“Nothing is true, everything is permitted” was supposedly the last words of the founder of a 12th-century Persian assassin group called Hashashin. It is a quote that has inspired thinkers like Nietzsche to include it in his work and regard it as the freedom of the spirit (1989). Although such a way of thinking argues that a “truly free individual” would not conform to social moral obligations due to a supposed contradiction between one’s “true... Continue Reading →
Mahmood, S. (2012). Politics of piety: the islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. This thought-provoking yet complicated book is a groundbreaking analysis of the complex relationship between religious practices and beliefs of (some) Muslim women and modern secular liberal discourses on feminism and other issues. The ethnography, published in 2004 by... Continue Reading →
The recent European discourse on blasphemy as applied to the behavior of Muslim immigrants in Europe serves, paradoxically, at once to confirm and to deny difference. Angry Muslim responses to the publication of the Danish cartoons are seen by secularists as attempting to reintroduce a category that was once a mea ms of oppression in... Continue Reading →
(The review of the book can be found here) But the questions that I have come to ask of myself, and which I would like to pose to the reader as well, are: Do my political visions ever run up against the responsibility that I incur for the destruction of life forms so that "unenlightened"... Continue Reading →
Thinking Prismatically 