Autorentext

Irfan Ahmad is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. He is author of Islamism and Democracy in India (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Klappentext

Terrorism in Question crafts a political anthropology of post-9/11 "new terrorism" by investigating who needs the category of terrorists and offering a global framework to understand anthropology, Islam and terrorism. In contrast to their depiction as antimodern, barbarian and fanatic, this study theorizes "Muslim terrorists" as radical friends of equality and visionaries of an unrecognized ethical politics. Marshalling fieldwork with media practitioners and refugees, participant observation of counterterrorism conferences in India and Oslo, and encounters with terrorists, it reorients anthropology to elevate its public voice. This book shows how fieldwork, poetry and political theory come together to exemplify decolonized knowledge.