To most people, the idea that Mahatma Gandhi was more violent than Adolf Hitler would seem preposterous. When you’re speaking to Slavoj Žižek, however, such a suggestion is par for the course. Žižek has argued that Gandhi led a movement that challenged imperial hegemony and articulated an alternative to it, whereas Hitler’s violence was oriented...

Of the many strange permutations that the so-called ‘war on terror’ has thrown up perhaps none is stranger than the process by which the distinctions between left and right that orientated western metropolitan politics since the time of the French Revolution have seemingly collapsed in relation to the ‘Muslim question’. The demise of the left–right...

The reasons given for imposing some kind of restriction on women’s choice to wear the burqa can ostensibly be grouped into three clusters of assumptions, assertions and arguments. Firstly, there is a set of assumptions that consider the burqa a security and safety issue. Secondly, there are the assertions that the burqa is a means...

The question is often asked 'What will Islamists do to democracy?' But it seems equally valid to ask 'What might democracy do to Islamists?' This Lowy Institute paper examines how three different Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Prosperous Justice Party in Indonesia and the Justice and Development Party, have all sought to...

We should be careful about trying to impose a single identity on Islamic communities in this country, argues Liza Hopkins.