Episódios
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In this final episode of Season 11, the Radio ReOrient team - Hizer Mir, Claudia Radiven, Saeed Khan, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid - look back over our discussions this season. We put these into the context in which the conversations took place: the context of the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories, of global Islamophobia, of campus movements and protests for decolonial liberation… and much more. We reflect on the value of the literary, which has been a thread throughout this season, for imagining beyond islamophobia and share some secret sneak peaks of what to expect next season! We will be back soon and look forward to catching up with you then, listeners old and new. But for now: let’s listen in!
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In this episode Salman Sayyid talks to Ian Almond about his work in world literature, including his 2021 book World Literature Decentered which looks at literature beyond the idea of the West. Ian is professor of World Literature at Georgetown University, whose work asks what it would mean to do literary study that embraces the non-West not as a residual category, but as the majority of the world. The interview connects up this work with Ian’s earlier work on dismantling Eurocentrism, and asks big questions about what is at stake in the idea of the global.
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This episode is the third one this series where we look back over the first principles of the ReOrient project. In previous episodes we have discussed post-orientalism and post-positivism, here we turn to decoloniality. Discussions of decoloniality have become increasingly mainstream since the ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’ and ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movements, and calls to decolonise are often heard on pro-Palestine marches around the world. But what is the relationship between the decolonial and the Islamicate? And how do we ensure that as it is mainstreamed, decolonial thought does not lose its meaning? To find out, let’s listen in.
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In this episode Salman Sayyid talks to Haiyun Ma about Muslimness in China. This is the second episode in this series which addresses this topic: in a previous episode we spoke to Darren Byler about Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan. In this episode, our focus is slightly different, and encompasses many Muslim groups in China. Haiyun Ma, assistant professor at Frostburg State University, tells us about his career and his interests in Islam and Muslims in Chinese history. This episode is one of our ‘Forgotten Ummah’ episodes, which tell the story of Muslimness in places that are not normatively or traditionally thought of as Muslim.
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In the first episode of this new series, Salman Sayyid and Haroon Bashir talk with Kelly Hammond about her new book.
Her book explores how the geopolitical rivalries between China and Japan created opportunities for Muslim Chinese to articulate their Muslimness politically and culturally. -
This episode is the first of two episodes this season on Muslims in China. Here Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talk to Darren Byler about his book Terror Capitalism:Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Darren is a sociocultural anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, whose book explores how islamophobia and capitalism contribute to the violence against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan. Our conversation spans the history of China, the question of global Islamophobia and the importance of friendship.
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Persevering with our literary theme this season, in this episode Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward chat to A. M. Dassu about her books for young readers. Az is a children’s author of fiction and non-fiction, whose books include Fight Back and Boy, Everywhere. Her books engage young readers with themes of migration, activism and political solidarity, and she often writes Muslim characters whose Muslimness is more than simply an aspect of their culture or heritage but plays an important role in their characterisation. We talked to her about her work for different age groups, about what it means to write Muslim characters with their own agency, and about the contexts in which children encounter Islamophobia and other racisms.
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In this episode of Radio ReOrient, we return to the literary theme of this season, to explore the work of Laury Silvers. Laury is the author of many successful book series set in the past and present of the Islamicate, including her Sufi Mysteries Quartet set in 10th Century Baghdad. In this interview she tells Saeed Khan and Salman Sayyid about her work, about the way that orientalism structures so many representations of Muslims and Muslim societies, and about how important it is for Muslims to be empowered to imagine themselves on their own terms.
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In this episode Hizer Mir and his co-author Sahar Ghumkhor talk to Shareef Muhammad about the phenomenon of Muslims in the Manosphere. Shareef is a scholar of history based in Atlanta, Georgia, who works on Muslims, race and third worldism - especially the experience of Black Muslims in the context of imperial America. This interview results from an article Sahar and Hizer wrote about the Muslim Manosphere, which observes the behaviour of Muslim men in alt right online spaces. Together with Shareef, they explain what drives these Muslim men to make alarming alliances with the far-right white supremacist men they meet online, and what this means for their understanding of Muslim masculinity.
