Tag: modernity
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Language is a Grandmother: The Long and Torturous Death of Urdu in America
Language is a Grandmother is a reckoning with the inheritance of Urdu for Muslims in America, seeking to provoke devastating self-interrogation in a critical moment: What will be the legacy of Urdu in America? What should be its legacy? What is Urdu’s relationship to Islam? The essay twins the life of Urdu with the life…
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Towards An Islamic Theory of Culture Part I: On Culture & The West
While the term “cultural studies” would not emerge as a distinguished academic discipline until the 1960s (with the establishment of the Centre for Cultural Studies in Birmingham), culture as an aspect of social life was first given serious consideration in the nineteenth century. During this period, many of the thinkers occupying the academic sphere of…
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7 Modern Deadly Sins and Misunderstandings: Inequality
In any given society, there are certain common sense moralisms ingrained within that culture. Certain aspects of ethical life and sentiments may be universal in nature and span multiple countries and continents, as part of a generalized weltanschauung. Yet, the particular way in which that ethic is practiced is always subject to cultural conditions and…
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Conceptualization of Islam as a ‘Religion’ and Possibility of the Secularist/Islamist Binary
The history of the modern Middle East is often narrated as a story of power struggles between competing ideologies. One such set of competing ideologies is Islamism and secularism. The aim of this paper is not to explore these ideologies in the light of Middle Eastern history and argue in favor of either one of…
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Hijab: Nicht mein Körper, nicht meine Entscheidung
Diese Reise, mich so zu bedecken und zu verhalten, dass es entsprechend meiner Annahme Gott gefallen und die Tatsache ehren würde, dass mein Körper nicht mir gehört, sondern etwas von Gott Anvertrautes (amanah) ist, war und ist nicht einfach: Millionen von muslimischen Frauen ringen damit.
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A Study of Worldviews: Islām and the Modern West, Part III: The Reign of Quantity
In the previous part, the notion of what I call ontological apathy was explored, which occurs when the reality of our place as humans in relation to God and nature is dissolved. In the worldview of Islām, we operate with the hierarchy of “ontology-epistemology-axiology-politics-economics,” and I have asserted that in the modern West, this hierarchy…
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A Study of Worldviews: Islām and the Modern West, Part II: Ontological Apathy
This article is part two of a series, you can find the part one here and part three here. In the last part, we established how the Islāmic civilization is built on a worldview that deems ontology as the highest determinative factor. This ontology, or pure metaphysics as Guénon calls it, concerns the Ultimate Reality,…
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A Study of Worldviews: Islām and the Modern West, Part I: Inversion
How do we make sense of reality? This is inarguably the most difficult question one can pose because it amounts to giving an explanation of everything. Even if we concede to the Heideggerian claim that metaphysics is inevitably nihilism, nihilism’s fundamental claim that there is no such thing as reality does constitute itself as an…
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近代性という「猛獣」を手懐ける―イスラーム的アプローチ―
ティモシー・ウィンター教授としても知られるアブドゥルハキーム・ムラド師は「虎を乗りこなす」という表現を用いて、近代性から退却するのではなく、敵対的あるいは友好的なアプローチをもって立ち向かうことを論じた。
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Dekonstrukcija zapadnih predstava o političkom islamu
Za zapadne posmatrače je nepoželjno postojanje političkog djelovanja sa metafizičkim referencama, jer je upečatljiva karakteristika savremenog doba to što je ono desakralizirano. Budući da je tako, islamsko političko djelovanje se, skoro po klišeu, posmatra u vezi sa bremenitim i analitički beskorisnim terminima kao što su „radikalizam“ i „fundamentalizam“. U najgorem slučaju, u vladajućim predstavama je…