Join us for a very special evening with Mohamed Abdou author of “Islam & Anarchism”
Drawing on the transnational historical, material, spiritual and symbolic of 1492 in Andalusia and the Columbia Conquistador invasion of the Americas, this book talk will discuss the relevance of Islam to the struggle for Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color liberation in the settler-colonial contexts of Zionist Israel and Crusading America and Canada. Through Islam and Anarchism, Abdou will address how discourses around Muslims and Islam all too often lapses into a false dichotomy of Orientalist and Fundamentalist tropes. A popular reimagining of Islam is urgently needed. Yet it is a perhaps an unexpected political philosophical tradition that has the most to offer in this pursuit: anarchism. Islam and Anarchism simultaneously disrupts two commonly held beliefs - that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; and that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious and anti-spiritual. Deeply rooted in key Islamic-Quranic concepts and textual sources, and drawing on radical Indigenous, Black, and Islamic anarchistic and social movement discourses, Abdou proposes 'Anarcha-Islam'. In constructing a decolonial and abolitionist, non-authoritarian and non-capitalist Islamic anarchism, Islam and Anarchism philosophically and theologically challenges the classist, sexist, racist, ageist, queerphobic and ableist inequalities in both post- and neo-colonial societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA. Abdou will address how what we are witnessing in Palestine and Turtle Island is an ongoing Religious-Racial War and the contemporary movement links between the Arab Spring's Tahrir Uprisings, 'Occupy Wallstreet', No Dakota Pipelines (NoDapl), Black Lives Matter, and the real-time unfolding of a genocide in Gaza.
Dr. Mohamed Abdou is a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization with extensive fieldwork experience in the Middle East-North Africa, Asia, and Turtle Island. He is currently the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is a former Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo and recently completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. He has taught many courses on various topics at the University of Toronto and Queen's University including on Indigenous Land Education & Black Geographies. His research stems from his involvement with the anti-globalization post-Seattle 1999 movements, organizing for Palestinian liberation, the Tyendinaga Mohawks and the sister territories of Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanehsatake, during the standoff over the Culbertson tract, as well as the anti-war protests of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. He is author of Islam & Anarchism: Relationships & Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022). He wrote his transnational ethnographic and historical-archival PhD dissertation on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary (2019).