The American Sufis: Self-Help, Sufism, and Metaphysical Religion in Postcolonial Egypt

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (04) ◽  
pp. 864-893
Author(s):  
Arthur Shiwa Zárate
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
World Today ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Metaphysical Religion ◽  
American Thought ◽  
Contemporary Islam

AbstractThis article examines an Arabic commentary on the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, written by a one-time leading intellectual of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muḥammad al-Ghazālī. Ghazālī’s 1956 commentary was perhaps the earliest manifestation of an influential genre of literature within the Islamic world today: “Islamic self-help.” Although scholars treat Islamic self-help as an effect of neoliberalism, this article reorients the study of Islamic self-help beyond neoliberalism by showing first, that Ghazālī’s early version of it emerged through a critical engagement with several ideological forms that relate in complex ways to neoliberalism's antecedent, liberalism; and second, that his Islamic self-help is best understood in terms of an Islamic encounter with American metaphysical religion made possible by Carnegie's text. It argues that Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help constituted a radical reconfiguration of Western self-help, one that replaced the ethics of self-reliance and autonomy with Islamic ethical sensibilities clustered around the notions of human insufficiency and dependence upon God. In doing so, it highlights how scholars of contemporary Islam might fruitfully pose the question of how novel intellectual trends and cultural forms, like self-help, become Islamic, instead of limiting their analysis to how Islam is reshaped by modern Euro-American thought, institutions, and practices.

scholarly journals Why Islam (Properly Understood) Is the Solution

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 137-145
Author(s):  
Nader Hashemi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This paper is a provocative play on the famous Muslim Brotherhood slogan al-Islām hūwa al-ḥāl (Islam is the solution). While critics of the Muslim Brothers rightly criticized them for the simplicity of their worldview in thinking that religion was a panacea for all of the problems confronting Muslim societies during the late twentieth century, an argument can be made that religion does profoundly matter in the context of the struggle for democracy in the Arab-Islamic world. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, democratic transitions in North Africa and the Middle East will be dependent on democratically negotiating the question of religion’s role in politics. Here I provide some reflections on this topic with a focus on Tunisia’s transition to democracy.  

scholarly journals Kepesatan Pembangunan dan Pemodenan Angkatan Tentera Malaysia (ATM) di Era Perang Dingin dan Pasca Perang Dingin

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (12) ◽  
pp. 160-169
Author(s):  
Ahmad Shah Pakeer Mohamed ◽  
Nazariah Osman ◽  
Mohamad Faisol Keling
Keyword(s):  
Self Help ◽  
Self Reliance

“Fenomena anarki” telah mempengaruhi kebanyakan negara untuk memberikan tumpuan dan perhatian terhadap pembangunan Angkatan ketenteraan bagi menjamin keselamatan untuk tujuan kelangsungan hidup. Manakala merujukkan kepada teori neo-realisme, teori ini mengatakan dilema keselamatan sebagai situasi yang sentiasa ada ancaman yang cuba untuk menggugat keselamatan negara mahupun ianya dari bentuk unsur ancaman tradisional mahupun dari unsur dari ancaman bukan dari tradisional. Akibat dari senario keselamatan dan sifat anarki dalam sistem antarabangsa, keadaan ini akan menyebabkan negara perlu bergantung pada diri sendiri untuk kelangsungan hidup. Ini merujuk kepada konsep self help atau self reliance di mana setiap negara mempunyai kepentingan negara mereka tersendiri dalam meneruskan kelangsungan hidup dalam sistem antarabangsa. Melihat dari sudut Angkatan Tentera Malaysia (ATM,) perspektif pembangunan dan pemodenan ATM semasa era Perang Dingin dan Pasca Perang Dingin ternyata mempunyai perubahan yang signifikan di mana pembangunan ATM sebelum tahun 1990 lebih bersifat konvensional dan pasca Perang Dingin memperlihatkan pembangunan ATM bersifat lebih strategik.

scholarly journals Marketing of Women Self Help Groups Products (with Special Reference to Chennai City)

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3S3) ◽  
pp. 607-613
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
Know How ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Developing Area ◽  
Self Help Groups ◽  
Chennai City

