Atiya Husain, "No God But Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism" (Duke UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another new episode of New Books and Islamic Studies, which is part of the New Books Network. My name is Shobana Xavier, and I'm one of your co-hosts of the channel. I hope you're safe and well wherever you are, and thank you so much for joining us today. In this episode, we are joined by Atia Hussain.

who's an associate professor of Africana Studies at Williams College, to discuss her new book, No God But Man, on Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism, published by Duke University Press in 2025. In this thoughtful study, Hussein examines the FBI's post-9-11 most wanted terrorist list as a means to rethink relationships between race and Islam in the United States.

She traces the genealogy of most wanted posters and how theories of the average man, not only theoretically but visually as well, informs the use and development of photographs and its accompanying descriptions on wanted posters used by police officers or the FBI.

To probe this pattern further, Hussein closely considers the activism and Islam of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur and her addition to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list in 2013.

Shakur was the first woman added to this list and joins Muslims who are not racialized in the descriptions in the poster. This pattern forces us to contend with how race as a category oscillates between racelessness and race and therefore reveals the categorical limitations of the racialization of Muslims.

It is here that the work of Black Studies scholars such as Sylvia Winter offers us necessary conceptual pathways forward. This book will be of interest to anyone thinking about race, Islam, and terrorism, surveillance or security studies, and Black Studies. In our conversation today, Ati and I spoke about the genesis of the book,

how she accessed and engaged most wanted posters, the revolutionary life of Assata Shakur, and how Black Studies, especially the scholarship of Sylvia Winter, served as a critical interlocutor and informed her thinking about race and Muslims in America.

So without further delay, here's my conversation with Atiya Hussain. Hi, welcome to the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast. How are you doing? Thank you so much. I'm doing pretty good. How about you? I'm doing well. It's, I think, a stressful time for everybody. And so I'm just grateful for the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with a colleague who has done amazing work and a new book.

No God But Man on Race, Knowledge and Terrorism. So I'm just really happy to process the book with you and talk to you about all the important arguments the book makes. I wonder for our listeners, if you could tell us a little bit about who you are and your intellectual journey and what led to the writing of this book.

Yeah, sure. So my name is Atiya Hussain. I'm an associate professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. But my PhD is in sociology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

And I'd say that, you know, some of the big themes in this book are around Islam and race. And that's something that I've been interested in for a long time. But really, the book goes back to 2013 when I was still in grad school. And I saw a news article at the time about the FBI adding Assata Shakur to their most wanted terrorist list. And I didn't know much about the list, but I had read

heard of her name, of course, as she was a former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member and has written an autobiography that's required reading. And so when I looked into

into her addition to that list, it was really striking because most of her political activity took place in the 1970s. But here she was in 2013, being added to this list while, you know, an asylee in Cuba for the last couple decades. So the news article had

a copy of her poster, her wanted poster. So I was looking at that and then just became curious to see the other posters on the most wanted terrorist list. So I just flipped through those and

And in just kind of casually doing that, I noticed that, you know, everybody else on that list was it wasn't at all surprising to see them there. It was mostly, you know, Muslim men, mostly brown Muslim men, mostly foreign born associated with, you know, Al Qaeda and other sorts of organizations like that.

But, you know, as someone who'd been interested in racial categorization, looking at their posters, I saw that they just didn't have race categories on there at all. But Assata Shakur did. And so I found that really striking. And I really wanted to understand what was going on. So this became a puzzle that kind of occupied me for the next decade.

But being, you know, in the process of being trained as a sociologist, my first move, I approached the question from that perspective, at least initially. And my first move was to see how consistent that racelessness was. And so in just kind of comparing posters on the same list, saw that just about everybody on the most wanted terrorist list didn't have a race if they were Muslim. Almost. There are some exceptions. Yeah.

And then, again, just clicking around, I compared those posters of Muslims on the most wanted terrorist list with Muslims in the rest of the most wanted program, where there are crime lists like parental kidnapping, murder, cybercrime, these sorts of things. And there were Muslims on those lists, right? And so if you look at their posters, they generally do have a race category. Right.

And so that was fascinating to me. So to me, what that suggested is that we can't say that their racial categorization or lack thereof is, you know, because they were Muslim, so to speak, because it's inconsistent for Muslims.

So while digging through this case to try to understand it, I was also sort of workshopping different frameworks to understand it with and, yeah.

I sort of tried the racialization of Muslims framework, which is something I'd been thinking with a lot as a grad student and in my dissertation research, which is a completely different project. This isn't my dissertation. And I was finding that that framework was helpful in some ways, but not in others. So with this new project, I realized that I needed a different approach. So by this time, I'd finished my dissertation. I'd started my first academic job.

