The Politics of Writing Islam provides a much-needed critique of existing forms of studying, writing and representing Islam in the West. Through critiquing ethnographic, literary, critical, psychoanalytic and theological discourses, the author reveals the problematic underlying cultural and theoretical presuppositions. Mutman demonstrates how their approach reflects the socially, politically and economically unequal relationship between the West and Islam.
While offering a critical insight into concepts such as writing, power, post-colonialism, difference and otherness on a theoretical level, Mutman reveals a different perspective on Islam by emphasizing its living, everyday and embodied aspects in dynamic relation with the outside world - in contrast to the stereotyped authoritarian and backward religion characterized by an omnipotent God.
Throughout, Mutman develops an approach to culture as an embodied, everyday, living and ever changing practice. He argues that Islam should be perceived precisely in this way, that is, as an open, heterogeneous, interpretive, multiple and worldly belief system within the Abrahamic tradition of ethical monotheism, and as one that is contested within as well as outside its 'own' culture.
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Nonfiction
Social Science
Philosophy
Islam
Social & Cultural Studies
Religion & Spirituality
Middle East Religions
HalfTitle 2
Series 3
Title 4
Copyright 5
Contents 6
Series Foreword 7
Acknowledgments 8
Introduction 10
Part I Ethnographies: Writing Culture 20
1 Writing Culture: The Name of Man 22
The ethnographic site 23
. . . or the scene of writing 29
At the threshold of knowledge 33
The inscription of man 37
A lesson of writing? 41
The postmodern as a foreclosure of the native informant 43
2 Native Speaker, Master Audience 46
Knowledge, ethics, dialogue 46
Native autobiography and the return of the ethnographic authority 49
The Qur’anic dialogics: The passion of the Other 53
Native speaker, master audience: A postcolonial scene 62
3 Exchange Past and Future 68
Native difference 69
Habit versus consciousness? 72
“A torsion of habitus” 81
Time of the other: Absolute past 85
Exchange past and present 94
His own ethnographer 98
Part II Literatures: Crossing Culture 102
4 Resonance of Light: Reading T. E. Lawrence 104
Said: Imperial affect 104
Deleuze: Ideas, or passages of life 108
Mimesis and fabula 115
5 Nomadism, or Sovereignty: Location of Culture 118
Isabelle Eberhardt’s sovereignities 123
Part III Psychoanalyses: The Voice of the Other 138
6 Orphan Religion 140
A story of modernity 142
Literature as the truth of religion: The Satanic Verses 148
The gift of the other: Abraham, Sarah, Hagar 155
Whose name is she? Right(ing) woman 162
7 Reciting: The Voice of the Other 168
The primal word 170
Levinas: Event and transcendence 172
Haunting: The lost book 175
Reciting: Specters 178
Dual words 182
Conclusion 184
Notes 196
Bibliography 250
Index 264
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