'High Illiteracy': Dispatches from the Echo Chambers of the Muslim West

This work is a critique born of belonging, penned from the perspective of a believer who finds it harder each year to reconcile the expansiveness of revelation with the narrowness with which it is applied.

Across ten essays, sometimes satirical, sometimes sorrowful, but always serious, this work diagnoses the condition of ‘high illiteracy’. This is not an illiteracy of letters, but of meaning; not of information, but of interpretation. It is the inability to distinguish method from purpose, symbol from significance, the path from the destination. Moving between memoir, reportage, and argument, Imady travels through the echo chambers of the Muslim West: the flattened rituals of grief, the liturgy of the halal markup, the theatre of resistance politics, the fetish of ‘scientific miracles’, the obsolete conference circuit, and the suburban intellectual ghetto, pressing, at each stop, on bruises that are self-inflicted rather than imposed from without.

Unsparing and deeply personal, High Illiteracy asks Muslims in the West to reckon honestly with who they have become, and who they still might be, calling for a re-examination of the jagged and often harmful separation between content and context that reverberates through Muslim hearts, minds, and communities.

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