This issue of AJISS provides a multidimensional perspective of today’sIslamic intellectual experience. What seems to contribute markedly to theshaping of this experience is the ongoing creative process of integrating thecontemporary with the historical and the particular with the universal. TheMuslims’ commitment to humanity’s persistent struggle for meaning andharmony is, in essence, deeply linked to their belonging to the social anddiscursive manifestations of the Islamic historical epoch.Similarly evident is that neither studying Islam nor seeking the constructionof an Islamic view of our times can be conducted coherently withoutinvoking human history and intellectual achievements located outsideof the traditionally defined boundaries of the Islamic intellectual venture.Examples abound. Western epistemological tools and concepts are nowused widely, with little hesitation, by an increasing number of Muslimsocial scientists. On another level, the emergence of world global systemshas left its imprint on the Muslims’ perceptions of universal justice. Theinfluences of non-Muslim suffering and struggle are becoming part of theMuslim consciousness. In a startling reflection of this development, thetragic history of Native Americans has recently been sought as an allegoricalwell-spring by Arab anti-imperialist poets. For Islam and the world,despite many pitfalls and dangers, this process of integration is ultimatelybound to transfer the Muslims’ worldview to an era that is fundamentallydisctinctive from the preceding “centuries of the Islamic experience.”Charles Hirschkind’s “Heresy or Hermeneutics: The Case of NasrHamid Abu Zayd” provides a lucid example of how modem Islamic intellectualismand its image, the discipline of Islamic studies, are predicated ona wide variety of sources, whether historical or contingent, traditional orotherwise. The case of Abu Zayd and his prolonged conflict with Islamiccircles in Egypt has been of particular interest to the western and Arab secularmedia alike. Emerging from the halls of the University of Cairo, thecontentious debate surrounding his ideas has marched all the way to theEgyptian judiciary. But Hirschkind is not a judge, and AJISS is not a courtroom.The focus here is on “the contrastive notions of reason and history,” ...
Tres símbolos y una metáfora en la poesía de Andrés Sánchez Robayna
