Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nation

In their efforts to apportion balme and channel retaliatory action in the post September II world, scholars and pundits alike have used a series of rhetorical techniques to great effect, manufacturing an image of Islam, the proverbial Other, that is highly conducive to the needs of liberal democracies but hardly a reflection of any one of the many 'authentic' Islams. This inevitably results in caricatures that have many uses, in portraits of dissenting groups it tends towards demonization. In this wide-ranging essay a scholar of religion asks the reader to consider how the classifications we use to name and thereby negotiate our social worlds are implicitly political and are being wielded in the public arena to carry out generally undisclosed/underanalyzed social work.