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The Kazanistan Papers: Reading the Muslim Question in the John Rawls Archives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2020

Murad Idris Open the ORCID record for Murad Idris [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

In The Law of Peoples (1999), John Rawls invented a fictional Muslim state that he called Kazanistan. The genealogy of Kazanistan I offer here is the first examination of Islam in Rawls’s papers. It contributes to a critical body of work about the Muslim Question and how Euro-American thinkers construct Islam. In recent years, theorists have turned to Rawls’s papers. The archival turn, however, has neglected the last phase of Rawls’s career and his book-length attempt at thinking internationally. I address this oversight and critically examine Rawls on Islam and global politics. I historicize Rawls’s turn to Islam, Kazanistan’s late introduction, and its transformations across drafts. By examining “the Kazanistan papers,” I highlight the dissonance between Rawls’s philosophical discourse on Islam and the contemporaneous geopolitics recorded in his archives. This disjuncture, I suggest, is characteristic of the logics of liberal deflection from empire and liberal “inflection” into the Muslim Question.

Type
Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 110 - 130
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

He is grateful to the helpful staff at the Harvard University Archives for their graciousness during his multiple visits to the archive in 2014, 2015, and 2018. His archival research on Kazanistan’s origins and politics was first conducted in Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 thanks to funding from the Violence/Non-Violence Mellon Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University; and again in May 2018, thanks to funding from the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. Versions of this paper, his archival findings, and his arguments about Kazanistan have been presented numerous times and have been in circulation for a few years. He completed this paper and a different piece on Kazanistan’s disciplinary origins in Fall 2018 thanks to a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, funded by the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study. He is grateful to participants at the University of Virginia Political Theory Colloquium (2015), APT (2018), CSPT–Toronto (2018), Critical Conversations @ IAS (2018), IAS Social Science Seminar (2019), APSA (2019), the University of Michigan Department of Political Science (2019), as well as colleagues who read or commented on earlier versions. For helpful conversations and questions, he is grateful to Banu Bargu, Ronald Beiner, Fahad Bishara, Robin Celikates, Daniel Cohen, Rodrigo Cordero, Yasmeen Daifallah, Lisa Disch, Beshara Doumani, Kevin Duong, Mohammad Fadel, Didier Fassin, Jason Frank, Nick Harris, Axel Honneth, Ulas Ince, James Ingram, Rahel Jaeggi, Leigh Jenco, Deme Kasimis, Pinar Kemerli, Munirah Khayyat, Justin Kirkland, Hagar Kotef, Theresa Krueggeler, Andrew March, Inder Marwah, Jeanne Morefield, Jennifer Rubenstein, Elias Saba, Joan Scott, Josh Simon, Ali Wick, Melissa Williams, Jessica Winegar, Elizabeth Wingrove, and students in his undergraduate seminar on “The Muslim Question” (Fall 2019) and his graduate seminar “Islam and Political Theory” (Spring 2020). He is most grateful to four anonymous reviewers at Perspectives on Politics, whose excellent suggestions and questions helped to strengthen the paper, and special thanks to Daniel O’Neill for his guidance as editor.

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