‘It’s Not Just about Faith’: Narratives of Transformation When Moving Out of Islam in the Netherlands and Britain

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the narratives of people with Islamic backgrounds in the Netherlands and Britain who have moved out of Islam. Rather than focusing primarily on ‘leaving faith’ (i.e. a predominantly negative and religiously centred approach), it will present four types of thematic trajectories that consider the broader life-worlds and experiences of the interlocutors. These themes will illustrate the relative weight of the religious voice in trajectories, rather than presupposing the centrality of religion in one’s (former) identity or trajectory. It will thereby display a broader understanding of the interlocutors’ experiences as being in a negative relation to religion alone: not only religious, but also political, social, ethnic and gender boundaries provided the contexts in which people moved out of Islam. The themes (‘religious break’, ‘social break-away’, ‘the entrance’ and ‘unconscious secularization’) will be illustrated by four case studies. A fifth case will be presented to illustrate the potency of the intertwinement of the themes.     

Further observations on the nature of prosopagnosia

Two new cases of prosopagnosia are described and compared with pertinent clinical material from the English language literature. The interpretation of this disorder most compatible with the clinical data appears to us to be that there is an underspecification of visuoperceptive information preventing both the formation of significant face images and the retrieval of well-known face memoranda existing within a relatively intact visual remote memory store. Failure of formation of immediate memoranda of similarly complex visual images is also commonly observed but does not seem to be a requirement for the symptom of prosopagnosia. Conceptualizing this abnormality as simply a material specific visual agnosia of images beyond the classifier level would still appear to be acceptable if less informative.     

Response To Jason Springs

Jason Springs’s Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society is a masterful attempt to practice productive conflict and democratic dialogue in the face of static antagonisms and deep-seated divisions. In my response, I underscore Springs’s insistence on mediating between the moral imagination of Richard Rorty and the prophetic critique of Cornel West. For the author of Healthy Conflict, any hope in the survival of democracy relies on balancing critique of domination with constructive proposals for a more just and equitable world. On the one hand, Springs rejects any strong distinction between moral imagination and socio-political critique; in fact, he argues for their intertwinement, especially in the work of West. At the same time, there are moments when he suggests an opposition between expanding the moral imagination and engaging in the critical enterprise, especially as he identifies the limits in Foucault regarding normativity and democratic struggle. I respond to this slippage by arguing that Foucault, and critical theory more broadly, open up possibilities for rethinking ethics, politics, and our relationship to the violence that sustains the order of things.