Islam Liberalism And Ontology

This book offers comparative ontologies of both Islam and liberalism as discourses more broadly construed. The author argues that, despite recent efforts to speak of overlapping consensuses and discursive congruence, the fundamental categories that constitute "Islam" and "Liberalism" remain very different, and that these differences should be taken seriously. Thus far, no recent scholarly works have explicitly or meticulously broken down where these differences lie. The author rigorously explores questions related to rights, moral epistemologies, the role of religion in the public sphere, and more general approaches to legal discourse, via primary and canonical sources constitutive of both Islam and liberalism. He then goes on to articulate why communitarian modes of thought are better suited for engaging with Islam and contemporary socio-political modes of organization than liberalism is. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations, Islam, liberalism, and communitarianism.

This book offers comparative ontologies of both Islam and liberalism as discourses more broadly construed. The author argues that, despite recent efforts to speak of overlapping consensuses and discursive congruence, the fundamental categories that constitute "Islam" and "Liberalism" remain very different, and that these differences should be taken seriously. Thus far, no recent scholarly works have explicitly or meticulously broken down where these differences lie. The author rigorously explores questions related to rights, moral epistemologies, the role of religion in the public sphere, and more general approaches to legal discourse, via primary and canonical sources constitutive of both Islam and liberalism. He then goes on to articulate why communitarian modes of thought are better suited for engaging with Islam and contemporary socio-political modes of organization than liberalism is. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations, Islam, liberalism, and communitarianism.

"Are human rights a universal norm, or a "western" value and therefore inappropriate and irrelevant for other cultures? How does Islam influence the understanding of human rights in Muslim societies? Is there an inherent antithesis between Islam as a religion and the value of human rights? How do we evaluate proposals for a particularly "Islamic" conceptualization of human rights? These questions are addressed in an international context in this book, which focuses especially on the interaction between human rights as a value and norm in international relations, and Islam as a constituent of political culture in particular societies."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

In the post-9/11 environment, the figure of the Muslim woman is at the forefront of global politics. Her representation is often articulated within a rights discourse owing much to liberal-secular sensibilities—notions of freedom, equality, rational thinking, individualism, and modernization. Muslim Women’s Rights explores how these liberal-secular sensibilities inform, shape, and foreclose public discussion on questions of Islam and gender. The book draws on postcolonial, antiracist, and transnational feminist studies in order to analyze public and legal debates surrounding proposed shari‘ah tribunals in Canada. It examines the cultural and epistemological suppositions underlying common assumptions about Islamic laws; explores how these assumptions are informed by the Western progress narrative and women’s rights debates; and asks what forms of politics these enable and foreclose. The book assesses the influence of secularism on the ontology, epistemology, and ethics afforded to Islam in the West, and begins to trace possibilities by which Islamic family law might be productively addressed on its own terms. Muslim Women’s Rights is a significant contribution to the fields of both Islam and gender and the critical study of secularism.

This book challenges received notions of ontology in political theory and international relations by offering a psychoanalytically informed critique of depoliticisation in prominent liberal, post-liberal, dialogic and agonistic approaches to pluralism in world politics. Paipais locates the temptation of depoliticisation in their labouring under the fundamental fantasy of various guises of foundationalism (in the form of either political anthropology or ontology as ‘in the last instance’ ground) or, conversely, anti-foundationalism (the denial of all grounds, yet still operating within a foundationalist imaginary). He argues, instead, for a formal political ontology of the void (against historicism) shot through an ‘incarnate’ messianic nihilism (against ethicism and teleological forms of politics). In so doing, the author offers critical readings of the messianic nihilism of Benjamin, Agamben, Taubes and Žižek by problematising the antinomian tendencies in their respective political theologies. The book argues for a version of Žižek’s Badiouian politics of militancy supplemented by a proper participatory understanding of St Paul’s messianic meontology and incarnational Christology as a means to reconceptualise the nexus between subjectivity, universality and political action in world politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations theory, political theory, critical social theory and political theology.

This issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society comprises four main research articles, each shedding light on the diverse ways in which the Islamic legal and theological tradition has shaped and intersected with premodern and modern societies. To start closer to home: Sam Houston’s contribution entitled “The “Metaphysical Monster” and Muslim Theology: William James, Sherman Jackson, and the Problem of Black Suffering” places American Muslim scholar Sherman A. Jackson’s important monograph Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering in conversation with the work of American pragmatist philosopher William James and suggests that Jackson’s account parallels James’s account of religion in that it speaks of the “practical effectiveness” of the “web of beliefs” constituting Islamic doctrines of God. Our next article explores the practical engagement of the official ulama as spokespersons of the Islamic legal and theological tradition in a different field: post-2011 Egypt. In his article entitled, “Ideals and Interests in Intellectuals’ Political Deliberations: The Arab Spring and the Divergent Paths of Egypt’s Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmad al-Tayyib and Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa,” Muhammad Amasha calls into question the commonplace generalizations about the ulama as being either pro-revolution or pro-regime by examining the politics of two prominent members of the pro-establishment ulama class. Syamsuddin Arif in his “Rethinking the Concept of Fiṭra: Natural Disposition, Reason and Conscience,” turns our attention to an understudied dimension of Islamic psychology: the role of innate human nature, or fiṭra, in the motivation behind human action. Drawing on recent Western as well as Islamicate scholarship, it attends to the biological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions of this Qur’anic concept, suggesting that it be treated not only as the natural tendency for humans to act or think in a particular way, but specifically as the religious, ethical, and rational instinct. Finally, Fateh Saeidi’s “The Early Sufi Tradition in Hamadān, Nahāwand, and Abhar: Stories of Devotion, Mystical Experiences, and Sufi Texts” explores the history of the development of early Sufism in Hamadān, Nahāwand, and Abhar through an analysis of three significant but understudied early Sufi texts: Karāmāt Sheikh abī ʻalī al-Qūmsānī by Ibn Zīrak al-Nahāwandī (d. 471/1078), Ādāb al-fuqarāʼ by Bābā Jaʻfar al-Abharī (d. 428/1036), and Rawḍat al-murīdīn by Ibn Yazdānyār