Elizabeth Shakman Hurd joins Protean View to discuss her new book, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (Chicago, 2025).
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Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm joins Protean View to discuss the superstition-secular-religion "trinary" as well as his upcoming book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of History (Chicago, 2026).
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Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza join Protean View to discuss their new book, Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur'an: A Patronage of Piety (Oxford, 2024).
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Norman Finkelstein joins Protean View to discuss the recent crackdown on the student protest movement, as well as BDS, free speech, leftist politics, and more.
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This episode of Protean View features Nader Hashemi, a political theorist and the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.
Hashemi joined Protean View to discuss his 2017 book, Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, and whether it remains relevant in the aftermath of October 7.
Sectarianization was published during the twilight of the Arab Spring and appeared to have a lot of explanatory power in that moment. The book argues that recent bouts of sectarianism in the Middle East are primarily informed by authoritarian regimes manipulating identity cleavages to extend their expiring shelf life. Nearly a decade later, as the politics of the region shift, does the sectarianization thesis still hold up?
We address the recent history of the Middle East and analyze post-Arab Spring politics as we attempt to situate the sectarianization thesis in the present moment.
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This episode of Protean View features Daniel Tutt, a philosopher, writer, and host of the Emancipations podcast.
Tutt joined Protean View to discuss a recent article he published with Muftah titled "Loser Politics," as well as his new book on Nietzsche, How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (Random House, 2024). In different ways, Tutt's article and book both address how Nietzsche’s thought has shaped the language of our politics, including the seemingly unavoidable winner-loser framework that Tutt suggests we’re trapped in.
We discuss why Nietzsche remains so important in our time, and how, in so many ways, his thought presents an obstacle to the development of a real working class movement interested in defying the strictures of the winner-loser binary.
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In this episode of Protean View, Muftah editor-in-chief Riad Alarian and senior editor Ahmed Elbenni sit down with Sherman Jackson to discuss his new book, The Islamic Secular (OUP, 2024).
Jackson’s central claim in the book is that Islam has its own version of the secular, distinct from other common understandings and applications in both Western scholarly and quotidian discourses. His book represents an attempt to theorize this form of the secular in conversation with a range of recent works in Islamic studies, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, political theory, and secular studies.
The conversation focuses on the theoretical foundations of Jackson's argument, especially the meaning, coherence, and tenability of a so-called religious secular. Jackson also discusses how his views compare and contrast with those of other theorists wrestling with similar questions, including Rushain Abbasi, Wael Hallaq, Shahab Ahmad, and others.
In this episode of Protean View, Muftah editor-in-chief Riad Alarian and managing editor Mohammed El-Sayed Bushra sit down with Salman Sayyid, a leading scholar in Critical Muslim Studies and Professor of Social Theory & Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds.
Together, they explore a range of relevant topics, including the “Muslim question,” the intersections of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, the genocide in Palestine, and the complex relationship between Islam and the state. Prof. Sayyid also shares his insights on the concept of defeat and the nature of resistance in its aftermath.
This wide-ranging conversation offers a deep and unflinching look at some of the most important questions shaping contemporary Muslim experiences and global politics.
In this episode of Protean View, Muftah editor in chief Riad Alarian sits down with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, a political theorist and professor of modern culture and media at Brown University. They discuss her latest book, The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024), which examines how French colonialism in the Maghreb and Zionist colonization in Palestine effaced a vibrant “Jewish Muslim world.”
Azoulay explores the history of Jews and their integral place within the Muslim ummah by focusing on the forgotten legacy of Algeria’s Jewish jewelers. She also shares her personal journey of embracing her identities as a Palestinian Jew, Algerian Jew, and Muslim Jew, and offers a powerful challenge to the boundaries of modern national and political identity.
This conversation uncovers the deep connections between identity, colonialism, and belonging in a world shaped by historical erasures.
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