And I was in reading groups with colleagues. And I was also part of the effort to create an Africana studies department at my university. So we were reading together the work of Sylvia Winter, Lewis Gordon, and other sort of thinkers in Black studies. And we were making an argument for that department that framed Black studies as an intellectual endeavor, that

that achieves what universities should be trying to achieve and not as a kind of a DEI initiative. So this context, a context of collective thinking and action, that's what I think really helped open up my understanding of race. One of my colleagues at the time, Corey Walker, he said something that really stuck with me. And he would say that Black Studies is not race studies.

Black Studies is not Race Studies. So as someone who studies race and Muslims, this really made me think and raise a lot of questions, because if it's true that Black Studies is not Race Studies, then what is the difference between them? How do we know it? Why are all things black then presumed to be racial if there is a difference?

What's the relationship between two things? And how would such a distinction, which I don't see widely adopted in the scholarly work on Muslims and race, how would such a distinction shift the ways that we theorize the positioning and experiences of Muslims? So these were some of the questions that really opened up the intellectual space that this book comes out of. I

I teach a course on race and religion. And as I was reading the book, I was thinking of all the ways to incorporate the different chapters into the syllabus, partly because I think it's so important, the connections and the synergies across kind of Black Studies and culture.

I don't know if you want to say Muslim studies or Islamic. I mean, these are all really broad fields. I don't know, religious studies. I think it's so important and I think it's such an important contribution that I hope our listeners will take away from this conversation. And so I think you've kind of laid out a sense of your broader interventions and some of the theoretical questions you're asking in this work.

Before we get into some of the nitty gritty in the chapters, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how the process of going about examining your case study went, partly because you're dealing with a lot of, you know, interesting photographs, pictures, or I don't know if we want to say photographs, but, you know, posters, ultimately. Did you have to act? Did you act?

access them through like internet archive? Did you have to be in contact with the FBI, which I can imagine would have been an fun process? I, you know, like how did you go about accessing some of the material culture ultimately that you're working with in this book? That's a, that's a great question because it really is, the materials really are so visual. So as far as the, the research, yeah,

you know, concerning the FBI goes, I think most scholarly works on the FBI will, you know, get documents through the Freedom of Information Act, or at least they'll try to. But this project is very much about the FBI's public archive.

So there wasn't really a serious need to get documents from the Bureau directly like that. I did try because I did have a concern about finding the documents.

official wanted posters, as opposed to some that, you know, people will make as a kind of fan fiction sort of a thing. Like on eBay right now, you can find posters, wanted posters of Osama bin Laden that appear like to be official FBI posters. But one of the ways that you can tell that they're not is because they have a race category for him that says Arab.

But that's not what the actual FBI poster looks like. So, yes, I did use Internet Archive. So old, you know, FBI website pages. And I had a whole team of research assistants and we downloaded the posters. We coded them for all of these race categories in order to make comparisons from 2001 until 2021. Okay.

But the Internet Archive begins in 1996. So we were able to look at posters from back then as well. And that was before the Most Wanted Terrorist list was created. So it's sort of technically outside of the purview of what I'm looking at. But that was part of the archive that I did think about a little bit earlier.

but perhaps not officially. And this is where, you know, in terms of research methods, that is a very social science kind of approach, you know, collecting all of the posters and coding them. But I didn't think about the analysis and the write-up in that kind of a way where I'm going to be reporting, here's how many posters were in this category versus this versus this. And part of the reason is because that archive is actually quite unwieldy and inconsistent in

And the thing that I was trying to understand didn't require me to give a kind of social science breakdown of everything happening on all of the posters across that time. Because some of the posters, for example, on the FBI website are of missing persons or multiple people on one poster who are associated with an investigation.

an event as opposed to one person per poster. And, you know, part of what the book critiques and that we know about traditional social science is you have to really systematize and discipline your data set. And, yeah,

That was something that I think would have taken away a bit from what I was interested in doing. And I think your like your data set, like I don't think I read the book and never thought that I was reading a sociologist writing this work, which is really interesting. Right. So I think that and of course, it's with Duke University Press. So I think that's also part of kind of the content of this particular press. But the work that you're doing and the way that you're engaging with these posters, I think, is phenomenal. Yeah.

Chapter one, for instance, is something that I really enjoyed and learned a lot about. It has like the theory, especially in bringing in Sylvia Winter, the idea and, you know, the idea of the perfect man or the ideal man and the image of it. It's just such a visual, like even it's like visually presenting the chapter the way that you've written and also talking about anthropometry in my space.

