Faisal Devji argues that new forms of militancy, such as the actions of al-Qaeda, are informed by the same desire for agency and equality that animates other humanitarian interventions, such as environmentalism and pacifism. To the militant, victimized Muslims are more than just symbols of ethnic and religious persecution-they represent humanity's centuries-long struggle for legitimacy and agency. Acts of terror, therefore, are fueled by the militant's desire to become a historical actor on the global stage. Though they have yet to build concrete political institutions, militant movements have formed a kind of global society, and as Devji makes clear, this society pursues the same humanitarian objectives that drive more benevolent groups.

Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (Crises in World Politics)

History

Devji, Faisal

Middle East

Oxford University Press

Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics

Faisal Devji argues that new forms of militancy, such as the actions of al-Qaeda, are informed by the same desire for agency and equality that animates other humanitarian interventions, such as environmentalism and pacifism. To the militant, victimized Muslims are more than just symbols of ethnic and religious persecution—they represent humanity's centuries-long struggle for legitimacy and agency. Acts of terror, therefore, are fueled by the militant's desire to become a historical actor on the global stage. Though they have yet to build concrete political institutions, militant movements have formed a kind of global society, and as Devji makes clear, this society pursues the same humanitarian objectives that drive more benevolent groups.

The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics

Columbia University Press

The Impossible Indian offers a rare, fresh view of Gandhi as a hard-hitting political thinker willing to countenance the greatest violence in pursuit of a global vision that went far beyond a nationalist agenda. Revising the conventional view of the Mahatma as an isolated Indian moralist detached from the mainstream of twentieth-century politics, Faisal Devji offers a provocative new genealogy of Gandhian thought, one that is not rooted in a clichéd alternative history of spiritual India but arises from a tradition of conquest and violence in the battlefields of 1857.
 Focusing on his unsentimental engagement with the hard facts of imperial domination, Fascism, and civil war, Devji recasts Gandhi as a man at the center of modern history. Rejecting Western notions of the rights of man, rights which can only be bestowed by a state, Gandhi turned instead to the idea of dharma, or ethical duty, as the true source of the self’s sovereignty, independent of the state. Devji demonstrates that Gandhi’s dealings with violence, guided by his idea of ethical duty, were more radical than those of contemporary revolutionists.
 To make sense of this seemingly incongruous relationship with violence, Devji returns to Gandhi’s writings and explores his engagement with issues beyond India’s struggle for home rule. Devji reintroduces Gandhi to a global audience in search of leadership at a time of extraordinary strife as a thinker who understood how life’s quotidian reality could be revolutionized to extraordinary effect.

The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Harvard University Press

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India’s Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India’s rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel.
 A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam.
 Revealing how Pakistan’s troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Asia

What are the motives behind Osama bin Laden's and Al-Qaeda's jihad against America and the West? Innumerable attempts have been made in recent years to explain that mysterious worldview. In Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji focuses on the ethical content of this jihad as opposed to its purported political intent. Al-Qaeda differs radically from such groups as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah, which aim to establish fundamentalist Islamic states. In fact, Devji contends, Al-Qaeda, with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action, actually has more in common with multinational corporations, antiglobalization activists, and environmentalist and social justice organizations. Bin Laden and his lieutenants view their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions faced by the Muslim world rather than an Islamist attempt to build states.
Al-Qaeda culls diverse symbols and fragments from Islam's past in order to legitimize its global war against the "metaphysical evil" emanating from the West. The most salient example of this assemblage, Devji argues, is the concept of jihad itself, which Al-Qaeda defines as an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, like prayer. Although medieval Islamic thought provides precedent for this interpretation, Al-Qaeda has deftly separated the stipulation from its institutional moorings and turned jihad into a weapon of spiritual conflict. 
Al-Qaeda and its jihad, Devji suggests, are only the most visible manifestations of wider changes in the Muslim world. Such changes include the fragmentation of traditional as well as fundamentalist forms of authority. In the author's view, Al-Qaeda represents a new way of organizing Muslim belief and practice within a global landscape and does not require ideological or institutional unity. 
Offering a compelling explanation for the central purpose of Al-Qaeda's jihad against the West, the meaning of its strategies and tactics, and its moral and aesthetic dimensions, Landscapes of the Jihad is at once a sophisticated work of historical and cultural analysis and an invaluable guide to the world's most prominent terrorist movement.

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Crises in World Politics)

Cornell University Press

Shahzia Sikander

Free of being prescribed while using a very prescribed and structured form. I like that tension. Miniature painting comes with a set of rules It's the materiality, the seductiveness of the surface, the investment, the submission, the hours that are put in In the end, they are very meditative and meaningful gestures, like ritual. In this sense, miniature painting is more about subverting modernity than subverting tradition. --Shahzia Sikander (from the interview with Bhabha)

Arts & Photography

Bhabha, Homey

Individual Artists

The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago

C. Hurst & Co. Publishers Ltd.

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India’s Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India’s rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel.  A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam.  Revealing how Pakistan’s troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.

Muslim Zion

A landmark first-time collaboration between poet Clark Coolidge and writer/scholar/artist Keith Waldrop, Bomb is a meditation on a book of photographs that document the Manhattan Project. Coolidge's thirty-page poem begins with epigraphs by Democritus, Gregory Corso and Andre Breton/Paul Eluard, and continues in an elliptical, glancing narrative style that lucidly investigates a subject often too traumatic to consider directly the impact of the atomic bomb on our lives. Or should we say instead, the bomb's impact on our everyday lives. As Coolidge puts it, the general tendency has been to 'put the bomb in a glass vase/add dust and forget.' Like all of Coolidge's work, Bomb is sharp, stark, and rhythmic; the poet here tangles with the dreamlike oddness of the photographs at hand in fits and starts of language with an explosive beauty. Keith Waldrop's series of collages are literal reworkings of the original pictures: deep blacks and bright whites excavated from the book, remade here in the image of the poem.

Bomb

COOLIDGE, Clark

Waldrop, Keith

Sikander, Shahzia

Sculpture

Granary Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Devji, Faisal. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Devji, Faisal

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Devji, Faisal. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (Crises in World Politics)

Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics

The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics

The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Crises in World Politics)

Shahzia Sikander

The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics

Muslim Zion

Bomb