Rethinking sharī'a: Javēd Ahmad Ghāmidī on hudūd

2007 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 356-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Khalid Masud
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
The One ◽  
Intellectual Movements

AbstractModern Muslim thought is usually studied in terms of a dichotomy between modernity and tradition; the former as Western impact, the latter as Muslim societies supposedly petrified in the past. These studies, however, have failed to appreciate the dynamics of Muslim intellectual movements. The west-centrism tends to overlook the local contexts. This paper is a study of a contemporary thought movement in Pakistan led by Javēd Ahmad Ghāmidī. In some ways this movement resembles the Wasatiyya of Egypt, especially in rethinking the application of sharīa in a modern state and the necessity of state in Islam. Ghāmidī's intellectual development took place in a traditional environment, and his movement grew with an analysis of the contemporary discourses on sharā'a in Pakistan. In his arguments on sharā'a, Ghāmidī is not apologetic; he rarely refers to Western criticism. He seldom differs with the Islamic modernists but he never leaves the traditional framework. Ghāmidī is not unaware of the modern context but since his discourse is primarily with the traditionalists on the one hand and Jamā' at Islāmī and its seceding groups on the other, he is more a critical traditionist than an Islamic modernist.

An Ordinary Soviet Death

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter describes the timing and motivations of the USSR's promotion of atheist doctrine. At the outset, it seems, the Soviets expected Orthodoxy to wither away, invalidated by rational argument and the regime's own record of socialist achievement. This did not happen, but Soviet officialdom did not take full cognizance of the fact until the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Then it was that the Soviet Union's confrontation with the West came to be recast in religious terms as an epic battle between atheist communism on the one hand and on the other that self-styled standard-bearer of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the United States. So, here indeed, in Soviet atheism, is a secular church militant—doctrinally armed, fortified by the concentrated power of the modern state, and, as many believed, with the wind of history at its back. It speaks the language of liberation, but what it delivers is something much darker. The chapter then considers the place of ritual in the Soviet secularist project.

The Laguatan: A Libyan Tribal Confederation in the Late Roman Empire

1983 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 96-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Mattingly
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
Main Instrument ◽  
The One ◽  
Libyan Desert ◽  
Late Roman

AbstractThe tribal grouping known as the Laguatan, Leuathae and Lawata in various late Roman and Arabic sources are identified as a powerful confederation of Libyan tribes. The confederation comprised two main types of tribes. On the one hand there were neo-berbers who migrated from the east to the west through the Libyan desert in late antiquity; on the other, there were the original inhabitants of the desert oases, of Cyrenaica and of Tripolitania who formed alliances with the newcomers. The growth of the confederation had a destabilising effect on the Roman frontiers and severe raids were made against the more Romanised areas, notably the territoria of the coastal cities.Through the sedentary agriculture of the allied Libyans, based on settlements such as Ghirza, and new conquest and exploitation, the Laguatan established an economic and agricultural regime largely independent of Rome. It is inappropriate, therefore, to view the Laguatan simply as camel-riding nomads as has been done in the past, nor was the diffusion of the camel a decisive factor in the timing of the onset of their raids. It is argued, on the contrary, that the camel was present at a much earlier date, that it was mainly used as a pack- and farm animal in pre-Islamic times and that the horse was the main instrument of the Laguatan in warfare and raiding. The Laguatan were the instigators of a Libyan cultural, religious and political revival and their history is of great importance to an understanding of the late Roman and Islamic eras.

scholarly journals O Vaticano II cinquenta anos depois

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (283) ◽  
pp. 629
Author(s):  
José Comblin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sufficient Time ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Para o A., o Vaticano II chegou tarde. Não houve tempo suficiente para implementar seu espírito, porque, logo após seu encerramento, aconteceu a maior revolução cultural do Ocidente e os desafetos do Concílio acusaram-no dos problemas surgidos dessa revolução e foram ouvidos. Por isso, a Igreja não só continuaria tendo dificuldade de adequar sua linguagem segundo os novos tempos, mas, fixando-se em esquemas mentais do passado, até faria o movimento contrário. Assim, por um lado, o Vaticano II ficará conhecido na história como uma tentativa de reformar a Igreja, e, por outro, como um sinal profético, uma voz evangélica, uma chamada para olhar para o futuro – como Medellín, em relação à AL, também contestado, é um farol que mostra o caminho.Abstract: For the Author, the Vatican II arrived too late. There wasn’t sufficient time to implement its spirit because, soon after its closing, the greatest cultural revolution in the West happened and the enemies of the Council blamed it for the problems resulting from this revolution and were heard. For this reason the Church would not only find it difficult to adapt its language to the new times, but, focusing on mental schemes of the past, would even make the opposite move. Thus, on the one hand, Vatican II will be known in history as an attempt to reform the Church and on the other, as a prophetic sign, an Evangelical voice, a summons to look towards the future – just like Medellin, in relation to AL, also contested, is a lighthouse that shows the way.

TARP DVIEJŲ KOLONŲ: XVIII A. PABAIGOS – XIX A. PRADŽIOS VILNIAUS MASONŲ KASDIENYBĖ SIMBOLIKOJE

2018 ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
The Past ◽  
Secular World ◽  
National Characteristics ◽  
Conservative Christian ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Craft Guilds

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.

“Ambiguist” Statesmanship

Worldview ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-8
Author(s):  
Will Herberg
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Fixed Points ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Actual Situation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
The One

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin

Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
First Language ◽  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.

Benson and Miller in Perspective

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Stock Of Knowledge

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

Globalizing Feminist Ethics

Hypatia ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison M. Jaggar
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Ethics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Discourse Community ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Small Communities ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Open Discussion ◽  
The One

The feminist conception of discourse offered below differs from classical discourse ethics. Arguing that inequalities of power are even more conspicuous in global than in local contexts, I note that a global discourse community seems to be emerging among feminists, and I explore the role played by small communities in feminism's attempts to reconcile a commitment to open discussion, on the one hand, with a recognition of the realities of power inequalities, on the other.

The Origins of Domestic Sheep and Goats: a Reconsideration in the Light of the Fossil Evidence

1969 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 368-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Payne
Keyword(s):  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Wild Relatives ◽  
The Other ◽  
Domestic Sheep ◽  
Sheep And Goats ◽  
Animal Domestication ◽  
The Past ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

In recent discussions of the origins and process of animal domestication (Reed, 1961, Zeuner, 1963), both authors rely on two kinds of evidence: on the one hand, the present distributions and characteristics of the different breeds of whatever animal is being discussed, together with its feral and wild relatives, and, on the other hand, the past record, given by literary and pictorial sources and the bones from archaeological and geological sites. Increased recognition of the limitations of the past record, whether in the accuracy of the information it appears to give (as in the case of pictorial sources), or in the certainty of the deductions we are at present capable of drawing from it (this applies especially to the osteological record), has led these authors to argue mainly from the present situation, using the past record to confirm or amplify the existing picture.Arguing from the present, many hypotheses about the origins and process of domestication are available. The only test we have, when attempting to choose between these, lies in the direct evidence of the past record. The past record, it is freely admitted, is very fragmentary: the information provided by the present situation is more exact, ranges over a much wider field, and is more open to test and control. Nevertheless, the past record, however imperfect it is, is the only direct evidence we have about the process of domestication.

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