scholarly journals Global Shinqīṭ: Mauritania’s Islamic Knowledge Tradition and the Making of Transnational Religious Authority (Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century)

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 953
Author(s):  
Zekeria Ahmed Salem
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Knowledge Tradition ◽  
Representational Space ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Today, Bilād-Shinqīṭ or Mauritania is often portrayed as an unparalleled center of classical Islamic tradition supposedly untouched by modernity. While previous scholarship has concerned itself mostly with Mauritania’s local intellectual history on one hand and its recent global fame on the other, in this paper, I document instead how, in less than two centuries, Mauritania has become not only a point of scholarly reference and symbolic/representational space of excellence in Islamic knowledge, but also one with an astonishing amount of global reach. Thus, I explore the ways in which Mauritania has continued to asserts its relevance and scholarly authority on a global scale. Drawing on a variety of historical, literary, and anthropological sources, I historicize the rise and mythologization of Mauritania as a peerless center of traditional sacred scholarship. I specifically examine how a number of widely different Muslim actors under changing circumstances continue to invoke, perform and re-invent Shinqīṭ/Mauritania. In documenting what I call Global Shinqīt over the longue durée, rather than simply illustrate how the so-called Muslim peripheries shape central traits of transnational normative Islamic authority, I argue instead that mobility, historical circumstances, and scholarly performance combined are at least as instrumental in the credible articulation of authoritative Islamic knowledge as normative discourses issued by supposedly central institutions, personalities, and religious bodies located in the so-called “heartland of Islam.” In so doing, I destabilize the center/periphery framework altogether in order to explore how Islamic religious authority is actually construed and operates under shifting cultural and political conditions.

scholarly journals Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World

1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-265
Author(s):  
Charles D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

Most studies of Islamist resurgence have focused on specific aspects ofthe Islamist political agenda and have sought to identify their intellectualroots in the writings of thinkers from the medieval period of Islamic history.Influenced by Iran’s Islamic revolution, these authors have been concernedprimarily with political Islam. It is rare to find a book that seeks to establishmodem Islamist thought within the context of western critical theoryand indigenous political conditions, or that explains its ideas in light of aconflict between revolutionary discourse and state hegemony. Abu-Rabi”sbook is thus all the more welcome, as it establishes a basis for considerationof Islamist thinkers that will be an essential reference in the fbtwx.The subject of this book is the thought of Sayyid Qqtb, consideredwithin the parameters of Islamic modernism, westernization, orientalism,and the contemporary Islamist response to these factors. Abu-Rabi‘ says heis undertaking an intellectual history of his subject, that of “a popular religiousmovement . . . founded by lay Muslim intellectuals” often at oddswith the traditional political and religious elites. But he considers this questionin light of the “question of continuity and discontinuity in modem Arabthought.” Influenced by Foucault, he argues that the question of epistemologicalacts and thresholds, of conceptual ruptures in the development ofideas, must be countered by the reality of continuities in Islamic thought,by the fact of an ongoing Islamic discourse whose exposition may changeaccording to historical circumstances but whose essence and focus of concernremain constant (pp. 5-6).The idea of continuity and discontinuity is a valuable method for consideringvarious themes in Arab thought, ranging from the liberal thinkersof the nuhdah (renaissance) to both secular and religious Arab responses tothe challenge of colonization and the question of how best could Arab-Islamic societies survive foreign occupation. Essential here is the questionof Arab Muslim “decline,” how and why it occurred, and how this declinemay be reversed. Abu-Rabi‘ surveys a variety of Muslim thinkers to positthree approaches to the relevance of Islamic tradition to the resolution ofthe problem of decline: the rejection of tradition in favor of intellectualstimulus from the West; a conservative approach calling for the “revival of ...

Ummah’s Rights or Human Rights? Universalism, Individualism, and Islamic Ethics in the Twenty-first Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Islamic Ethics ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Societal Needs ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”

Of Promise and Peril: Doctoral Study in Public Administration in the 21st Century

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
John R Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Faculty Member ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Doctoral Study ◽  
Recent Graduate

The author, a recent graduate of the Doctor in Public Administration program, shares his thoughts about what it means to study public administration in the twenty-first century. He hopes his insights, born out of more than a forty year-long career in the field—decades of work in colleges and universities as a faculty member, dean, provost, vicepresident, and acting president, as well as his extensive experience in teaching public administration at the graduate and undergraduate levels—will help doctoral students in their academic pursuits. More specifically, he hopes that his remarks will make Ph.D. students think more deeply about the promise of their endeavors and, on the other hand, give them advance warning about perils of the process and ways to avoid them.

Pythagorean Women Philosophers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorota M. Dutsch
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
First Century ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Grant Agency ◽  
Women Philosophers ◽  
Historical Accounts

Modern scholarly accounts of Greek philosophical history usually exclude women. And yet, from Dixaearchus of Messana to Diogenes Laertius, classical writers record the names of women philosophers from various schools. What is more, pseudonymous treatises and letters (likely dating after the first century CE) articulate the teachings of Pythagorean women. How can this literature inform our understanding of Greek intellectual history? To take these texts at face value would be naïve; to reject them, narrow-minded. This book is a deep examination of the literary tradition surrounding female Pythagoreans; it envisions the tradition as a network of texts that does not represent female philosophers but enacts their role in Greek culture. Part I, “Portraits,” assembles and contextualizes excerpts from historical accounts and wisdom literature. Part II, “Impersonations,” analyzes pseudonymous treatises and letters. Texts are approached with a mixture of suspicion and belief, inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Suspicion serves to disclose the misogyny of the epistemic regimes that produced the texts about and by women philosophers. Belief takes us beyond the circumstances of the texts’ production to possible worlds of diverse readers, institutions, and practices that grant agency to the female knower. In the process, the book uncovers traces of a fascinating dialogue about the gender of philosophical knowledge, which includes female voices.

