scholarly journals Maqasid and the Challenges of Modernity

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Wael B. Hallaq
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Theoretical Underpinning ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Portion ◽  
To Come

A central feature of public Muslim discourse over the past three decades has been the call to restore the Shari‘a in one form or another. Some reformers have proposed a new theoretical underpinning for this restoration, arguing for the adoption of foundational concepts that bear little, if any, resemblance to  their pre-modern counterparts. A central question that ineluctably emerges in this aporia is: What narrative must be adopted as the representation of the historical Shari‘a, the Shari‘a that prevailed until the early portion of the nineteenth century? If the colonial narrative is ipso facto programmatic and teleological, and if it served and still serves the purposes of all but those of the subaltern majority, then what other narrative must be adopted in the project of creating the new symbiosis? And if the jural voices of the subaltern are to come in for serious consideration, then how are we to represent them, if we can at all? And if we cannot, then into what espistemic predicament, if not a perennial aporia, does this throw both the privileged scholar and the reformer/intellectual? This article does not provide answers to these questions but rather addresses the problematics that these and related questions raise in dealing with the challenge of introducing into the modern Muslim condition one form of Islamic law or another.

Exiled from History: Africa in Hegel’s Academic Practice

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 165-194
Author(s):  
Tom C. McCaskie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Academic Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
Shadow Cast ◽  
To Come ◽  
African Intellectuals ◽  
Educational Formation

Abstract:Many scholars, African and otherwise, have excoriated G.W.F. Hegel for his dismissal of Africa from history and progress in his lectures on the philosophies of history and religion. This has been done by quoting his texts and setting his words in the context of his influence on nineteenth-century European imperialism and racism. A different approach informs this paper. I treat Hegel, a complicated person, as a working university academic with a career to make and an overriding desire to publicize his own thought. I provide biographical insights relevant to these matters, and go on to examine specific texts about Africa that Hegel either sought out or chanced upon, read, misread, excerpted, used, and misused in support of his theorizing and apriorism. Attention is paid throughout to the construction, recording, and dissemination of Hegel’s lectures, and to aspects of their reception and authority in the educational formation of selected modern African intellectuals. I argue that such persons and African studies more widely are still trying to come to grips with the long and enduring shadow cast by Hegel over both the past and present of the continent.

Introduction: Transmitting Rosa Luxemburg

2018 ◽  
Vol 94 (94) ◽  
pp. 4-6
Author(s):  
Filippo Menozzi
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Question ◽  
Living Substance ◽  
To Come ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Nancy Fraser ◽  
Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg will be honoured, remembered, and celebrated as a figure from the past only when, in a future still to-come, the goals of social justice, peace and equality that she fought for are realised. As long as bitter struggles and widespread suffering continue, she is still living, a living substance that is part of the present and can inspire political engagement. The wider meaning of declaring Rosa Luxemburg our contemporary, then, is that the objectives she struggled for are still to-come, and the forms of violence and oppression she struggled against are still part of the material social conditions of today’s world. This coevalness can be pronounced because many issues at the heart of her thought and activism are still with us: from imperialism and the national question to what Nancy Fraser calls the 'back-stories' of capitalism. This special issue of New Formations aims to contribute to the transmission of this vital legacy by suggesting questions about relevance, memory and resonance: how does Luxemburg speak to us, how do her thoughts echo with our own? How can we prevent the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg from becoming heritage, a thing of the past? The essays and interviews included in this special issue grapple in different ways with the central question of how to assess the contemporaneity of Rosa Luxemburg without turning her into an object of commemoration.

MURDER IN KHAYBAR: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ORIGINS OF THE QASĀMA PROCEDURE IN ISLAMIC LAW

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolph Peters
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Islamic Jurisprudence ◽  
Penal Law

AbstractThe institution of qasāma has intrigued both Muslim jurists and western scholars. The first were puzzled by its violation of essential legal principles, the latter by its apparent pre-Islamic origins. Because of its archaic and irrational character, western scholars assume that the institution was not applied in practice: "[I]t does not appear that this institution functioned much, even in the past, when the penal law of Islam had a certain practical application." However, the evidence of fatwa collections shows that the qasāma was indeed enforced by courts as late as the nineteenth century, and the rules connected with it have now found their way into some modern Islamic criminal codes. The qasāma, it appears, was a living institution in Islamic law and not just theory. In this essay I will try to shed some light on the origins of this institution and its reception into Islamic law. I will attempt to chart the earliest developments of Islamic jurisprudence by analyzing the available hadith material and the statements of the first generation of jurists. In the conclusion I will suggest that my analysis of the material on qasāma corroborates Motzki's and Powers' revision of the chronology of the development of Islamic jurisprudence first put forward by Joseph Schacht in The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950).

Suicidal Behavior in Black South Africans

Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
South African Society ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
To Come

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

Screen Wonders of the Past: And to Come?

1957 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-393
Author(s):  
Kenneth MacGowan
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
To Come

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Kun
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
To Come ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
A Current

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

Islam and War: Tradition versus Modernity

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 181-212
Author(s):  
Joseph S Spoerl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Law Of War ◽  
Critical Method ◽  
Entire World ◽  
Modernist Project ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Muslim Scholars

Islamic thinking on war divides roughly into two main schools, classical and modern. The classical (or medieval) view commands offensive war to spread Islamic rule ultimately across the entire world. The modernist view, predominant since the nineteenth century, limits war to defensive aims only. This paper compares the views of two important Muslim scholars, the classical scholar Ibn Ishaq (d. 767) and the modernist scholar Mahmud Shaltut (d. 1963). This comparison reveals that the modernist project of rethinking the Islamic law of war is a promising though as-yet-unfinished project that can benefit from the insights of Western scholars applying the historical-critical method to the study of early Islamic sources.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.

Sleep in western culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Ekirch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sleep Deprivation ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Sleep Onset ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Predominant Form ◽  
Artificial Illumination ◽  
Illness Anxiety

Although a universal necessity, sleep, as the past powerfully indicates, is not a biological constant. Before the Industrial Revolution, sleep in western households differed in a variety of respects from that of today. Arising chiefly from a dearth of artificial illumination, the predominant form of sleep was segmented, consisting of two intervals of roughly 3 hours apiece bridged by up to an hour or so of wakefulness. Notwithstanding steps taken by families to preserve the tranquillity of their slumber, the quality of pre-industrial sleep was poor, owing to illness, anxiety, and environmental vexations. Large portions of the labouring population almost certainly suffered from sleep deprivation. Despite the prevalence of sleep-onset insomnia, awakening in the middle of the night was thought normal. Not until the turn of the nineteenth century and sleep’s consolidation did physicians view segmented sleep as a disorder requiring medication.

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