Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World

In Unveiling Traditions Anouar Majid issues a challenge to the West to re-imagine Islam as a progressive world culture and a participant in the building of a multicultural and more egalitarian world civilisation. From within the highly secularised space it inhabits, a space endemically suspicious of religion, the West must find a way, writes Majid, to embrace Islamic societies as partners in building a more inclusive and culturally diverse global community. Majid moves beyond Edward Said's unmasking of orientalism in the West to examine the intellectual assumptions that have prevented a more nuanced understanding of Islam's legacies. In addition to questioning the pervasive logic that assumes the "naturalness" of European social and political organisations, he argues that it is capitalism that has intensified cultural misunderstanding and created global tensions. Besides examining the resiliency of orientalism, the author critically examines the ideologies of nationalism and colonialist categories that have redefined the identity of Muslims (especially Arabs and Africans) in the modern age and totally remapped their cultural geographies.Majid is aware of the need for Muslims to rethink their own assumptions. Addressing the crisis in Arab-Muslim thought caused by a desire to simultaneously "catch-up" with the West and also preserve Muslim cultural authenticity, he challenges Arab and Muslim intellectuals to imagine a post-capitalist, post-Eurocentric future. Critical of Islamic patriarchal practices and capitalist hegemony, Majid contends that Muslim feminists have come closest to theorising a notion of emancipation that rescues Islam from patriarchal domination and resists Eurocentric prejudices. Majid's timely appeal for a progressive, multicultural dialogue that would pave the way to a polycentric world will interest students and scholars of postcolonial, cultural, Islamic, and Marxist studies.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction: Villainies Veiled and Unveiled 1. Can the Postcolonial Critic Speak? Orientalism and the Rusdie Affair 2. Millennium without Arabs? 3. The North as Apocalypse 4. Women’s Freedom in Muslim Spaces Conclusion: Indispensable Polyentricity Notes Index

About the Author :
Anouar Majid is Associate Professor of English at the University of New England in Maine.

Review :
"An important book. Coming from a different intellectual perspective, Majid qualifies and expands the ordinary terms of postcolonial discourse and he does so from a genuinely international intellectual position. There are few academics writing today who draw on the cultural and literary range that Majid does here." - Leila N. Ahmed, author of Women and Gender in Islam "This excellent book is full of passionate, polemical scholarship. Majid covers a wide-ranging territory - the persistence of 'orientalist' discourse, 'Arab' nationalism, 'Islamic fundamentalism,' postcolonial criticism, a critique of capitalism, contemporary Muslim feminist scholarship, and (black) African novels from Islamic cultural backgrounds. This timely book will make a significant contribution to current debates about progressive social, political, and cultural directions." - Abdul JanMohamed, University of California, Berkeley