I'm probably totally butchering how you say that. Yeah. So you're using these theorists to kind of actually map the genealogy of how these photographs emerged from, you know, from police stations historically to now being kind of, you know, really centerfold and this culture around FBI most, you know, the most wanted posters. So can you talk a little bit about this and how you theorize so brilliantly in this book, in this chapter of how you talk about what,

the image, the work that the image is doing in terms of symmetry and in terms of how we perceive kind of aesthetics and how idealness is really racialized and very like, you know, physical. And we know this, right? People who study race, they realize that so much of this was historically very biological or very scientific. And we critique this in the contemporary period. But I love this chapter because you're giving us a really tangible example of how this played out and that we take for granted that it continues to play out.

whether we recognize it or not, as this is the genealogical origins of this, you know? Yeah, that's a great question. And sometimes that's my favorite chapter too, actually. So in trying to figure out this puzzle, I mean, in my head, I've called it the case of the missing race. Okay, so in my head, trying to figure out the case of the missing race is

And trying it from different angles. One thing that actually the reviewers at the press, the anonymous reviewers, helped me to realize is that I really needed to get into the history of wanted posters. Because if I want to understand the presence or absence of a race category, then I need to think about...

you know, what that form is on which the race category is present or absent. And so in looking into the history of the wanted poster form, I ended up getting into this sort of history of statistics that informs that form. So

So the wanted poster form gets traced back to the work of Adolphe Quetelet, who was a 19th century Belgian astronomer, actually. And one of his big contributions was to take the bell curve or the normal curve from astronomy and move that into social statistics. So into the study of humans.

And Ketelé is an interesting figure because I don't think his name is quite so popular as the names of like Francis Galton, for example, that famous eugenicist. But J. Edgar Hoover credits Galton and Ketelé for developing the FBI's identification practices. So from Hoover's writing, we learn that

Ketelay's concept of the average man was really important for the FBI. And so for Ketelay, the average man was in the very center of

of that bell curve was the mean or the average. And so the word average can suggest that he's talking about mediocrity, but for him, that middle of the curve was where the perfect, idealized, good and beautiful human was. And the qualities that were on the sort of two tails of the curve were where monstrous qualities were and unnatural qualities. So, um,

So Quetelet, his concept of the average man isn't really well accepted. Statisticians at the time aren't really into it, but French police are into it. And they use it, specifically Alphonse Bertillon, a French police prefect, says,

He adopts this average man concept to organize police files. And he develops a whole system of identifying presumed criminals from the moment they're arrested. Right.

That involves creating small cards with photographs. He invents the mugshot, really. So mugshots and then a kind of detailed description, really very much resembling the wanted posters that I analyze in the 21st century.

And the way that he organizes these tens of thousands of cards is according to their distance, each card's distance from the average man. So the average man very materially becomes an organizing concept for the police.

And this method is then adopted all over the world. So across France's colonies, across the rest of Europe, and then eventually to the U.S. where the FBI starts to use it, too. And so what I'm arguing is that wanted posters come out again.

of this genealogy, the way that they look, and then also what each category means, where the reference point for each of those categories of race and sex and nationality and citizenship and height and weight and all these things that are on wanted posters right now, including kind of unusual ones that were on Bertinan's and also today's posters like tattoos and scars and marks.

that all of these categories have a reference point in the average man. They are not just sort of neutral descriptors, but there's a reference point that gives each of those categories meaning. So when we're thinking about any one of those categories on the posters, then it's important to think about the place of the average man relative to them.

This is just such a fascinating chapter. I loved it. And I think just like a great chapter, like if you're looking for a teaching resource, you know, when you're trying to have some of these ideas, because I think it really, for me, someone who dwells in the tangible, it gave me a really visual example of how this work of racialization and the project continues to this day. The other piece of your project and your book is really the focus on this figure, Asacha Shakur. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about who...

who she is and why the fact that she is Muslim in however way, I mean, it shows up differently, for instance, when she is incarcerated and shows up in court and Islam is being utilized in a particular way. How, what does Muslimness or Islamness have anything to do or implicating her story in a way?

Yeah, there are two chapters that are about her in a way. And I didn't start out the project intending to make Assata Shakur such a major figure in it. But there are so many aspects of her story that are just really important.

really important, I think, for what they can tell us about race and its relationship with Islam in this country and these other things that I was otherwise interested in starting this project out. And so, yeah,

So with her, she is a really, really important figure for young people in the past decade or so who've been fighting against racism, like the, you know, Black Lives Matter and so on.

And even with this kind of increased attention on her, both from the FBI and from the local sort of, you know, New Jersey, New York state officials and police unions that are really, really interested in extraditing her. And then even in the scholarly literature on Assata Shakur, we don't see much mention of her ever having been Muslim. Right.

