Iza Hussin
Dr Hussin is Mohamed Noah Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and University Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The University of Cambridge. Her research and teaching are in the areas of comparative politics, Islam and Muslim politics, law and society, and religion and politics. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation and L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Prior to joining POLIS, she was a member of the faculty in Political Science at the University of Chicago. She has served as Chair of the Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, the international advisory board of Islamopedia online, and the advisory council of the Cambridge Institute on Religion and International Studies. Her forthcoming book, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press 2016), explores the construction of Islamic law in colonial India, Malaya and Egypt.
Current research projects include a manuscript on the travels of law across the Indian Ocean arena and a collaborative project on Internet fatwa.
Current research projects include a manuscript on the travels of law across the Indian Ocean arena and a collaborative project on Internet fatwa.
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Papers by Iza Hussin
Iza Hussin's book is a fresh account of the interaction between Islamic law and both colonialism and the modern state. Its freshness does not lie in advancing a comprehensive or causal explanation. It builds solidly on some past writings, but it recenters our understandings, shows links among developments across the Muslim world, and ventures into much underexplored terrain. The result will likely be embraced by a multidisciplinary audience and provide a model of how to understand Islamic law in the modern world.
As author Darryl Li writes in his introductory essay for this forum: “In recent decades, no figure has incited as much discourse and elicited as little insight as the so-called ‘jihadi’—especially those traveling across borders to fight in the name of a global Muslim community. The Universal Enemy is, most concretely, an exploration of one such transnational jihad: the peregrination of several thousand Arabs and other Muslims who fought alongside their co-religionists in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It tells a story of how these combatants navigated national, racial, and doctrinal differences in service of a pan-Islamic vision, drawing on over a decade of ethnographic interviews and archival research in a half-dozen countries in Arabic, Bosnian, and several other languages.
Despite the ample commentary on ‘jihadism,’ The Universal Enemy aspires to model a different sensibility and set different standards in approaching the topic. Specifically, this is a book that seeks to break free from the gravitational pull of the national security mindset, studying adversaries of the state but with no desire to advise it. And, perhaps more directly relevant for many readers of The Immanent Frame, the book also eschews the defensiveness and apologia that characterize even much of the critical writing on Muslims and the War on Terror. It does this by refusing to reduce the category of jihad to mere violence and instead uses this particular jihad to think about universalism.”
Including contributions from Gil Anidjar, Cemil Aydın, Faisal Devji, Azeezah Kanji, Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, Mezna Qato, and Jothie Rajah. Edited by Mona Oraby and Iza Hussin.