Postmuslim - by Youssef Rakha (Paperback)

About the Book

An ambitious and timely essay collection exploring what it means to be Arab-Muslim in the twenty-first century

Book Synopsis

An ambitious and timely essay collection exploring what it means to be Arab-Muslim in the twenty-first century

Postmuslim, Youssef Rakha's debut essay collection, tells the story of Islam's clash with the West in the last thirty years from a perspective rarely available to the Western reader. Impassioned, intimate, erudite, and playful, these essays trace Rakha's intellectual and spiritual transformations across multiple decades alongside significant moments in recent history. He recounts "losing his religion" as a teenager in Cairo after the fall of the Berlin Wall, resentful of the conservatism and rigid conformism of his middle-class Egyptian milieu. But what he sees and comes to understand about the West eventually disenchants him as well. Along the way, Rakha explores rich subjects such as boxing and democracy, addiction and the "hungry ghost" of the great ninth-century poet Al-Mutanabbi, recent Egyptian history rewritten in the form of horror film tropes, and a bold proposal to revitalize Arab-Muslim culture via the surprisingly multicultural lifeways of the Ottoman Empire.

"Postmuslim" is a term of Rakha's invention that embraces the fullness of Muslim identity rather than its essentialized and distorted versions. This is a vital book for anyone negotiating their own relationship to alienation, faith, intersecting identities, and the hypocrisy of those in power.

Review Quotes

"Thoughtful, imaginative and erudite, Rakha's book offers a vision of Arab-Muslim identity based in tolerance, diversity, and pride in global citizenship. A bold and timely collection that artfully challenges Arab-Muslim stereotypes."--Kirkus

"Postmuslim explores the past three decades of Islam's clash with the West from a secular Muslim perspective, finding inspiration for the future in the multiculturalism embodied by the Ottoman Empire."--Publishers Weekly

"Rakha explores the past three decades of Islam's clash with the West from a secular Muslim perspective, finding inspiration for the future in the multiculturalism embodied by the Ottoman Empire."--The Millions

"A whirling ballet of ideas, delivered with the strength of a boxer's punch, on what it means to be male, Muslim, and Arab in a world that hides its hostility to all three behind political benevolence and lofty ideals."--Bina Shah

"Postmuslim asks not only where Islamophobia stems from and how its consequences can be fatal, but how the interiority of daily Muslim life is brimming with contradiction, messiness, and ecstasy."--Dalia Al-Dujaili

"We are so lucky that in this beautiful book Youssef Rakha has done the hard work of reimagining what personal identity might look like if we take all of the lovely and necessary parts from our heritage and our former ambitions and discard the rest."--Maris Kreizman

"Sparring genius right here."--Merve Emre

"This is it. This is the book. Postmuslim gives us back what centuries of essentialism, in-fighting and colonial thuggery have taken: a full, honest account of Muslim identity. Its history, its fractures, and its possible futures."--Noor Naga

"Few writers have captured the intellectual and emotional complexities of contemporary Arab-Muslim identity with the acuity of Youssef Rakha. [Postmuslim] captures the contradictions, inheritances, and freedoms of a generation, and offers a compelling new framework for thinking beyond the categorical prisons of postcolonial and post-imperial identity."--Saleem Haddad

About the Author

Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan's Seal; The Crocodiles; Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won a Sawiris Cultural Award; and The Dissenters.