University of New England

UNE scholar and author Anouar Majid examines the place of religion and Islam in the culture of globalization

University of New England English Professor Anouar Majid has been described by Princeton scholar and public intellectual Cornel West as one of a few "towering Islamic intellectuals," a leading figure in examining the place of religion and Islam in postcolonial theory and the culture of globalization.

Professor Majid, a native of Morocco, is both a scholar and novelist.

In his latest book, A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America (University of Minnesota Press, September 2007), Majid explores unexpected common ground in one of the most inflammatory issues of the twenty-first century: the deepening conflict between the Islamic world and the United States.

Moving beyond simplistic answers, he argues that the Islamic world and the United States are both in precipitous states of decline because, in each, religious, political, and economic orthodoxies have silenced the voices of their most creative thinkers—the visionary nonconformists, radicals, and revolutionaries who are often dismissed, or even punished, as heretics. 

The solution, Majid concludes, is a long-overdue revival of dissent. Heresy is no longer a contrarian’s luxury, for only through encouraging an engaged and progressive intellectual tradition can the nations reverse their decline and finally work together for global justice and the common good of humanity.

Since the publication of a A Call for Heresy, Majid has been interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS, Cynthia Black on Air America Radio, and a number of other interviewers on local Public Radio stations around the nation. Majid was also profiled in a feature on Mawid Fil Mahjar on Al Jazeera television.

Freedom and Orthodoxy
A Call for Heresy continues the line of thought from his earlier book, Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age, in which he argues that conflicts such as September 11th and the war in Iraq are not an ominous clash of civilizations but the failure of our one and only human civilization to capitalize on its tremendously rich cultural resources to establish a more humane global order.

In Freedom and Orthodoxy, Professor Majid takes the view that the inflexible, all-encompassing worldviews of Euro-American ideologies that have characterized world history since 1492 have resulted in the retreat of Islam and other non-European traditions into dangerous orthodoxies and a growing climate of suspicion, fear and terror.

He observes that the critics of President Bush who believe that the administration invaded Iraq because of the oil bonanza that could accrue to well-connected U.S. companies are forgetting the long view of American history.

U.S. intervention in Iraq, he writes, is a "manifestation of a strain that is part of a larger and complex history, one that not only began with the American Revolution (to which the president alludes in his inaugural address), but goes back further in time to the early colonial settlers and even to the Spanish conquistadors before them in other parts of the Americas. What unites the Iberian conquests of the New World, the British settlements in North America, and the American Revolution is not only a quest for freedom, but also a messianic will to (re-)Christianize or remake the world anew."

"Hence," he adds, "the agenda of reshaping the Middle East is perfectly consistent with this enduring pattern."

Freedom and Orthodoxy, published by Stanford University Press, was listed by the British magazine New Statesman as one of the best books of 2004. The Middle East Journal wrote that "Majid presents an all-encompassing view of significant aspects of history and suggests new conceptual avenues that may enable the world... to move toward peace and harmony." Itinerario, the official journal of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, describing it as a “masterful synthesis drawing on a breadth of scholarship by historians, theorists, and literary critics as well as primary literary texts,”  concludes by saying that “this is an important work that calls for further engagement and serious contemplation.”

Unveiling Traditions
In an earlier book, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, Professor Majid issued a challenge to the West to reimagine Islam as a progressive world culture and a participant in the building of a multicultural and more egalitarian world civilization. From within the highly secularized space it inhabits, a space endemically suspicious of religion, the West must find a way, he writes, to embrace Islamic societies as partners in building a more inclusive and culturally diverse global community.

In the book, Professor Majid moves beyond Edward Said's unmasking of orientalism in the West to examine the intellectual assumptions that have prevented a more nuanced understanding of Islam's legacies.

Unveiling Traditions, published by Duke University Press in 2000, was recommended by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as a book for understanding the context of 9/11. The international journal of postcolonial studies,  Interventions, wrote that the book “could not be more timely, appearing almost prophetically as a voice of both urgency and moderation in its vision of a progressivist Islam. . . . It cannot be emphasized enough how salient this work is, how auspicious its defense of a moderate and humanist vision of Islam has turned out to be." In his book, Democracy Matters (2004), Cornel West describes the the book as a “superb text” and a “must-read.”

Unveiling Traditions grew out of a series of essays that Professor Majid published in the 1990s, including "Can the Postcolonial Critic Speak? Orientalism and the Rushdie Affair," published in Cultural Critique as its lead article. This essay has become required reading on Salman Rushdie and is taught at universities across the English-speaking world. It was listed as one of the major articles of 1995 in Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 5.

Politics of Feminism in Islam
The themes of Islam and human rights explored in "Can the Postcolonial Critic Speak?" article were further elaborated in "The Politics of Feminism in Islam," published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, considered the premier journal of theoretical feminism. Listed in the International Bibliography of Political Science (1998) and the International Bibliography of Sociology (1998), this seminal article has been assigned in many courses and discussed in several feminist circles around the country. The article was republished in a book titled Islam, Politics, Gender by the University of Chicago Press (2002).

The Novel, Si Yussef
Recently, Professor Majid's novel Si Yussef, originally published in 1992 and republished in paperback by Interlink in 2005, has been the focus of much scholarly and critical interest. The novel recounts the observations of the narrator Lamin, a young university student in Fez, who, one gloomy day, encounters the subject of his tale, Si Yussef, in Ashab’s café in Tangier. They continue to meet for the next twelve days—exactly four weeks and two days before Si Yussef’s death.

Si Yussef  is the subject of a book chapter in Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2006. The study, authored by Dr. Chourouq Nasri, is titled “Tangier: a Place Reinvented, Made and Unmade by Anouar Majid in Si Yussef.” Another study of Si Yussef and its comparison to the Paul Bowles’s novel Let It Come Down has been authored by Professor Mohamed Elkouche and is published online. More papers on Si Yussef are scheduled for an international conference in Tangier in May 2008.

Apart from his scholarly books and novel, Professor Majid in 2004 co-founded and started editing Tingis, the first Moroccan-American magazine of ideas and culture. The magazine has been featured in the Portland Press Herald, the Boston Globe, and other U.S. and Moroccan media outlets.

He has lectured and given keynote addresses at major universities and cultural institutions, and has also contributed opinion pieces to the Chronicle of Higher Education that have been reprinted in other publications.

Professor Majid  earned his Ph.D. at Syracuse University and is chair of the Department of English at UNE.