scholarly journals COVID-19 as archetype rather than event: Thinking COVID-19 in the light of Eliade’s ‘terror of history’

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Auwais Rafudeen
Keyword(s):  
Linear Time ◽  
Modern View ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Ways Of Being

For Eliade, linear time constitutes the metaphysical substrate of modernity. Consequently, the modern subject experiences time as an irreversible series of events occurring within an absolutised history. It is this subject that ‘makes’ that history. By extension, this time, and the history it valorises, cannot be transcended. This sets up the modern view against a premodern one where temporality is seen in multiple ways, allowing history to be transcended by archetypes. Eliade mourns the alternative ways of being and meaning cultivated by the premodern self that have been lost to hegemonic modernity and its associated, often precarious, subjectivity. He believes that these archetypal modes need to be recovered to counter the damage caused by modernity’s desire to ‘make history’. I reflect on this Eliadean thesis in the light of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis, drawing on an example from the Islamic tradition to show what an archetypal, rather than event-centred, approach to the crisis might look like. Specifically, I examine the thoughts of British Muslim theologian, Abdal Hakim Murad, on COVID-19, who reflects on the phenomenon both in the light of the archetypal Islamic concept of the divine names and the event-centred capitalism of late modernity.Contribution: Through an examination of Eliade’s important text, the article continues the decolonial interrogation of modernity’s foundations and its implications for being and acting in the world as distinct from premodern approaches. By highlighting time in both approaches, Eliade shows modernity’s foundations to be just as ‘theological’ as those of religion.

Religious Freedom in Islam

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Philpott
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Human Right ◽  
The West ◽  
Empirical Examination ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Muslim Majority

Is Islam hospitable to religious freedom? The question is at the heart of a public controversy over Islam that has raged in the West over the past decade-and-a-half. Religious freedom is important because it promotes democracy and peace and reduces ills like civil war, terrorism, and violence. Religious freedom also is simply a matter of justice—not an exclusively Western principle but rather a universal human right rooted in human nature. The heart of the book confronts the question of Islam and religious freedom through an empirical examination of Muslim-majority countries. From a satellite view, looking at these countries in the aggregate, the book finds that the Muslim world is far less free than the rest of the world. Zooming in more closely on Muslim-majority countries, though, the picture looks more diverse. Some one-fourth of Muslim-majority countries are in fact religiously free. Among the unfree, 40% are repressive because they are governed by a hostile secularism imported from the West, and the other 60% are Islamist. The emergent picture is both honest and hopeful. Amplifying hope are two chapters that identify “seeds of freedom” in the Islamic tradition and that present the Catholic Church’s long road to religious freedom as a promising model for Islam. Another chapter looks at the Arab Uprisings of 2011, arguing that religious freedom explains much about both their broad failure and their isolated success. The book closes with lessons for expanding religious freedom in the Muslim world and the world at large.

How Reality is Reasonable

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Dimensional Manifold ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Fundamental Entity ◽  
Spatiotemporal Relations ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This chapter begins with a systematic presentation of the doctrine of actualism. According to actualism, all that exists is actual, determinate, and of one way of being. There are no possible objects, nor is there any indeterminacy in the world. In addition, there are no ways of being. It is proposed that actual entities stand in three fundamental relations: mereological, spatiotemporal, and resemblance relations. These relations govern the fundamental entities. Each fundamental entity stands in parthood relations, spatiotemporal relations, and resemblance relations to other entities. The resulting picture is one that represents the world as a four-dimensional manifold of actual ‘qualitied contents’—upon which all else supervenes. It is then explained how actualism accounts for classes, quantity, number, causation, laws, a priori knowledge, necessity, and induction.

To Make a Choice You Should Know The Option Physiological and Psychological Contribution of the Female Component in National Security and Intelligence

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Sabrina Magris
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Female Component ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Ways Of Being

The paper addresses the importance of the role of women in Intelligence and National Security with the specific purpose to highlight the quality of female contribution in all different domains. The world is changing and in this change, Intelligence risks being left behind as never before. An epic evolution and change are underway that will upset ways of being and ways of thinking. All this not suddenly and all this without realizing it if not after the fact. The world is changing, women “are gain the upper hand” taking over also numerically and it is not realized that a change must happen in the field of Intelligence with a space left to women, not because they are women but because of their abilities. In all domains, from strategic to an operational one. Blindness to change that many Agencies are having. And those who are making changes often do so because they are obliged by the rules but not by evaluating the concrete capability of individuals. Two factors risk being explosive if no action is taken. The paper highlights the physiological and psychological contribution of the female component in the National Security and Intelligence work, and why diversity is scientifically important to successfully conduct operational and strategic tasks. It also describes the existing lack of models, how to enlarge the interest of young girls to join the Intelligence Community, and a look into the near future regarding the training and the recruitment processes with specific regards to women.

