CRITICAL MUSLIM STUDIES
About Us
This website is a platform for bringing together and putting forward the different elements of Critical Muslim Studies as a field of thought and study. Critical Muslim Studies is not confined to a single discipline, or scholarly work, or methodological approach. It is an epistemological orientation that starts from the idea that the hierarchy between the west and the non-west is no longer assured. Among its themes, it includes a critique of Eurocentrism and positivism and an engagement with decolonial and postcolonial thinking.
The ReOrient journal is the flagship journal of Critical Muslim Studies. We have launched a ReOrient blog and a series of podcasts under the banner Network ReOrient in an effort to mobilize the insights of the field to and for a broader audience, as a public engagement with knowledge production and mobilization.
A FORUM FOR CRITICAL MUSLIM STUDIES
Manifesto
ReOrienting
Etymologically, the “orient” referred to the sky, the east in the sky, and the eastern expanse of the heavens. The epistemological significations of “orient” developed as it focused the human gaze on the rising sun in the east so that seeing and therefore knowing were ever and always marked with each passing day. The temporality of knowing was a knowing anew, concomitant to the continual arising and appearance of the day, of the orient sun. The terrestrial connotations of “orient” that followed were imperative ones, directives for the placing of objects to face the east.
ORGANISATIONS
FEATURED PODCASTS FROM NETWORK REORIENT
Engaging Topics and Issues
Collections and soundbites from our Network ReOrient / Critical Muslims Studies SoundCloud station.
REORIENT
The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies
ReOrient is dedicated to rethinking those entities and events considered to lie outside the conceptuality of Western hegemony, culturally, geopolitically and philosophically. The journal encourages a decolonial and non-orientalist approach to the analysis of the historical and contemporary political, socio-economic, and cultural processes constitutive of the Islamicate in its widest-ranging permutations.
ReOrient Going Open Access
We are excited to share the news that ReOrient is now available Open Access (OA) Gold via JSTOR. This means that all of our content is now freely available to readers, anywhere around the world, from the date of publication onwards. We are also including links on our website to all of our articles, which will direct readers to the PDFs stored on JSTOR’s website. We at ReOrient had been carefully studying, for several years now, the possibility of making our journal freely available to the public without requiring institutional or individual subscriptions. For an independent journal like ours, we needed to be certain that transferring to an OA platform still constitutes a sustainable basis for the production of the journal. The benefits of going OA are numerous, especially for our own particular project of exploring the post-Western and re-imagining the Islamosphere. Going OA means that more readers will have access to our content in every corner of the globe, furthering our geographical reach. Libraries located in the Global South will no longer have to pay costly subscription rates to access our content. The potential to reach a larger audience helps to create the conditions for a ‘tipping point’ in knowledge production and discussion, so that we can build a community of those who want to take the critique of Orientalism seriously, who are suspicious of positivism and who are eager to explore the possibilities of a decolonial imagination. Finally, going OA means that ReOrient can circulate beyond the confines of the Global North.