Important Dates

Dr. Abdelmjid Kettioui (ENSAM, Moulay Ismail University, Meknès, Marokko), Fellow at the Bayreuth Humboldt Centre, who is visiting the Departement of Study of Religion, will give a lecture on his research on Thursday, July 22nd, 2021 from 4:15 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.:

Moroccan Activist Nonreligion in the Diaspora: The Neoliberal Politics of a Subcultural ‘Non-Movement’

This talk aims to map out Moroccan nonreligious activism in the diaspora as a subcultural ‚non-movement’ (Bayat 2011). Emerging in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring in 2010/2011, these unorganized and marginalized voices of nonreligion have steadily encroached upon a religious field theretofore monopolized by the state and the Islamists. Based on interviews with key nonreligious activists and non-activists in Morocco and abroad, this paper takes pseudonymous activist Hicham Nostik (aka Kafir Maghribi or Moroccan infidel) as a case study. Nostik speaks and writes in the Moroccan dialect to demystify Islam’s sacred Arabic texts through ‘subcultural modes of knowledge production’ (Kettioui 2020). Articulating an oppositional and decolonial position vis-à-vis Islam’s religious authoritarianism and the Arab invasion of North Africa in the seventh century, Nostik reproduces the neoliberal and supremacist romance of New Atheism and remains reticent about state authoritarianism and the ‘coloniality of modernity’ (Mignolo 2018).

Due to the current situation and limited spatial capacities, we cordially invite interested parties to follow the lecture via Zoom: https://uni-bayreuth.zoom.us/j/69799911176?pwd=TFM4WXk4SDVrRkl3WFVLSWJ2ZkZUQT09