scholarly journals Revisiting Fanaticism in the Context of Wasaṭīyyah

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. i-xx
Author(s):  
Ahmad F. Yousif
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Violent Behavior ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Traditional Sense ◽  
Private Matter ◽  
Religious Assurance ◽  
Religious Nature

Fanaticism is derived from the Latin word fanum, which refers to sacred placesof worship such as temples or other consecrated sites. The complete term fanaticusmeans “to be put into raging enthusiasm by a deity.”2 In the modernsense, a fanatic is simply an individual who goes to an extreme, is overly zealousor unreasonably enthusiastic regarding an issue, idea, opinion, or action.These ideations do not have to be of a strictly religious nature, but may alsobe in regard to a personal or private matter or a larger political, social, or economicissue. Despite the broadness of its contemporary application, it is mostcommonly used in its traditional sense of religious zealousness, intolerance,and violence.In today’s literature fanaticism stands not for the content of any particularreligious position, but for a mentality and attitude that can attach an attitudeof radicalism, rigor, and extremism to the content of any ideal or ideology.According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it refers to a person “holding extremebeliefs that may lead to unreasonable (actions) or violent behavior.”3 One featureof this mentality is the “religious assurance of the establishment of beliefthrough dogmatic and moral legalism, often founded on a fundamentalist positivismin matters touching revelation.”4“Fundamentalism” (uṣūlīyah), on the other hand, is originally a Protestantterm developed in the early part of the twentieth century to refer to Christiangroups that believed in the Bible’s inerrancy, as opposed to those who soughtto make scriptural changes to accommodate the modern world.5 It is somewhatredundant in the Islamic context; however, some scholars have been trying tounderstand the connection between Islam and fundamentalism.6 Theoretically,the great majority of practicing Muslims are “fundamentalists” because theybelieve that the Qur’an remains unchanged from its initial revelation. Therefore,the following analysis will mainly focus on the concepts of fanaticismand wasaṭīyah from a comparative perspective that emphasizes their recentdevelopments and connections to Islam ...

Marriage Broking: Catalysis

Reactions ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Atkins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Chemical Industry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Homogeneous Catalyst ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Industrial Chemistry ◽  
The World ◽  
Fritz Haber

A ‘catalyst’ is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself being consumed. The Chinese characters for catalyst, which translate as ‘marriage broker’, convey the sense exactly. For instance, a huge advance in industrial chemistry was achieved early in the twentieth century when the German chemist Fritz Haber (1868–1934) found that nitrogen and hydrogen could be induced to combine to form ammonia, NH3, if the two gases were heated under pressure in the presence of iron. They hardly react at all if iron is not present. Haber’s achievement has helped to save the world, as well as contributing not a little to its destruction. Ammonia is of prime importance for the production of fertilizers, and through that application catalysis has helped to feed the world. Ammonia is also of prime importance for the manufacture of explosives, and through that application catalysis has taken away with that hand some of what the other hand has provided. The chemical industry could not function without catalysts as they enable reactions to occur at economically viable rates. They also enable some reactions to occur which in their absence would not occur at all. Catalysts are used to refine fuels, thus enabling transport. They are used in the manufacture of polymers, thus enabling the fabrication of so many of the artefacts of everyday life as well as the fabrics of fashion and furnishings. Without catalysts there would be very little of what we recognize as the familiar modern world. Our bodies also function under the control of catalysts. Biological catalysts are called enzymes, and I describe their function in Reaction 27. There are two broad classes of catalyst. A ‘heterogeneous catalyst’ is typically a solid and the reagents are liquids or gases that flow over the solid and react as they come into contact with it; this is the case with Haber’s catalyst. A ‘homogeneous catalyst’ is a gas or a substance that dissolves in a liquid reaction mixture. Anthropogenic (human-made) chorine atoms, perhaps from aerosol gases that have travelled up into the stratosphere, are homogeneous catalysts for the destruction of ozone.

