Tag: western civilization
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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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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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Musings on The Impossible State
A Book Review of The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament by Wael Hallaq. For a beginner, The Impossible State (henceforth referred to as TIS) is an incomprehensible tome.