Islam and the West

It is said in the myths of the Greeks that the Phoenician Princess Europa was playing on the seacoast of her city of Tyre with her attendants when she was lured by the great Greek God Zeus who had disguised himself as a white bull and abducted her to Crete where he made her queen.

Mensen met een beperking krijgen van moslimgemeenschap in Nederland en (in het Westen) niet de aandacht die zij vanuit religieus, historisch en maatschappelijk oogpunt verdienen. En meer nog dan materiële zorg hebben zij behoefte aan geestelijke zorg, aldus de auteur Tijani Boulaouali.
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People with disabilities do not get the attention of Muslim community in the Netherlands and (in the West) that they deserve from a religious, historical and social perspective. And even more than material care they need spiritual care, says the author Tijani Boulaouali.
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الشريحة ذات الاحتياجات الخاصة لا تتلقى الاهتمام الكافي من المجتمع الإسلامي في هولندا والغرب، الذي يضمنه لها الدين الإسلامي. وأكثر من ذلك فهي لا تحتاج الرعاية المادية فقط، بل العناية الروحية أيضا، حسب التجاني بولعوالي.

Muhammad Asad, (1900 – 1992) is a Jewish-born Austro-Hungarian born journalist who reverted to Islam, in his book “Islam at the Cross Roads” Muhammad Asad (1934) writes, “Many of Western civilizations historical experiences are deeply tinged by a strange animosity towards Islam.  To some extent this also is an inheritance from Europe's antiquity.  The Greeks and the Romans regarded only themselves as "civilized", while everything foreign, and particularly everything living to the east of the Mediterranean, bore the label "barbarian".  Since that time the Occidentals have believed that their racial superiority over the rest of mankind is a matter of fact; and the more or less pronounced contempt for non-European races and nations is one of the standing features of Western civilization.  This alone, however, is not enough to explain its feeling as regards Islam.  Here, and here alone, the Western attitude is not one of mere indifference, as in the case of other "foreign" religions and cultures: it is one of deep-rooted and almost fanatical aversion; and it is not only intellectual but bears an intensely emotional tint. The West may not accept the doctrines of Buddhist or Hindu philosophy, but it will always preserve a balanced, reflective attitude of mind with regard to those systems.  As soon, however, as it turns towards Islam, the balance is disturbed and an emotional bias creeps in” (Asad, 1934, p. 49).

Alija Ali Izetbegović (1925-2003) is one of the outstanding Muslim thinkers in recent history who have re-conceptualized the Islamic worldview and ethos in the context of the contemporary world on the one hand and critically reflected upon the modern Western civilization, on the other. Izetbegović conceives Islam as a system representing a middle path between Christian spiritualism and materialism of modern civilization. However, like any profound philosophical system, his thought requires exposition and interpretation, which the present paper ventures to undertake. Specifically, the paper inquires whether and how far his vision of Islam facilitates coexistence between Muslims and the others, especially regarding the Muslims living in Western societies. The query is crucial because some writers have accused Izetbegović of being a fundamentalist who pursued an agenda of monolithic Islamic culture with little room for meaningful participation of non-Muslims. The paper concludes that c...

“I myself,” stated C. S. Lewis to his fellows during his inaugural address at Cambridge University, “belong far more to that Old Western order than to yours.”  In the same speech, Lewis went further to identify himself as a “dinosaur” and “an Old Western Man.” Prima facie these comments seem straightforward enough, but under close scrutiny, does Lewis’ identification of himself as an “Old Western Man” mean anything, and if so, what?

