| Summary: | The poetics of incitement--a poetics found in texts originating in the West containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims--became a "accepted, mainstream, and profitable genre of textual production" in the West. Raja's book urges a cosmopolitan mode of reading for metropolitan readers, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other. The book also offers a critique of and intervenes in the debate between unbridled adherence to the absolute value of the right to free speech and the right of the reader to respond. All too often texts of the poetics of incitement are read from a universal, Western perspective by metropolitan academics, students, and the masses, without much thought given to how a Muslim reader. To remedy this, Raja offers and theorizes "democratic reading practices" as "a mode of training our students that emphasizes that engagement with texts is never really unmotivated." Becoming democratic readers, Raja argues, gives teachers and students a way, though impossible to completely perfect, of reading from the point of view of the Other. In doing so, Raja provides a genealogy of the Muslim Sacred thereby giving readers an overview of the history and specific knowledge that constitutes an average Muslim reader of these texts. Raja offers a form of critical practice that takes into account the specific modes of reading and practice of experiencing literary texts as informed by Islamic metaphysics, a way toward a cosmopolitan practice of reading.
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