At Freedom’s Limit

This is a work of literary criticism; Sadia Abbas selects works of art, literature, film and other media and popular culture emanating principally from Europe and the US, and South Asia and the Middle East. She presents these texts and images as the most intricate and complex evidence of ‘a new “Islam”’ (p. 1). According to her account this new form of Islam began around 1988 with the condemnation of Salman Rushdie (‘the Rushdie affair’, p. 1) and the end of the Cold War the following year. The author posits freedom as central to this instantiation of Islam. However, it is a ‘freedom’ that is only such for lack of another word. The freedom it holds out is one defined by contrast with a kind of mandatory freedom—a kind of freedom both sanctioned and promoted by authorities and governments of Western countries, chiefly although not exclusively by the US and the UK. This dominant assigned form of freedom is a species of freedom that possesses a monopoly on the word ‘freedom’ but does not, according to the new form of Islam, grasp or capture the true sense of it. The artists and writers whose works Abbas explores and interprets seek to simultaneously resist the assignment, and salvage or appropriate (and whilst appropriating re-shape) the meaning of freedom

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Freedom of the press · Islam · Literature · Meaning (existential · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · History · Law · Philosophy