روشنفکری/ روشنفکر، اصطلاحی متداول در دورة جدید برای قشری از دانشوران جامعه که غالباً در حوزه فرهنگ و سیاست مشتغل به اندیشة سنجشگرانه‌ و درپی تأثیرگذاری اجتماعی‌اند. دشوار بتوان تعریفی همه‌پسند از روشنفکر به‌دست داد؛ هم به این دلیل که غالباً مفروضات مختلف ایدئولوژیک بر تعیین خاستگاه و وظیفة این قشر تأثیر می‌نهند و هم به دلیل تداعیِ‌ لفظیِ غلط‌اندازِ واژة روشنفکر در زبان فارسی که معادلی درست برای هیچ‌یک از واژه‌های مشابه خود در زبانهای اروپایی نیست (← ادامة‌ مقاله). مشهورترین معادل‌های اصطلاح روشنفکر در زبان عربی، مُثَقَّف، مُفَکِّر، مُستَنیر و إنتلجِنسیا و در زبان ترکی، آیدین ، مُنِوِّر  و اِنتلکتوئل  است. این مقاله تلقی‌های گوناگون از مفهوم روشنفکری و نیز مهمترین مسائل تاریخ روشنفکری در ایران را در سه بخش بررسی می‌کند:
(1) مقدمه‌ای درباره واژه‌ی روشنفکر در زبان فارسی و زمینه‌های ظهور روشنفکری در غرب؛
(2) روشنفکری از نگاه اندیشوران ایرانی؛
(3) مسائل روشنفکران ایرانی.

در بخش سوم مسائل روشنفکران در نگاهی کلی، ناظر بر شش موضوع اصلی دانسته شده که هریک دربردارنده‌ی طیفی از نظریه‌ها و راهبردهای رهایی‌بخش در میان دو قطب متقابل است و در قالب شش دوگانه‌ی زیر دسته‌بندی می‌شود:
الف) دوگانه‌ی سنت و تجدد؛
ب) دوگانه‌ی دوگانة دین و علم؛
ج) دوگانه‌ی تکلیف و حق؛
د) دوگانه‌ی شرق و غرب؛
هـ) دوگانه‌ی عدالت و آزادی؛
و) دوگانه‌ی انقلاب و اصلاح.

ذیل هریک از این دوگانه‌ها، پرسشهای متنوعی قرار می‌گیرد که می‌تواند ناظر به دولت یا جامعه،‌ ناظر به خدا یا انسان، ناظر به شخص یا ساختار، ناظر به فرد یا جمع، و از همه مهمتر ناظر به قدرت سیاسی یا قدرت مذهبی یا قدرت عرفی باشد. راهبردهای رهایی‌بخش روشنفکران گاه مبتنی بر یکی از‌ سویه‌های این دوگانه‌ها‌، گاه برپایه‌ی آشتی‌دادن دو سوی مختلف و ایجاد سنتزی از آنها، و گاه بربنیان فرارفتن از موقعیت دوگانه بنا شده‌است.

The unedited presentation text for my first effort at treating Islam and the terror of the other at a shared conference between The Sorbonne and United Arab Emirates University in 2009. This paper focuses on Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, with minor reflections on John Le Carre's A Most Wanted Man, looking at how the novels "grapple . . . with the implications of the implicit and explicit forms of power now wielded by Islam as a nation among nations."

This article considers the antipathy between the Anglo-Saxon West and Islam and between the various strands of Islamic thought through the self-regulating biopolitics of Foucault. It looks at the mechanisms infused with power that led to these traditions conviction that they are the harbingers of truth and that this should be the global standard against which we judge our behaviour. It argues that Foucault provides a useful insight into why people are so convinced by, and regulate themselves according to a single interpretation, so that alternatives seem strange, misguided irrational and so requiring of intervention (false traditions like people should be subject to normalisation).  It further argues that the well-established mechanisms of governmentality account for the West’s unified approach, an overarching apparatus of truth absent from the Islamic world that accounts for Islam’s factional nature and for the internecine conflicts that so often afflict the region. It argues then that Foucault provides the tools that not only explain conflict between traditions but within less institutionalised interpretations. Finally, the article addresses Foucault’s religious teachings to explain what it is about the Middle East that compels the West to interfere so frequently in its affairs.

