The subject of this book is a new "Islam." This Islam began to take shape in 1988 around the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, And the first Gulf War of 1991. It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at once flexible and constrained-indeed, it is a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and reformation are worked out. At this discursive site are many metonyms for Islam: the veiled or pious Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question; "How do we free ourselves from freedom?" Again and again, freedom is imagined as Western, modern, imperial-a dark imposition of Enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his or her own enslavement is imagined as freedom's other. At Freedom's Limit is an intervention into current debates regarding religion, secularism, and Islam and provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. It shows that, even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters.
"This is the first book to deal with the interlinked phenomena of Islamic radicalism and Islamophobia by exiting the apologetic discourse to which left-liberal critique has largely been reduced. Re-deploying the Eurocentric terms that inform so much scholarship on the issue, Abbas shows how her own allies on the left have ended up focusing on a severely Protestant kind of Islam, in contrast to whi
St. Anthony's College, Oxford University
"Once in a while, a book comes along with the force of a gale and shakes the carefully laid foundations of an academic field or discourse. This is such a book. A compelling and erudite tour-de-force that relentlessly examines the historical amnesias and political erasures at the center of contemporary popular culture and critical theory constructions of the Muslim subject, At Freedom's Limit power
Rutgers University
"Sadia Abbas is a virtuoso of cultural and literary criticism. She has a remarkable ability to expose essentialist and exclusivist prejudices that hide in discourses repudiating the essentialism and exclusivism of others. Uncompromising in the vindication of all the oppressed, including the victims of victims, this book sharpens both our critical faculty and our sense of justice."
Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
