TY - BOOK AU - Abbas,Sadia TI - At Freedom's Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament SN - 9780823257867 U1 - 306.6/97 23 PY - 2014///] CY - New York, NY : PB - Fordham University Press, KW - Islam KW - 20th century KW - 21st century KW - Literary Studies KW - Middle Eastern Studies KW - Postcolonial Studies KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Middle Eastern KW - bisacsh KW - Cold War KW - Pakistani Literature KW - Postcolonial Islam KW - War on Terror KW - baroque KW - blasphemy laws KW - enlightenment freedom KW - pious Muslims KW - political theology N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; The Argument --; 1. The Maintenance of Innocence --; 2. The Echo Chamber of Freedom: The Muslim Woman and the Pretext of Agency --; 3. Religion and the Novel: A Case Study --; 4. How Injury Travels --; 5. Cold War Baroque: Saints and Icons --; 6. Theologies of Love --; Notes --; Index; restricted access N2 - The subject of this book is a new “Islam.” This Islam began to take shape in 1988 around the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the first Gulf War of 1991. It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at once flexible and constrained—indeed, itis a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and reformation are worked out.At this discursive site are many metonyms for Islam: the veiled or “pious” Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question “How do we free ourselves from freedom?” Again and again, freedom is imagined as Western, modern, imperial—a dark imposition of Enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his or her own enslavement is imagined as freedom’s other.At Freedom’s Limit is an intervention into current debates regarding religion, secularism, and Islam and provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. It shows that, even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters.This book includes extended readings of jihadist proclamations; postcolonial law; responses to law from minorities in Muslim-majority societies; Islamophobic films; the novels of Leila Aboulela, Mohammed Hanif, and Nadeem Aslam; and the paintings of Komail Aijazuddin UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823257898?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780823257898 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780823257898/original ER -