Last academic year, students at my college asked me to participate in two faculty panel discussions on current events: one on ISIS (also known as Islamic State, ISIL, and DAESH) and the other on Charlie Hebdo and free speech. The panel on ISIS took place in November 2014, shortly after the group’s dramatic victories in northern Iraq and the start of the U.S.-led air campaign against it. The panel on Charlie Hebdo took place a month after the massacre of the satirical magazine’s Paris-based staff and cartoonists.
I am not an expert on ISIS or any of the warring parties that have made a battleground of Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. I do not study militancy and insurgency, or the politics, culture, and history of the Middle East. Nor am I an expert on the French satirical tradition, the alienation and radicalization of minority youth in France, or the politics of free speech. The focus of my scholarship is a world away from any of this: most recently Sufism (Islamic mysticism) in medieval South Asia.
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