Download or read book Islam Orientalism and Intellectual History written by Mohammad R. Salama and published by I. B. Tauris. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the events and aftermath of 9/11 have shown, the relationship between Islam and the West is deeply troubled. Here Mohammad Salama calls for a new understanding of Islam as a historical condition that has existed in relationship to the West since the seventh century. He compares the Arab-Islamic and European traditions of historical thought since the early modern period, focusing on the watershed moments that informed their ideas of intellectual history and perceptions of one another. Islam, he argues, has played a major role in enabling and positioning Western historiography at key points, leaving palpable imprints on Islamic historiography in the process. Focusing on Ibn Khaldun, the complexities of orientalism and modernity, and recent European as well as Arab writings on these themes, this book is essential for all those interested in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, Western and Islamic philosophies of history, and modernity.
Download or read book Islam Orientalism and Intellectual History written by Mohammad R. Salama and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-03-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates on the relationship between Islam and the West rage on, from talk of clashing civilizations to political pacification, from ethical and historical perspectives to distrust, xenophobia and fear. Here Mohammad Salama argues that the events of 9/11 force us to engage ourselves fully, without preconditions, in understanding not just the history of Islam as a religion, but of Islam as a historical condition that has existed in relationship to the West since the seventh century. Salama compares the Arab-Islamic and European traditions of historical thought since the early modern period, focusing on the watershed moments that informed the two traditions' ideas of intellectual history and perceptions of one another. He draws attention to European intellectual history's entangled links with the Islamic philosophy of history, especially the complexities of orientalism and modernity. Recent critical reflections on the work of Ibn Khald?n confirm this intertwined and troubled relationship, reflecting major disparities and contradictions. At the same time, recent Arab writings on Europe's intellectual history reveal a struggle against erasure and intellectual superiority. Calling for a new understanding of the relationship between Islam and the West, Salama argues that Islam has played a major role in enabling and positioning various paths of Western historiography at crucial moments of its development, leaving palpable imprints on Islamic historiography in the process. He proposes an answer to a fundamental question: how to make sense of the mechanics of production in Arab-Islamic and Western historiographies, or how to identify the ways in which they have both failed to make sense of themselves and of each other in an increasingly disenchanted postnationalist world. Spanning an impressive array of recent writings on these themes as well as older foundational texts in both traditions - including al-Tabar?, Ibn Khald?n, Hegel, al-Jabart?, Toynbee, Foucault, Edward Said, and Hourani - this book is both timely and crucial for all those interested in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, Western and Islamic philosophies of history, modernity, and the relationship between Islam and the West.
Download or read book Orientalism written by Edward W. Said and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.
Download or read book The Makings of Indonesian Islam written by Michael Laffan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indonesian Islam is often portrayed as being intrinsically moderate by virtue of the role that mystical Sufism played in shaping its traditions. According to Western observers--from Dutch colonial administrators and orientalist scholars to modern anthropologists such as the late Clifford Geertz--Indonesia's peaceful interpretation of Islam has been perpetually under threat from outside by more violent, intolerant Islamic traditions that were originally imposed by conquering Arab armies. The Makings of Indonesian Islam challenges this widely accepted narrative, offering a more balanced assessment of the intellectual and cultural history of the most populous Muslim nation on Earth. Michael Laffan traces how the popular image of Indonesian Islam was shaped by encounters between colonial Dutch scholars and reformist Islamic thinkers. He shows how Dutch religious preoccupations sometimes echoed Muslim concerns about the relationship between faith and the state, and how Dutch-Islamic discourse throughout the long centuries of European colonialism helped give rise to Indonesia's distinctive national and religious culture. The Makings of Indonesian Islam presents Islamic and colonial history as an integrated whole, revealing the ways our understanding of Indonesian Islam, both past and present, came to be.
Download or read book German Orientalism written by Ursula Wokoeck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 19th century and the first part of the 20th German universities were at the forefront of scholarship in what we now call Orientalism. Drawing upon a survey of thousands of published works this book presents a history of the development of Oriental studies during this period.
Download or read book Orientalism and Islam written by Michael Curtis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an historical analysis of the theme of Oriental despotism, Michael Curtis reveals the complex positive and negative interaction between Europe and the Orient. The book also criticizes the misconception that the Orient was the constant victim of Western imperialism and the view that Westerners cannot comment objectively on Eastern and Muslim societies. The book views the European concept of Oriental despotism as based not on arbitrary prejudicial observation, but rather on perceptions of real processes and behavior in Eastern systems of government. Curtis considers how the concept developed and was expressed in the context of Western political thought and intellectual history, and of the changing realities in the Middle East and India. The book includes discussion of the observations of Western travelers in Muslim countries and analysis of the reflections of seven major thinkers: Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Tocqueville, James and John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Max Weber.
