New Texts Out Now: Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism
Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Joseph Massad (JM): I had been thinking for a while about a different book, namely one that traces genealogically the transformation in the semantic uses of the term “Islam” since the eighteenth century in Europe and among Muslims and Arabs in Asia and Africa. The project is an intellectual and semantic history of a term and the peregrinations it has made and undergone since its insertion in a modern “European” lexicon that depicted it as the opposite of an emergent “Europe” and an emergent “liberalism,” let alone the historic enemy of Christianity—indeed, how Islam became not only un-Europe and non-Europe but specifically anti-Europe, not to say only anti-, but also and interestingly, ante-Christian.
Before I undertook this history, I thought it important to write an introduction as to how “Islam”—regardless of what it was, is, becomes, or what it constitutes and constituted—operates within western liberalism, and how liberalism is related to Protestantism, the latter seen as a precursor of current understandings and practices of liberalism in an interesting relationship that was being conceived between what came to be constituted as “religion” and the modern state. It was important that I explained to myself and to my readers how liberalism functions internally in relation to the antonymical objects it created and creates, especially Islam on one side and Europe and Protestant Christianity on the other, but also derivatives therein, including Western democracy and Oriental despotism; European and Christian women’s freedom versus Muslim women’s slavery; European and Euro-American sexual freedom versus “Islamic” repressiveness and oppressiveness of sexual desires and practices; the tolerance of modern Europe versus the intolerance of Islam and Muslims; indeed the sanity of Europe versus the neurosis, even the psychosis, of Islam. It was then that I realized that my introduction to the book had become a book unto itself, which I decided to go ahead and write before I proceeded to write my original project on the many genealogies of “Islam.”
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