Ashraf Kunnummal

• PostDoc Position at University of Johannesburg

This article aims to analyze the Islamophobic politics at the heart of citizenship denial in the context of India’s CAA-NRC legislation in December 2019 by the Indian Parliament under the leadership of the BJP. The politics of citizenship denial in India thus emerges in appearance as a legal tussle between the Muslim minority citizenship rights and...

Some of the most crucial debates surrounding Islamic legitimacy and cinema rotate around the question of the permissible ( ḥalāl) and prohibited ( ḥarām) in Islamic law and how these function for Muslim theology and politics. Emerging from these debates, halal cinema has been one of the recent critical interventions in the field of Indian and Islam...

This paper calls for a paradigm shift in the face of the remarkably common, but ultimately stereotypical and simplistic perceptions of ‘Islamic’ constitutions requiring all laws to conform to Shari’a. It problematizes the term ‘Islamic’ to describe disparate constitutions and constitutionalism(s) in Muslim majority countries demonstrating the plura...

Decolonial studies define the coloniality of power as a complex assemblage of dominance and hegemony that emerged during the modern era or the era of colonialism, which stretches from the conquest of the Americas to the present. This article argues that, as part of the critical dialogue between decolonial studies and Islamic liberation theology, th...

Farid Esack and Hamid Dabashi are two critical Islamic liberation theology scholars who redefined the discourse on 'self and 'other' in contemporary Islamic thought. These two scholars engage with the self and other category of pluralism and the employment of theodicy in Islamic liberation theology. Using pluralism to clear the space for a liberati...

Some of the most crucial debates surrounding Islamic legitimacy and cinema rotate around the question of the permissible ( ḥalāl) and prohibited ( ḥarām) in Islamic law and how these function for Muslim theology and politics. Emerging from these debates, halal cinema has been one of the recent critical interventions in the field of Indian and Islam...

This article argues that the post-secular turn is the new social analysis that shapes the politics of the impoverized2 in Islamic liberation theology. In this article, I suggest that, given the essentialism and determinism characterizing much of the contemporary studies of religion and secularism, a direct articulation of a post-secular approach fr...

This article aims to situate the problems and prospects of thinking about critical Islamophobia studies in the context of India. In doing so, first, the article traces the technical and political impasses to the emergence of critical Islamophobia studies in India by looking at the problem of denial of Islamophobia with respect to Indian nationalism...

Malala Yousafzai (1997-) became an international icon after Pakistan-based Tehrik-i-Taliban militants attacked her on her way to school on October 9, 2012. In the following days, the global media gave extensive coverage to the attack from multiple narrative positions. This article argues that the traveling of Yousafzai as an image of a Muslim girl'...

This paper examines the question of Islam and its relationship to violence in Muslim reformer Asghar Ali Engineer’s pre- and post-11 September 2001 works in response to the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC . We argue that that while his pre-9/11 approach to violence offers a much more historical and systemic...