After Muslims: Authority, Suspicion, and Secrecy in the Liberal Democratic State
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Published:December 2023
This chapter explores how some of the historical relations between authority and suspicion work to constitute modern democratic politics and shape modern liberal social imaginaries in order to better understand the contemporary predicaments of Muslims in Euro-America. It highlights a central feature of the modern state that liberal democracies share: the growing need to generate and manage secret knowledge in order to sustain sovereignty. It shows how this process generates a distinctive economy of secrecy and suspicion and a new modality of authority that profoundly impacts conceptions and perceptions of social life within modern liberal social imaginaries, giving rise to particular understandings of truth, citizenship, blasphemy, and Islam within liberal democracies today.
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