A Different Passage to India

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-142
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora
Keyword(s):  
Western Civilization ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Muscular Christianity

Ashis Nandy, an Indian psychologist and cultural critic of the post-1945 era, has spent his career largely re-imagining “Indic civilization” as a Gandhi-inspired rejection of Western civilization and especially Western modernity. Very much like Brunner in his rewriting of German civilization, Nandy returns us to pre-nation-state Indian literary and religious texts, the interpretation of which he reconstructs in order to rescue the texts from modern revisionism that has been shaped by the “muscular Christianity” of the Raj. Further, Nandy understands Indic culture, reaching from Afghanistan to Vietnam, as a diversified yet unified entity, comprising a host of territories within one, supra-national civilization. In this sense, Nandy’s work echoes that of Brunner on the authentic, pre-nation-state German Reich, complete with its array of Volksgemeinschaften. But Nandy’s thinking is also reflected in the modern Hindutva movement of present-day India.

Hind Swaraj: Reading Gandhi’s Critique of Modernity in Tehran

Social Change ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kian Tajbakhsh
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Constructive Dialogue

In both Iran and India, many social and cultural obstacles to authentic and humane social development are often traced to complexities caused by an encounter with Western modernity. In this essay, I explore what the Iranian reception of modernity might gain from the Indian conversation on Hind Swaraj. I show that Gandhi’s thought contains two different critiques of modernity. The first radical option entails the rejection of modernity and its core institutions such as the nation-state; the second proposes adapting traditions, including religions, within the framework of a pluralistic democracy so as to craft alternative versions of the nation-state. The objective of the essay is to examine those aspects of the latter strand of Gandhi’s thought that may be compatible with Iranian realities. A further goal is to put Iranian and Indian voices together in a constructive dialogue with one another.

Modernity, Nationalism, and Civilizing the Arts

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
Banu Karaca
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Art World ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
The Arts ◽  
German Art

Unsettling narratives on the purported alterity of Turkey and Germany, Chapter 1 discusses parallels and differences in German (1871) and Turkish nation-building (1923) and the role of art in claiming modern nationhood. It examines tropes of Turkey’s “belated modernity” and Germany’s Sonderweg as two discourses of exceptionalism that have significantly shaped the art world and asks what these tropes reveal and obscure. The young Turkish republic witnessed an enthusiastic embrace of artistic modernism, as Ottoman art was deemed unfit for the modern nation-state. In contrast, Germany officially decried modernism as decidedly “un-German.” It was only in the 1950s that the Federal Republic adopted explicitly occidental cultural policies to overcome longstanding anti-western and anti-modernist currents as part of its post-WWII rehabilitation. How can one explain the persisting asymmetry in the perception of Turkish and German art, given that Turkey’s attempt to align itself with Western modernity by rationalizing artistic expression in the 1920s predates West-Germany’s shift to occidental cultural policies that were only established after 1945? The controversies surrounding “national art” and continued anxieties regarding modern belonging discussed in this chapter show how ideas of modernity and civility remain indebted to processes of violence that art must always disavow.

Criticism of “Colonial Modernity” through Kurdish Decolonial Approaches

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Engin Sustam
Keyword(s):  
Global Capitalism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The West ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Western modernity with its colonial application has created an identity trauma and patriarchal domination of the memory of colonized and oppressed peoples. Critiques from colonized territories encourage us to reread the colonial epistemes of modernity, whether or not centered on the West. The Kurdish political movement thus defines a new interpretation of modernity based on the critique of colonialism and global capitalism: “democratic modernity.” This chapter problematizes the relations between modernity, the nation state, the destruction of ecology, social confinement, the relationship of the forces of these relations, but above all the modalities by which it becomes possible to act on them to break the “stalemate” of the modernity of thought in the twenty-first century.

Re-thinking Recent German History

1952 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-345
Author(s):  
Hans Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
German History ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Full Professorship ◽  
Sacred Values ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Vital Forces

