33 research outputs found

    From Blasphemy to Sacrilege

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    Qur’an burnings have come to constitute a subculture in Scandinavia. Why have they focused on sacrilege against Islam’s scripture, while blasphemy against its prophet still dominates polemics in other parts of Europe? This essay traces the emergence of blasphemy as the principal form in which such polemics occur to colonial India. It shows how critics there tried to attribute Muslim protests against insults to Muhammad with a religious language they seemed to be missing. With its globalization after the Cold War, this debate about blasphemy was taken up in Europe. But in the Nordic countries it has been replaced with sacrilege as a way of rehearsing the religious element that remains absent from Muslim demonstrations of offence against alleged insults to Islam

    Jinnah and the Theatre of Politics

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    En este artículo estudio cómo el fundador de Paquistán, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, consiguió ser el líder de los musulmanes a pesar de su comportamiento herético, educación británica y arrogancia que, lejos de alejarlo de las masas, apuntalaron su popularidad. Jinnah venía a representar una política basada en la iniciativa más que en la búsqueda de lo tradicionalmente auténtico. La política musulmana en India rechazaba el nacionalismo por pertenencia a un espacio físico, que habría reducido a los seguidores del Profeta a una minoría, no a una nación.In this essay I will look at the way in which Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, managed to lead Muslims without claiming to resemble them in any way. His heretical background, anglicized character and sheer arrogance instead served to augment rather than detract from Jinnah’s popularity, because he represented a politics based on novelty rather than heredity, artifice rather than authenticity. Muslim politics in colonial India was founded upon the rejection of blood-and-soil forms of nationality, which could only define the Prophet’s followers there as a minority and not a nation. Pakistan therefore had to be fought for in the purely ideal terms of a political logic, whose iconic representation was to be found in the biography of the man hailed as its creator

    Jinnah and the theatre of politics

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    In this essay I will look at the way in which Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, managed to lead Muslims without claiming to resemble them in any way. His heretical background, anglicized character, and sheer arrogance instead served to augment rather than detract from Jinnah’s popularity, because he represented a politics based on novelty rather than heredity, artifice rather than authenticity. Muslim politics in colonial India was founded upon the rejection of blood-and-soil forms of nationality, which could only define the Prophet’s followers there as a minority and not a nation. Pakistan therefore had to be fought for in the purely ideal terms of a political logic, whose iconic representation was to be found in the biography of the man hailed as its creator

    Trump's Truth: a comment on Arjun Appadurai

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    Lying with the Enemy: Militant Islam in the Global Arena

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    Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric has consistently voiced a desire for global equality between Muslims and Christians, or between the Islamic world and the West. Having accused America of hypocrisy as far as its advancement of this equality is concerned, Bin Laden turns his attention to the only form in which he thinks such equality is now possible: the equality of death. This is why he has repeatedly emphasized the need for an equivalence of terror between the Muslim world and America, as if this were the only form in which the two might come together and even communicate one with the other. For Al-Qaeda, terror is the only form in which global freedom and equality are now available. Terror therefore functions as the dark side of America’s own democracy, as inseparable from it as an evil twin. So in the aftermath of the 2005 Madrid bombings, Bin Laden issued a statement in which he defined terrorism as an effort to universalize security as a human right, if only by refusing to accept its monopolization by the West. For equality demanded that security should be enjoyed by all or by none

    APOLOGETIC MODERNITY

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    Communities of Violence

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    Being, belonging and becoming: a study of gender in the making of post-colonial citizenship in India 1946-1961

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    Concentrating on the time frame between the establishment of India's Constituent Assembly in 1946, and the passing of the Dowry Prevention Act in 1961, this thesis attempts to write an alternative history of India's transition to Independence, by applying the tools of feminist historiography to this crucial period of citizenship making, as a way of offering new perspectives on the nature, meaning and boundaries of citizenship in post-colonial India. It focuses on a cohort of nationalists and feminists who were leading members of two prominent women's organisations, the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) and the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), documenting and analysing the voices and positions of this cohort in some of the key debates around nation building in Nehruvian India. It also traces and analyses the range of activities and struggles engaged in by these two women's organisations - as articulations and expressions of citizenship in practice. The intention in so doing is to address three key questions or areas of exploration. Firstly to analyse and document how gender relations and contemporary understandings of gender difference, both acted upon and were shaped by the emerging identity of the Indian as postcolonial citizen, and how this dynamic interaction was situated within a broader matrix of struggles and competing identities including those of minority rights. Secondly to analyse how the framework of postcolonial Indian citizenship has both created new possibilities for empowerment, but simultaneously set new limitations on how the Indian women's movement was able to imagine itself as a political constituency and the feminist agenda it was able to articulate and pursue. Thirdly to explore how applying a feminist historiography to the story of the construction of postcolonial Indian citizenship calls for the ability to think about the meaning and possibilities of citizenship in new and different ways, to challenge the very conceptual frameworks that define the term

    Being, belonging and becoming: a study of gender in the making of post-colonial citizenship in India 1946-1961

    No full text
    Concentrating on the time frame between the establishment of India's Constituent Assembly in 1946, and the passing of the Dowry Prevention Act in 1961, this thesis attempts to write an alternative history of India's transition to Independence, by applying the tools of feminist historiography to this crucial period of citizenship making, as a way of offering new perspectives on the nature, meaning and boundaries of citizenship in post-colonial India. It focuses on a cohort of nationalists and feminists who were leading members of two prominent women's organisations, the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) and the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), documenting and analysing the voices and positions of this cohort in some of the key debates around nation building in Nehruvian India. It also traces and analyses the range of activities and struggles engaged in by these two women's organisations - as articulations and expressions of citizenship in practice. The intention in so doing is to address three key questions or areas of exploration. Firstly to analyse and document how gender relations and contemporary understandings of gender difference, both acted upon and were shaped by the emerging identity of the Indian as postcolonial citizen, and how this dynamic interaction was situated within a broader matrix of struggles and competing identities including those of minority rights. Secondly to analyse how the framework of postcolonial Indian citizenship has both created new possibilities for empowerment, but simultaneously set new limitations on how the Indian women's movement was able to imagine itself as a political constituency and the feminist agenda it was able to articulate and pursue. Thirdly to explore how applying a feminist historiography to the story of the construction of postcolonial Indian citizenship calls for the ability to think about the meaning and possibilities of citizenship in new and different ways, to challenge the very conceptual frameworks that define the term.This thesis is not currently available in OR

    THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND MODERN THOUGHT: INTRODUCTION

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