Meet the Author: Imposing Modernity in the Global South with Omer Awass

We are pleased to invite you to the first Meet the Author event of this semester. Our guest will be Dr. Omer Awass, Resident Scholar at the Open Academy for the Study of Islamic Spirituality (OASIS), who will present his new book Imposing Modernity in the Global South: Studies of Coloniality and Decoloniality in Muslim Societies and States (Bristol University Press, 2026). The book is about to be published, and this will be the first time Dr. Awass talks about it with an audience, so we are especially glad to host this conversation at MEDIT.

The book traces the colonial foundations of modernity in non-Western contexts and challenges Eurocentric accounts of it. Focusing on Muslim societies, it looks at how empire, secularism, capitalism and the nation-state have shaped political, economic and social life, and how states and societies in the Global South continue to adapt to and resist a hegemonic modernity.