kazakhs. The evolution of the political process is considered in connection with other administrative reforms of Russia in the Kazakh steppe and among the Muslims of the empire, the place and role of this issue in colonial policy at various stages are determined. It also analyzes the correction of the position of the Russian authorities, depending on the change in the foreign policy situation and changes in the boundaries of possessions. The source complex was made up of published and archival documents and materials from the repositories of Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, a number of which are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

“The Muslim Question” in 16th Century Spain

The article challenges the traditional perception of the negative image of the Muslim period in the mass consciousness of that time, based on the material from “Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II”. Neither the objects of “Moorish origin”, nor the “Moors” themselves, nor the “Moriscos” had any negative connotations in the perception of the Spanish people in the 16th century. Intellectuals took the lead in reevaluating the historical experiences of that time, which led to the development of national historiography and the emergence of the “Black Legend”, depicting the intense conflict between Muslims and Christians during the long Reconquista period. This reevaluation was driven more by the goals of state-building than by popular sentiments, as the scientific and political knowledge of that time was just beginning to comprehend the ideas of a unified kingdom, standardized laws, and a shared history.

Responsible Muslims and Normalizing Islam

In this article, I take up the “Muslim Question” in relation to neoliberalism and the Dutch government through a community approach focusing on the responsibilization of citizens. Based on fieldwork that I have conducted over the last 15 years, I will argue that, in order to understand the Muslim Question, we have to explore how Muslims respond to the “neo-liberal Muslim Question.” I will explore how the paradoxes and tensions that co-constitute the neoliberal Muslim Question, create opportunities for some Muslims to be able to find, then enlarge and navigate a space for themselves as responsible subjects within a particular framework which also, simultaneously, targets them as potentially unruly subjects. In doing so I show how Muslims engage with the neoliberal governance of themselves and demonstrate how their approach is informed, shaped, enabled and challenged by the racial neo-liberal discourse of the Muslim Question.

The “Muslim Question”

The introduction to the special issue The “Muslim Question”: The Micropolitics of Normalizing Islam and Muslims outlines three dynamics at play in all four contributions: normalization, classification and micropolitics. Starting with Michel Foucault and his notion of normalization, I argue that Muslims are classified and problematized in specific ways depending on the particular socio-historical context. Every problem and every classification depends on an idea of the “normal” or on norms. These norms central to the dynamics of normalization are reproduced through practices in everyday life. From this perspective, norm-reproducing micropo- litics shapes the social fabric of interaction.

Six or Eleven Theses on “Islamic” and “Christian” Terrorism in America

The term “Christian terrorism” began to appear in U.S. media narratives following a shooting outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015. Reflecting on a blog post I wrote from this time nearly six-years later, where I had proposed six theses on “Islamic” versus “Christian” terrorism in America, I consider how this rhetoric has developed in the interim. Adding five additional theses, I argue that the relative absence of terror attacks on U.S. soil throughout the Trump era, and the preoccupation with a variety of culture wars issues, has complicated the ways in which Muslims/Islam are constructed in the contemporary United States. I also consider the “Muslim question” and how it relates to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question.” Despite certain parallels between these issues, I propose that the “question” for Western Muslims today is less about achieving basic rights as it is a battle over the definition of Islam itself.

Entanglements in the colony: Jewish–Muslim connected histories in colonial India

AbstractThis article examines often ignored ‘minority entanglements’ forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

Мусульманские подданные в имперской практике по аккультурации кавказских инородцев: исторический опыт Дагестана конца XIX - начала ХХ в. (на примере системы образования)

