| Summary/Abstract |
This co-edited volume offers readers an exciting set of eighteen contributions by leading scholars of popular culture and Islam in diverse geographic settings. Each essay provides sustained attention to the trouble with totalizing and ahistorical accounts of religious formation. Racist and Orientalist stereotypes of Islamic orthopraxy are especially available for scrutiny, of course, given the Muslim world’s tremendous diversity and difference. More challenging is the task of avoiding neoliberal essentialisms about religion’s modern functions. Common assertions, whether in the West or not, include, for example, that religion is necessarily “bad” when swaying people toward fundamentalist retrenchment or extremism and conversely “good” and “true” if used to help people engage in reform without challenging underlying mechanisms of secular power. Editors change tack with a felicitous proposal at the book’s outset. Art, they remind readers, “is not inherently revolutionary, even if it does have the potential to encourage significant change.” If a book about popular culture can draw attention to the ways religious formations are integrally related to human artistic practice in local, transregional and global settings, Islam’s effects need not be made somehow uniformly epiphenomenal to dominant social and economic forces. Especially in the wake of the Arab revolutions, critical studies of popular culture can move beyond evaluating religious movements according to their relative success in calling authoritarian leaders to account.
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