Anouar Majid, far right; Olivier Roy to the left

by Anouar Majid, Tingitana, March 6, 2014

Olivier Roy gave a spirited and light-hearted lecture at Oslo’s Litteraturhuset on secularism Islam and the West, followed by comments from a Norwegian expert on terrorism and myself. As happens to me nowadays, I chose not to comment on, or highlight, the finer points of his critical analysis of the terms “secular” and “religious,” but to express my barely disguised exasperation with the tropes that have blocked the Muslims’ mind for more than two centuries. The question, in the end, is not whether religion is misread, or whether it is good or not, but whether we are condemned to define ourselves in terms penned down for us by scribes from antiquity and the early medieval period. I don’t care much about secularism, but I do lament the waste of our mental faculties and our entrapment in mythologies that are totally dissociated from our current experiences. The prophets of Scripture spoke the languages of their people; who will speak for us today? –