But if you look at court records, if you look at some of her correspondence from prison, if you look at the writings of like the Assata Shakur Defense Committee, who supported her at this time and collected money for her defense, if you look at the newspapers of the 70s when she was on trial, then you see that there is enough of a mention of her.

her association with Islam to raise some questions about what it means. So one of the things that I argue is that, well, so first, what the chapter, that second chapter you're talking about, what it does sort of methodologically is that it looks at how the words Islam and Muslim circulate in all these materials in the 70s while she is on trial for murder.

for the killing of a New Jersey state police officer at this shooting on the New Jersey Turnpike that resulted in one of her comrades, Zaid Malik Shakur, for him to die. And then she's incarcerated and put on trial, and so is Sandiata Akoli, other Panthers who are in the car with her. So while on trial, the way that these words sort of show up

is they're associated with her asserting herself. And it's a way for her, the way she invokes Islam is not as something for which she should get redressed, but as a source of power, as someone who is not completely controlled or controllable.

And so I then kind of use that association, that kind of pattern in how Islam and Muslim appears around her to think about her as a counterweight to racialization projects. Because to be racialized is to be subordinate, to be subordinated. And she refuses that at every level. So of course she knows and experiences these deeply violent attempts to subordinate her.

But it's her approach to what that means that I want to highlight and the place of Islam in that refusal. So it's not like she takes it on as a kind of marginalized identity. It's the its relationship to power and a refusal of control is a really powerful theme, I think. And

In the specific context of the U.S., that kind of engagement with Islam really militates against race, I'm arguing, where race, in this context again, is about obliterations.

of Africans' past and history and civilizations and knowledge and community and so on, obliterations that result in this racial figure of the Negro. And part of the creation of that figure involved an erasure of Islam and

from Africans, where Islam was associated for Europeans with a kind of dominant civilization. This is where I'm really drawing on Cedric Robinson. And so for Asada Shakur to kind of engage Islam in this way,

Even with all of its complexity around, you know, she says in her autobiography that she never practiced Islam. And yet she also has a religious freedom case in courts in order to get Fridays off.

off from court. So even with all of that complexity, her engagement with Islam as a source of power and refusing control really destabilizes the very basis of race. And it's consistent with a major feature of Black Islam otherwise, which is a rejection of white divinity, that sort of theological character of

of that, you know, universalized, idealized average man. So average man is just one name for that general figure, right? Like Foucault calls it man. Sylvia Winter calls it man one and man two. You know, I also draw on the work of R.A. Judy and he talks about the noble man. You know, Du Bois talks about the strong man. But it's the same idea that you have an idealized human and everything is sort of then to be designed to advance that particular human. Yeah.

And so there is a whole set of an order of knowledge that comes with that. And I think what I'm arguing here is that Asada Shakur's engagement with Islam challenges that.

And I didn't, I mean, I know Barter in terms of like in recent times, especially with Black Lives Matter movement. But I didn't know so much about the way that Islam was utilized and showing up in the court cases. So that was really fascinating to read. And also some of the court images you had included of her covered. And so it's fascinating. And it's also interesting to think about what were the connections between

being made, especially with what Elijah Muhammad was saying on Malcolm X and how Islam was being utilized in Black consciousness movements, which continues to be conversations in Islam, but it's quite siloed. And so it's interesting to weave this into the broader conversation that you're having, which is about how is race operating not only for Black Muslims, but for Muslims overall, which I think is what your chapter three is getting into and the way in which then

Islam, for some people, then becomes raceless, right? And so here you have been collecting these posters, archives, and you start documenting or noticing these really fascinating patterns about how certain Muslims are...

presented on the posters and the descriptions are just so fascinating. You have a few of them in this chapter and you're bringing this into, again, this larger conversation you're having of how at one point Islam was

is race, other points it's not. What does it mean when it's tied to a Black woman versus what does it mean when it's tied to an Arab man who his skin tone is olive but is raceless in other ways, right? And a name becomes a different indicator. What they're wearing becomes a different indicator. So I think you carry this on to chapter three. So can you talk us through some of these patterns you noticed on your posters and ones that stood out for you maybe or still kind of

of plague you as you think about this project.

Yeah, this is, I mean, like, this is really the central puzzle that motivated the entire project. And everything, everything in this project has been, has been motivated by, you know, how can we really explain these patterns? And like the, the, just the incredible strength of that raceless pattern is, is so, is still so fascinating to me. And so, yeah,

So, yeah. So just to kind of review what the patterns are on the most wanted terrorist list, for the most part, Muslims do not have a race category at all. The word race does not appear on the poster. And then in the hundreds of other posters across the rest of the most wanted program, there's usually like 300 to 400 posters at any given time, like in the in the 2000s.

And out of those, there are, you know, a few dozen Muslims and they do have a race category. And in fact, most people in general across the life of the program since 1950 have had a race category. So across time, you have race categories. Why is it missing for the...