Friedrich meinecke, the Dean of German historians, celebrated* in October 1951, the month of his eighty-ninth birthday, the fiftieth anniversary of his appointment to a full professorship. In his reply to an adress by theFreie Universität Berlin, of which he is one of the founders andEhrenrektor, Professor Meinecke called our time great because of its concern with the “highest and most sacred values of mankind, the liberty, honor, right and dignity of the individual,” a struggle which draws “all the vital forces of Western civilization” closer together, labor and the middle class, Catholics and Protestants. This emphasis on individual liberty and on the unity of Western civilization has rarely been heard among German historians. Perhaps Meinecke's personal evolution is one of the hopeful signs in Germany. For he came from the strictest conservative Old-Prussian background: his upbringing was satiated with anti-liberalism, anti-semitism and a fervent Bismarckism. In his younger years he praised the German “ascent” from the cosmopolitanism of a Kant or Goethe to the nation-state of a Ranke and Bismarck. As an old man he began to ask himself whether Ranke had not misled German historiography and the German intellectual development. As far back as 1924, in an introduction to a new edition of Ranke'sPolitisches Gespräch, he pointed out that Ranke's concept of the powerful states as the embodiment of God's thoughts and ideas ennobled and sanctioned their elemental struggle for power. This glorification of the State became even more dangerous when later German historians abandoned the objective

scholarly journals Rationality and Freedom in Islamic Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-213
Author(s):  
م.د.احمد عبد الكريم عبد الوهاب
Keyword(s):  
Positive Attitude ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Core ◽  
Thought Reform ◽  
Intellectual System ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Intellectual Foundations ◽  
Islamic Civilization

Abstract Rationality and freedom are fundamental elements of Western modernity. Although modern and contemporary Islamic thought has established its intellectual foundations on the fundamentals of intellectual thought that are at the core of its Islamic intellectual system, at the same time many of its intellectual products have been a response In spite of the fact that this Islamic intellectual response stands out from Western modernity as a negation or a positive attitude. The Islamic intellectual response differed in determining its position on Western modernity, depending on the nature of the historical stage that was The Islamic nation, as well as the nature of the challenge posed by Western civilization to other nations and other civilizations, including the Arab Islamic civilization, so we see that the response of modern Islamic thought reform differs in his vision and directions from the response of Islamic fundamentalist contemporary thought.

A Church with the Soul of a Nation

2021 ◽  
pp. 309-328
Author(s):  
George M. Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Mass Higher Education ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Commission Report

World War II generated concern for restoring values in Western civilization. The Harvard Report of 1945 urged study of the best in the West, including religious texts as one source of such values. The Truman Commission report of 1947, Higher Education for a Democratic Society, added more practical concerns for the new mass higher education. Humanists such as Robert Hutchins were appalled. The postwar era saw a broad religious revival in mainstream higher education, blending broadly Protestant, democratic, and humanistic ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr and other leading scholars provided guidance. The problem, though, was that the liberal Protestant emphasis on freedom tended to undercut any specific religious demands. Senator Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade helped test the extent and limits of freedom. Leading educators often saw Catholics and their schools as too authoritarian. William F. Buckley’s critique of Yale’s claim to be a meaningfully Protestant institution should be understood in this context.

Labels, Histories, Politics: Indian/South Asian Dance on the Global Stage

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVANTHI MEDURI
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The South ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Indian Nation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Uk

In this paper, I discuss issues revolving around history, historiography, alterity, difference and otherness concealed in the doubled Indian/South Asian label used to describe Indian/South Asian dance genres in the UK. The paper traces the historical genealogy of the South Asian label to US, Indian and British contexts and describes how the South Asian enunciation fed into Indian nation-state historiography and politics in the 1950s. I conclude by describing how Akademi: South Asian Dance, a leading London based arts organisation, explored the ambivalence in the doubled Indian/South Asian label by renaming itself in 1997, and forging new local/global networks of communication and artistic exchange between Indian and British based dancers and choreographers at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

The Qur'an, Faith and the Impact of the Feminist Interpretative Movement on the Arabic Text and its Legacy

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-183
Author(s):  
Hassan al-Shafīe
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Text ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Intellectual Movement ◽  
Qur'anic Interpretation

The present study discusses the cultural and intellectual movement, now on the point of prevalence in the contemporary Islamic world, which adopts the Western ‘hermeneutical method’ and applies it to the Qur'an in particular, and Islamic religious texts in general. The author shows this movement's complete disregard for the established principles of tafsīr, the traditional Arab-Islamic rules of Qur'anic interpretation and the related Prophetic aḥādīth as preserved in the authenticated Sunna. The author argues that the ‘hermeneutical method’ starts from the preconceived notion that the Islamic heritage is male-centred and biased against women, both theoretically and practically, and, on this basis, proposes that the time has come for an intellectual break with this premise and the re-interpretation of the Qur'an and faith in the light of Western Christian hermeneutics. This paper proposes that this method fails to take historical events and the civilisational Islamic experience into account.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document