The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel

2005 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent Nongbri
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Justin Martyr ◽  
John's Gospel

The thesis of this paper is simple: we as critical readers of the New Testament often use John Rylands Greek Papyrus 3.457, also known as P52, ininappropriate ways, and we should stop doing so. A recent example will illustrate the problem. In what is on the whole a superb commentary on John's gospel, D. Moody Smith writes the following about the date of John:For a time, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century, the possibility that John was not written, or at least not published, until [the] mid-second century was a viable one. At that time Justin Martyr espoused a logos Christology, without citing the Fourth Gospel explicitly. Such an omission by Justin would seem strange if the Gospel of John had already been written and was in circulation. Then the discovery and publication in the1930s of two papyrus fragments made such a late dating difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. The first and most important is the fragment of John chapter 18 … [P52], dated by paleographers to the second quarter of the second century (125–150); the other is a fragment of a hithertounknown gospel called Egerton Papyrus 2 from the same period, which obviously reflects knowledge of the Gospel of John…. For the Gospel of Johnto have been written and circulated in Egypt, where these fragments were found, a date nolater than the first decade of the second century must be presumed.

Modern Medical Yoga: Struggling With a History of Magic, Alchemy and Sex

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Alter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Fitness ◽  
Holistic Health ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Yoga ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medieval India

The history of modern yoga is rooted in the history of alchemy and the practice of magic in medieval India. In physiological terms it is also intimately linked to tantric ideas concerning the immobilisation of semen. However, modern yoga as a form of practice which emphasises physical fitness, wellness and holistic health, emerged more directly out of the early twentieth-century yoga renaissance. Leading figures such as Shri Y ogendra and Swami Kuvalyananda sought to purge yoga practices such as asana, kriya and pranayama of all things esoteric, mystical and magical and establish practice on the basis of pragmatic, rational, scientific principles. They did this within a framework of what can be called secularised spiritualism. Since the early part of the last century yoga has been popularised, systematised and routinised on these terms, as reflected in countless schools founded by teachers with various degrees of training and experience, as well as in thousands of popular, scientific and academic publications. In all of these schools and publications—both more and less spiritual and philosophical—there is, it will be argued, a degree of profound ambivalence if not explicit contradiction between a secularised, 'sanitised' scientific ideal of medicalised practice, and the 'other history' of sex, magic, and alchemy. This 'other history' both undermines and authorises the idea of yoga as medicine, and, it will be argued, the tension between pragmatic rationalism and esoteric magic makes yoga powerful.

Modernism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Dimensional Spectrum ◽  
Culture History ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rule Out

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.

War in Social Thought

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Original Argument

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.

Gewalt und Kommunikation

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jens Bonnemann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Normal Case ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Philosophy Of Dialogue ◽  
The Individual

In ethics, when discussing problems of justice and a just social existence one question arises obviously: What is the normal case of the relation between I and you we start from? In moral philosophy, each position includes basic socio-anthropological convictions in that we understand the other, for example, primarily as competitor in the fight for essential resources or as a partner in communication. Thus, it is not the human being as isolated individual, or as specimen of the human species or socialised member of a historical society what needs to be understood. Instead, the individual in its relation to the other or others has been studied in phenomenology and the philosophy of dialogue of the twentieth century. In the following essay I focus on Martin Buber’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of intersubjectivity which I use in order to explore the meaning of recognition and disrespect for an individual. They offer a valuable contribution to questions of practical philosophy and the socio-philosophical diagnosis of our time.

State of Fashion: Searching for the New Luxury

APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
The Other ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
The Public ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.

Levantine Art in the “Orientalizing” Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-383
Author(s):  
Marian H. Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The West ◽  
False Dichotomy ◽  
First Millennium

The “Orientalizing period” represents a scholarly designation used to describe the eighth and seventh centuries bce when regions in Greece, Italy, and farther west witnessed a flourishing of arts and cultures attributed to contact with cultural areas to the east—in particular that of the Phoenicians. This chapter surveys Orientalizing as an intellectual and historiographic concept and reconsiders the role of purportedly Phoenician arts within the existing scholarly narratives. The Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West. The designation “Phoenician” has a similarly complex historiographic past rooted in ancient Greek stereotyping that has profoundly shaped modern scholarly interpretations. This chapter argues that the luxury arts most often credited as agents of Orientalization—most prominent among them being carved ivories, decorated metal bowls, and engraved tridacna shells—cannot be exclusively associated with a Phoenician cultural origin, thus calling into question the primacy of the Phoenicians in Orientalizing processes. Each of these types of objects appears to have a much broader production sphere than is indicated by the attribute as Phoenician. In addition, the notion of unidirectional influences flowing from east to west is challenged, and instead concepts of connectivity and networking are proposed as more useful frameworks for approaching the problem of cultural relations during the early part of the first millennium bce.

Gender and Social Exclusion in European Migration Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 658-676
Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Other ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
The One ◽  
European Migration

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.

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