About

Murad Idris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, with a wide-ranging interest in political theory and the history of political thought. His scholarly work encompasses topics such as war and peace, critical theory, conceptual history, anticolonial and postcolonial thought, political theology, international political theory, comparative political theory, and Arabic and Islamic political thought. He has authored the book 'War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought' (2019), which has received multiple awards including the David Easton Award from APSA, the International Ethics Best Book Award from ISA, and the Best Book in Interdisciplinary Studies Award from ISA. Additionally, he co-edited 'The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory' (2020). His articles have been published in various academic journals, and his work explores themes such as colonialism, ethics, fundamentalism, interfaith studies, memory, peace, politics, race, ethnicity, violence, and war, across regions including the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Idris has held fellowships and positions at prestigious institutions such as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Prior to his current appointment, he was an Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. His current projects include analyzing dominant tropes about Islam and their genealogies of freedom, toleration, and violence, as well as works on Qutb’s international thought and the reception history of Ibn Tufayl’s allegory, Hayy ibn Yaqzan.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Theology
• Epistemology
• Law
• Social Science
• Religious studies

Selected publications

• 8 A Conversation About ‘War for Peace’

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2025-08-14

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• Critique, Imperative, Interrogative; or, Diogenes, Erasmus, and Arabic Philosophy on Investing in the World

  2025-07-22

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  Abstract Discussions of cosmopolitanism observe a time-honored convention when they begin by calling Diogenes the Cynic the originator of the word cosmopolitan. Although there is disagreement about whether his cosmopolitanism is purely negative or has positive implications, commentators tend to affirm him as the origin of a Western discourse. This chapter takes issue with both aspects of this interpretation. Against this framing, it explains three kinds of cosmopolitan discourse. First, it offers a counter-reading of Diogenes, locating in him a critique of the material conditions and political values that naturalize the idiom and conventions of citizenship, including belonging and investment in the world (or the West). Second, it shows that later pre-Enlightenment commentators, including Erasmus, replace this critical dimension with an imperative for a universalist cosmopolitanism. Erasmus’ Complaint of Peace, exemplifying the trouble with cosmopolitan universalism, privileges Christianity as the ultimate form of humanity and finds the value of the Turk to lie in his status as a potential convert. Third, the chapter turns to three classical Arabic texts by the prose writer al-Jāḥiẓ and the philosophers al-Fārābī and Ibn Ṭufayl to present a third modality of being and investing in the world. The cosmopolitan interrogative raises questions about the grounds from which cosmopolitanism can be articulated, the way its global scale transforms interior scales and political forms, and the perspective from which the claims of competing cosmopolitanisms can be adjudicated.

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• A Conversation About ‘War for Peace’

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2025-08-08

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• Political theologies of Christian missionaries, European colonialism, and postcolonial resistance

  Journal of International Political Theory · 2023-02-01 · 1 citations

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  This review supplements William Bain’s Political Theology of International Order by sketching out two historical threads that are inseparable from the histories of European thought and order that occupy the book. There are gestures toward both strands along the margins of Bain’s account, in a few observations and footnotes. They also have important implications for the place of political theological difference in this story and for the status of colonialism, hierarchy, and resistance. First, I expand on some of the book’s references to non-Christians and discuss the place of Islamic theology. Second, reflecting on Luther in relation to Muslim empires and adapting Bain’s acknowledgment of Grotius’s justifications for colonialism, I highlight the significance of hierarchy, enmity, and violence for a number of the thinkers mentioned, especially what their political theologies authorize in relation to non-Christians. These two sets of observations can help us imagine a complementary story less about international order than about the politics of proselytization and colonization. It also raises questions about the work that political theology as an analytic can do, especially when we globalize political theory and international political thought. I conclude by pondering the place of resistance in relation to imposed order and immanent order.

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• Peace movements in Islam: History, religion, and politics

  Politics Religion & Ideology · 2022-10-02 · 1 citations

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  "Peace movements in Islam: History, religion, and politics." Politics, Religion & Ideology, 23(4), pp. 537–538 Notes1 See Murad Idris, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2019).2 Sara Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 76. Also see Murad Idris, ‘Islam Out of History: Three Genealogies’, History of the Present 11:2 (2021), pp. 253–278.

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• Introduction

  European Journal of Political Theory · 2022-06-22

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  Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality locates an “alternative legacy of modernity” in how revolutionary movements across three centuries and four continents interpreted and claimed different pasts, concepts, and alternatives for themselves. These movements, from the Communards to the Zapatistas to the Russian Revolutionaries, engaged in democratic experiments in self-government, radical equality, and collective possession. In this forum, Tomba's interlocutors offer reflections and questions about the position of the critical historian, universality, and colonialism. Tomba's response explains the stakes of his project with two further examples of his historiographic practice.

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• 6. Peace, or the Moral Economy of War: Between W. E. B. Du Bois and Sayyid Quṭb

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022-05-09 · 1 citations

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• Philosophy in Light of In the Shadow of Justice - Katrina Forrester: In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. 432.)

  The Review of Politics · 2022-01-01

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  Philosophy in Light of In the Shadow of Justice - Katrina Forrester: In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. 432.) - Volume 84 Issue 3

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• The Location of Anticolonialism; or, Al-Afghānī, Qāsim Amīn, and Sayyid Quṭb at the Peripheries

  Critical Times · 2022-08-01 · 3 citations

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  Abstract Recent decades have seen a turn toward colonialism and anticolonial thought in the discipline of political theory. This turn has done the crucial work of bringing questions of dispossession, racialization, and the critical imaginaries of marginalized bodies of thought into the mainstream of the discipline. The expansion, however, has been marked by a tendency to typecast the archive of anticolonial thought with a handful of figures. This article examines the edge of the archive, or three thinkers who are only at its margins. They are Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, Qāsim Amīn, and Sayyid Quṭb, each of whom occupies a central place in the archive of modern Islamic thought. The article reads the peripheries of their works, tracing the arcs formed by their incidental references to places around the world, and, ultimately, probing their location in anticolonialism and contemporary critical thought. The article calls this double method of selection and interpretation periphereia.

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• Islam Out of History

  History of the Present · 2021 · 4 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract The definition of Islam as submission, the claim that Islam needs a Luther, and the desire to identify jihād with private and spiritual struggle, all reflect a series of compulsions and elisions. The three idioms are fundamental to how Islam has been constituted in language as a subject and as a problem. They each also have forgotten genealogies. This article outlines these genealogies and their intersection through the politics of translating Islam as submission, peace, or salvation; of narrating its place and temporality in modernity; and of reinterpreting historical texts and exemplars through the prism of liberalism and toleration. These three moves take Islam out of history. The dislocation of Islam winds through three disciplinary moments that track political theory’s investments in philology, teleology, and philosophy. The article concludes by pointing toward critical possibilities and resources that emerge out of alternative discursive formations—formations that dwell alongside or behind the three idioms and that remain suppressed in them.

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Frequent coauthors

• A. P. Martinich

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared

• Siwing Tsoi

  The University of Texas at San Antonio

  1 shared

• D.J. Albert

  1 shared

• Eric Goodfield

  American University of Beirut

  1 shared

• Magid Shihade

  1 shared

• Sungmoon Kim

  Cambridge University Press

  1 shared

• Stuart Gray

  Washington and Lee University

  1 shared

• Yitzhak Dahan

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• David Easton Award from APSA
• International Ethics Best Book Award from ISA
• Best Book in Interdisciplinary Studies Award from ISA