Empowerment implies equal conditions to girls. It supplies more significant access to know-how as well as sources, greater liberty in decision making, higher potential to consider their lifestyles and flexibility from the irons troubled all of them through personalized, view and also technique becoming conscious of their own condition and setting, setting their personal schedules, developing area on their own, obtaining skill-sets, developing positive self-image, addressing problems, and developing self-reliance. It is actually certainly not merely a social as well as a political method, yet a personal one too - as well as it is not simply a procedure however a result too. Empowerment of girls creates them much more powerful to encounter the challenges of lifestyle, to beat the disabilities, handicaps, and inequalities. It makes it possible for ladies to discover their total identification and powers in all realms of life. The study is actually generally concentrated on the efficiency of SWOT aspects on the total assessment of Women Self Help Groups product in Chennai Metropolitan area

scholarly journals ‘We could be anything we wanted to be’: remembering Jimmy Rogers

Race & Class ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-84
Author(s):  
Michael Romyn
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Youth Services ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Alternative Community

Between 1967 and his death in 2018, Jimmy Rogers, a unique figure in the UK’s black self-help movement, dedicated himself to the welfare of black young people via basketball. Through Rogers’ own words and oral histories of individuals who knew him, this article traces his path from Liverpool 8, where he introduced organised basketball in 1967, to London, where he established the Brixton Topcats basketball club in response to the ‘riots’ of 1981. Rogers learnt through his own life of hardship – of being brought up ‘in care’ – the need for discipline, self-belief and self-reliance. And he used these experiences and his basketball skills to mentor generations of dispossessed young black men and later women, who found, through his clubs, an antidote to a world of institutional racism, economic hardships, and heavy-handed policing. At a time of drastic cuts in youth services, he showed the importance of alternative community-led youth provision to black working-class inner-city residents.

Comments on Regionalism and Ethnicity in American Literature

Prospects ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 463-469
Author(s):  
Virginia Yans-McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethnic Identities ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Structural Relationships ◽  
Structural Analogues ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
American Thought

All the essays in this group are studies in American identity. They argue persuasively that regionalism and ethnicity are integral parts of what I can at this point only hesitantly call “mainstream” American self-definitions, be they literary, academic, intellectual, or popular. Werner Sollors' essay, really a phenomenological analysis of American thought about regionalism and ethnicity, exposes the structural analogues among intellectual, academic, and popular thought on these subjects. In his analysis of Styron, Jules Chametzky, on the other hand, suggests that the strategy of exchanging and appropriating regional and ethnic identities allows writers such as Styron both to legitimize marginal identities and to enter the mainstream. By implication, Chametzky's paper, like Sollors', is also concerned with structural relationships or exchanges between European high cultural forms and the popular domain.

scholarly journals The Islamic Theory of International Relations

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-125
Author(s):  
Glenn E. Perry
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Public Involvement ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Legal Code ◽  
World Today ◽  
Aggressive Attitude ◽  
Original Dynamic

This book provides a remarkable reformist approach to Islam in generaland to the Islamic theory of international relations in particular. The authorbegins by attributing the tragic condition of the modem Islamic world to itsstagnation, brought about by the predominance of taqlid. Only with a resolutionof the ”time-place issue” p. 4), a phrase that recurs throughout the book in relationto the necessity of distinguishing between what is permanent and what isa mere dated application in another time and place, does AbQSulaymzin believethat “the badly needed original dynamic and realistic policies” (p. 4) can befound.The author distinguishes between the Shari’ah and fiqh (writings of Islamicjurists), which he maintains has been inaccumtely considered to be “law in itselfand not a secondary source of Islamic law” p. 4). The siyar (i.e., juristic writingsrelated to international relations), AbuSulayman argues, is not “an Islamic lawamong nations’’ that constitutes “a sort of unified classical legal code” (p. 7).He also criticizes some writers for overlooking the diversity of classical opinion,saying that Majid Khadduri in particular presented only the “strict position”of al Shifi‘i while ignoring “the equally authoritative opinion of Abu Hanifah”AbuSulayman insists that it is necessary to understand the Qur’an and theSunnah “in the context of conditions at a time when the early Muslims wereconfronted by unceasing aggression and persecution” (p. 35) and criticizes theuse of abrogation (naskh) to exclude a more tolerant outlook. It is necessaryfor today‘s Muslims, the author says, ”to go back to the origins of Muslim thought. . . . and reexamine and reform their methods and approaches” (p. 49). Thetask of developing the required new methodology, he argues, must not be leftto the ulama alone, because they “no longer represent the mainstream of Muslimintellectual and public involvement” and are not educated in “the changes. . . inthe world today” (p. 76).Characterizing “modern Muslim thought in the field of external affairs”- particularly an “aggressive attitude involved in the classically militant approachto jihad” in the case of “a people who are [now] weak and backward ...

