Join us! Friday, October 7th @ 7pm: Toronto book launch of Islam and Anarchism. Discussion with author Mohamed Abdou at Another Story book store
Join us for the Toronto Book launch of Mohamed Abdou’s book Islam and Anarchism. A discussion with the author will be happening on Friday, October 7th at 7pm at Another Story book store, 315 Roncesvalles Avenue.
Drinks and refreshments will be available and books will be available for purchase.
Accessibility: Please note bathrooms are down a flight of stairs.
Masks are mandatory and complimentary masks will be distributed to attendees who need them.
Discourse around Muslims and Islam all too often lapses into a false dichotomy of Orientalist and fundamentalist tropes. A popular reimagining of Islam is urgently needed. Yet it is a perhaps unexpected political philosophical tradition that has the most to offer in this pursuit: anarchism.
Connecting the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings with social movements like BLM-NoDAPL-INM, Islam and Anarchism is an interdisciplinary work, which simultaneously disrupts two commonly held beliefs - that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; and that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious and anti-spiritual. Deeply rooted in key Islamic concepts and textual sources, and drawing on radical BIPOC, Islamic anarchistic and social movement discourses, Abdou proposes ‘Anarcha-Islam’.
Constructing a decolonial, non-authoritarian and non-capitalist Islamic anarchism, Islam and Anarchism philosophically and theologically challenges the classist, sexist, racist, ageist, queerphobic and ableist inequalities in both post- and neo-colonial societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA.
About the author:
Mohamed Abdou is a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist activist-scholar. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo. His twenty years of activist research and experience centers on Palestinian, Indigenous, Black, and people of colour liberation, and draws on the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, as well as his participation in the Egyptian uprisings of 2011.
