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Rushain Abbasi

Rushain Abbasi is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University in 2021, where his dissertation was awarded the prestigious Alwaleed Bin Talal Prize for Best Dissertation in Islamic Studies. He formerly served as an Associate Research Scholar at the Abdullah S. Kamel Center for Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School.

Symposia

The Premodern World and the Secular

But how subversive can a contemporary inquiry be if it remains a paradigmatically modern- and Euro-centric affair (as the critical literature on the secular has historically been). My suggestion is that if the secular is a temporal and spatial concept emanating from the modern West (as many would agree), its “shadows” will necessarily lie elsewhere.

Essays

If Not Secular, then What? Reflections on an Islamic Dialectic

The idea of the modern secular presupposes the existence of a holistic premodern world in which the amorphous phenomenon of religion penetrated all realms of life. But the existence of an Islamic distinction between the religious and non-religious domains suggests otherwise: not a latent secularity, but rather a difference of an altogether different kind. But if it is not equivalent to the “secular,” then what is it?

The Rupture of Desire: An Interview with China Miéville

The following is a small portion of a longer interview with China Miéville in the journal Political Theology.

Pussy Riot and the Church

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

In Memoriam: Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas and the Journey of Theology Toward the Future

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

Vulnerability

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?