Alfarabi on the Prudence of Founders

1998 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-741 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Colmo

Two striking features of Alfarabi's Book of Religion remind us of Machiavelli's Prince. Alfarabi is very much concerned with what Machiavelli would call a new prince, the founder of a political order. Like Machiavelli, Alfarabi emphasizes the extent to which the founder needs prudence, understood as the faculty by which political men make sound determinations about particular circumstances. The status of prudence is enhanced by the pervasiveness of change over time as Alfarabi sees it. The pervasiveness of change entails that any political founding will require repeated, and prudent, renewal. For Alfarabi, as for Machiavelli, the varying dictates of prudence in response to specific political situations pose a challenge to the universal rules or laws found in religion. Alfarabi differs from Machiavelli in carefully distinguishing prudence from mere cunning or cleverness, depending on whether or not the end sought is morally good.

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Habib Ahmed

Using ideas from New Institutional Economics (NIE), this paper examines the Islamization of economies and links it to the Islamization of knowledge. NIE uses a multi-disciplinary approach to explain how economic structures evolve and change over time. These structures are studied at four levels: cultural, institutional, organizational, and transactional. While culture embodies a given society’s body of knowledge, the nature and growth of that knowledge determine the type and evolution of an economy’s institutions, organizations, and transactions. This paper contends that the Islamization of economies failed mainly due to a lack of the Islamic knowledge needed to produce the appropriate institutions and organizations. After examining the status of knowledge in the Muslim world, examples of legal institutions are presented to illustrate how dormant Islamic scholarship led to economic structures that lack an Islamic ethos. Establishing an Islamic economic structure would require reorienting an Islamic society’s culture via the creation of new Islamic knowledge that can build appropriate institutions, organizations, and transactions.


2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Habib Ahmed

Using ideas from New Institutional Economics (NIE), this paper examines the Islamization of economies and links it to the Islamization of knowledge. NIE uses a multi-disciplinary approach to explain how economic structures evolve and change over time. These structures are studied at four levels: cultural, institutional, organizational, and transactional. While culture embodies a given society’s body of knowledge, the nature and growth of that knowledge determine the type and evolution of an economy’s institutions, organizations, and transactions. This paper contends that the Islamization of economies failed mainly due to a lack of the Islamic knowledge needed to produce the appropriate institutions and organizations. After examining the status of knowledge in the Muslim world, examples of legal institutions are presented to illustrate how dormant Islamic scholarship led to economic structures that lack an Islamic ethos. Establishing an Islamic economic structure would require reorienting an Islamic society’s culture via the creation of new Islamic knowledge that can build appropriate institutions, organizations, and transactions.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela G. Alfaraz

AbstractThis paper presents variationist sociolinguistics research on the copula estar with predicate adjectives in Cuban Spanish, a variety in which it appears to have gone largely uninvestigated. To examine its social and linguistic distribution, a real-time study with data from the 1960s and 1990s was coupled with an apparent-time study with data from the 1990s. Findings showed that generation and adjective type were significant factors constraining the variation. The comparison of different generations in real and apparent time suggested that the frequency of estar had increased significantly in the younger generation compared to older ones, and it had remained stable for the two age cohorts studied in real time. Results for following adjective showed that the extension of estar was favored in two of eight adjective classes. These findings suggest that Cuban Spanish has experienced a change over time in the frequency and distribution of innovative estar with predicate adjectives.


Author(s):  
Bayrta B. Mandzhieva ◽  

Introduction. In the system of artistic and visual means, the epithet occupies one of the important places. To create a heroic image, the narrator uses epithets that characterize the status of the hero, age and heroic merits of the heroes. Goal and tasks. The purpose of the article is to study artistic-identifying combinations - epithets in the recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times, to identify their preservation and change over time. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were solved: epithets were identified in three different-temporal texts of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” (1862, 1970, 1971), a comparative analysis of artistic-identifying combinations in the texts of different dzhangarchi was carried out. Method. To study the poetical and stylistic texture, we applied the comparative method. The material of the research was records of different times: 1) “The Song about how the famous Ulan Shovshur of the mangas khan of the Ferocious Shara Gyurgyu reproached the Maloderbet cycle of 1862; 2) an audio recording of “Songs about the duel of a lion [-the hero] Ulan Khongor the Beautiful with the Ferocious Shara Gyurgyu” by Jangarchi Telty Lidzhiev 1970; 3) audio recording of “Song of Shara Gyurgyu” by jangarchi Mikhail Mandzhiev 1971. Results. The study of epithets in recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times showed that over more than a century that has passed since the first recording, the epic text in its artistic embodiment has undergone changes. The song “Shara Gyurgyu” of the Maloderbet cycle of 1862 is distinguished by an abundance of epithets, while in the recordings of the late tradition of the epic, there is a transformation of the artistic level of the text. Storytellers Teltya Lidzhiev and Mikhail Mandzhiev adhere to the main plot structure in the process of performance, without sharpening attention to poetic tropes. Observations of the texts of different storytellers at different times show that Dzhangarchi, having a wider epic knowledge, performs the song in accordance with the criteria of fidelity of reproduction, following the tradition of the epic school to which he belonged. A comparative analysis of recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times allowed us to identify constant units at the level of textual embodiment, which accumulate the poetical and stylistic basis of the epic narrative and mark the key links of the epic narration of the Kalmyk heroic epic “Dzhangar”.


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Garbarini ◽  
Hung-Bin Sheu ◽  
Dana Weber

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Nordberg ◽  
Louis G. Castonguay ◽  
Benjamin Locke

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