This chapter addresses the issue of religious authority in Berlin Sufi communities in the context of native European converts to Islam and second-generation Muslims who are born to Sufi followers (murids).
It will discuss the following research questions. How is religious authority in Western Sufi groups constructed, and how does it affect interreligious and intrareligious conversions? How does the presence of many native European converts affect local Sufi communities? How do these European converts view Islamic normative tradition and express their religious identity? And how do they influence the defining discourses of local Sufi communities?
I will particularly address intrareligious conversion, regarded here as a
process of religious learning and gradual adoption of religious norms and
practices in Sufi communities. This chapter will also address the institutionalization and collective expressions of religious authority in some Sufi communities in Berlin, namely in the Sufi Center Rabbaniyya and the Tariqah Burhaniyya.

Depictions of the West abound in the propaganda produced by the self-proclaimed “Islamic State,” presenting to potentially sympathetic audiences an overwhelmingly negative image of a supposedly homogeneous political entity. Combining quantitative and qualitative language and visual analysis, we systematically expose the various facets of this image and analyze the overall picture. Drawing on the “clash of civilizations” literature as well as on research on extremist language, we conceptualize this presentation of the West as a powerful radicalizing voice shaping today’s global civilizational politics.

This contribution interprets the east-central European post-liberal governments’
recent anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-human-rights hysteria in the context of the increasing dependence of the region’s societies for livelihood on employment in the western EU, the widespread racialization of east European labor in the western EU, and the refusal of east European political elites and societies at large to consider possible “Left” critiques of the EU. Given those circumstances, and laboring under related anxieties, post-state-socialist political elites and societies have assumed a fundamentalist-racialist posture. They redirect their repressed anger toward incoming refugees, claim an ahistorical, essential kind of Whiteness and contribute to rigidifying European discussions of “race.”

To access the article, please follow the link to the publisher https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/unbearable-whiteness-of-the-polish-plumber-and-the-hungarian-peacock-dance-around-race/59244B15CB295020E51DF252BDA76604.

If the above link does not work, please look up Slavic Review in your own institution's library website and download the paper from there.

If that fails, please contact the authors at jborocz@rutgers.edu or jborocz@gmail.com or msarkar@binghamton.edu and they will be happy to provide a copy. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If the idea of the medieval has been widely deployed in the colonial and neocolonial West as a marker of cultural backwardness, the Anglo-American perspective has often regarded Spain as part of a historically underdeveloped world and as a late-comer to Protestant/Enlightenment traditions of democracy, tolerance, and progress. Yet the many cultural dimensions of medieval Iberia make it pressingly relevant to current critiques of western modernity. This volume, which brings into dialogue historians and literary scholars in medieval and modern Iberian cultures, interrogates the contemporary significance of the distant Spanish past, particularly in regard to tensions in the relationship between the West and Islam. Rejecting an illusory space of neutrality, the search for relevance is envisioned as an ethically and politically necessary form of inquiry.

Peter the Venerable’s apologetic writings against Islam did not constitute a problematic document, as some scholars seem to suggest, related to a new style of approach to the Muslim world intended both as separate and opposite to the strictly military one, but could be instead interpreted as an ideological justification of a kind of “intellectual crusade” conducted by the clergy and rooted, according to the intention of the Abbot of Cluny, on a supposed “objective” knowledge of Islam. The composition of these texts is situated in the general frame of the Reconquista (722-1492) of the territories under the Islamic power by the Christian armies, having been written at the core of this historical process. Although some passages seem to manifest a wider pastoral interest, as addressed to the Muslim world as such, however a careful reading of the texts suggests a different interpretation. Actually, the writings of Peter the Venerable should be understood as a programmatic intellectual project aiming at the conversion of Muslims living in the territories reconquered by the Christian monarchs and, at the same time, at preserving the Christian populations from converting to Islam. The texts’ ideological frame is rooted in the notion of Islam as an “heresy” which, beyond a strict theological perspective, define the ideological asset of the Catholic Church in the midst of the struggle for the spiritual and consequentially political supremacy of the Christian world after the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the idea of Latinitas Cristiana, at the core of the notion of Europe as a singular political reality, as intended and promoted by the Papacy.

