Why does one hear so much about tolerance today, when as little as a few decades ago it was considered an obsolete virtue, anachronistic and outstripped by the progress of our civilization? When a virtue is lacking we remember it most! Must we conclude from the emphasis placed on tolerance these last few years that we have entered an era of generalized mutual incomprehension? The conquests of the intellect; local, national and international juridical practices; education open to global issues; the (...) intermixing of humanity that has never before “moved” so much under the combined effect of emigration; tourism and the developments in transportation and vast information exchanges served by efficient techniques that make communication one of the greatest benefits of our culture; all this could have led mankind into a surplus of exchanges on all levels, and better mutual appreciation leading to more tolerance. (shrink)

Islamic culture may be labelled a ‘superculture’ on account of its richness, whose living message goes from the peasants of the Indian subcontinent to Africa, for instance, dating back fourteen centuries in time. The author contrasts with an Islam that is frozen in its medieval form an Islam capable of inventing new solutions. The drama of today’s Muslim populations is living under the sign of a failure to adapt, because there has been no adequate analysis of the demands of their (...) time. But there is a social message in Islam, of brotherhood, justice, effort, liberation, which remains to be translated into a project for joint action for current generations. There is integration, the complementarity of individual action, collective effort and spirituality. But the integration of the sacred into social life is so ‘un-contemporary’ that in Islamic lands an extra effort is required to grasp its true implications. (shrink)

Résumé La culture islamique peut être qualifiée de « superculture » par sa richesse, dont le message vivant va des paysans d’Insulinde à l’Afrique, par exemple, et qui remonte à quatorze siècles dans le temps. L’auteur oppose à un islam figé dans son élaboration médiévale un islam capable d’inventer des solutions renouvelées. Le drame des peuples musulmans d’aujourd’hui est de vivre sous le signe de l’inadéquation, faute d’une analyse suffisante des exigences de leur temps. Mais il y a un message (...) social de l’islam, de fraternité, de justice, d’effort, de libération, à traduire en projet d’action collective pour les générations actuelles. Il y a intégration, complémentarité de l’action individuelle, de l’œuvre collective et de la spiritualité. Mais l’intégration du sacré à la vie sociale est tellement « inactuelle » que en terre d’islam, il faut un surcroît d’effort pour en appréhender les véritables pièges. (shrink)

Criticism; civilization, Arab; literature and society; culture; study and teaching; culture in literature.

The question of bias in methodology and terminology is a problem that faces researchers east, west, north and south; however, it faces Third World intellectuals with special keenness. For although they write in a cultural environment that has its own specific conceptual and cultural paradigms, they nevertheless encounter a foreign paradigm which attempts to impose itself upon their society and upon their very imagination and thoughts. When the term “developmental psychology” for instance is used in the West Arab scholars also (...) say “developmental psychology”, when “applied psychology” is mentioned they hurry to use the same term etc. Why not establish a new science with its own mechanisms, methodologies and points of reference to deal with epistemological biases and open up the gate of ijtihad with respect to them? This collection of papers aims to discover some of the biases latent in our terminology, methodologies, research tools, and conceptual principles, and to propose alternative ones marked by a greater degree of independence and neutrality. This is not to belittle the human value of the West’s creative contributions but to emphasize the danger of making it the ultimate point of reference and then trying to continuously play “catch up” with it. (shrink)

Along the lines of a previous work, the geometrical structure of Hibert bundles describing extended quantum free particles is repeated with Galilei external and internal independent symmetries. Then, in order to introduce the interaction, this structure is extended by replacing configuration and momentum spaces by the socelled spaces of trajectories and extended velocity boosts, respectively. These provide representations giving the probability amplitudes for the particle to follow certain trajectories. The interaction can be introduced in the transformation law from functions on (...) the space of trajectories (free dynamics) to functions on spacetime (intracting dynamics). This transformation law, which makes use of a universal distribution, is seen as a functional in our work according to a quantum functional theory which generalizes the ideas of de Broglie. Intertwining of induced representations gives the free propagator in the space of trajectories and, henceforth, the propagator with interaction in space-time for the extended particle. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] book examine the perennial question of Islam and democracy from an interesting angle. It focuses on seven case studies of relatively successful democracies in Muslim-majority countries. The objective is to uncover ‘relationships between political manifestations of Islam and competitive, democratic politics and [to explain] how interpretations more amenable to democracy can take root’. The author also (...) seeks ‘to determine how actors in Muslim majority states draw upon democratic concepts within Islam’. He then seeks to draw lessons from these successes for the fate of the struggling post-Arab Spring polities, mainly Egypt and Tunisia. This is a novel approach, seeking creatively to employ empirical data to answer important theoretical questions about impediments to/facilitators of democratization.Using indicators from Polity and... (shrink)

In contemporary Western and Arab cultural critique, secularism as a worldview is believed to have experienced inherent transformations from solid rationalmaterialism (the emphasis on reason, science, progress, emancipation, industrialization, and nation building) to liquid non-rational materialism (the celebrationof the body, sex, global markets and consumption). This paper explores the arguments of both Zygmunt Bauman and Abdelwahab Elmessiri who advocate this thesis in the light of the major manifestations of these transformations.

In contemporary Western and Arab cultural critique, secularism as a worldview is believed to have experienced inherent transformations from solid rationalmaterialism (the emphasis on reason, science, progress, emancipation, industrialization, and nation building) to liquid non-rational materialism (the celebrationof the body, sex, global markets and consumption). This paper explores the arguments of both Zygmunt Bauman and Abdelwahab Elmessiri who advocate this thesis in the light of the major manifestations of these transformations.