The Postmuslim

Dear friends, After writing this personal obituary of Khaled Khalifa—which The Markaz Review were kind enough to publish for his arba’een—events in Palestine, or rather the civilized world’s response to events in Palestine, upstaged practically everything in my life. The horror forced me back into a state of engagement I hadn’t really experienced since the Arab Spring.

If I don’t write now I never will. Since I published this Arabic response to the horror, people—Arabs—have argued with my decision not to address the West. They tell me it is necessary to talk to those worth talking to. They tell me they want to yell and growl and weep in English, and that I should bear witness to the sounds they make while the ghosts of murdered children from all over Gaza run to the Egyptian border.

… three of my favorite authors working in English today who, by agreeing to feature alongside me and Dani Arbid of the great Barakunan on this podcast, all three of them – from Australia, Malmö (via London), and Berlin, respectively – truly reassured me that there was some point to what I’ve been doing with my life after all.

They come with spring. The equinox on the heals of the Iraq War’s twentieth anniversary. And I am thinking again of that mysterious scene in Genesis when three strangers stop at Abraham’s tent in the desert and he kneels and begs them to accept his hospitality. God has come to tell him and his wife Sarah that, even though the two are terrifically old, they will still bear the child they were once promised.

A defining moment in my career happened this week when, seven years after I started writing it, my English debut finally found a truly credible home. It won't be out for another two years, but there is no describing how moved I've been by people's responses to the news. Here is Murad in 2015, and 2022:

The next one's a book! But first, if you find yourself in a reasonable time zone and can spare the time, come to my long delayed Afikra conversation (with the great Malek Rasamny). It's at 7 pm Cairo time (that's noon in NYC) on Wednesday 30 March.

in Black and White — the New Year Special, ladies and gentleman! First. An excerpt from Madeline Beach Carey's incredible essay on my unpublished English novel (and my two Arabic novels published in English translation). In April 2020, when we were all still locked down in our homes, Rakha sent me this debut novel in English, Amna. I read the PDF of the manuscript over a few days and looked forward to eventually reading the published version.

Shadi Abdel Salam passed away 35 years ago today, and to mark the occasion I am sharing an extract from Barra and Zaman, also by way of introducing this new blog-newsletter combo. To which end there is, additionally, a rather dubious gift at the very end of this post. 75 All through the first half of the 20th century, it turns out, ancient Egypt is central to the nationalist renaissance being prophesied or planned.

When he read "The Postmuslim" (more than three years after it was written), Robert K. Beshara sent me the Giorgio Agamben essay "What Is the Contemporary?" Reading it, I remembered how essential the idea of being contemporary had been to my thinking about the postmuslim stance. One tweep objected to my use of the word in the context of taking a position, pointing out that the contemporary is simply what exists at the present time, and I was unsure how to respond.