The poetics of secular cosmopolitanism: Anouar Majid’s critical views of Islam and America

ABSTRACT

Anouar Majid, a Moroccan diasporic writer in the US, is the author of one novel and five critically acclaimed books on Islam and the West. His latest unfavourable polemics against Islam as well as his seeming detour from the pursuits for diverse stronger religions and cultures to the Universalist ideals of the Founding Fathers are likely to provoke controversies. However, this paper argues that the diasporic ethos of openness and dialogism in his novel Si Yussef continues to prevail in his polemical scholarship of Islam and America. Majid’s succinct call for espousing the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers emanates from the latter’s incarnation of the imaginary of tout-monde (‘unity-diversity’), as theorised by Edouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation. In their acceptance of all sorts of differences and denunciation of dialectical philosophies in the context of universal humanity, the Founding Fathers and their ghost scholars envisage secular cosmopolitanism as a panacea to the troubled relationship between Islam and America.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• America
• diaspora
• poetics of relation
• secular cosmopolitanism

Acknowledgments

The Journal of North African Studies’ anonymous reviewers have an important role in shaping this article. Their illuminating insights, pertinent remarks and continuous suggestions informed much of the argumentative quality and structure of this article. I sincerely thank Dr Anouar Majid who accepted willingly to respond to some interview questions, and for his warm reception during a round table discussion of Majid’s scholarly work I took part in, at New England University Campus in Tangier, September 18th, 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).