South Asia’s encounter with Western colonialism preceded that of the Arab world, arguably rendering it more sensitive to the intellectual challenges implicit in political subjugation. Consequently, scholars of South Asian Islam, such as Francis Robinson, have highlighted its role historically more as an exporter than as an importer of reformist ideas, particularly during the decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The subject of this book, Shaykh Abu al-Hasan Ali Nadwi (1915–99), exemplifies both these tendencies through his life and works. First, he confronts head-on the challenges posed to Muslim civilization by Western cultural and political hegemony. Second, through a corpus of eloquent and passionate Arabic publications and frequent lecture tours abroad, he speaks to the trauma of a post-colonial Arab world still reeling with the shock of its inglorious place in the new global political order.

FULL BOOK REVIEW CAN BE ACCESSED HERE: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/h4ra9XG7a9gDYEs8Gn5A/full

This article sets out to define the role of Islam in the early modern emergence of a Christianized transatlantic sphere that was to stand at the origins of our contemporary notion of "the West". Part One discusses various sources and scholarly opinions with regards to the role played by Islam in the European-Christian discovery, conquest and settlement of South America. It shows that, in spite of early Muslim ventures into the Atlantic, the Islamic sphere ultimately failed to take advantage of its Atlantic coastlines in the medieval period. Part Two argues that, from the early modern period onwards, the Islamic sphere was systematically sidelined by Christian maritime powers in their quest for dominance over the Atlantic sphere. Part Three explains how these European-Christian efforts to deny Islam access to the Americas are reflected in the early modern Muslim documentation of the Americas, to the extent that the earliest description and history of South America in Arabic, dealt with in Part Four, was written as late as two centuries after Columbus reached the Caribbean by a Christian, i.e. the Chaldean priest Ilyās b. Ḥannā al-Mawṣilī from Baghdad. Against this backdrop, the article concludes with some reflections on the significance of this documentary evidence for the emergence of the transatlantic sphere known as "the West" in English, "al-gharb" in Arabic, a sphere that was almost untouched by Islam until the twentieth century.

Since the early years of European contact with the Muslim East, hijab, in general, and the veil, in particular, have been seen by Westerners as symbols of the Islamic degradation and oppression of women. Interestingly, this perception has arisen almost exclusively without any input from Muslim women (or even Muslims in general) and without any attempt to understand why women who choose to veil do so. This essay seeks to critically examine this Western perception in an attempt to determine (1) whether it is reasonable and (2) from where it originates. It opens by giving some context to the Islamic understanding of the veil and outlining the meaning of hijab and how these terms will be used in this paper. Secondly, it briefly judges whether the perception is warranted based on Qur’anic hijab and modesty prescriptions and related later hadith and interpretive (tafsir, or exegesis) writings alongside commentary by later Muslim scholars. Third, this essay examines two potential origins – both historical and contemporary – of the Western view of the veil and its subsequent intolerance toward Islam. It also explores modern secularism as a potential perpetrator of this stereotypical modern Western view of Muslim women and the veil. Ultimately, the essay advocates an appropriate response to the Muslim veil for Australia today.

