Image source: Wikimedia Commons There is no difference between a bearded religious extremist who wants to kill you because he believes he ranks higher in the eyes of his god, and is therefore tasked with killing anyone who is different to him, and a non-bearded, well-dressed man with a new phone and a fancy car who believes he ranks higher in the eyes of his god, and so is tasked with torturing and imprisoning and inciting against anyone who is different. 1 These are the words of queer Egyptian activist Sarah Hegazi, originally written in Arabic for Mada Masr in 2018. Hegazi suffered under the homophobic, violent, and corrupt militaristic regime of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi in Egypt. Imprisoned and tortured for waving a rainbow flag at a concert in Cairo, she fled to Canada where she continued to organize with fellow revolutionaries, especially to support Sudanese uprisings against then-president Omar al-Bashir. In June of this year, Hegazi took her ow...
Image source: Wikimedia Commons It has always baffled me why those most interested in understanding and changing the barbaric domination that characterizes our modernity often—not always—withhold from the very people they are most concerned with the right to complex personhood. — Avery Gordon 1 In the summer of 1993, Foreign Affairs published an article by American political scientist and academic Samuel P. Huntington titled “Clash of Civilizations?” Thought by some to be prophetic, the author claimed to foretell a new phase of history, one in which civilizations opposed to one another in ways of life and viewpoints on the world—especially Islamic civilizations and “the West”—would clash, likely violently, in a bid for dominance over one another and over the world. Huntington goes on to prescribe a series of belligerent actions and attitudes to take towards the “non-Wests,” at times preemptively. 2 His essay is replete with us-versus-them language th...