Discourse around Muslims and Islam all too often lapses into a false dichotomy of Orientalist and fundamentalist tropes. A popular reimagining of Islam is urgently needed. Yet it is a perhaps unexpected political philosophical tradition that has the most to offer in this pursuit: anarchism. Islam and Anarchism is a highly original and interdisciplinary work, which simultaneously disrupts two commonly held beliefs - that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; and that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious and anti-spiritual. Deeply rooted in key Islamic concepts and textual sources, and drawing on radical Indigenous, Islamic anarchistic and social movement discourses, Abdou proposes 'Anarca-Islam'. Constructing a decolonial, non-authoritarian and non-capitalist Islamic anarchism, Islam and Anarchism philosophically and theologically challenges the classist, sexist, racist, ageist, queerphobic and ableist inequalities in the entwined imperial context of societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA.

About the Author
Mohamed Abdou is a self-identifying Muslim anarchist activist-scholar and diasporic settler of colour, living on unseeded Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. His twenty years of activist research experience centres on Palestinian, Black, and people of colour liberation, and draws on his experiences with the Mohawks of Tyendinaga, the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and participation in the Egyptian uprisings of 2011. He is a former Adjunct professor of Arab and Islamic social movements at Queen's University who completed his transnational and interdisciplinary ethnographic and historical-archival PhD on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity, Gender, Sexuality, and Politics in the Contemporary.

Reviews

'This is one of the fiercest books I've ever read. It is a call to action. It is conceptually rich and gives us new methodological tools for thinking theory and politics together. It is unrelenting in its critique of liberal assimilationist tendencies in diasporic and BIPOC knowledge production and movement organizing. Abdou is a truth-teller of the highest order. Drawing together disparate geographies and thought into a dazzling web of interconnectedness and dialogue, Islam and Anarchism proffers a kaleidoscopic vision of what could be otherwise'

-- Jasbir K. Puar, author of 'Terrorist Assemblages' and 'The Right to Maim'

'A passionate plea for a spiritual decolonial movement. Mohamed Abdou advances a vision of Islam that is abolitionist at its core, reminding us that Islam has been and can still be a religion of the oppressed, one that is anti-capitalist, egalitarian, anti-ableist, anti-patriarchal, queer feminist and for Muslims and non-Muslims alike'

-- Sherene H. Razack, Distinguished Professor and Penny Kanner Endowed Chair, Gender Studies, UCLA

'An uncompromising queer-feminist vision of decolonial, abolitionist, and anti-capitalist praxis that is keyed to the pluralistic traditions of Islamic spirituality and anarchic thought'

-- Iyko Day, Elizabeth C. Small Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts



Book Information
ISBN 9780745341927
Author Mohamed Abdou
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Pluto Press
Publisher Pluto Press