Critical Perspectives on Islam and the Western World

Critical Perspectives on Islam and the Western World PDF

Author: Jonathan Johansen

Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc

Published: 2006-01-15

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781404205383

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Primary and secondary source documents discuss the Islamic view of Western culture, the Western perspective on Islam, the confrontation of the two cultures, jihad, and Islam in Europe.

Islam and the West

Islam and the West PDF

Author: Michael Thompson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780742531079

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The essays in Islam and the West: Critical Perspectives on Modernity approach the interactions of Islam, the West, and modernity through overlapping social, historical, economic, cultural, and philosophical layers. Viewed through this complex prism of analysis, the full dimensions of the relationship become clear and the result is a deeper understanding of the nature of modernity and how other societies can relate to each other.

Debates on Civilization in the Muslim World

Debates on Civilization in the Muslim World PDF

Author: Lütfi Sunar

Publisher: Works

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780199466887

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Since its birth as a concept, civilization has been defined by an encounter with the 'other'. Barbarism, the ever-ready counter concept, has provided civilization with its raison d'etre-that of exerting violence upon other societies to 'civilize' them. Enlightenment thinkers defined civilization as an opponent of nature, while science and technology, tools with which nature was to be conquered, became one of the basic indicators of development. Thus was formed the unbroken tie between civilization and science. In the Muslim world, civilization became a synonym for modernization, a lifestyle imposed by the colonialists and their local counterparts. However, as this volume reveals, the resistance to and reception of Western modernity by non-Western societies is not homogenous, nor is the 'othering' unidirectional. If the Orientalist discourse portrayed the Islamic East as an exotic, seductive, and untamed 'other', a corresponding Occidentalism also stereotyped the West as the soulless, mechanistic 'other' to Islam. Challenging the embedded prejudices within social theory, Debates on Civilization in the Muslim World questions the Eurocentric understanding of civilization and also explores the themes of modernization, globalization, and the future of the civilization debate.

Beyond Modernity

Beyond Modernity PDF

Author: Mohammed Moussa

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-10-30

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1538150956

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A contest is afoot in Muslim discourses around the world in the twenty-first century. Prevalent norms and acts are subject to competing motivations, trends and forces. The image of a monolithic Islam is thus wholly inadequate to identify and interpret the different expressions of Muslim thought and practice in their specific yet connected contexts. This book proposes competing and persuasive perspectives for interpreting what Muslims say, do and think in collective settings or in the light of common frames of reference. The chapters contained in this book reflect a diversity of disciplines and interests. Nonetheless, a common thread of the preoccupation with meanings in context unites the contributors and the approaches to their chosen examples. Islam is not a discrete category that is taken for granted. Instead, the cacophony of voices in the Muslim world situated in specific contexts, variously national, regional or global, is allowed to inform each chapter. Here one encounters contemporary Muslims participating in discourses with a contested character that create opportunities to augment or question orthodox dictates or transmit or alter existing beliefs and practices. What emerges are nuanced portraits of contemporary Muslim thought and practice that reveal a far from monolithic Islam to which all things Islamic can be reduced.

After Orientalism

After Orientalism PDF

Author: François Pouillion

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-11-27

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 900428253X

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The debate on Orientalism began some fifty years ago in the wake of decolonization. While initially considered a turning point, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was in fact part of a larger academic endeavor – the political critique of “colonial science” – that had already significantly impacted the humanities and social sciences. In a recent attempt to broaden the debate, the papers collected in this volume, offered at various seminars and an international symposium held in Paris in 2010-2011, critically examine whether Orientalism, as knowledge and as creative expression, was in fact fundamentally subservient to Western domination. By raising new issues, the papers shift the focus from the center to the peripheries, thus analyzing the impact on local societies of a major intellectual and institutional movement that necessarily changed not only their world, but the ways in which they represented their world. World history, which assumes a plurality of perspectives, leads us to observe that the Saidian critique applies to powers other than Western European ones — three case studies are considered here: the Ottoman, Russian (and Soviet), and Chinese empires. Other essays in this volume proceed to analyze how post-independence states have made use of the tremendous accumulation of knowledge and representations inherited from previous colonial regimes for the sake of national identity, as well as how scholars change and adapt what was once a hegemonic discourse for their own purposes. What emerges is a new landscape in which to situate research on non-Western cultures and societies, and a road-map leading readers beyond the restrictive dichotomy of a confrontation between West and East. With contributions by: Elisabeth Allès; Léon Buskens; Stéphane A. Dudoignon; Baudouin Dupret; Edhem Eldem; Olivier Herrenschmidt; Nicholas S. Hopkins; Robert Irwin; Mouldi Lahmar; Sylvette Larzul; Jean-Gabriel Leturcq; Jessica Marglin; Claire Nicholas; Emmanuelle Perrin; Alain de Pommereau; François Pouillon; Zakaria Rhani; Emmanuel Szurek; Jean-Claude Vatin; Mercedes Volait

