Why do state subjects express devotion and loyalty to a centre that repeatedly fails to provide adequate life provisions or the dignity one is entitled to by way of citizenship? How does the state, in turn, manipulate the intense desire to belong to extend, rule, and control? In engaging lyrical prose, Nosheen Ali takes on these questions in Delusional States, which above all is an attentiveness to anguish and unrequited love.

Jinnealogy offers an alternative archive and modality of religion in the postcolonial city.For Anand Vivek Taneja, the presence of invisible Jinn spirits among the ruins of pre-colonial empire in contemporary Delhi points to the ideology and limits of post-colonial nation-state sovereignty in India, while offering an alternative ethical inheritance of Islam in a rapidly changing urban landscape.Each chapter presents a nuanced and poetic insight of Islam that crosses nationstate borders, Hindu Nationalist politics, time, and religious identity.Straddling fine-grained ethnography of Jinn saint shrines in Delhi with historical insights gleaned from state archives, the academic history of religion, and literary sources the book offers a convincing view of the way in which the history of Islam and its ecological entanglements are transformed and traced in contemporary Delhi.Jinn saints challenge the archival amnesia of the post-colonial state that seeks to efface Muslim presence in India, as well as the politics of Muslim reform that aims to purify Islam of supposed cultural accretions in favour of a return to the practices of the original community of first Muslims (salaf).Through an introduction and seven chapters, readers are introduced to the fascinating labyrinthine world of Jinn saint shrines, state archives, and urban transformations in Delhi.The ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla, a medieval fort, is the location around which the ethnography unfolds.The introduction establishes the central argument of the book, that the popular veneration of Jinns as saints in contemporary Delhi challenges statist conceptions of religion, time, and order.Jinns travel large distances in an instant, arrive unannounced in dreams, and refuse to be buried by bureaucracy, legal battles, or theological debates.Taneja sees in Jinn veneration "a parallel Islamic discourse" (9) accessible to both Muslim and non-Muslim that forms an integral component of the ethical inheritance of North India.He draws on Shahab Ahmed's notion of the exploratory authority of Sufi Islam that challenges the legalistic textual approach of the ulama.Exploratory authority allows Taneja to trace a discursive tradition of imagination and practice that connects across time and place through literature, poetry, and political practice.

This book attempts to develop an Islamic political philosophy of good governance grounded on Ihsan.The author defines Ihsan as a spiritual state that emphasizes love over law, ethics over politics, compassion over retribution, other-caring or self-annihilation (Fanaa) over identity or self-assertion and process (Islamic governance) over structure (Islamic state).He claims that this is the highest, most beautiful, most compassionate state and "an enlightened understanding of Islam," where the enlightenment is that of Kant (97).The argument is developed in three stages.Initially, in Chapters 2 and 3, he makes the case, in a very Orientalist and apologetic way, for the writing of the book by demonstrating that Muslims have lost Ihsan.After introducing Ihsan in Chapters 4 and 5, he focuses on political philosophy in Chapters 6 and 7.Chapter 2 aims to show the systematic exclusion of Ihsan in the development and application of Islamic law by presenting two cases.The first is about breaking one's fast during Ramadan through having sexual intercourse with one's spouse.Khan argues that the Prophetic practice that jurists refer to ends with forgiveness and even with charity shown to the man who breaks his fast.But "[e]very jurist" (20) only provides the first part, where the Prophet listed the compensations, and ignores the last part.The second case is about blasphemy against the Prophet.And, he claims that blasphemy laws and Muslim reactions to blasphemy are "completely un-Islamic" (26).His main example is the Asia Bibi case in which she, a Christian woman in Pakistan, is accused of insulting the Prophet, with a huge controversy arising as a consequence of this.Chapter 3 is about Muslim responses to modernity in relation to Islamic revivalism.Khan identifies four such responses: those of traditionalists, modernists, Islamists and secularists.The first three are "Islamic responses" (52) since Islam is central to their projects in one way or another.Among them, Khan champions modernists as they have "sought to demonstrate that Islam is not incompatible with science, modernity, democracy and human rights" and "are primarily concerned with the loss of the principal belief that Islam is a progressive religion" (49), while both traditionalists and Islamists miss the point and the realities of the world.However, he argues that despite the "excellent pathways" (59) prescribed by modernists, unfortunately, Islamists have had the most impact on contemporary Muslims.Hence, Khan holds Islamists responsible for the problems of Muslims; and their cardinal sin, he argues, is the reduction of Islam to a (political) identity

After Newsweek published an article in 2012 entitled “Muslim Rage and the Last Gasp of Islamic Hate,” Twitter proliferated with jokes under the hashtag #MuslimRage. These funny one-liners acted as rebuttals to the negative affect of the Newsweek article by opposing its images of uncontrolled ideological anger with funny quips about the innocuous nature of everyday Muslim life. This analysis argues that #MuslimRage tweets became sensational because of their unique form of argumentation through humor that could only happen through Twitter. Because tweets are iconic and enthymematic, they make arguments that function as a form of individualized, massively resonant counterpropaganda. For Muslims, digital jokes created cognitive space of action that directly combated negative stereotyping and public ridicule.