Mohamed Abdou on Anarcha-Islām, Settler Colonialism, & Empire

In this episode we will welcome Dr. Mohamed Abdou to talk about his work on Islam and Anarchism and his recent battle with repression and demonization by Columbia president Minouche Shafik and the United States congress and the media. We will also talk about reflections from the student encampments and more.
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 has been the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University in the Spring of 2024. He is a former Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo and recently completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ Inequalities, Identities, and Justice research team at Cornell University; he continues to be listed as an international affiliate scholar with Einaudi. His research stems from his involvement with the anti-globalization post-Seattle 1999 movements, 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): www.plutobooks....
His scholarship and writings have appeared in the Journals of Political Theology, Settler-colonial, Anarchist Development in Cultural Studies, Al-Raida as well as Feral Feminisms and Roar Magazine. He wrote his transnational ethnographic and historical-archival PhD dissertation on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary (2019).
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In Solidarity with Mohamed Abdou and Jodi Dean -
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[@theamazingfuzzlord]

Ok but let’s talk about Dr. Abdou’s outfit 🔥

[@malatesta1968]

deeply profound discussion 🔥🖤🔥🖤🔥 thank you, Jared and Dr Abdou! 🔥

[@billesler6231]

Dr. Abdou is brilliant

[@Jshmoney1738]

One of the best discussions I’ve watched

[@parableofthekid]

deeply appreciative of mohamed abdou's words and work

[@OscarDiaz-mx8ik]

an amazing and important discussion, hope to see Dr. Adbou on here in the future too. So much richness here.

[@mrpieceofwork]

Something I have been struggling with near daily is how complicit I am in perpetuating the settler-colonial "project" on this land, as I am trapped in this State, and as well, how I am all about rehabilitating wildlands, and wishing to LIVE off the land... yet I am of European descent. The very act of "homesteading", by its very definition, is one of the pillars of this centuries long "project". I would very much rather wish to join those who have a much deeper and lasting "claim" to this land here on Turtle Island, but of course this is not to be, not as who I am, nor just in this time. What shocked me to my core, though, and I suppose opened up a whole can of worms with trying to reconcile what is "right", with that what is the current status quo here, is... we all need to survive, after all, so a "return to the land" is a... given?... it just pissed me off that the "premiere" website for permaculture I am on forced me to remove "Akokisa stolen land" from my location on my profile, and change it to "traditional lands". Seems to me this "return to the land" movement has just as much settler-colonial baggage to contend with as the rest of the "mainstream" population here. We are all still fully complicit. But how to correct our mistake?

[@memaya212]

he got so much to tell us. I hope he can make us happy with more lectures

[@0MVR_0]

first academic I have seen without five metric tons of books in the background.

[@MAKCapitalism]

I imagine because the semester is over and he's not coming back next year

[@0MVR_0]

@@MAKCapitalism Yeah, I have been fired from an academic position for what I highly suspect were political reasons. Honestly, though the style is probably a better look, having to rely on whether a person is making sense rather than the amount of paper behind them. Good on you for getting him two hours for a long career that was ended in minutes of a Congressional hearing.

[@MAKCapitalism]

@@0MVR_0 that's fcked up. I'm sorry to hear that.

[@0MVR_0]

@@MAKCapitalism for what the matter may be worth, obviously this forum is hardly the appropriate place to have a back and forth yet, Abdou may be very correct to analyze Islam as a separable phenomenon to the culture of Muslims whether they be traditionalist or queer oriented. My work as a linguist has lead me to establish a plausible etymological connection between the respective Arabic word Qur'an to the Chinese 公案 gongAn and Japanese koAn which are known concepts of Shen buddhism that arose in China contemporaneous to the advent of Islam and Ummayad. GongAn translates literally to 'public case' however the meaning is close to "judging an audience through the device of how they react to a story". The literary invention was a method to provoke self-discovery among participants, as back then the borders between buddhism, Syriac nestorianism, Islam, and Hermeticism were porous along with Mutazilite sects, Juddaism and Zoroastrianism. So Abdou is attempting to find definitions of Islam that are material rather than conventional or concessionary to whoever is in power, as the de facto definition of 'Islam' would lead, and to those ends he may desire to look east as teh west has long lost the interest in communicable jurisprudence.

[@AbbaIdrisLawal]

He does have more to say than does with mountain of books on the shelf