Audio Interview: Dr. Omer Awass on Value-Inversion Theory, the World-System, the Global Power-Field, Peripheralization, Instrumental Rationality and Bureaucracy
In this exclusive Waywards interview, Dr. Omer Awass, associate professor of Arabic & Islamic Studies at American Islamic College in Chicago, Illinois, answers questions about the theory he put forward in his recently published article, “Reconceptualizing Secularization and Secularism: The Value-Inversion Theory,” and about what he wrote in two articles authored for the Journal of World-Systems Research, “Outlines of a Global Power-Field (GPF) Theory (Part 1),” and “The New Shape of the Global Power-Field (GPF) After the Transformation of the Modern World-System Post-WWII (Part. 2).” As Dr. Awass noted during the interview, he also authored the essay, “Contending with Capitalism: Fatwas and Neoliberal Ideology,” for the JWSR. Early in the conversation, Dr. Awass and I spoke briefly about a reported essay I wrote and interviewed him for several months ago, “Understanding the Modern World-System in the Longue Durée,” which was published by The Long Now in late March.
Our recent interview took place via Zoom on June 14. Since I no longer have an institutional Zoom account, our initial session was limited to 40 minutes. Given the time constraints, we conducted the interview in two consecutive Zoom meetings. I spliced the audio recorded from both sessions together. You can find and listen to the embedded interview audio below the photo of Dr. Awass and the bio he shared.
Omer Awass
Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies American Islamic College
Chicago, IL.
Omer Awass is an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American Islamic College in Chicago, IL. He completed his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Temple University. His current research interests center on religion, modernity, and globalization. He has been carrying out field research on contemporary fatwas across the Muslim world to assess how they are negotiating their postcolonial realities. His book Fatwa and the Making and Renewal of Islamic Law is published by Cambridge University Press (2023). He has recently published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of World-Systems Research, Journal of Critical Historical Studies, and the Sociology of Islam Journal. He has spent more than thirteen years of his life studying, researching, and teaching in various African and Asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Morocco, Kenya, Senegal, and Tanzania. In the summer of 2022 and the winter of 2023, he studied Mandarin in Taiwan. This undertaking is paving the way for his long-term research project in comparative civilization between China and the Muslim World.