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In this episode we celebrate the release of a special issue of the ReOrient journal, ‘Hindutva and the Muslim Subject’, edited by Sheheen Kattiparambil. Shvetal Vyas Pare and Sheheen sat down to discuss the special issue, introducing what Hindutva is and how it relates to global projects of Islamophobia within and beyond India (including Tel Aviv’s genocide in Palestine). ‘Hindutva and the Muslim Subject’ is issue 8.2 of ReOrient, and is available freely via open access from Pluto Journals here. Let us know what you think by contacting us on socials: @cmsreorient.
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The third episode of this season of Radio ReOrient continues our project this season of returning to the first principles of Critical Muslim Studies. In the previous episode, Hizer Mir and Salman Sayyid discussed post-positivism: here they turn to post-orientalism. The advent of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 shook the foundations of many academic disciplines. Not only Oriental Studies (which was the most obvious object of Said’s critique) but almost every discipline found itself asking the question: how should we respond to Said’s Orientalism? How should our subjects be studied differently now that we know what we know about knowledge production? In this episode we delve into some of these questions.
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This episode is the first of three special episodes in this season of Radio ReOrient in which we look back on the first principles of Critical Muslim Studies. In this episode, Hizer Mir talks to Salman Sayyid about post-positivism - what it means, what it offers, and how it relates to the project of decolonising. The discussion that we kick off here will reverberate throughout this series, as we return to talk in later episodes about post-orientalism and decoloniality.
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Radio ReOrient is back for another season, and this time Hizer Mir is joined by a new team of hosts: Claudia Radiven, Saeed Khan and Chella Ward. In this first episode Hizer and Chella interview Ambereen Dadabhoy, associate professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College, about her brand new book Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds (Routledge, 2024). In the process we discover Shakespeare’s secret Muslim characters, travel around an early modern Mediterranean that is nothing like the border of Europe we know today, and ask whether it is possible to talk about Islamophobia much earlier in history than its conventional beginnings.
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In this episode of the Radio ReOrient podcast, Dr. Shehla Khan, Dr. Sher Ali Tareen, and Salman Sayyid discuss the ongoing crisis in Pakistan under Gaza’s looming shadow . The latest exacerbation of the crisis comes with the general elections of February 2024, which represent an electoral heist of historically unprecedented proportions followed by the regime’s concerted efforts to normalize the results. This conversation ties the current political climate to broader global issues, including the tragic events in Gaza. The discussion navigates through a complex of concepts central to the development of a critically informed understanding of the Islamosphere.
Secularism is usually understood as the separation of church and state, religion and politics, or rationality from dogma. This is an overly simplistic reading of the concept, which dates to historically long-running power struggles and wars that accompanied the rise of European nation-states and colonial empires, and fundamentally changed the exercise of political power. Rather than merely marking the disentanglement of political from sacral authority, secularism refers to the process whereby princes and monarchs (rather than priests) gradually extended their authority over state and society in an uneven, contested, and variable fashion. The process culminated in the establishment of a form of state that based sovereign authority on a set of interrelated functions. Firstly, it assumed the power to legislate the boundaries between the public and private spheres. Secondly, it constructed 'religion' as a category denoting a distinct area of human experience, primarily identified with Christianity. Thirdly, it relegated this area of experience to the private sphere, and in doing so, also proclaimed its neutrality and non-interference in this domain as a means of promoting societal harmony and tolerance. Taken together, these endeavors enabled the rise of secular power and informed its deep anomalies. Far from retreating from the newly instituted realm of 'religion', the newly empowered secular state sought to domesticate its content and purpose, regulate its expression, differentiate 'good' from 'bad' variants, and ultimately co-opt and align with some sects and denominations while suppressing or persecuting others.
Lastly, the conversation critiques in passing 'methodological nationalism'—an approach to understanding the world that considers the nation-state and its territorial limits as the naturalized, sole points of reference for explaining and analyzing complex political, social, and economic phenomena that sidelinesthe merits of a relational, transnational approach.
