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 ...

Rediscovering the Islamic Classics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed El Shamsy
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Hot Spot ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
History Of

Islamic book culture dates back to late antiquity, when Muslim scholars began to write down their doctrines on parchment, papyrus, and paper and then to compose increasingly elaborate analyses of, and commentaries on, these ideas. Movable type was adopted in the Middle East only in the early nineteenth century, and it wasn't until the second half of the century that the first works of classical Islamic religious scholarship were printed there. But from that moment on, as this book reveals, the technology of print transformed Islamic scholarship and Arabic literature. The book tells the story of how a small group of editors and intellectuals brought forgotten works of Islamic literature into print and defined what became the classical canon of Islamic thought. Through the lens of the literary culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arab cities—especially Cairo, a hot spot of the nascent publishing business—the book explores the contributions of these individuals, who included some of the most important thinkers of the time. Through their efforts to find and publish classical literature, the book shows, many nearly lost works were recovered, disseminated, and harnessed for agendas of linguistic, ethical, and religious reform. The book is an examination of the central role printing and its advocates played in the intellectual history of the modern Arab world.

Health and Medicine in the Islamic Tradition

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-90
Author(s):  
Dennis Michael Warren
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
Human Health ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Medical Tradition ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The late Dr. Fazlur Rahman, Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Islamic Thought at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, has written this book as number seven in the series on Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions. This series has been sponsored as an interfaith program by The Park Ridge Center, an Institute for the study of health, faith, and ethics. Professor Rahman has stated that his study is "an attempt to portray the relationship of Islam as a system of faith and as a tradition to human health and health care: What value does Islam attach to human well-being-spiritual, mental, and physical-and what inspiration has it given Muslims to realize that value?" (xiii). Although he makes it quite clear that he has not attempted to write a history of medicine in Islam, readers will find considerable depth in his treatment of the historical development of medicine under the influence of Islamic traditions. The book begins with a general historical introduction to Islam, meant primarily for readers with limited background and understanding of Islam. Following the introduction are six chapters devoted to the concepts of wellness and illness in Islamic thought, the religious valuation of medicine in Islam, an overview of Prophetic Medicine, Islamic approaches to medical care and medical ethics, and the relationship of the concepts of birth, contraception, abortion, sexuality, and death to well-being in Islamic culture. The basis for Dr. Rahman's study rests on the explication of the concepts of well-being, illness, suffering, and destiny in the Islamic worldview. He describes Islam as a system of faith with strong traditions linking that faith with concepts of human health and systems for providing health care. He explains the value which Islam attaches to human spiritual, mental, and physical well-being. Aspects of spiritual medicine in the Islamic tradition are explained. The dietary Jaws and other orthodox restrictions are described as part of Prophetic Medicine. The religious valuation of medicine based on the Hadith is compared and contrasted with that found in the scientific medical tradition. The history of institutionalized medical care in the Islamic World is traced to awqaf, pious endowments used to support health services, hospices, mosques, and educational institutions. Dr. Rahman then describes the ...

Islam without Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad S. Dallal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Ganges

Replete with a cast of giants in Islamic thought and philosophy, Ahmad S. Dallal’s pathbreaking intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Muslim world challenges stale views of this period as one of decline, stagnation, and the engendering of a widespread fundamentalism. Far from being moribund, Dallal argues, the eighteenth century--prior to systematic European encounters--was one of the most fertile eras in Islamic thought. Across vast Islamic territories, Dallal charts in rich detail not only how intellectuals rethought and reorganized religious knowledge but also the reception and impact of their ideas. From the banks of the Ganges to the shores of the Atlantic, commoners and elites alike embraced the appeals of Muslim thinkers who, while preserving classical styles of learning, advocated for general participation by Muslims in the definition of Islam. Dallal also uncovers the regional origins of most reform projects, showing how ideologies were forged in particular sociopolitical contexts. Reformists’ ventures were in large part successful--up until the beginnings of European colonization of the Muslim world. By the nineteenth century, the encounter with Europe changed Islamic discursive culture in significant ways into one that was largely articulated in reaction to the radical challenges of colonialism.