Modern realities regarding educational policy in the regions dictate the need to be guided by many nuances in Russia. The importance of education for non-Russians was also perceived as one of the most important components of the policy of the Russian Empire in the periphery, the main function of which was the nationalization of the peoples of the outskirts. Taking into account the fact that in pre-revolutionary Russia the "national school" was considered as a Russian national school, it is obvious that the presence of schools of other nations, for which Russian was not the mother language, could not take place. Based on this, the purpose of this article is to consider issues related to the policy of acculturation in the national periphery by introducing the state language — Russian in all spheres of life, including in the field of education. Dagestan was specifically chosen as a geographic area for the study, as a region of other cultures, where the vast majority of the population professed Islam, and the education system from time immemorial was an extensive network of Muslim religious schools. In the time we are studying, the latter became part of the so-called. "Muslim question" in the context of the general development of the Caucasus region. The attempts made to implement the policy of the "school-religion" tandem, the essence of which was to direct the Gentiles to the Christian-Russian future by establishing foreign schools and parochial education, did not lead to positive results. The chronological framework of the work covers the end of the 19th — beginning of the 20th centuries. The choice of such temporary boundaries was caused by the peculiarities in the political development of Russia under the conditions of the post-reform imperial-liberal model and the building of new relationships with the Muslim part of the population of the outskirts. As a result, a direction was developed that combined the loyal and delicate attitude of the authorities, on the one hand, and the manifestation of caution regarding Islamic life in the region, on the other, which took place throughout the entire period studied by the authors of the article up to the revolution of 1917.

All the Poor and Wretched

AbstractIn this article, Ng examines Tan Malaka's engagements with labor universalism and Muslim universality in his respective attempts to theorize the problematic of minority subjectivity vis-à-vis universal emancipation. Located at the periphery of global capitalism, Indonesia, though embodying conditions of subordination, exploitation, and unfreedom through historical colonialism, is notably marked by a necessary unevenness in totalization and complete subsumption; this set of heteronomous conditions gave rise to historically distinct and specific discourses and forms of resistance. In positing the Dutch East Indies as one of the peripheral sites within a global Marxist knowledge economy, Ng argues that the constellation of Marxist discourses articulated by Tan Malaka—organized around the “Muslim question”—attempt to powerfully link the question of peripherality to emergent notions of the universal. Ultimately, the “Muslim” for Tan Malaka emerges not as an identity, historical subject, or a people per se, but as a “minor” political model of composition immanent to the relations of capital.

Thinking Europe’s “Muslim Question”: On Trojan Horses and the Problematization of Muslims

Understanding the ways in which Muslims are turned into “a problem” requires an analytic incorporating the insights gained through the concepts of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism into a larger frame. The “Muslim Question” can provide such a frame by attending to the systematic character of this form of racism, explored here through biopolitics. This article develops a conceptualization of Europe’s “Muslim Question” along three lines. First, the “Muslim Question” emerges as an accusation of being an “ alien body” to the nation, often expressed through the Trojan horse legend. Second, the “Muslim Question” is elaborated through demands of integration and assimilation, in which the production of difference entangles with calls and measures to regulate Muslims. And third, the “Muslim Question” is brought to life upon the terrain of gender and sexuality, as the imaginary of threat at the heart of the “Muslim Question” is a replacement conspiracy centered on birthrates.

Can the Celebrity Speak? Controversies and the Eulogistic Fandom of Shah Rukh Khan

This article addresses the participation of celebrities and their fans in media controversies. As techno-social events, controversies are constitutive of discursive battles, between numerically conscious participatory communities, aimed at describing the meaning and significance of cultural symbols. Celebrities, in their capacity as cultural symbols, provide the ground for staging these discursive battles. Fan participation, as auxiliary of celebrity participation, is studied here specifically to discern its essential functions vis-a-vis controversies. For elaborating its argument, this article looks at Shah Rukh Khan (hereafter SRK) and his fandom in India. SRK, as a transcultural symbol of Liberal Islam, was embroiled in media controversies wherein the meaning and significance of his ‘Muslimness’ was debated and scrutinised. Marked by struggles between SRK fandom, on one side, and right-wing/reactionary groups on the other, these controversies testify SRK’s centrality in political debates surrounding the ‘Muslim Question’ in Indian Polity. This article argues that SRK Fandom’s primary discursive function is to create an ‘Eulogistic Buffer’ that insulates SRK from right-wing/reactionary islamophobia.

