exploring muslim identities in europe & north america

It may seem it was very long ago but ... In July 1934, the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, considered to have been the chief political theorist of national socialism, published in the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung  (the journal of national socialist lawyers of which he was editor in chief of) an article that relates to his Political Theology and his theory of sovereignty [1] entitled "Der Führer schützt das Recht" (The Führer protects the Law), effectively justifying in it the murderous Night of the Long Knives by recognizing in Führer's sovereign authority the "highest form of administrative justice" ( höchste Form administrativer Justiz ).  I was reminded of this as I was thinking about how international treaties and legislation regarding refugee protection have been flouted by EU member states to the point that they are not worth the paper they have been printed on, or how our right to free movement is being curtailed by regimes of ...

Recently, Charlie Hebdo featured a cartoon that purportedly provided commentary on the refugee situation and accusations of sexual misconduct in Germany by controversially depicting Aylan Kurdi—the three-year-old Syrian boy whose tragic drowning captured global attention—as a grown "pig-faced" individual chasing "white" women. The questionable caption asks what Aylan might have grown up to become, implying he would be an assailant in Germany. The illustration, created by Laurent Sourisseau, who is the magazine's current director and a survivor of the terrorist attack at Charlie Hebdo's offices, appears to underscore the claims that refugees, including Syrians, were among the perpetrators of the sexual assaults reported in Cologne, Germany, on New Year's Eve. Despite the claims of Charlie Hebdo that it champions a "healthy critical attitude," the overtly provocative nature of the cartoon borders on sheer sensation-seeking. Indeed, misinterpreta...

UMUT OZKIRIMLI  and  SPYROS A. SOFOS   Appeared in openDemocracy.com on 13 January 2015 Freedoms are not unlimited but who, when and how can we limit them? Two colleagues agree to disagree. Content warning: graphic and potentially offensive imagery, including torture. Umut – This time it was different. I could not put a finger on how I felt on the morning of January 7, as I was refreshing my Twitter feed every ten seconds, hypnotized by the cold-blooded execution of Ahmed Merabet at the scene of the massacre. I was horrified of course, and angry like everybody else, at the perpetrators, at the structural conditions that have produced them, at the way in which religion had become a cloak for what was essentially a politically motivated act of barbarism. But there was more to it. I was also numbed by disbelief, a profound sense of desperation, even defeatism. In a way, I felt like the Knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, seeking answers to existential questi...