scholarly journals Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-156
Author(s):  
Amr G. Sabet
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Qur'anic Exegesis ◽  
Muslim Scholars

This book, an historical survey of the Islamic injunction to command rightand forbid wrong, a biographical exposé of Muslims who understood andpracticed this principle, and a bibliographical reference, is a welcome andtimely addition to the literature on Islamic thought. Detailed and extensive,yet not particularly difficult to read, it is equally accessible to all readers. Itsmain theme is the basic Islamic individual and communal duty to stop otherpeople from doing wrong. Cook contends that few cultures have paid suchmeticulous concern to this matter, despite the issue’s intelligibility in justabout any culture.As a central Islamic tenet, this principle could not be ignored, and yet itssociopolitical implications and consequences made it the focus of rigorousattention by Muslim scholars. The doctrine inexorably brings up the balancingand equally sacrosanct value of privacy, together with issues of knowledge,specialization, competence, and stability – the “how” of the whole matter.After all, the act of forbidding wrong was not supposed to undermine theprinciple by becoming an intrusive breach of privacy, an excursus into socialprying, or a potential justification for unmitigated rebellion against the state.The book consists of five parts comprising 20 chapters. Part I sets thedescriptive framework by elaborating the normative material found in theQur’an, Qur’anic exegesis, tradition, and biographical literature about earlyMuslims. Part II is dedicated to the Hanbali school ince its foundation byAhmad ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855) in Baghdad. The author traces its shiftinginfluences in Damascus and Najd, where the school continues to have a holdin the Saudi state to this day. Part III deals with the Mu‘tazilis and their Zaydiand Imami heirs, all of which, Cook contends, provide the richest documentationfor the intellectual history of forbidding wrong. The remaining Sunnischools of thought, the Khariji Ibadis, together with a chapter on al-Ghazali’stackling of the duty and another chapter pulling together the discussion ofclassical Islam, comprise Part IV. Finally, Part V surveys the duty’s saliencein modern Islamic thought and developments in both the Sunni and Imamischools and engages in a comparative exercise with this duty’s pre-Islamicantecedents and with non-Islamic cultures, including the modern West ...

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.

Reason and Religion in Modern History

2019 ◽  
pp. 199-241
Author(s):  
Joshua Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Rational Theology ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Reading

This chapter focuses on Victorian debates over the intellectual origins of modernity. These hinged on competing interpretations of the place of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the history of ‘mind’. Secularly inclined sociological critics such as Henry Thomas Buckle, who held to an epistemological phenomenalism influenced by John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, hailed these periods for having refined the inductive sciences which drove true progress. An alternative reading of post-Reformation intellectual history, developed by John Tulloch and others, and attacked by agnostics, instead credited it with having made rational theology possible. Underlying these debates was the question of whether experience was confined to the world of sense data, or else also encompassed the intuitive powers of mind. William Inge, in dialogue with Idealist philosophy, developed the latter possibility, in ways that hinted at the development of the apologetic authority of history into a new concern with the psychology of religion.

3 Engaging the Constitutive Laws of Others: Necessities, Ideas, Interests

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hirschl Ran
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Simon Bolivar ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comparative Government ◽  
John Selden

The chapter explores some key junctures in the intellectual history of comparative public law in the early-modern and modern eras. It highlights how the interplay between intellectual inquisitiveness and instrumentalism has influenced many of the field’s epistemological leaps, from the first attempts in the 16th century to delineate a universal public law and to study comparative government in a methodical fashion (John Selden, Montesquieu, and Simón Bolívar, among others), to the current renaissance of comparative constitutional inquiry particularly in Europe, the United States, and Canada. The examples illustrate that comparative constitutional inquiry is best understood as being driven by a combination of intellectual innovation and a compatible political agenda or ideological outlook. In some instances, intellectual pursuit led the way with an instrumentalist goal or ideological agenda providing added impetus. In other instances, comparative constitutional inquiry was more directly driven by political interests, ambitions, and aspirations, writ small or large.