“Ọrọ, nwa, ẹkọ”, the talk, the look, the education: reflections on a pedagogy of cosmoperception

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roseane Santos Mesquita ◽  
Késia Dos Anjos Rocha
Keyword(s):  
Educational Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Educational Practices ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Look ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Present Text ◽  
The Way

The present text bets on the power of reflections on a pedagogy guided by cosmoperception. It is a collective call for the enchanted ways of perceiving and relating to the other. “Ọrọ, nwa, ẹkọ”, the talk, the look, the education, insurgent forces that grow in the cracks, just like moss, alive, reborn. That is the way we think about education, as a living practice, turned to freedom. Freedom understood as a force that enables us to question certain hegemonic truths entrenched in our ways of being, thinking and producing knowledge. In dialogue with the criticisms on the decolonial thought and by authors and authoresses who are putting themselves into thinking about an epistemology from a diasporic place, from the edges of the world, we will try to problematize the effects of the epistemic erasures promoted by the colonial processes and how that has affected our educative practices. The look at the educational experience that happens in the sacred territory of candomblé, will be our starting point to think about politically and poetically transformative educational practices.

scholarly journals Reply to Doing Indigenous Epistemology: Internal Debates About Inside Knowledge in Māori Society’, by Toon Van Meilj

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Sissons
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Indigenous Epistemology ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ways Of Being

Van Meijl is right to insist that epistemology must be about active, socially contested ‘ways of knowing’ and that understanding the relationship between such ways and their products is as much an ethnographic problem as it is a philosophical one. Ways of knowing, as social practices, are also, more generally, ways of being or becoming and so are not, in my view, radically distinct from the ontologies they produce and reproduce. Phillipe Descola argues strongly that his four ‘ontologies’ are also schemas of practice, fundamental ways that people know, experience and inhabit the world. I think Van Meijl is mistaken, therefore, when he characterises the ontological turn in anthropology as being about different relations between mind and matter. For me, it is most significantly about the different ways that personhood or subjectivity can be understood and embodied.<br>

Making textiles into persons: Gestural sequences and relationality in communities of weaving practice of the South Central Andes

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Y Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Central Andes ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
South Central ◽  
Technical Practice ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Ways Of Being

The complex social and technical dimensions of weaving in contemporary Andean communities of practice are examined to suggest how these might have evolved so that populations could coordinate and make sense of their daily tasks in an emerging biocultural space. Rejecting former constructivist epistemological biases in operational studies of working practice, the article explores an alternative approach where technical practice is given meaning through ways of being in the world, and where common sense-making derives from the idea that textiles are living beings. The nurturing processes of a relational ontology where ‘making’ is ‘growing’ are traced in the patterns of learning and their gestural sequencing in weaving communities, in winding instruments that intercalate productive spheres and in finished textiles that express productive yields.

Costituzione e religione

2009 ◽  
pp. 5-46
Author(s):  
Silvio Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
The State ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Legislation And Jurisprudence ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The World

- An examination of a country's Constitution offers useful pointers for understanding how the state in question conceives and regulates its relationship with religion. In this essay, the author analyses the constitutions of all the countries of the world, considering three groups of enactments: the ones that concern a constitution's inspiring ideals and principles, the ones that deal with the sources of law and, lastly, the ones that regulate the relationships between the state and religions. An examination of this material paints a picture of the position accorded to religion in each country's legal system and above all highlights the differences attributed to the cultural and religious background that inspires them: in particular, the differences between the Western countries with a Christian tradition and the Arabian countries with an Islamic tradition, but also the differences found, within the Islamic world itself, between Arabian and non-Arabian countries. While recognising that any comparison between constitutions needs to be completed by an analysis of other sources of legislation and jurisprudence, this article indicates several directions for future research to develop on this work.

Religion, Violence, and the State

2018 ◽  
pp. 226-262
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The Military ◽  
Subsequent Rise

This chapter focuses on religio-political violence, whose widespread incidence—after Pakistan's realignment in the US-led War on Terror in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent rise of a new, Pakistani Taliban—has threatened the very fabric of state and society. It examines the violence in question from two broad and intertwined perspectives, one relating to the state, and the other to Islam and those speaking in its terms. Part of the concern in this chapter is to contribute to an understanding of how the governing elite and the military have often fostered the conditions in which the resort to religiously inflected violence has been justified. It also suggests that the nonstate actors—ideologues and militants—have had an agency of their own, which is not reducible to the machinations of the state. Their resort to relevant facets of the Islamic tradition also needs to be taken seriously in order to properly understand their view of the world and such appeal as they have had in particular circles.

Queering Queer Conversations

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-305
Author(s):  
David F. Purnell ◽  
Christina L. Ivey ◽  
Andy Sturt
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
International Symposium ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
The World ◽  
Conference Papers ◽  
Ways Of Being

One of the strengths of autoethnography is the connections that can be made through the telling of story. This article is an compilation of the connections made during presentations at the International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry. Despite age differences, situations, and ways of being in and of the world, there were overlaps in the experiences of the authors. Three individual conference papers are merged to begin a conversation of queering queer narratives through an exploration of embodiment, relationality, and self-presentation without resorting to an established, and perhaps reified, queer iconography. From our queer identities, we offer narratives that are neither settled nor normative from our individual queer standpoints. We write to champion a different view of possibilities for queer non-normativity.

Branded Beautiful

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Lia T. Bascomb
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
White Men ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Queer People ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Amnesia ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
The U.S

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.

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