Drawing on this year’s presidential theme, this panel will focus on how contemporary Muslim communities have negotiated the logics of Western secularism by reconceptualizing and problematizing the idea of “freedom.” The first paper explores Islamic concept-practices relating to tahrir (“freedom”) in the context of French settler colonialism in Algeria (1830–1962). The second paper considers how a state discourse on “freedom” governs Germany’s adjudication of asylum claims based on conversion to Christianity, especially among claimants coming from countries such as Iran and Afghanistan. The third paper highlights how French Muslim women have been mobilizing to “disrupt, decolonize and dismantle the political-theological practices and ideologies of freedom” that have been built precisely on their subjugation. The final paper challenges essentialist interpretations of ummah through an examination of how a community of Indonesian Muslim immigrants in Philadelphia have redefined this concept as a form of liberatory cosmopolitanism.
This paper thinks through the concept-practice of takwīn al-nafs (formation of the subject-self) as a form of ethico-politics among a group of anti-colonial writers and actors in the years surrounding the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). I investigate how takwīn al-nafs troubles the assumed secularity of freedom (and its correlates, liberation, emancipation) as a category of political modernity in its troubling of the boundaries of the ethical/political, as well as the self-contained subject self in the relationship of the anthropos to other living beings: the Divine, as well as animals, plants, the earth, and other celestial beings. Drawing from archival material, publications, and ethnographic fieldwork with students of the Association of Algerian Muslim Scholars and the philosopher and critic Malek Bennabi, I explore how takwīn functioned as a response to colonial subjectification and as an enduring mode of re-membering a dismembered epistemic and ethical-political horizon.
This paper examines how asylum adjudications based on conversion to Christianity expose the paradoxes of religious freedom within secular nation-states. While the 1951 Refugee Convention upholds the right to change religion as grounds for asylum, European courts overwhelmingly reject such claims. Decision-makers assess not only persecution risk but also the “genuineness” of conversion, thereby constructing a “Christian orthodoxy” that is far removed from the lived religion of converts or their German supporters.
Drawing on ethnographic research in Germany, this paper argues that courts “secularize” Christianity by transforming it into a legal category, using religious freedom as a mechanism of exclusion rather than inclusion. Asylum seeking converts to Christianity must navigate a contradiction: invoking religious freedom while seeking cultural belonging to a secular state with a Christian history that distrusts overt religiosity. This process reveals how secularism does not simply protect freedom but also constrains it, reinforcing racial and national boundaries.
Against the backdrop of increasing constraints and surveillance in the name of secular “liberation,” French Muslim women pursue a vision of freedom that refuses any binary opposition between secularism and Muslim piety. Drawing on decolonial feminism and Islamic moral psychology, as well as on “secular sensibilities” of choice, rights, and liberation, French Muslim women pursue their freedom through spaces of gender and racial non-mixité. They engage with the moral language of choice, freedom, and rights in a way that intensifies rather than diluting their pious aspirations. Freedom is cherished as a devotional virtue cultivated in community, rather than as an individualized resistance. This presentation underscores the Islamic genealogies of freedom that inform these women’s discourses, as counterweights to an Enlightenment understanding. Islamic ethics of non-compulsion, of consent and testimony, and of training the soul are essential ways to understand freedom and choice as “Islamic secular,” decolonial feminist, and pious sensibilities.
The concept of ummah is often misrepresented in Western discourse as a transnational Muslim solidarity that undermines the nation-state. Kwame Anthony Appiah critiques ummah as “toxic cosmopolitanism,” claiming it prioritizes religious loyalty over universal moral obligations. However, this critique oversimplifies ummah and ignores its historical evolution, particularly among marginalized Muslim communities facing structural injustice. This study critically engages Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, highlighting its Eurocentric assumptions and its detachment from political struggle, which fail to address systemic exclusion and the lived experiences of racialized Muslim minorities.
Through a field study of Indonesian Muslim immigrants at Al-Falah Mosque in Philadelphia, this research examines ummah as an ethical practice of recognition and resilience. By centering lived experience, it challenges reductionist portrayals and argues that ummah functions as an alternative cosmopolitanism—a moral praxis of solidarity, liberation, and justice in response to systemic exclusion.
| Mayanthi Fernando | mfernan3@ucsc.edu | View |
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