Download or read book Restating Orientalism written by Wael B. Hallaq and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Edward Said’s foundational work, Orientalism has been singled out for critique as the quintessential example of Western intellectuals’ collaboration with oppression. Controversies over the imbrications of knowledge and power and the complicity of Orientalism in the larger project of colonialism have been waged among generations of scholars. But has Orientalism come to stand in for all of the sins of European modernity, at the cost of neglecting the complicity of the rest of the academic disciplines? In this landmark theoretical investigation, Wael B. Hallaq reevaluates and deepens the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project. Refusing to isolate or scapegoat Orientalism, Restating Orientalism extends the critique to other fields, from law, philosophy, and scientific inquiry to core ideas of academic thought such as sovereignty and the self. Hallaq traces their involvement in colonialism, mass annihilation, and systematic destruction of the natural world, interrogating and historicizing the set of causes that permitted modernity to wed knowledge to power. Restating Orientalism offers a bold rethinking of the theory of the author, the concept of sovereignty, and the place of the secular Western self in the modern project, reopening the problem of power and knowledge to an ethical critique and ultimately theorizing an exit from modernity’s predicaments. A remarkably ambitious attempt to overturn the foundations of a wide range of academic disciplines while also drawing on the best they have to offer, Restating Orientalism exposes the depth of academia’s lethal complicity in modern forms of capitalism, colonialism, and hegemonic power.
Download or read book Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century written by Khaled El-Rouayheb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period.
Download or read book Orientalists Islamists and the Global Public Sphere written by Dietrich Jung and published by Equinox Publishing (UK). This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In light of the ongoing public debate that focuses on differences between Islam and the West, this book suggests a change of perspective. It departs from the observation that both western Orientalists and Islamist activists have defined Islam similarly as an all-encompassing religious, political and social system. In shifting from differences to similarities, it leaves behind the increasingly circular debate about the "true" nature of Islam in which the Muslim religion has been represented either as intrinsically hostile to or as principally compatible with modern culture. Instead, it associates the evolution of a particularly essentialist image of Islam with a complex process of cross-cutting (self)-interpretations of Muslim and Western societies within an emerging global public sphere. Putting its focus on the life and work of a number of paradigmatic individuals, the book investigates the intellectual encounters and discursive interdependencies among western and Muslim intellectuals. In a historical genealogy it deconstructs the essentialist image of Islam in uncovering its conceptual foundations in the modern transformation of European and Muslim societies from the nineteenth century onwards. Thereby, the changing infrastructure of the global public sphere has facilitated the gradual popularization, trivialization, and dissemination of a previously elitist discourse on Islam and modernity. In this way, the idea of Islam as an all-encompassing system has been turned into accepted knowledge in the Western and Muslim worlds alike.
Download or read book Contending Visions of the Middle East written by Zachary Lockman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition considers how the 'global war on terror' has changed the way the West views the Islamic world.
Download or read book Interpreting Islam written by Tamara Sonn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-10-10 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Sonn provides the first English translation of The History of Intellectual Movements in Islam (1928), a seminal text of Arab modernism written by the Palestinian intellectual Bandali al-Jawzi (1871-1942). In that book, Jawzi offered the first Marxist interpretation of the history and development of Islamic thought. The continuing importance of his work lies in Jawzi's critical method of reevaluating both European "orientalist" and classical Muslim accounts of Islamic history. Fifty years before Edward Said's landmark Orientalism, Jawzi identified the vested imperial interests as the weakness in both methodologies. Sonn's translation brings to life this skillful and entertaining critique of Islamic history. Her introduction places Jawzi's thought in context with both postmodern intellectuals and Muslim reformers who continue the struggle to apply Islamic principles to contemporary life.
