Muslim Spaces of Hope - 9781848133013

This book, by a collection of distinguished post-colonial critics, acknowledges but challenges the contemporary "Islamic problem" by asking the ways Muslims experience hope and share it with others. Assertions of difference are put on hold, suggestions of compatibility entertained. Assumptions that Muslims are non-liberal and anti-modern are challenged with evidence about their negotiations of liberalism and modernity. The increased scrutiny of Muslim identities replaces overtly racist ideas with ostensibly ethnic, cultural and religious categories within discourses of social difference. New divisions between Muslims and others echo colonial binaries of black and white, colonized and colonizer, within practices of divide and rule. this book speaks in the context of wider debates about social difference, oppression and liberation.