On the Muslim Question

Abstract

Marx’s essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ marks the Jew as the site where post-Enlightenment Europe confronted the spectre of theology in the question of citizenship. In our time, the figure of the Muslim has become the axis where questions of political philosophy and political theology, politics and ethics meet. Islam is marked as the pre-eminent site of danger to politics; to Christians, Jews, and secular humanism; to women, human rights and the state system; to democracy and free speech; to the values and the institutions of the Enlightenment. The Muslim question does not displace the Jewish question, but rather emerges out of it as ‘the general question of the age.’ This question takes different forms in the institutions and imaginaries of Europe and the United States, in popular political discourse and in political philosophy, yet all demand reconsideration of a politics founded on enmity and an Enlightenment still held within the limits of Christendom.