These concepts are used in this conversation to illuminate the current crisis in Pakistan as an example of how Muslim political sovereignty, whether in Palestine, Egypt, Eastern Turkestan, or for the Rohingya, continues to be systematically undermined.
Further Readings and Listening
tps://criticalmuslimstudies.co.uk/project/the-political-struggle-in-pakistan/
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/pakistan-reframing-the-debate/id1458817693?i=1000619861664
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-political-struggle-in-pakistan/id1458817693?i=1000614889565 -
In this episode of Radio ReOrient, Salman Sayyid, with Hizer Mir as your host, discusses why Gaza matters. This leads to a wide range of discussions with topics ranging from ongoing support form Washington, London and other Western governments for Israel, how the notion of ummah deployed in light of the attack on Gaza has disrupted the nation state model (amongst others) and what is meant by the concept of Palestinisation of Muslims and how that can be resisted.
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Islamophobia is a global phenomenon found not only among the international 'usual suspects' of gross and systemic human and civil rights violators but also among established liberal democracies that present themselves as custodians of the international legal order.
In this episode of Radio ReOrient, we talk to Saul Takahashi, an international human rights lawyer and academic who navigates the intersections between Islamophobia and the international liberal order. He describes his odyssey through the landscapes of Islamophobia, beginning with his human rights work with the UN in occupied Palestine (where he reverted to Islam), to his observations on the Muslim minority in Japan. In Japan, Saul witnessed how the growth of Muslimness seemed to go hand-in-hand with increased state surveillance.
The journey continues to Denmark, where Saul researched the institutionalization of Islamophobia in urban governance, demonstrating furthermore that Islamophobia is racism, and racism is a form of governmentality as much as it is about abusive attitudes and street violence. Given the global nature of Islamophobia, we conclude this conversation by examining some hopeful proposals that Saul has written about reforming the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to make it a more effective player in the struggle against Islamophobia. -
This episode of Radio Reorient is based on an event held on Islamophobia and Emancipation. This event was held to discuss the definition of Islamophobia that was put forth by the people’s definition in the UK… Islamophobia is a form of racism against Muslimness and perceived Muslimness.
In this intriguing episode of Radio ReOrient, Kawter Najib, Abdoolkarim Vakil, Salman Sayyid, hosted by myself, Hizer Mir engage in a discussion that explores Islamophobia, its definition and emancipation. -
In this episode, Kawter Najib sits with Hizer Mir to return to the topic of Islamophobia in France. In this discussion we talk about Kawter’s own experiences of Islamophobia in France as well as the Islamophobic murder of French-Algerian teenager Nahel Merzouk in the summer.
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In this episode of Radio ReOrient, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Claudia Radiven and your host Salman Sayyid, talk about some of the issues raised by Rebecca’s new book Erasing Palestine (https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2903-erasing-palestine).
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In the realm of popular culture, representations of ancient Greeks and Romans abound in the West and Western adjacent societies. Classics, primarily focused on the study of Greeks and Romans, serve as Western history's foundational narrative. However, this narrative tends to create a timeline that excludes Muslim contributions and unintentionally supports the colonial-racial agenda of the West.
In this intriguing episode of Radio ReOrient, Dr Marchella Ward from the Open University and Abdoolkarim Vakil from King's College, London, engage in a discussion that explores the notable similarities and differences between two academic domains: Critical Ancient World Studies and Critical Muslim Studies. This episode serves as an anticipatory introduction to the forthcoming publication titled "The Case for Forgetting Classics," edited by Mathura Umachandran and Dr Marchella Ward. Within this volume, numerous scholars come together with a shared commitment to decolonize the study of ancient Greeks and Romans.
Recorded during the Bradford Literature Festival, this conversation provides a platform for reflecting on how the discourse of ancient Greco-Romans has shaped Western perceptions of history, epistemology, and identity, underwriting the exclusion of Muslimness. - Mostrar mais