Critical Perspectives on Literature and Culture in the New World Order

Critical Perspectives on Literature and Culture in the New World Order PDF

Author: Washima Che Dan

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2012-11-15

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1443842931

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The fifteen chapters in this volume explore both new and tested theoretical perspectives on literature and culture at large; this multiplicity of discourses is a reflection of the implicit discontent in conforming to the New World Order, and a contestation against hierarchical relationships between countries, which inform the social, cultural and political climates of weaker nations. With the political and economic hegemony of stronger nations, weaker nations run the risk of being dominated, or at the very least, having their own national identity and sovereignty steeped in ambivalence in the face of a globalised culture. This volume hopes to bring together critical views in relation to the construction of cultural studies in the Western framework, the application of literary theory in the readings of vernacular literature, contestation of the mainstream scientistic methodology of cultural evaluation, the role of English literature in Asian cultures, the application of postcolonial theory in literature, literary ethics in relation to Islamic literature, as well as the Islamic and Western conceptions of democracy. More than half of the articles in this collection centre on Islam as a guiding principle, or as a context through which critical perspectives are made on literature and culture in today’s globalised world order. This inadvertent foregrounding of Islam reflects a continuing dialogue on and with Islam and its significant impact on existing academic discourses founded upon Western-style scholarship.

Islam, Marketing and Consumption

Islam, Marketing and Consumption PDF

Author: Aliakbar Jafari

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-01-13

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1317753232

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In recent years, a critically oriented sub-stream of research on Muslim consumers and businesses has begun to emerge. This scholarship, located both within and outside the marketing field, adopts a socio-culturally situated approach to Islam and investigates the complex and multifaceted intersections between Islam and markets. This book seeks to reflect various unheard and emerging critical voices from within the Muslim world, and provide a series of critical insights on how, if and why Islam matters to marketing theory and practice. It questions the existing assumptions and polarising discussions which underpin the portrayal of Islam as the ‘other’ of Modernity, while acknowledging that Muslims themselves are partially responsible for creating stereotyped representations of Islam and ‘the Muslim’. This wide-ranging and insightful collection will advance emerging critical perspectives, and provide new insights that will influence the generation and application of knowledge in the context of Muslim societies. It will open up fresh conversations for scholars in marketing as well as the broader humanities and social sciences.

Islam and the West

Islam and the West PDF

Author: Mohammed Jabar

Publisher: Mereo Books, mereobook, mereobooks

Published: 2014-11-01

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1861513003

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ÿSince its origins in the deserts of Arabia fourteen centuries ago, Islam has grown until today it has one and a half billion followers, nearly a quarter of mankind. Today Islam is feared and distrusted by much of the Western world for its association with religious extremism and terrorism, although the vast majority of Muslims believe only in peace, love and service to Allah and assert that extremism has no place in their faith.

Islamic & European Expansion

Islamic & European Expansion PDF

Author: Michael Adas

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9781566390682

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This volume of essays makes available the essential background information and methods for effective teaching and writing on cross-cultural history. The contributors--some of the most distinguished writers of global and comparative history--chart the advances in understanding in their fields of concentration, revealing both specific findings and broad patterns that have emerged. The cover image, "The Arrival of the Dutch at Patane," from Theodore de Bry, India Orientals, Part VIII (Frankfurt: W. Richteri, 1607) depicts the two key phases of global history that are covered by the essays. Muslim inhabitants of the town of Patane on the Malayan peninsula warily confront a Dutch landing party whose bearing suggests that it is engaged in yet another episode in the saga of European overseas exploration and discovery. The presence of the Muslims in Malaya reflects an earlier process of expansion that saw Islamic civilization spread from Spain and Morocco in the west to the Philippines in the east in the millennium between the 7th and 17th centuries. The Dutch came by sea to an area on the coastal and island fringes of Asia, the one zone where their warships gave them a decisive edge in this era. The citizens of Patane had good reason to distrust the European intruders, since the Portuguese who had preceded the Dutch had used force whenever possible to control the formerly peaceful trade in the region and often to persecute Muslim Peoples. Author note: Michael Adas is Abraham Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is currently editor of the American Historical Association's series on Global and Comparative History and co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series on "Studies in Comparative World History." He has published numerous articles and books, including most recently (with Peter Stearns and Stuart Schwartz) World Civilization: The Global Experience (1992) and Turbulent Passage: A Global History of the Twentieth Century (1993).

Making Sense of the Secular

Making Sense of the Secular PDF

Author: Ranjan Ghosh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-04

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1136277226

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This book offers a wide range of critical perspectives on how secularism unfolds and has been made sense of across Europe and Asia. The book evaluates secularism as it exists today – its formations and discontents within contemporary discourses of power, terror, religion and cosmopolitanism – and the focus on these two continents gives critical attention to recent political and cultural developments where secularism and multiculturalism have impinged in deeply problematical ways, raising bristling ideological debates within the functioning of modern state bureaucracies. Examining issues as controversial as the state of Islam in Europe and China’s encounters with religion, secularism, and modernization provides incisive and broader perspectives on how we negotiate secularism within the contemporary threats of terrorism and other forms of fundamentalism and state-politics. However, amidst the discussions of various versions of secularism in different countries and cultural contexts, this book also raises several other issues relevant to the antitheocratic and theocratic alike, such as: Is secularism is merely a nonreligious establishment? Is secularism a kind of cultural war? How is it related to "terror"? The book at once makes sense of secularism across cultural, religious, and national borders and puts several relevant issues on the anvil for further investigations and understanding.