Tag: modernity
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The Long Way Home: A Review of ‘Putting Everything in Its Proper Place’
Introduction This past Ramadan, the legendary Malaysian sufi and academician, Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas returned to the mercy of His Lord; a beautiful return for a life spent in service of the Qur’an. Many contemporary scholars regard him as the mujaddid (reviver) of the era owing to the incomparable gravitas that his oeuvre that stretches…
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The Rise of Political Salafism in Bangladesh and Its Challenge to Traditional Sunni Authority
Bangladesh has a distinctive presence in global perceptions of the Muslim world. Its religious character has been shaped not by militant orthodoxy but by a multi-layered, syncretic Sunni culture that is bound up in centuries of Ḥanafī jurisprudence, Sufi devoutness and vernacular Islamic expression, with approximately 150 million Muslims making it the third-largest Muslim-majority nation…
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Asabiyyah, Social Cohesion, and Moral Renewal: Ibn Khaldūn’s Insights for Contemporary Muslim Societies
The rapid movement to urban centers has disrupted traditional family ties and the sense of community within neighborhoods, while the overwhelming reach of digital connectivity has, paradoxically, diminished the richness of daily interactions that once fostered moral responsibility. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) stands out among pre-modern thinkers due to his systematic approach to analyzing the…
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The Fictional Thirst and Postmodern Hunger
“Verily, hardship is followed by ease.” -Quran 94:6 Fiction is valued for its magnificent ability to portray lived ideologies in metaphorical form. Such portrayals are assessed, positively or negatively, according to how persuasively their metaphors are developed and sustained. Recently, I happened to choose a work that struck me as a generative metaphor. South Korean…
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Sharīʿah in the Modern World: Reviewing Mashal Ayobi’s ‘The Light We Lost’
A Book Review of The Light We Lost: Grappling with Shariah in the Modern World by Mashal Ayobi The aftermath of the catastrophic Bondi shooting, and the start of Zohran Mamdani’s term as Mayor of New York, has put Muslims, terrorism, the Sharīʿah and the like back into the limelight of oriental focus, the favored…
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Industrial Islamism and Manipulation in Turkiye
Industrial Islamism dismantles the common assumption that Islamism in modern Turkey arose primarily from cultural nostalgia or religious resentment against Westernization. Instead, he locates its roots in the rise of a distinct social class, the faubourgeoisie, that emerged from Turkey’s accelerated post-Cold-War industrialization.
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Fasting as an Entry into a Transcendent Cosmic Realm
The author explores the crisis of meaning within modernity, emphasizing the loss of metaphysical grounding and identity amid neoliberal consumerism. It presents fasting as a transformative practice, aligning the self with divine attributes and serving as a resistance against hyper-individualism. Fasting purifies the soul, bridging human experience with transcendence and spiritual elevation.
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The Artist and the Nafs in Modernity
This epitomizes the phenomena of the modern artist, marketing themselves as a part of the art, rendering the art and its meaning as secondary. The commercialization of art and the aggrandization of the self become imperative in propelling the artist’s quest for financial gain. In essence, art is now judged on its ability to be…
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Spiker’s Hierarchy & Freedom: A Case For Akbarianism Against the Poverty of Modernity
Hasan Spiker’s most recent work, Hierarchy & Freedom, explores the historical/philosophical relationship between “hierarchy” and “freedom” in Western thought, providing a convincing case for Platonism and its innate hierarchical structures in opposition to the empirical, positivistic philosophical structure forwarded by the West.
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Lessons on the Pitfalls of Modernity in ‘The Road to Mecca’
Muhammad Asad’s autobiographical account The Road to Mecca (1954) is a fine work that moves between various genres, including historical narration, adventure tale and conversion story, presenting numerous entertaining anecdotes. More intriguing, however, is the unique and fascinatingly nuanced insight that Asad (formerly Leopold Weiss), gives into a soulless and lost Europe of the early…