Papers by Humeira Iqtidar
Religion, state & society, Oct 20, 2021
ABSTRACT Prompted by the contributions to this collection, this afterword reflects on questions a... more ABSTRACT Prompted by the contributions to this collection, this afterword reflects on questions about how Europe is imagined and inhabited. Talal Asad once claimed that ‘Muslims are present in Europe and yet absent from it’. He suggests that this paradox arises from the ways in which Europe is imagined such that Muslims are excluded in profound manner from its history and development. Not recognising their historical and long-running presence in Europe, albeit in varying numbers over time, means that they are not seen as an integral part of it, only as an additive extra. The contributions collected here explore the implications of this erasure of Muslims as Europeans from the European public imagination, while also shedding light on the ways in which continued Muslim presence and commitment to ethical self-making contests and engages with modes of governance suspicious of Muslims.
Religion, state & society, Mar 15, 2021
Economic and Political Weekly, Jun 1, 2013
University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013
The killing of British citizens without democratic oversight raises questions over the government... more The killing of British citizens without democratic oversight raises questions over the government's use of drones democraticaudit.com /2015/10/15/the-killing-of-british-citizens-without-democratic-oversight-raises-questionsover-the-governments-use-of-drones/ In August two British citizens were killed by British drones in Syria. The government has managed to avoid tough questions about the precise level of threat posed by the men to UK by conflating the right of an individual to selfdefence with a state's capacity to pre-emptive action. But Humeira Iqtidar writes that it remains hard to judge the appropriateness of the action because it was taken without any democratic oversight, raising worrying questions about the use of drones by the UK government.
University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013
University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013
Journal of Archival Organization, 2012
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jun 25, 2013
University of Chicago Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2013
Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2012
Debates about secularism refuse to go away just because some have declared that we live in a post... more Debates about secularism refuse to go away just because some have declared that we live in a post-secular world. Indeed, it is only now when a high-decibel monologue about the importance of saving secularism has quietened down that certain conversations about secularism are possible. Efforts to come to a more fine-grained understanding of the different facets of secularism are underway in academia and this book is a valuable addition to that project. The original impetus for this collection was Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. This poses the challenge of placing the collection: is it to be read with and/or after Taylor's book or separately from it, as a book in its own right? In their introduction to this collection, the editors provide a helpful overview of Taylor's book and place it within his larger body of work. It would, of course, be helpful to have read the 896 pages of A Secular Age to engage fully with the ideas which the contributors to this collection present, but, equally, the collection can serve as a guide to reading Taylor's work with a more critical eye. To my mind, however, the collection can stand alone-largely because of the strength of some of the chapters which make a wider contribution to debates about secularism. At the very least, the collection of responses to Taylor's work moves beyond his arguments, with most authors bringing their distinctive disciplinary and critical perspectives into the discussion. Jon Butler's contribution, for instance, is a much-needed corrective to the lack of historical specificity, not just in Taylor's book but in most theory-driven investigations of secularism and secularisation. (Another recent contribution in this regard is the volume edited by Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones on Religion and the Political Imagination.) Butler rightly points out that there is significant historical material which goes against the assumption that belief was axiomatic prior to the Reformation. Acknowledging the presence of indifference if not outright lack of belief in the pre-Reformation period dislodges the singularity of contemporary developments and ''secularization theory's impulse towards inevitability'' (211). Butler contends that Taylor ignores this literature not for lack of learning but due to epistemological bias. Jonathan Sheehan's contribution may initially seem to be orthogonal to Butler's when he asks if questions of historical specificity, including those raised by Butler, ''irritate or otherwise deflect the 'secular age' concept in any way'' (224) and answers in the negative. Yet, Sheehan, too, suggests a fundamental alternative to Taylor's reading of history by arguing for a deeper exploration of the non-religious outside the concept of 'secular'. Similarly, Wendy Brown's contribution is an excellent example of an interlocutor who engages generously but critically with Taylor's arguments and in the process opens doors for thinking about secularism more deeply. Brown tackles Taylor's dismissal of historical materialism and attempts to show why and how a nuanced historical materialism may yield results in furthering our understanding of secularism within a neo-liberal context. In a Book Reviews 147
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
Abul A‘la Maududi explicitly built on Islamic ideas of equality to critique nationalism and moder... more Abul A‘la Maududi explicitly built on Islamic ideas of equality to critique nationalism and modern racism. How then could he reject the idea of social equality between men and women? This is particularly puzzling given his noticeable employment of a Marxist critique of the marketisation of society and liberal conceptions of freedom in his controversial 1939 book Pardah. Parsing out the structure of his argument in Pardah in some detail and emphasising the hitherto understudied engagement with Marxist ideas in his thought, this article shows that Maududi rejected a specific vision of social equality, where equality amounts to exchangeability. His use of Marxist ideas to non-Marxist ends was in large part a result of his assessment of Marx as a capable historian but a flawed philosopher, and more fundamentally a very different conception of society to the Marxist one. Maududi relied on his by then well-developed concept of divine sovereignty to carry much of the conceptual burden rega...
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Papers by Humeira Iqtidar