Trafficking

2018 ◽  
pp. 344-358
Author(s):  
Paul Amar
Keyword(s):  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Global History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Forms Of Violence

This chapter offers a global history, as well as cultural, legal, and political–economic analysis, of “trafficking,” a set of relationships and processes often constituted as the dark mirror of globalization. First, the chapter traces how the term “trafficking” emerged. Second, it examines the evolution of “trafficking” in the context of “drug wars,” from the imperial Opium Wars in China in the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first-century “narco” battlegrounds of Mexico. Third, it surveys how global studies-related research has developed critical lenses for analyzing the politics of “sex trafficking” and “human trafficking.” Finally, it examines the term “trafficker” as selectively deployed along racial and social lines in ways that produce obscuring pseudo-analyses of the violence of global capitalism that preserve the impunity of certain powerful actors, create monstrous misrepresentations of globalizing forms of violence, and stir moral and racial panics on a global scale.

Traditional Polity and the Dynamics of Change in India

1963 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Bondurant
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
The One

The title of this essay begins with the word traditional and it moves towards the idea of change. As is well known, these terms—tradition and change—are not opposites, nor are they to be understood in contradistinction to one another. It is important in this context to avoid the temptation to treat them as contradictory or to draw contrasts between what one considers on the one hand traditional, and on the other, changing. One cannot accurately speak of what was as over against what will be, or what is becoming. Nor can one view the ancient as opposed to that which is modern. Clearly, the opposite of change is permanence and persistence, and is not—at least not necessarily—to be couched in terms of the traditional. One need only to remind oneself that among the most compelling elements in the West's intellectual history is the idea of progress, to understand that there are indeed traditions in which the notion of change itself has played a significant role. And so it does not follow that "traditional Indian polity" is a set of concepts to be placed over against the "dynamics of change"—quite the contrary, as I shall try to show in what follows.

Empire after Liberalism: The Transatlantic Right and Identitarian War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Male ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The One

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.

Madness, virtue, and ecology: A classical Indian approach to psychiatric disturbance

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512098224
Author(s):  
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Psychiatric Disturbance ◽  
Indian Medical ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Relationship

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.

Bilingual Heaven: Was There a Distinct Persianate Islam in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire?

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 214-241
Author(s):  
Aslıhan Gürbüzel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Other World

Abstract What is the language of heaven? Is Arabic the only language allowed in the eternal world of the virtuous, or will Muslims continue to speak their native languages in the other world? While learned scholars debated the language of heaven since the early days of Islam, the question gained renewed vigor in seventeenth century Istanbul against the background of a puritan reform movement which criticized the usage of Persian and the Persianate canon as sacred text. In response, Mevlevī authors argued for the discursive authority of the Persianate mystical canon in Islamic tradition (sunna). Focusing on this debate, this article argues that early modern Ottoman authors recognized non-legal discourses as integral and constitutive parts of the Islamic tradition. By adopting the imagery of bilingual heaven, they conceptualized Islamic tradition as a diverse discursive tradition. Alongside diversity, another important feature of Persianate Islam was a positive propensity towards innovations.

scholarly journals 來自「東方」的聲音圖景：江文也作品的異國情調與民族追尋

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (36) ◽  
pp. 081-106
Author(s):  
張琬琳 張琬琳
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
International Standards ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
The World ◽  
General Society

<p>二十世紀初，在國際間崛起的各國勢力，加速了各民族內部自我整頓與反省的動力，東方音樂家學習西方音樂，也試圖以西方音樂的樂制，來整建自我民族內部的音樂紋理。</p> <p>東方音樂家欲望著西方，希冀能登上國際音樂舞臺；西方樂壇也期待從東方音樂家那裡，聽見西方人能夠「聽得懂」的「東方聲音」。在東 / 西方彼此期待、渴望之間，音樂本身被賦予極大的感官寓意，對西方人而言，帶有異國情調的音樂，尤其能夠吸引他們的目光；對於東方音樂家而言，這些「東方」的元素，卻是取自於不同民族風土的獨特聲音。</p> <p>本文聚焦臺灣近代音樂家江文也，以近年來新出版的傳記、日記和音樂作品全集，以及本論文作者近年於歐洲搜集的史料為分析佐證，探討江文也「屬於自己 / 東方的聲音」創作，如何引發西方樂壇對於「東方聲音」的想像。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>The early twentieth century was a century that had the two global-scale World Wars between world powers across continents and oceans. Rising nationalism and increasing national awareness became a major political issue in general society. Eastern musicians reflected on the issue and diligently learned Western music system to get a remarkable grasp of it. Because they knew well the so-called Oriental music sounds must be rooted in the Western music theory to be able to compete among nations by international standards. On one hand, Eastern musicians desired to be seen and rival upon the world stage; on the other hand, Western musicians looked forward to hearing pure Oriental music sounds from the East. However, for Taiwanese composer Jiang, Wen-Ye, the Oriental music sounds are not the ones of a traditional and exotic concept. Traditionally, the Oriental music sounds derive its flavor from the pentatonic scale and use traditional Chinese musical instruments to play. It is under such circumstances Jiang, Wen-Ye compose beautiful musical forms that embody his love and respectful duty to the Taiwanese motherland throughout frequent international music events and competitions.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document