Islam and contemporary world literature

This is the provisional title of a research monograph under contract with Edinburgh University Press. The project seeks to demonstrate how religious referents related to Islam and the Muslim world in literary writings by authors from both Muslim and non- Muslim backgrounds can be employed as a finely mazed instrument for analyzing cultural- religious belongings, grounded in individualized interpretations of Islam. This project was conceived on the back of the 2015 migrant crisis, caused by a conflux of two migration streams, consisting of refugees fleeing conflict zones in the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean and elsewhere in the Muslim world and a more sustained pattern of economic migrants from North and West Africa. This has led to a dramatic and radical resetting of the social-cultural engineering exercise known as multiculturalism due to the polarization between its proponents and their detractors, who both continue to operate on the basis of collective identity formations grounded in religious communitarianism and ethno-religious nationalism respectively. Inspired by the work of John Caputo, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney and Mark C. Taylor in Western theology and philosophy, the research is based on the premise that also literary texts featuring Islam and Muslims offer a rich source for individualized interpretations of religion. A selection of a dozen case studies featuring different modes of interaction between the Muslim world and other cultural-religious civilizations, ranging from fertile intellectual cross-pollination to violent encounters, and held together by an accretive conceptual framework drawing on postmodern and postcolonial theories of cosmopolitanism (Beck, Dabashi), cultural hybridity (Bhabha), and so-called nomadic thinking (Braidotti, Deleuze, Shayegan) will render an alternative perspective in support of a bold and robustly formulated argument for attaching greater importance to the individual when accounting for the religious aspects of multiple belongings of Muslims in an increasingly interconnected world.