Being a Muslim in The World by Hamid Dabashi

Author:Hamid Dabashi
Language: eng
Format: epub

4

Being a Muslim

Abstract: In Chapter 4,1 argue that being a Muslim in the emerging worlds is both an ontological question and a proposition predicated on a radical re-thinking of the epistemic terms with which new regimes of knowledge might take shape. The formalism of the critical and creative faculties necessary to cultivate a language of existential self-awareness is contingent on the formal disposition of the language we will have to cultivate in conversation with the vital parameters of our renewed pact with post-Western history.

Dabashi, Hamid. Being a Muslim in the World.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Doi: 10.1057/9781137301291.

To be a Muslim in this world today, in this world and for any meaningful posterity, means being able to stand up and say, “I am a Muslim” and after that, to breathe comfortably, without looking over your shoulder or waiting for the other shoe to drop. I live in a city in which to be a “Jewish intellectual” is proverbial to its history, yet a Muslim cannot be anything but a terrorist. The idea of a Muslim scholar, Muslim intellectual, Muslim feminist, Muslim Marxist, Muslim psychoanalyst, Muslim poststructuralist, Muslim postmodernist, or any other normal and varied moral and intellectual disposition that is connected to a person who is a Muslim has now been made entirely alien to this world we call home. To be a Muslim in this world begins by reclaiming those identities. It is in this city of New York—where the criminal atrocities of 9/11 happened—that one must stand up and say, “I am a Muslim.” It is in London, where a band of Muslims has formed a “Council of ex-Muslims” that one must stand up and say, “I am a Muslim.” It is in North America and Western Europe where one must get up and say “I am a Muslim.” It is in Tehran, where another band of militant tyrants have laid exclusive claims on how to be a Muslim, and where they, as Muslims, have perpetrated criminal mass executions of political prisoners and conducted repeated university purges, cultural revolutions, and systematic abuses of their own citizens, that one must, a fortiori, stand up and say, “I am a Muslim.”

To be a Muslim is to own up to criminal atrocities that Muslims have done—and to stand up to those who are invested in blowing those atrocities out of proportion to justify even greater atrocities done to Muslims.

It is in Madrid, where another band of criminal Muslims have wreaked havoc on innocent people, and also in Mumbai, where yet another gang of Muslim terrorists went on a rampage and murdered countless innocent people, one must also stand up and say, “I am a Muslim.” To be a Muslim in this world begins by categorically denouncing the nonsensical gibberish of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust—for no degree of commitment to and solidarity with the Palestinian cause can ever mean dismissing, denigrating, or disregarding the sufferings of millions of human beings—and this is precisely the way you will find the moral authority to

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