Orientalisme telah lama dipandang pejoratif oleh dunia Islam. Hal ini disebabkan oleh pandangan dan persepsi kaum Muslimin atas karya-karya orientalis dan para sarjana Barat yang umumnya menggambarkan Islam secara distortif. Beratus-ratus tahun Islam digambarkan secara tidak akurat dan bahkan disalahfahami. Di satu sisi, secara historis, seperti diungkapkan kritikus orientalisme paling menonjol, Edward Said, gambaran-gambaran salah tentang Islam dan Timur dalam orientalisme memang dengan sengaja diproduksi sebagai proyek Barat untuk mempertahankan dominasi politik dan ekonominya atas dunia Islam. Tapi, di sisi lain, gudang koleksi raksasa tentang literatur keislaman yang tersimpan baik dalam perpustakaan-perpustakaan universitas Barat, tidak bisa dinafikkan juga. Koleksi itu juga merupakan blessing in disguise (berkah, hikmah) karena dampak positifnya yang luas dan tidak terduga. Dampak positif itu berupa kontribusi terhadap perkembangan studi Islam yang luas, terbuka, gambaran Islam menjadi lebih historis dan sosiologis yang memberikan informasi dan pemahaman yang lebih realistis tentang sejarah Islam. Yang tak terduga kemudian adalah orientalisme berfungsi ibarat bumerang. Awalnya seperti diungkap Said adalah usaha Barat untuk mendominasi Timur, tapi diam-diam ia justru berdampak positif pada proses pengenalan Islam lebih luas di Barat terutama dalam wliayah akademik dan bahkan pada kebangkitan Islam sendiri.

Murad’s Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions is a rare and profound book. It consists of 100 pithy aphorisms - termed "contentions" - on a diverse array of topics ranging through ethics, cosmology, metaphysics, theology, law and history. Each contention is a terse distillation of Murad's often exquisitely crafted ruminations on a given matter followed by his own compressed elucidation (the commentary).  Though sometimes abstruse and esoteric, the book weaves itself into a dense, multi-faceted tapestry of insights into a range of contemporary issues that concern the religious mind.

Bernard the Monk's Itinerarium is a ten-page guidebook for pilgrims traveling from Rome and Bari to Babylon and Jerusalem. It has not been studied as a source for Mediterranean history. Bernard shows how the late ninth-century Mediterranean economy was characterized by religious ideology. Islam and Christianity acted differently in establishing the "ethos" of an economy of exchange. While Muslim law and authority channeled the exchange, Christian apocalypticism wished for its end. Bernard's apocalypticism was in particular a response to the Muslim occupation of southern Italy. Such a response has been regarded as typical of the "age of ignorance" about Islam. But Bernard was surprisingly knowledgeable, and his account illustrates a largely unknown chapter in the history of the Christian encounter with Islam.

I have conducted a study on Human Rights. I have made some sincere efforts to enlighten the importance of Human Rights in Islam and tried to address the misconceptions of western countries against the religion of Islam. It is concluded that Islam is the pioneer of Human Rights, and it is the best religion; nonetheless, the leaders and people of Islamic countries are responsible for the deteriorating conditions of Islam. Because due to their ignorance of Islamic principles, the adversaries of Islam cannot correctly understand and learn from them.

(LC Class No.): JQ1809.A8 R4435 2018

[You may download the introduction and the summary and conclusion sections here, (some 45 pages + bibliography)] [those who need futher information about the subjects  may e-mail at me cengizdinc1971@gmail.com ]
[This book is a shortened and simplified version of my PhD thesis,
completed in the autumn of 2005, University of Bradford] (https://www.savaskitap.com/Cengiz-Dinc_ar_3223)

http://www.kitapavrupa.com/kitap/debating-islamism-modernity-and-the-west-in-turkey-the-role-of-welfare-refah-party-/448256.html&filter_name=cengiz%20din%C3%A7

