Yasmina Raiani

Do they seek for other than the Religion of Allah?―While all creatures in the heavens and on earth have, willing or unwilling, bowed to His Will (accepted Islam) [aslama], and to Him shall they all be brought back.

Surat Al ‘Imran (3:83) (Yusuf Ali)

Islam is, for S. Sayyid, a divinely given and ‘ummatically’ inflected name that assembles “narratives and practices, heritages and futures” (9) from which a “total way of life” can bloom (47). Sayyid stresses that Islam is a “relational and contrastive” collective identity enabled by difference and rejection (28; also see 72, 162). He writes that the Prophet’s arrival mended reigning social schisms and oriented a freshly minted world around a new fissure between Muslims and non-Muslims (see 172). We live in the historical sequence emerging from this chasm.[1]

But as the foregoing ayah suggests, even Khomeini’s Great Satan is Muslim to the extent that he acts in accordance with God’s will: the kafir’s submission may be unknowing and unwilling, but it is nevertheless named “Islam.” Continue reading ““I am a Thing, Not a Person”: Rethinking Difference in Recalling the Caliphate“ →