Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Postmuslim: A Testimony

Postmuslim: A Testimony

Rakha, Youssef

Paperback

Biographies GeneralPolitical BiographiesLetters & Essays

Publisher Price: $18.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date September 15, 2026

ISBN10: 1644454157
ISBN13: 9781644454152
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: Sep 15 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

An ambitious and timely essay collection exploring what it means to be Arab-Muslim in the twenty-first century

Postmuslim, Youssef Rakha's debut essay collection, tells the story of Islam's clash with the West in the last thirty years from a perspective rarely available to the Western reader. Impassioned, intimate, erudite, and playful, these essays trace Rakha's intellectual and spiritual transformations across multiple decades alongside significant moments in recent history. He recounts losing his religion as a teenager in Cairo after the fall of the Berlin Wall, resentful of the conservatism and rigid conformism of his middle-class Egyptian milieu. But what he sees and comes to understand about the West eventually disenchants him as well. Along the way, Rakha explores rich subjects such as boxing and democracy, addiction and the hungry ghost of the great ninth-century poet Al-Mutanabbi, recent Egyptian history rewritten in the form of horror film tropes, and a bold proposal to revitalize Arab-Muslim culture via the surprisingly multicultural lifeways of the Ottoman Empire.

Postmuslim is a term of Rakha's invention that embraces the fullness of Muslim identity rather than its essentialized and distorted versions. This is a vital book for anyone negotiating their own relationship to alienation, faith, intersecting identities, and the hypocrisy of those in power.

Also from

Rakha, Youssef

View All

Also in

Letters & Essays

View All