BAR Book Forum: Atiya Husain’s Book, “No God but Man”

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor

12 Mar 2025

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Atiya Husain. Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. Her book is No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism.

Overview of the book (from the publisher)

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 Adolphe 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 altogether.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Atiya Husain: One of the big goals of the book is to open up analytical space to consider whether thinking inside of the terms of race is ultimately a dead end for the project of deriving strong explanations and, relatedly, for the project of moving toward liberatory political goals. The 2024 presidential election results further suggest a need to open up this space. Specifically, in the US, there is a general expectation that people of color vote Democrat and have a problem with Trump, but many people of color, people who are otherwise organized by the standard race categories we work with, did not behave as expected. A significant enough proportion of people of color voted for Trump to raise questions about this general expectation. Speaking to this political moment, the analysis in No God but Man helps identify that the issue here is not only the inaccuracy of the assumption of the Democratic hold on the POC vote, but the prediction and conceptualization of behavior on the basis of race categories to begin with. If race categories cannot capture the election outcome and voting patterns, while race and racism had so much to do with it, then the need for other ways to understand race and racism is critical. It is my hope that the book helps identify ways in which we may move in such an analytical direction.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book

Activists and community organizers use the language of “centering” to describe their interest and focus, often to stake out a claim that functions as a way to manage difference. The book analyzes the thought that backs the metaphor of a center because the metaphor appears in the history of FBI wanted posters - the major case I analyze in the book. Specifically, the book shows how the very form of the contemporary FBI wanted poster has roots in the work of Adolphe Quetelet, nineteenth century Belgian astronomer and statistician. He imports the normal curve or “bell curve” from astronomy into the study of humans. He mapped human traits onto the curve and argued that the center was the location of the normal or superior human, and those features and peoples who were on the tails of the curve were deviant from the norm or center. Quetelet’s model was one of center and margin, and what many activists are fighting against is the sort of world that Quetelet’s work has helped to build. Our spatial and political imaginary can be limited or it can be opened up, and the models we engage play a structuring role. I hope activists and community organizers find knowledge of this history useful for removing a barrier from their political imaginations so they can do the absolutely critical work they do unrestricted by it. Activists and community organizers today look up to the Black liberation movement, and the book reads the Black liberation movement – its arguments, historiography, and political activity – as a counterweight to this model of a center that opens up space for thinking from somewhere without modeling that space off of the old normative human with a center and periphery, thus offering a model, however imperfect, that is far closer to what contemporary activists and community organizers strive for.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

The fourth chapter of the book questions the specific ways in which many of us have gone about framing violence against Muslims as racial. The pathway that this framing takes often secularizes Islam in order to make Muslims candidates for racial solidarity. This presents a problem at several levels depending on your investments. One problem is an empirical one: the FBI, a major player in violence against Muslims, actually withdraws race for its highest value Muslim targets (quite literally highest value, as they have the highest bounties or rewards for information leading to capture) on the bureau’s Most Wanted Terrorist list. In practice, this is a kill list. If race is a category imposed by an oppressive force, and in this case it is a category withdrawn when Muslims are put on such a list, does that not raise questions about the nature and practice of violence against Muslims by the national security state? Solidarity across lines of difference is absolutely desirable, but the question is whether “race” enables collaboration across difference, honoring difference, or if it requires distorting Muslims – like it has distorted so many others – in order to make us eligible for solidarity. This has been a limitation of the secular left and it has limited the range of possibilities.

Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?

The Black studies movement and the black consciousness movement are really inspiring to me, along with decolonial thought and liberation theology for diagnosing the problem of modernity as a theological one. All of these intellectual movements offer rich historical narratives to support that redefining. They engage in a powerful redefining of categories as part of their larger projects, and what I try to borrow from them is that maneuver and the thinking behind it (rather than just exporting the categories themselves) to think about cases and moments that are not usually approached using these frameworks in combination. As Eqbal Ahmad once said, “Wrong premises do not usually produce right policies,” and these intellectual movements have paid serious attention to premises – the premises of those they critique, as well as their own. Even as they were concerned with the intellectual dimensions of political struggle, I admire the ways in which these movements did that; they did not make the accomplishment of ideological purity their central goal, but were committed to action as inseparable from the intellectual project.

As far as individual intellectuals go, there are a few whose work I admire and engage quite a bit in the book: Eqbal Ahmad, Dhoruba bin Wahad, RA Judy, and Sylvia Wynter.

Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?

There are several books I’d like to draw attention to: the forthcoming 49 Points of Attention by Jihad Abdul Mumit, Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton, the new translation of Enrique Dussel’s The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Perfect Victims by Mohammed ElKurd, The Islamic Secular by Sherman A. Jackson, and When Only God Can See by Walaa Quisay and Asim Qureshi. These texts are all very different from each other. They are from different fields and with very different approaches, but all of them are pushing readers to consider something generative, something that will open up possibilities. The way I hope to engage them in my future work (which is on something still more different – statistics and W.E.B. Du Bois) is to think about these works methodologically. What are they doing, and how are they doing it? How do they go about making their arguments, and what sort of an analytical pathway have their works carved out for those of us engaged in the project of knowledge production? My book argues, like others before me, that the problem of race is, in part, a problem of knowledge. This raises the question of other ways of knowing, and I believe these books can help with this urgent project.

Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.

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