Description

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'One of the fiercest books I've ever read' - Jasbir K. Puar

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 'Anarcha-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 both post- and neo-colonial societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA.

About the Author

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Mohamed Abdou is a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist activist-scholar. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo. His twenty years of activist research and experience centers on Palestinian, Indigenous, Black, and people of colour liberation, and draws on the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, as well as his participation in the Egyptian uprisings of 2011.

Praise For…

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'One of the fiercest books I've ever read. It is a call to action and conceptually rich. Abdou is a truth-teller of the highest order, drawing together disparate geographies and thought into a dazzling web of dialogue, offering a kaleidoscopic vision of what could be otherwise'
Jasbir 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