Download or read book Challenging the New Orientalism written by Mohammad Shahid Alam and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past few decades, a new form of Orientalism has been developing. As exemplified by Elie Kedourie and Bernard Lewis, it points to Islam as the West's archenemy. The rise of political Islam and its opposition to Western domination of the Islamic world are seen as evidence of a deep, abiding hatred of all things Western. Accordingly, the new Orientalists call for thorough reforms, among them regime changes, wars, and the imposition of 'democracy' on Islamic societies. They warn that if the West shrinks from this challenge, the Islamists will surely gain power and destroy the West. The essays in this book "written after 9-11" dispute the new Orientalist presumption of an unchanging Islam, opposed to "Western" values and incapable of adapting to the modern world. The not-so-hidden objective of the new Orientalism is to promote acceptance of the US and Israel's imperialist push into the Islamic world as both a security imperative and a civilizing mission. Alam argues that the new Orientalists claim of a categorical split between Islam and the West is based on a biased, inaccurate interpretation of history. While recognizing the political and economic failings of the Islamic world, Alam shows that they are legacies of two centuries of Western imperialism and are shared by all regions at the periphery of the prevailing global capitalism. If the Islamic world lags behind China and India, it is because of two factors that have given a new edge to Western involvement in West Asia and North Africa: oil and Zionism. In Alam's view, Israel is a powerful destabilizing force in the region, whose survival depends upon turning the Western-Islamic conflict into a hot war. Not surprisingly, many of the new Orientalists are strong partisans of Israel.
Download or read book Ibn Khaldun written by Robert Irwin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world--a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas. Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain, becoming a major political player as well as a teacher and writer. Closely examining the Muqaddima, a startlingly original analysis of the laws of history, and drawing on many other contemporary sources, Irwin shows how Ibn Khaldun's life and thought fit into historical and intellectual context, including medieval Islamic theology, philosophy, politics, literature, economics, law, and tribal life. Because Ibn Khaldun's ideas often seem to anticipate by centuries developments in many fields, he has often been depicted as more of a modern man than a medieval one, and Irwin's account of such misreadings provides new insights about the history of Orientalism. In contrast, Irwin presents an Ibn Khaldun who was a creature of his time--a devout Sufi mystic who was obsessed with the occult and futurology and who lived in an often-strange world quite different from our own"--Jacket.
Download or read book Rediscovering the Islamic Classics written by Ahmed El Shamsy and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The people who selected, edited, and published the new print books on and about Islam exerted a huge influence on the resulting literary tradition. These unheralded editors determined, essentially, what came to be understood by the early twentieth century as the classical written "canon" of Islamic thought. Collectively, this relatively small group of editors who brought Islamic literature into print crucially shaped how Muslim intellectuals, the Muslim public, and various Islamist movements understood the Islamic intellectual tradition. In this book Ahmed El Shamsy recounts this sea change, focusing on the Islamic literary culture of Cairo, a hot spot of the infant publishing industry, from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As El Shamsy argues, the aforementioned editors included some of the greatest minds in the Muslim world and shared an ambitious intellectual agenda of revival, reform, and identity formation. .
Download or read book Reforming Modernity written by Wael B. Hallaq and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reforming Modernity is a sweeping intellectual history and philosophical reflection built around the work of the Morocco-based philosopher Abdurrahman Taha, one of the most significant philosophers in the Islamic world since the colonial era. Wael B. Hallaq contends that Taha is at the forefront of forging a new, non-Western-centric philosophical tradition. He explores how Taha’s philosophical project sheds light on recent intellectual currents in the Islamic world and puts forth a formidable critique of Western and Islamic modernities. Hallaq argues that Taha’s project departs from—but leaves behind—the epistemological grounds in which most modern Muslim intellectuals have anchored their programs. Taha systematically rejects the modes of thought that have dominated the Muslim intellectual scene since the beginning of the twentieth century—nationalism, Marxism, secularism, political Islamism, and liberalism. Instead, he provides alternative ways of thinking, forcefully and virtuosically developing an ethical system with a view toward reforming existing modernities. Hallaq analyzes the ethical thread that runs throughout Taha’s oeuvre, illuminating how Taha weaves it into a discursive engagement with the central questions that plague modernity in both the West and the Muslim world. The first introduction to Taha’s ethical philosophy for Western audiences, Reforming Modernity presents his complex thought in an accessible way while engaging with it critically. Hallaq’s conversation with Taha’s work both proffers a cogent critique of modernity and points toward answers for its endemic and seemingly insoluble problems.
Download or read book Times of History written by Aziz Al-Azmeh and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-20 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of essays on current questions of historiography, illustrated with reference to Islamic historiography. The main concerns are conceptions of time and temporality, the uses of the past, historical periodisation, historical categorisation, and the constitution of historical objects, not least those called "civilisation" and "Islam". One of the aims of the book is to apply to Islamic materials the standard conceptual equipment used in historical study, and to exercise a large-scale comparativist outlook.
Download or read book Alfarabi s Book of Dialectic Kit b al Jadal written by Fārābī and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the first complete English translation of a central text in the Islamic philosophical tradition, with meticulously researched commentary and interpretation.
