Recent months have witnessed considerable angst in the academy over what is and isn’t Islam(ic). Spurred by events from the attacks in Paris to Graeme Wood’s Atlantic article on ISIS, scholars of Islam have agonized over whether and how to apply the label “Islamic” or “Muslim” to characterize recent events. Reviewing various commentaries, there is a limited range of arguments that, by proffering competing positivist accounts of the Islamic, thereby play into a climate of moral panic about the threat Islam poses to domestic and international orders. By playing into the moral panic, such arguments, in the aggregate, preclude both critical interrogation of the scholarly…

  came into town on a highway from Atlanta, the shining symbol of a young and prosperous and growing New South. It was February 2013 and I was making the first of several trips to Albany, Georgia, in the southwestern part of the state, sixty miles from the Alabama border. Jimmy Carter’s evangelism took root here. It is the home Ray Charles evokes when he says Georgia’s on his mind. Stately antebellum plantations line the highway into town, rare historic gems that still stand because this area avoided direct fire during the Civil War. Today, millionaires and billionaires host lavish retreats…

In the wake of the Chattanooga shooting, a dangerous suggestion appears from right and left Terrorist violence can make the previously unthinkable suddenly seem acceptable. The levels of surveillance introduced after 9/11 could have been considered reasonable only in the climate of collective panic that the attacks induced. But this week’s reaction to the fatal shooting of four Marines and a Navy petty officer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by a 24-year-old Muslim has to win the prize for the worst proposed civil liberties infringement to come out of a violent disruption. No matter how high tensions may have run after the Boston Marathon bombing or…

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are using code words and collaborating with some of the biggest fearmongers and not paying a price. Cultural wedge issues have long been a feature of presidential campaigns, where Republicans in particular capitalize on the fears some have of the Other.  In 2012, the Republicans gravitated toward a new target: Muslims. Theycourted extreme segments of the Evangelical community who worked themselves into a fever pitch about living under sharia law and the dealing with the overthrow of Christianity. With the 2016 presidential race in full swing, this Islamophobia is resurgent. Here are a few examples. Encouraging…

Il n’est pas possible de tenir en quatre pages la contribution de l’Islam à la renaissance de la pensée européenne. C’est pourquoi, cet exposé n’est qu’un résumé de quelques lignes. Son intérêt consiste pourtant à offrir au lecteur des points de repères suffisamment détaillés pour qu’il se forge une idée sur cette question. Il n’y a aucun doute que le patrimoine civilisationnel humain se réalise ainsi : donner et recevoir. Il…