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The Opening of Mecca & the Closure of Violence | Rushain Abbasi

November 1 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Stanford University Religious Studies Professor Rushain Abbasi will discuss his research on the relationship between “the rule of God” and current theories of human sovereignty.

7 p.m. to 9 p.m. | Friday, November 1, 2024 | MCC Prayer Hall | Join us in person or virtually at mcceastbay.org/live

This presentation is based on Professor Abbasi’s treatise, which studies the event of the Prophet Muhammad’s so-called conquest of Mecca and the Prophet’s general granting of amnesty to the “conquered” (placed in quotation marks because this group is referred to as the “released”) as a way of reflecting more broadly on the unique relationship between law and violence in Islam and the politics of “submission” (and not “sovereignty”) which made this moment in history possible.

Questions? events@mcceastbay.org

Rushain Abbasi lives with his wife and two children in Hayward, California. For his day job, he teaches Islam, philosophy, and history classes in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He also teaches courses at Bay Area masjid on Islam and the West in the evenings. He is currently writing articles and books on secularism, liberalism, and its relationship to Islamic law, the phenomenon of “Ummatic Amnesia,” the uncanny presence of Islam in Western literature and history, and the Hegelian differentiation of “abstraction” into its beautiful and evil forms. God willing, the Opening of Mecca and the Closure of Violence is his first monograph, which will be finished within the year

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