Activity Of The Office Of Muslims Of Uzbekistan…

For decades, the "Muslim question" was initially under the rule of Tsarist Russia, and later, during the years of Soviet rule, under the constant observation of a separate, uncontrollable, primarily white empire, and then the red empire.

Multiculturalism and the Muslim Question

Multiculturalism and the Muslim Question

Norwegian Muslims denouncing terrorism: beyond ‘moderate’ versus ‘radical’?

ABSTRACT In contemporary European societies, Muslims are often viewed through a binary frame of ‘moderate’ versus ‘radical’. This article aims to deconstruct the dichotomy of ‘moderate’ versus ‘radical’, and to explore how Muslims uphold, appropriate or subvert this binary frame. It takes up three case studies of public events organized in the city center of Oslo, Norway, by Muslims who wanted to make explicit statements against violence committed in the name of Islam. Based on participant observation, qualitative interviews with the organizers and a large collection of news reports and opinion pieces, the author demonstrates that these statements can be seen as a ‘multiple critique’: against terrorism, against stereotypical representations of Muslims and Islam, and (in some cases) also against the ‘moderate/radical’ dichotomy. This article critically addresses the pressure on Muslims to prove that they are peaceful and loyal citizens, and examines the relationship between the ‘Muslim Question’ and contestations about ‘true’ Islam.

Magomet-Bek Hadjetlaché and the Muslim Question: Deceit, Trust, and Orientalism in Imperial Russia after 1905

Magomet-Bek Hadjetlaché and the Muslim Question: Deceit, Trust, and Orientalism in Imperial Russia after 1905

The Interior Frontiers of Germany

Abstract In 2012, the regional court of the city of Cologne ruled that ritual male circumcision constituted unjustified bodily harm. This prompted a nationwide debate culminating in the enactment of legislation guaranteeing male circumcision without medical justification under certain preconditions. This article proposes to approach the ‘circumcision debate’ as a discursive strand of the systematic problematisation of Muslims as ‘Muslims’, which I analyse through the analytic of the ‘Muslim Question’. In addition, I refer to the concepts of recursive history and of the interior frontier to contextualise the 2012 circumcision debate and the political purpose it has served, namely, to establish racial distinctions and interior frontiers between Germans, Jews and Muslims.

‘It’s the birth rates’: Sex, gender, and race in Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’

‘It’s the birth rates’: Sex, gender, and race in Europe’s ‘Muslim Question’

Changing Paradigms: Islam and Muslims in Spain

Abstract Based on a selection of four recent publications, this article addresses the question of Islam and Muslims in Spanish society within the framework of the peripheral position of Spanish Orientalism. These publications discuss Islam in Spain from perspectives that differ in objectives and methodology. The first book, by anthropologist Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste deals with the image of “the Moorish” over the course of Spanish history. The second, written by sociologist Salvatore Madonia is representative of a new line of research specifically interested in young Muslims in Spanish societies. The third publication, by anthropologist Jordi Moreras focuses on “radicalisation” as a new trend to study Muslim populations. The last volume, coordinated by arabist Luz Gómez-García, includes a significant number of articles, which analyze the relationship between the legitimacy and authority of Islam from a transnational perspective.

Confronting the Indian State: Islamism, secularism, and the Kashmiri Muslim question

AbstractThis paper investigates the framework of Islamist politics of Jama'at e Islami in Indian-administered Kashmir. Even though Jama'at e Islami creates the notion of “other” in the Indian state and challenges it but Kashmir's provincial relationship with India also forces it to work within the limits set up by the same state. This paper, thus, conceptualizes the relationship between Indian state and Islamists in a Muslim Majority region that demands the right to self-determination. In doing so, the paper interrogates Jama'at e Islami's rhetorical opposition to the political doctrine of Indian secularism and raises queries about minority rights and their place in the Islamist project.