What is the conceptual status of modernity in the Muslim world? Scholars describe Muslim attempts at appropriating this European idea as being either derivative or incomplete, with a few calling for multiple modernities to allow modern Islam some autonomy. Such approaches are critical of the apologetic way in which Muslims have grappled with the idea of modernity, the purity and autonomy of the concept of which is apparently compromised by its derivative and incomplete appropriation. None have attended to the conceptual (...) status of this apologetic itself, though it is certainly the most important element in Muslim debates on the modern. This essay considers the adoption of modernity as an idea among Muslim intellectuals in nineteenth-century India, a place in which some of the earliest and most influential debates on Islam's modernity occurred. It argues that Muslim apologetics created a modernity whose rejection of purity and autonomy permitted it a distinctive conceptual form. (shrink)

The Bhagavad Gita's philosophical and political significance remains forever contemporary. In this volume a group of leading historians reflect on the significance of the Bhagavad Gita for political and ethical thinking in modern India and beyond. These essays contribute new perspectives to historical, contemporary and global political ideas. Violence and nonviolence, war, sacrifice, justice, fraternity and political community were constitutive of India's political modernity, and it was to these questions that Indian public figures turned their attention in the nineteenth and (...) twentieth centuries. Oriented towards the future, these commentaries and interpretations of a text that locates war as the central problem of human life have detached the Gita from antiquity and made it foundational for India's modernity. The book would be of interest to academic researchers as well as general readers interested in South Asian history, Indian philosophy and religion. (shrink)

This paper discusses how it is possible to find, in the Islamic tradition, a universal concept of “humanity”. It insists on the concept of “ummah” as a peculiar Muslim way to define a comprehensive humanity, and try to point out its internal limits. It shows the communal implication of this concept and the ways it can, or cannot, be considered as constitutive of a we-group concept that may eventually lead to conflict and violence. It brings to the attention of the (...) reader some historical examples, focusing, among others, on Mohammad Iqbal’s contribution. (shrink)

One of the consequences of Al-Qaeda’s terrorism has been its blurring of the distinction between national and international politics, both of which have lost a great deal of their former autonomy by serving as hosts for a set of new global concerns and practices. The Global War on Terror can be seen as an effort to externalize Al-Qaeda’s global threat by internationalizing it in a conventional war, and thus reinforcing both the autonomy of international politics and its separation from that (...) of a national variety. More than a conservative move to protect the international order, however, the War on Terror was also an ambitious attempt to remake global politics in the wake of the Cold War. But despite the transformations it has wrought, the War on Terror failed to create either a new global order or even a new global politics. (shrink)