Muslim on the most wanted terrorist list. So those are the sort of two things that go together there. But like you mentioned, what's unusual about them is not only that they're missing a race category, it's that sort of in its place, they have a complexion category. So an olive is the most common complexion. And then sometimes you have dark, sometimes you have light. And

And then one thing that's also really important to mention, I think, is that out of the people that are, you know, missing a race category on the most wanted terrorist list, if you were to just look at their images alone without any of the other information, they could be classified in really anything.

any of the five major racial categories that we have in the U.S. There are people who would easily be understood as white Americans, Black Americans, Asians, Arabs, South Asian. I mean, really, any number of categories are possible, but they are not there. And instead, you have complexion. And so

This this pattern of presence and absence really drove home for me that there is something around this category of race that that is what's missing. So in a way, it's like the complexion category is.

can do some kind of work with helping to identify these people since the ostensible purpose of the posters is to get the public to identify these people if they were to see them and then report back to the FBI. But like the first chapter talks about, there are actually a number of other purposes that these posters serve. But the complexion category can serve that kind of immediate identification need

And which raises the question why race as a category can't do that or isn't there, or it means something else such that it doesn't feel relevant to put here. So what is it about race? And so what this chapter then sort of says.

thinks about at the end is, you know, just some possible explanations for why there's no race category. What is it that could be going on here? And one of the things that I, you know, draw on some other thinkers to consider is the place of absence or secrecy or a kind of shadowiness in the war on terror. Because the terrorist as an enemy in the war on terror, you know,

is understood as a figure that could sort of be, you know, lurking anywhere or operates with a certain kind of secrecy or, you know, you wouldn't know them when you see them. You know, there's...

sleeper cells, like that concept. And so there's something there, I think, where it's like the absence of race sort of marks them as extremely different and in the shadows. The other piece that is important by way of explanation is, again, that race signals subordination.

So if we go to the kind of average man on the bell curve, race, if represented there, is kind of like a deviation from that idealized human. Right.

And what's important about this, the way that Muslims are represented in the war on terror is that they are not represented as a weak enemy, but as a formidable enemy, as a powerful one. And if we look into some of the earliest history of the U.S., there is there is a fear of Muslims as a competing colonial force, in fact.

that would do to Europe what Europe has done to the rest of the world. So it's important then to sort of mark the enemy as powerful, which would then help to justify the use of extreme measures to control and punish and root out an enemy that's marked as just that extreme.

So so that's the sort of idea behind thinking about what it means that they don't have a race and the way that they're represented with these images that that, you know, there's a kind of mismatch there.

It's just so fascinating to see it laid out, as you excellently do in this chapter. And you're kind of like stunned and left to deal with it. And I think kind of the offerings you give us to process some of the patterns you've highlighted is really helpful, especially when I, you know, I think it comes up in the chapter as well, thinking about domestic terrorism too, right? This notion that, yeah, it's not that it's coming from outside of

But of course, there's some of that. But it's that it's also here and beneath. And what do we do when it's somebody who is a white man from Alabama who has converted to Islam and therefore their race is white? Like, you don't want to maybe...

technically amplify that as part of what's happening. So I think this kind of oscillation between race and racelessness and the theorization of it in this chapter is really provocative and it left me a lot to think about and still process.

In the last substantive chapter, we return again to Shakur. And again, I didn't know this, that she was the first woman to be added to, you know, the terrorism list. And which is, again, the gender dynamics, I think, are also fascinating, which are trying to get us to think intersectionally, as is done in critical race studies and black studies and a lot of other fields of what it means when race and gender are intersecting.

in these complicated ways. But how is it that she became the one that gets added to this list, the first woman? Especially if she, you know, is in Cuba and has lived quite public life and is doing interviews and things like that.

And I guess after that, we'll talk a little bit about some of what you offer in this chapter as kind of final thoughts for thinking about the field of especially Black studies, what it can offer to those of us who are working in Muslim studies or Islamic studies or religious studies. And some of the work that needs to happen, I think, also is what you are challenging us to do.

Thank you so much for that. It's the thing with Assata Shakur that's really interesting is

you know, in terms of the FBI adding her to this most wanted terrorist list is when it was announced, they said that she's the first woman to be added to it. Um, but she is also the first person associated with the black liberation movement of the mid 20th century to be added to it. And it's really interesting that that's not, um, part of what, what they talk about. Um,

And so there are a number of things happening at this time in 2013. So you have this kind of ramping up of Black Lives Matter. You have, you know, some organizations named after Assata Shakur at universities. You have students agitating for a change in name. And so some things become named after her. So she's serving as a symbol in these ways.