https://www.amazon.com/Debating-Islamism-Modernity-West-Turkey/dp/6052328665

This study focuses on the Welfare Party elite’s conceptualisation of modernity
during the party’s last 4-5 years before its closure in 1998. Since
the party was the most important Islamist organisation in Turkey, it was
at an important point of interaction between Islamism and modernity.
The study tries to determine the significance of the WP discourse on key
modernisation issues by answering such questions as how the WP elite
conceptualised modernity; how this conceptualisation was formulated,
constructed and what was modernity’s relationship with the West in their
view. It argues that, the WP elite had a distinct (Islamist) understanding
of modernity which, despite its differences in its approach to some basic
issues (e.g. secularism) overall remained within modernity by sharing
most of its major characteristics. The WP elite, similar to many other
Islamist movements, advocated a more Islamic (less secular and less
Westernising) route to modernity; and they could not be considered as
anti-modernists.
The study contributes towards a better understanding of the critical role
that a version of Islamism plays in Turkey’s politics and process of modernisation
and provides insights about the impact of Western modernity
on the sizeable Islamist section. The study employs important concepts
such as secularisation, nationalism, the modern state, economic development
(science, technology, industrialisation), capitalism and democracy
as important components of modernity. An analysis of the views of the
WP elite with regard to these concepts and processes serves to better understanding
the Islamist stance towards the particular path of modernisation
in Turkey, modernity in general, and also the West.

Founded in 1952 by the Palestinian jurist Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani (1909-1977), Hizb ut-Tahrir’s (HT) raison d’être is the re-establishment of the Caliphate. HT currently has a presence in over forty countries, an estimated membership of a million people, and some millions of supporters across the world. My dissertation examines how HT’s formulation of the caliphate—particularly as it expresses itself in Britain—functions as a site of “Muslim modernity.” It is my contention, in other words, that HT’s ideas of the caliphate are inseparable from, and are thought through—consciously and unconsciously—modern western notions of being and thinking which permeate “the unconscious of knowledge” for people around the world, for the crucial reason that colonialism fundamentally reconfigured knowledge systems across the world, not least the Muslim world. I argue, in other words, that contemporary modes of being Muslim—whether religiously, politically, culturally, ethically—are necessarily inflected by modern western notions of being, as they form the backdrop to our global sense of being in the world. As such, HT’s modern Islamic political project—or any Islamic project, for that matter—is not so much an alien mode of thinking about politics—or ethics, or culture, or religion, or what have you—vis-à-vis western modes of being and thinking, but rather is part and parcel of modern western life writ large.

Orientalism is a western style of thinking that sees the Orient as an object of study stigmatized with otherness.  In this style of thinking, the Orient is represented as a passive object, which is detached from its history and past and is seen as the “other”. As Mladen Dolar said in the introduction of the Sultan’s Court book, two critical thinkers who dealt with Western ideas about the Orient are Edward Said and Alain Grosrichard. They argued that those ideas were largely a misrepresentation of the East, arising from prejudices, bias, imaginations and ideological interests of the Western societies.  Clearly, orientalist representations do not exhibit a realistic picture, thus they are the tools that constitute the imagined knowledge for the description of the East. This imagined Orient often creates longing, option and faraway perfection for the East, by imagining the East as something different to the West, something exotic and something mystified. For orientalism, this mystery of the East is something attractive and something to be discovered. Over time, the approach of the Western orientalists towards the East has changed its direction. It started with the Enlightenment period in which their approach is one with the spirit of curiosity and inquiry and continued with the spirit of fascination and nostalgia. Finally, orientalist discovery ends with the Colonial period where intervention and exploitation are the main motives.

This edited volume examines the multifaceted concept of ʿilm in Islam — its agency and manifestations in the connected realms of science, religion, and the arts. The aim is to explore the Islamic civilisational responses to major shifts in the concept of ‘knowledge’ that took place in the post-mediaeval period, and especially within the context of the ‘early modern’. From the perspective of this volume, as shown by the multiple perspectives of the authors, the true value of knowledge lies in its cross-civilisational reach, as when the development of knowledge in pre-modern Islam exerted profound changes onto the Europeans, whose resurgence in the early modern period has in turn forced massive changes onto the Islamic worldview and its systems of knowledge. Now the landscape of knowledge has significantly changed, the Muslim mind, which has been historically calibrated to be particularly sensitive towards knowledge, can and should open to new horizons of knowing where science, religion, and art can meet again on freshly cultivated and intellectually fertile grounds.