This post examines the Islamic movement that most explicitly patterns itself on early Islamic history –Salafism – and the way in which its distinctive social practices are fundamentally indebted to modern questions and challenges of visibility and social performance.

In the introduction to the symposium “The Roots and Ruptures of Contemporary Islamic Piety,” Aaron Rock-Singer elucidates the questions within contemporary Islamic studies that stand between the completeness of historical narratives and the ruptures of Muslim intellectual, social, and cultural life.

This piece is from the Political Theology Network archives originally posted on August 23, 2012.

The prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas of Pergamon (Ecumenical Patriarchate) passed in Athens, on February 2, 2023.

From Myanmar to Mariupol, from the streets of Memphis to the waves and winds of the Mediterranean Sea: resistance to violence takes many forms. So does political protest against precarity. At which point does the unavoidable vulnerability of the living condition come to expression as political agency? Can such precarious politics constitute or configure an alternative community?