And what Angela Davis and Lennox Hines, who was one of Assata Shakur's lawyers in the 70s, what they argued in an interview on Democracy Now! is that the idea behind adding her in 2013 to this list was to kind of frighten a younger generation of activists who would who look up to her and, you know, see that.

see themselves in her. And, you know, with the, with the Black feminist commitments of Black Lives Matter, she's a really important figure. Um,

And then you see in the FBI announcement of their addition of Asada Shakur to this list, they kind of make a similar argument. They say that they want a younger generation who wasn't around in the 70s to know about her, but from their perspective, of course. And so there is this kind of battle for the soul of a new generation that's playing out and she's serving as this symbol of

As to why she is that symbol, I mean, there are a few things we can kind of notice at the outset. But one of the things about studying, you know, a state agency like the FBI is, you know, you can't possibly know every motivation. We just have, you know, some kind of partial information here with the public archives in my case. And so, yeah.

She is she's one of the few panthers to escape prison and to sort of stay that way. So her liberation from prison and her asylum in Cuba, like that was an incredible victory on the part of the movement in the in 1979. Yeah.

So so there is that that sort of symbolism there. So I think that's a that's a really big thing.

And then also that because she's in Cuba, this state that, you know, kind of bounces often on of the, you know, on the state sponsors of terrorism list that the U.S. has. Her name comes up in negotiations around normalization of relations with Cuba. Right.

So she's serving as a symbol of so many things that, you know, for her to be added to this list brings all of that symbolism with it and amplifies it, too.

I'm trying to think if that answered all the questions that you brought up. But as far as gender goes, there is so much there. And some of the second chapter talks about it as well, where I argue that she's ungendered and she's kind of gendered, which is to say she's gendered in whichever way sort of makes sense at the time. So on some of her posters, there is a kind of masculinization. And then if you read about

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's also interesting because I think you had included one where there's several pictures in a row of her. And it's also because the picture, once you start, you're in the thick of the book, you realize the type of pictures you use and how it's framed is also impacting as much of the descriptors that are following the photograph as well, right? Be it men or women. But it says something when she is the only woman in a sea of pictures of men as well, right? Like what is the kind of

insinuation of danger that is at play, especially when it's a terrorism list at this particular moment in time and the ways in which we think about terrorism. It's just, again, it just really boggles the mind, but it's so important that it needs to be said and explained and theorized in the way that you do so carefully. Stepping back a little bit, I think the end of this chapter, you're also getting us to think about, as you said in the introduction, that you've arrived at this book

in conversation with colleagues, I know, in Black Studies, which I think is so important. And the book, you know, engages with Sylvia Winters. And I often am in conversation with colleagues who often say, like, why doesn't Religious Studies use Sylvia Winters more, right? Like, why isn't that part of kind of the canon that we teach? And maybe it's an interdisciplinary argument or we're bounded by our discipline.

and all of kind of the excuses we give to each other. I'm not saying I buy it, but, you know, it's just kind of the things that get said around. So I'm really, I think one of the things that I'm really compelled by in the book is your use of Black Studies and bringing it to kind of studying terrorism, you know, anti-Muslim racism, racism,

And what it's offering and what you would want people, you know, such as myself to take away from it in terms of what work that we need to do, I think. And that might be we need to start reading Sylvia Winters. You know, I don't know if that's as simple as that. But I think in this particular moment of time when institutions are being constrained in the way it is.

reading your book against it, there also felt even more of an urgency than before. Yeah. I really appreciate that question. And I'm going to struggle to answer it. Um,

It's, you know, one of the things that I hope to have done in this book is to just open up a little bit of space to have a different kind of conversation on race than what we typically do in the study of race and Islam. I definitely don't have all of the answers. I may not even have some. But I do think that there is a body of work in some of the more foundational works in Black Studies that

that can really open up our thinking on race and Islam. You know, whether we're talking about like a Muslim studies, critical Muslim studies, you know, like that general kind of world. I'm not thinking about a particular tradition inside of the study of race and Islam, which is why I'm keeping it sort of open. But as far as Sylvia Winter goes, she definitely has so much to say about religion and

and secularization and the way that that connects to the 1492 moment. And I've found it, her work, so, so useful. And I know that I am also part of a kind of resurgence of interest in her work over the past few years, whereas, you know, she's been, you know, a major thinker in Black studies for all of this time. And

And I would say that I think it's great for people across fields to read her and pick up her work and not, you know, allow ourselves to be remained inside of those disciplinary silos and trapped in them or something like

But I think that in doing that, it's really important to actually engage the work and the thinking, as opposed to what I sometimes see with her and then with a few others is a kind of sprinkling of the name on top of something. When really, if you go in and read her carefully, there are certain frameworks that then don't become possible anymore once you deeply engage the work.

And so for me, I was reading her at a time when I was trying to see, like, if this racialization of Muslims framework can help explain the case of the missing race and why it felt why I felt stuck, why I felt like it wasn't working. But what else is there? What am I supposed to do? And so thinking about that, you know, about secularization and this figure she calls Man 2,

And then thinking about the history of wanted posters and the average man, I was like, oh, so this secularization project and the relationship of Islam and Muslims to that and how race is part of that secularization project.

