The Inheritance of ISIS
Dr. Faisal Devji
Thu, 19 September 2019, 6:30 PM
SFU Harbour Centre Campus Vancouver, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 5K3
Segal Centre Room 1400
While both scholarly and journalistic analyses of Muslim militancy see it emerging out of a longer history of Islam’s politicization, I want to argue that exactly the reverse is true, with much of the violence that characterizes contemporary terrorism deriving from the refusal of politics. The destruction of profane Muslim authority in colonial times was matched by efforts to reconceive Islam itself as a form of social self-management by means of divine law, one that reserved sovereignty for God alone. The problem of what came to be called Islamism, then, was how to produce a society without sovereignty. The inheritance of ISIS is one consequence of the failure of this struggle.
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