Firas Alkhateeb

Instructor at @DarulQasim, PhD in Islamic intellectual history and Ottoman studies from UChicago, occasional woodworking

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

I will never stop making fun of NYC culture. Caricature city.

[Bradeaux @BradeauxNBA]

Knicks fans are hilarious 🤣

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

@TheoKnights Absolutely devastating. It was such a vibrant department a decade ago. The way they’ve gutted it is unforgivable.

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

That ‘99 Knicks run was unbelievable. I still think they win that series if Patrick Ewing wasn’t injured.

[Basketball Forever @bballforever_]

It's a 1999 FINALS REMATCH 😤

The last time the Spurs and Knicks played in the NBA Finals, Rick Brunson, Jalen's dad was on the team 🤯

[RoadtoRoots @aRoadtoRoots]

Help us take learning back to its roots, this Zhull Hijjah - give to an initiative dedicated to giving young Muslims transformative learning experiences.

https://t.co/9bNstmd3Il

[RoadtoRoots @aRoadtoRoots]

Crossing Over: The Lost Art of Muslim Travel https://t.co/rQXzM1MyPI

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

@thesubmitter_ Hüseyin Yılmaz’s “Caliphate Redefined” is probably the best resource on this.

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

Our engagement with modernity needs to go beyond blind imitation and conservatism and actually explore new ideas, particularly in the realm of political theory. What has been tried so far simply hasn’t worked.

New post. Link in the next tweet:

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

Ottomans and Mamluks as Models for the 21st Century: On engaging the Islamic content in changing socio-political contexts

https://t.co/ePG13aPq9o

[ًً @kelevitch]

The nation-state is not the natural political unit of Muslim civilization
And Muslims unconsciously know it, which is why every Muslim-majority country has an identity crisis baked into its constitution.
The nation-state requires you to locate sovereignty in a people, a territory, a ethnicity. But Islamic political theology locates sovereignty in Allah, with the umma as the collective body cutting across blood, land, and language by design. These are not compatible operating systems.

So what happened post-colonialism is that Muslim societies inherited the French or British state model, tried to run Islamic social expectations through it, and got permanent institutional schizophrenia.

Turkey tried to resolve it by amputating Islam. Egypt tried to suppress it. Iran tried to fuse them and got theocratic bureaucracy. The Gulf states paper over it with oil money.
None of them solved it because the form itself is the problem.

The caliphate gets dismissed as medieval fantasy but the people dismissing it never explain what legitimate political theology actually looks like for a civilization that never agreed that Caesar and God occupy separate domains.
The West worked out Westphalia because it needed to stop its religious wars. That settlement was theirs to make.
Muslims were never at that table. They just woke up one day already living inside the conclusion.

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

Is this the Orthodox Christian version of Muslims insisting that we were better off being the colonized instead of the colonizers because of some supposed moral superiority?

[Darul Qasim College @DarulQasim]

Introducing Tafsir Guidance — a research initiative and scholarly platform of the Tafsir Department at Darul Qasim College dedicated to advancing rigorous Quranic scholarship through original research, critical inquiry, and methodologically grounded study. 

Learn more: https://t.co/ZltaonODwO

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

Time to once again make a joke that’ll fly over the heads of literally all my students.

Side note: The time between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the release of “Take Me Out” is only about 4x as long as the time between the release of “Take Me Out” and now. I’m old.

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

It’s time for my annual joke about WWI starting due to the assassination of an alt-indie rock band from the early 2000s that will fly over all my students heads.

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

There’s a time and a place for actual scholarship and deep engagement with issues like this. YQ would rather sow discord in a public setting because he thinks that’s what scholarship is. He has consistently shown that he has neither shame nor wisdom.

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

Yasir Qadhi is a fool who wants everyone else to be as confused as he is. He’s spent his entire adult life jumping from one ideological controversy to another chasing after views & likes.

He’s a second rate scholar & Dr. Brown was smart to not take the bait & join YQ in the mud.

[Hallvard Holte @HallvardHolte]

Yasir Qadhi absolutely throws Jonathan AC Brown off balance with this curveball. I really admire just how blunt and direct YQ so often dares to be in addressing such very difficult questions. Not meant as a criticism of Brown, but YQ is infamous for this. Refreshing. Alpha.

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

@TariqMK_ Yeah I never use AI images at all. I instruct Claude to come up with a theme and layouts while leaving blank areas on each slide to import images.

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

Hating on generative AI is in vogue and legitimate.

But being able to upload lecture slides with no design to Claude and have it output this is pretty insane.

Yeah, a real graphic designer would be better. But that was never an option anyways. This makes design more accessible.

[Fons Vitae Books @FonsVitae]

JUST PUBLISHED: The Harmonious Unity · Liu Zhi’s Sino-Islamic Interpretation of the Five-Fold Path

https://t.co/Bqk34OAoux

[Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) @Open_ITI]

One of the bigger obstacles to creating manuscript-based digital corpora using HTR models has been the fact that Islamicate manuscripts often use very complex, non-horizontal text layouts, this page from a late 18th c. Persian, Arabic, and Kurdish anthology a very apt example:

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

@salwanajmart

[Firas Alkhateeb @khateeb88]

This is silly and reductionist. Andalus didn’t fall because ulama were being ulama.

Arguments like this are thinly veiled attacks on the Islamic intellectual tradition itself instead of a serious engagement with historical sources.

[Mohsin Farooq @alabdulfaqeer]

At a time when Muslim Spain was facing it's final decline, and the Crusaders were steadily advancing, capturing one Muslim territory after another, the scholars of the land had become entangled in such trivial debates as whether it was permissible for a woman to remove facial ++