That's where I need to look to see how race is operating here, as opposed to counting up which categories are where and who is classified as what. The question instead can become, what is the classification practice? Because one of the things that Winter argues that I think is so powerful is

She says we need a new science. We need a new, a different way of, so the way that I kind of take that to mean is that, like when thinking about the posters, right, is that it's not just about, you know, switching one descriptor out for another. Like the solution is not for the FBI to find a race category for its most wanted terrorist list. Right.

But instead, it's those very terms of description that are the issue, because what they mark is deviance from an idealized human. So the thing to kind of get at is that idealized human and this world that's sort of built to advance just one small subsection of humanity as though it's all of humanity.

So one of the things that Winter argues as part of this argument she makes about the human is that what made Black Studies so radical and so revolutionary was not that it created a little place inside the university for talking about racial Blackness. That's a development that she critiques. But what made it initially so radical and revolutionary, and the way she says it, is that it exoticized Europe.

it destabilized that universality that it established for itself.

And I think it's very interesting that she marks that as what's so revolutionary about Black Studies as its start. And nowhere in that do you yet see the words Black, yeah? So it's not about advancing a kind of racial Blackness and, you know, creating a new average man, but make it Black. It's about...

It's about a complete transformation of knowledge. So I found that really inspiring and really productive for even just understanding analytically what was going on in the cases I was thinking about. And as a reader, I just found it so generative and it was so sharp.

And I really felt in the book that she was like one of your interlocutors, right? Like I think you had people that you're having conversations with and it felt like she was along. She was in all of the pages. And I think that's kudos to you in terms of how you showed up to engage her and do the work that you're asking all of us to do is to show up. And I think, you know, I...

I think a lot about some of my work is on Islam in America. And so this is how I show up to the conversation. And I think it's one of the first times that I'm kind of having a conversation on race and Muslims in America and seeing Sylvia Winters. And so that's why it provoked that in me. It was like, wait, why hasn't this

You know what I mean? Why aren't we all doing that? It seems like this is something that we should be doing. And what is it that's causing us not to do that, to kind of engage with the work that is there and not to reinvent the wheel is that these scholars have done it for us, right? Sylvia Winters being kind of one of the most important ones. So I was really, it's a thought that's staying with me and I'm going to take it. So thank you for that amazing, amazing gift.

In your conclusion, I read as a meditation of kind of the realities of the time and what your book is kind of bringing us to the bigger picture. And you're kind of navigating this notion of theirs and ours.

From Ahmed and you're kind of trying to think about what that means in terms of our current moment of race and anti-racism and especially in light of what's happening with Palestinians. Right. And how racism gets operationalized in kind of the discourse of the state of Israel and trying to commit the atrocities that it's committing. Right. And how it affects.

It gets co-opted in certain ways, right? At a moment in time. And I think this is kind of the work of the entirety of your work is that in this book, at least you're thinking about how at a moment in time, things become race and other times it doesn't. And so you're not staying with the posters. You're getting us to think beyond them and trying to get us to kind of look up and see the world around us. So did you want to share some final thoughts around that in terms of what people should take away?

Definitely. So that that final chapter is really thinking with Iqbal Ahmed's famous speech, Terrorism, Theirs and Ours. And it's a speech that he gave before 9-11 and he actually passed away before that time. He was a revolutionary thinker who, you know, was was part of so many really just, you know, so many revolutionary and radical movements of his time.

In the in the mid 20th century and in this speech, he he argues that there are he's making an argument about the way that we think about what terrorism is and the relationship between that and everything else that sort of action taken around it.

So he argues that their terrorism, which is to say state officials, they have a really inconsistent definition of what terrorism is. And there are so many books now about this, like, you know, Lisa Stamnitsky's work, Disciplining Terror, and so many others that just track that inconsistency and

And what he argues is that the power of that inconsistent definition is that the state can then do whatever it wants. It can call anybody or anything a terrorist and then act in these authoritarian sorts of ways.

And he says that what needs to happen is a kind of developing a different understanding of what terrorism is that is consistent and that treats it for what it is, he says.

So with that as a kind of model, I'm thinking about if he has terrorism, there's an hours for me, it's race, there's an hours. So I'm thinking about his model in terms of race where, you know, just like terrorism has a thousand definitions, race does too. I mean, how much even between the two of us have we talked about and published on this and given it different definitions and all of that, right? So, yeah.

