No God but Man

Reconceptualizing the relationship between race and Islam in the United States, No God but Man theorizes race as an epistemology using the FBI’s post-9/11 Most Wanted Terrorist list and its posters as its starting point. Atiya Husain traces the origins of the FBI wanted poster form to the work of nineteenth-century social scientist Adolph Quetelet, specifically his overvalued type of human called “average man.” Husain argues that this notion of the human continues to structure wanted posters, as well as much contemporary social scientific thinking about race. Focusing on the curious representations on the Most Wanted Terrorist list that range from Muslims who lack a race category on their posters to the 2013 addition of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur, Husain demonstrates the ongoing influence of the average man and its relevance even today, proposing a counterweight to the category by engaging Shakur’s turn to Islam in the 1970s in the legal context. In doing so, Husain shows the limitations of race as an analytical category all together.

“Atiya Husain makes an exciting and original intervention in well-worn debates around Islam, race, and security to illuminate the blind spots on racialization in literature on secularism and Islam and the gaps around secularism and Islam in literature on racialization and Blackness. Analyzing state repression and logics of securitization in profound ways, Husain offers a striking account of genealogies of radicalism, race, and religion.”

Atiya Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College.