The intellectual origins of the Royal Society-London or Oxford?

1968 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Invisible College ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Oxford Group ◽  
The Invisible

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 at Gresham College. Even in the seventeenth century divergent views arose among its founders as to its intellectual origins and the events which led up to its foundation. So it is not surprising that echoes of these divergences were heard when the Society was celebrating its Tercentenary in 1960. The main points in debate were the extent of Francis Bacon’s influence on its foundation, and the respective contributions of the related groups in London and Oxford. Miss Syfret had already successfully challenged Thomas Birch’s view that the ‘Invisible College’ mentioned by Boyle and centring round Hartlib was in any direct way linked with the foundation of the Royal Society. Professor Douglas McKie in Origins and Founders brought both the London and Oxford groups into his account, and his and Miss Syfret’s interpretations seemed to fit one another (1). However, a booklet from Oxford written by Miss (now Dr) Margery Purver and Dr E. J. Bowen claimed that John Wilkins and the Oxford group were the only begetters of the Royal Society, and rejected John Wallis’s claims for the earlier London group around Gresham College. Dr Purver has elaborated the arguments in favour of this view in a recently published book (2). The Editor of Notes and Records has now asked me to put on record my own views, since I had already discussed this aspect of the intellectual history of the period in my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965).

ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO MODERNIZATION IN THE LATE OTTOMAN PERIOD: İZMİRLİ İSMAİ L HAKKI'S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AGAINST MATERIALIST SCIENTISM

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Sait Özervarli
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Close Investigation

The aim of this article is to explore the distinctiveness of İzmirli İsmail Hakki (1869–1946) in the context of late Ottoman intellectual history and to suggest several implications of his thought on our understanding of debates on religion and modernization among Ottomans in the modern period. Studies on modern Islamic thought in the 19th and 20th centuries are mostly limited, especially in Western literature, to works dealing with a few well-known figures in the Arab world, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. However, a close investigation into several mostly neglected or yet uncovered thinkers of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, can provide us with more interesting aspects of this period. The earlier interest of Istanbul ulama in modernization, their closer and more direct contact with Europeans, and the long historical experience of central Ottoman intelligentsia in similar reviving attempts are some of these aspects. This article aims to demonstrate that central Ottoman studies can make significant contributions to the current knowledge of the period, not only in political history, as has been the main focus so far, but also in religious and intellectual thought. It will show how a contact was established between modern European and Ottoman religious thought, in which ways the issue of modernization became an important topic in religious circles, and what kind of perceptions took place among them about its content and limits.

Interpreting Islam in China

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Petersen
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Strategic Objectives ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Han Kitab

This book explores the contours of the Han Kitab tradition through discussing the works of some of its brightest luminaries in order to identify and explicate pivotal transitions in Sino-Muslim engagement with the Islamic tradition. A distinctive intellectual tradition emerged during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Sino-Muslims established an educational system known as scripture hall education (jingtang jiaoyu經堂教育‎), which utilized an Islamic curriculum made of Arabic, Persian, and Chinese works. The Han Kitab, a corpus of Chinese-language Islamic texts developed within this system, reinterpreted Islam through the lens of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian terminology. Three prominent Sino-Muslim authors are representative of major junctures within the history of Sino-Islamic thought and are used to illustrate discursive transformations within this tradition: Wang Daiyu 王岱輿‎ (1590–1658), the earliest important author; Liu Zhi 劉智‎ (1670–1724), the most prolific scholar; and Ma Dexin 馬德新‎ (1794–1874), the last major intellectual in premodern China. The chapters explore how these authors defined being a Muslim through an examination of their thoughts on the hajj, the Qur’an, and the Arabic language. In the discussions, I analyze how they deployed the categories of pilgrimage, scripture, and language in their writings, as well as their strategic objectives in doing so. More broadly, this book fosters an exploration of issues of vernacularization, translation, centers and peripheries, and tradition. It offers theoretical directions for redescription of critical categories in the study of religion, especially within translingual Muslim communities.

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