The Politics of What Is Islam?: What Kind of Question Is This, Anyway?

Murad Idris is an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Virginia. He is the author of War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (2019) and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (2020). He is presently working on a book on the genealogies of linguistic constructions of Islam across multiple archives, in relation to peace, violence, history, and empire. This essay was completed while Idris was the AMIAS Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.