SELF-MADE MAIDS: BRITISH EMIGRATION TO THE PACIFIC RIM AND SELF-HELP NARRATIVES

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-304
Author(s):  
Melissa Walker
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Collective Psyche

The victorian discourse of self-help, popularized by Samuel Smiles in the mid-nineteenth century, was integral to the success of mid-Victorian British emigration and colonialism. As Robert Hogg notes in his study of British colonial violence in British Columbia and Queensland, Samuel Smiles's notion of character, which embraced the virtues of hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, and energetic action, helped sanction masculine colonial violence and governance in these regions (23–24). According to Robert Grant in his examination of mid-Victorian emigration to Canada and Australia, one's desire “to better him or herself” was closely entwined with Smiles's self-help philosophy and the rhetoric of colonial promotion permeating British self-help texts “in the projection of the laborer's progress from tenant to smallholder to successful landowner through hard work” (178–79). Francine Tolron similarly observes the pervasiveness of the success narrative in emigrant accounts of New Zealand, noting that this story often constitutes “yet another tale of the British march of Progress” (169) with the yeoman, John Bull, as the hero at its centre, who adopts the imperialist impetus to subdue the wilderness and recreate an ideal England in which a man can earn gentility through hard work and uprightness of character (169–70). She extends accounts by male emigrants to New Zealand to the “collective psyche” of all New Zealanders “whose stuff is made up of earth, so to speak, the inheritors of the old archetypal Englishman who worked on the land before the dawn of the industrial era” (173). These studies contribute significantly to a growing body of scholarship that considers the connections between self-help literature and British emigration and colonialism. Yet, occasionally such analyses apply the meaning of self-help rhetoric universally across British male and female emigrant groups when the rise from tenant to landowner was typically a male, not a female, prerogative. Building on this important body of work, this paper considers how domestic concerns, rather than a sole focus on controlling foreign lands and people, informed versions of success penned by a particular group of mid-Victorian middle-class female emigrants and these women's understanding of their positioning within the colonies.

scholarly journals MODERASI ISLAM (WASATHIYAH ISLAM) PERSPEKTIF AL-QUR’AN, AS-SUNNAH SERTA PANDANGAN PARA ULAMA DAN FUQAHA

Al-Risalah ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43
Author(s):  
Muhammad Khairan Arif
Keyword(s):  
Islamic World ◽  
World Today ◽  
Islamic Thought

Konsep Wasathiyah Islam atau moderasi Islam saat ini telah menjadi arah atau aliran pemikiran Islam yang telah menjadi diskursus penting dalam dunia Islam dewasa ini, melihat kondisi umat Islam yang selalu menjadi tertuduh dalam setiap peristiwa kekerasan yang dilakukan oleh personal muslim yang tidak memahami karakter dan ini ajaran Islam. Oleh karenanya penilitian literatif ini bertujuan memberikan pemahaman dan konsep orisinil tentang aliran pemikiran moderasi islam, agar setiap muslim modern dapat memahami dan mengimplementasikannya dengan benar dan komprehensif dalam kehidupannya sehari-hari. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kepustakaan dan kajian literasi Islam klasik maupun modern dari Al-Qur’an, As-Sunnah dan kitab-kitab klasik dan modern dari para Ulama dan Fuqaha yang kompeten dibidangnya. Literatur tersebut dikaji dan dianalisa oleh peneliti dengan teliti untuk menghasilkan kesimpulan yang tepat dan teruji. Hasil penelitian ini adalah; diketahuinya secara pasti makna dan konsep moderasi Islam menurut Al-Qur’an, As-Sunnah dan para Ulama serta menjawab keraguan sebagian muslim terhadap konsep moderasi Islam   The concept of Wasathiyah Islam or the current Islamic moderation has become the direction or the flow of Islamic thought that has become an important discourse in the Islamic world today, see the condition of Muslims who have always become accused in every event Violence committed by personal Muslims who do not understand the character and this teachings of Islam. Therefore, this literative study aims to provide an original understanding and concept of the flow of Islamic moderation thinking, so that every modern Muslim can understand and implement it properly and comprehensively in its life.This research uses a method of literature and study of classical and modern Islamic literacy from the Qur'an, As-Sunnah and the classical and modern books of scholars and Fuqaha who are competent in their field. The literature is examined and analysed by researchers carefully to produce precise and proven conclusions.The results of this research are; To be sure the meaning and concept of moderation of Islam according to the Qur'an, As-Sunnah and scholars and answer the doubt of some Muslims on the concept of moderation Islam

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