exploring muslim identities in europe & north america

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...

PROPUST KOJI JE UGROZIO SVIJET Činjenice koje trebate znati o Islamskoj državi An article by Sanja Despot partly drawing upon a public lecture I gave at Lund University on the Islamic State and on a short interview with me on the implications of the Paris attacks (in Serbo-Croat). Published in tportal on 21.11.2015 Tijekom jedne od racija u iračkoj Faludži 2004. američke snage su u zatvor Bucca privele grupu ekstremista, među kojima i do tada nepoznatog tridesetogodišnjaka Ibrahima Avada Ibrahima al Badrija, danas poznatijeg pod imenom Abu Bakr al Bagdadi. 'Bio je skitnica kada smo ga pokupili 2004. Nismo imali kristalnu kuglu koja bi nam kazala da će on jednog dana postati glava ISIL-a', ispričao je prošle godine za New York Times neimenovani dužnosnik Pentagona. U spomenutom članku se konstatira da je razvoj samoproglašenog kalifa Islamske države bio direktno uvjetovan pogrešnim američkim akcijama u Iraku Da se Amerika nije 2003. upustila u iračku avanturu, ISIL-a danas ne b...

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...