Race has a thousand definitions, but what is more productive to do, in my view,

is to develop an understanding of race that does not operate inside of its terms and frameworks like the average man and doesn't accept that bell curve as sort of revealing a truth about humanity and doesn't accept that there is some kind of ideal human and we should all sort of, you know, that we are all here in order to serve it.

there's a way to talk about that current reality without accepting its terms. And so the goal is to ultimately sort of develop a different understanding, a different epistemology, a different way of knowing. So in that way, I'm sort of thinking about how race comes up in the Palestine Solidarity Movement right now. And one of the things that

that I noticed is, you know, you have so many, so many contradictions, right? You have, you have diversity and inclusion officers who are doing the work of punishing student activists, right? And you have a nation state structured, like, you know, in some ways, like the sort of nation state model coming out of that 1492 moment.

that employs this concept of anti-racism to justify genocide. So rather than clinging to anti-racism as something that conceptually belongs to, you know, to liberation movements,

I'm trying to sort of perceive the ways that it's being used right now in these sorts of very powerful ways. I mean, for a state to use that concept is incredibly powerful. Right. And and the U.S. has in in many ways also. And so the conclusion that I'm sort of reaching there is.

is that rather than trying to sort of resuscitate and save this concept of anti-racism that can be used in these sorts of ways, because it really is just kind of an inverse of racism. It's not about building a completely different world, that if we were to let that go, what could we then actually build? How could we understand our relationships to one another in different terms?

So I think, you know, one of the challenges and, you know, one of the conversations that I've been having a lot with people about this book is that, well, what about how race is, you know, a tool of liberation? What about how it's a way that we've related to one another to form coalitions? And, you know, it has it has served in that way.

Not always effectively. And I think some of the reasons why are because of the very limits of race, that there is a kind of idealized human. We talk about centering this group or that group, which mimics that same model. And so I don't know if that model is actually serving us the way that we think it is. And if it's not, then are we ready to try something else?

I think one of the things I really appreciated about reading the book is that I felt like I was just reading the book without, I mean, of course, I had my academic hat on and my host hat on and everything. But I think in this moment where things are feeling so hyper strained for a lot of us who do this type of work, it was just a welcome space to sit and read.

and to kind of explore this with you. And so I really appreciated the tone and the style and the accessibility, but also the depth and sharpness and the precision of language you bring to the work that you did. For a lot of us who are just struggling in the day-to-day of how to talk about these things,

And so I think it served a lot of purposes. And I hope our listeners will pick up the book and I hope people will add it to the courses and people will talk about it. So huge congratulations to you on this wonderful book that you have written. And I know it's going to impact a lot of people who are doing this work and many others. I know this book has just come out and hopefully you're celebrating and, you know, spending time with your family and all of those important good things.

But I'm curious to know if there's things on the horizon for you in terms of a next project idea that you're swimming in or starting a climb on or something like that. First of all, if I don't get a chance to say it, thank you so much for your really generous engagement with this book. These are such great questions and really a big part of the audience that I have in mind.

is, you know, people, people like you and people who are, you know, doing the kind of work that we're doing and are ready to kind of think about it in different ways and see what really will help us get to the place we want to get to. So, so thank you. And then as far as the kind of next thing goes, yeah.

It really comes out of this project and that first chapter and thinking about the history of statistics where, you know, what that first chapter really does is show how the very basic assumptions of statistics, even as we use it today, where means and averages are so important, that those very assumptions have race built into them. Yeah.

And so as a sociologist, one of the things that has been happening over the last few years is a kind of celebration of W.E.B. Du Bois as someone who has pioneered society.

statistics in sociology that, you know, the Philadelphia Negro and this other work that he did really made these major contributions to quantitative work in the discipline. And so one of the things that I find really curious is that even as Du Bois did this kind of work,

He had a really complex analysis of race, and he, of course, challenged racism. And he had a different understanding of what it means to be human compared to somebody like Kittley and these early statisticians in Europe where he studied briefly. So what I want to think about is how, for someone like Du Bois,

the method, like statistical methods, where those meet his theory of the human.

to see, are there ways that we can do this differently? I don't really see us throwing statistics out anytime in the near future. But I do think that it's worth looking into, you know, how someone who was very serious about fighting racism and

creating a different world thought about these tools and used them and what we might be able to learn from that. I love that. I also think anybody who does statistics or math generally is just so smart. So that's just amazing.

It's just like a thing that I can't handle. But I just, yeah, I just love the conceptualization and the work and kind of the different methods you're drawing on. I think it's really cool. And I look forward to that work when it comes up. But most importantly now, I hope you celebrate and also just stay safe and find joy in all the good things. But yeah, thank you for connecting with me for the New Books and Islamic Studies podcast. And yeah, I hope you'll be back on the show another time as well. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this and appreciated all your questions. And that was my conversation with Atsia Hussain about her new book, No God But Man, on race, knowledge, and terrorism. I hope you enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you'll join us again next time. Until then, take good care.