Postmuslim

An ambitious and timely essay collection exploring what it means to be Arab-Muslim in the twenty-first century



Postmuslim, Youssef Rakha's debut essay collection, tells the story of Islam's clash with the West in the last thirty years from a perspective rarely available to the Western reader. Impassioned, intimate, erudite, and playful, these essays trace Rakha's intellectual and spiritual transformations across multiple decades alongside significant moments in recent history. He recounts "losing his religion" as a teenager in Cairo after the fall of the Berlin Wall, resentful of the conservatism and rigid conformism of his middle-class Egyptian milieu. But what he sees and comes to understand about the West eventually disenchants him as well. Along the way, Rakha explores rich subjects such as boxing and democracy, addiction and the "hungry ghost" of the great ninth-century poet Al-Mutanabbi, recent Egyptian history rewritten in the form of horror film tropes, and a bold proposal to revitalize Arab-Muslim culture via the surprisingly multicultural lifeways of the Ottoman Empire.

"Postmuslim" is a term of Rakha's invention that embraces the fullness of Muslim identity rather than its essentialized and distorted versions. This is a vital book for anyone negotiating their own relationship to alienation, faith, intersecting identities, and the hypocrisy of those in power. An ambitious and timely essay collection exploring what it means to be Arab-Muslim in the twenty-first century Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan's Seal; The Crocodiles; Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won a Sawiris Cultural Award; and The Dissenters. "Postmuslim explores the past three decades of Islam's clash with the West from a secular Muslim perspective, finding inspiration for the future in the multiculturalism embodied by the Ottoman Empire."-Publishers Weekly