Peninsula Press, Bookshop.org, Amazon.com

Thoughtful, imaginative and erudite, Rakha’s book offers a vision of Arab-Muslim identity based in tolerance, diversity, and pride in global citizenship. A bold and timely collection that artfully challenges Arab-Muslim stereotypes.

Kirkus

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We are so lucky that in this beautiful book Youssef Rakha has done the hard work of reimagining what personal identity might look like if we take all of the lovely and necessary parts from our heritage and our former ambitions and discard the rest.

Maris Kreizman, author of I Want to Burn This Place Down

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This is it. This is the book. Postmuslim gives us back what centuries of essentialism, in-fighting and colonial thuggery have taken: a full, honest account of Muslim identity. Its history, its fractures, and its possible futures.

Noor Naga, author of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

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A whirling ballet of ideas, delivered with the strength of a boxer’s punch, on what it means to be male, Muslim and Arab in a world that hides its hostility to all three behind political benevolence and lofty ideals.

Bina Shah, author of A Monsoon War

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Intimate, searching, and wonderfully unruly, Postmuslim is an incisive and provocative meditation on faith, history, and belonging. Few writers have captured the intellectual and emotional complexities of contemporary Arab-Muslim identity with the acuity of Youssef Rakha. The collection’s central concept— the “post-Muslim”— feels both startlingly original and strangely familiar: one that captures the contradictions, inheritances, and freedoms of a generation, and offers a compelling new framework for thinking beyond the categorical prisons of postcolonial and post-imperial identity.

Saleem Haddad, author of Floodlines

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Postmuslim pulls into view the very human experience of Muslims living in the west in language that seeks truth above all else. Youssef Rakha has a poetic ability to bring meaning and spirit to geopolitical discourse that rejects the notion of objective storytelling, an urgency in today’s world. Postmuslim asks not only where Islamophobia stems from and how its consequences can be fatal, but how the interiority of daily Muslim life is brimming with contradiction, messiness and ecstasy.

Dalia Al-Dujaili, author of Babylon, Albion

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With erudition and wit, Rakha uses the genre of memoir to deliver a political tract to salvage a Muslim identity from the depredations of the genocidal imperialist and the hypocritical Islamist alike.

Hazem Jamjoum

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Postmuslim explores the past three decades of Islam’s clash with the West from a secular Muslim perspective, finding inspiration for the future in the multiculturalism embodied by the Ottoman Empire.

Publishers Weekly

All Coverage

Mentions in The Millions, Chicago Review of Books, Publisher’s Weekly, and Mizna

Excerpts in Joyland, Cutleaf Journal, Shenandoah, Kismet, and Guernica

Reviews in Kirkus, and The Brooklyn Rail