L’Islam, les orientalistes et l’Occident. Recherche de contact et de dialogue

Cet article veut promouvoir la coopération et le dialogue entre les occidentaux et les musulmans dans un proche avenir. Il s’intéresse à l’originalité et la créativité humaines telles que requises dans des situations de rencontre. Un défi majeur de notre époque est celui de la communication, y compris en ce qui concerne les religions. Ceci constitue en effet un test pour la dignité humaine et le résultat n’est pas certain. Fondamentalement, islam est une foi humaine, un mode de vie et une forme d’ordre social. Pendant trop longtemps — malgré la pratique d’études orientalistes —, l’Occident a vu l’islam à travers le prisme d’intérêts occidentaux : matériels, culturels et spirituels. Au temps de l’hégémonie occidentale, il aurait difficilement pu en être autrement. L’islam tendait à être construit comme une alternative radicale au monde occidental. Une telle construction dualiste de l’Occident et de l’islam, cependant, n’est pas seulement insoutenable d’un point de vue scientifique. Elle implique aussi un provincialisme politique. Nous faisons ici certaines propositions pour créer de nouveaux genres de rapports entre occidentaux et musulmans.This article calls for increased cooperation and dialogue between born “Westerners” and born “Muslims” in the near future. It suggests human originality and individual creativity be valued when those cultures are encountering each other. A major challenge of our time is that of communication, including in religious matters. It is a test of human dignity with a far from certain outcome. Basically, Islam is a human faith, a way of life, and a kind of social order. For too long — notwithstanding the practice of Orientalist studies — the West has viewed Islam in the perspective of Western material, cultural and spiritual interests. In a period of Western hegemony it could hardly have been otherwise. Islam tended to be constructed as a radical alternative to the Western world. This dualist construction of the West and Islam, however, is not only untenable in scholarly terms but also implies political provincialism. Suggestions are made to create new kinds of relationships between Westerners and Muslims

Being Tamil, being Hindu:Tamil migrants’ negotiations of the absence of Tamil Hindu spaces in the West Midlands and South West of England

This paper considers the religious practices of Tamil Hindus who have settled in the West Midlands and South West of England in order to explore how devotees of a specific ethno-regional Hindu tradition with a well-established UK infrastructure in the site of its adherents’ population density adapt their religious practices in settlement areas which lack this infrastructure. Unlike the majority of the UK Tamil population who live in the London area, the participants in this study did not have ready access to an ethno-religious infrastructure of Tamil-orientated temples and public rituals. The paper examines two means by which this absence was addressed as well as the intersections and negotiations of religion and ethnicity these entailed: firstly, Tamil Hindus’ attendance of temples in their local area which are orientated towards a broadly imagined Hindu constituency or which cater to a non-Tamil ethno-linguistic or sectarian community; and, secondly, through the ‘DIY’ performance of ethnicised Hindu ritual in non-institutional settings

Menneskelig indsigt ved studiet af religion

It is suggested that there are at least four kinds of insight which can be obtained in the course of the study of religion. To start with, we can obtain insight into the very different motivations and intentions with which people, including ourselves, can set out to study religion.Secondly, in the course of our work we can arrive at a better insight into the complexity of the scholarly study of religion and in particular the very different approaches which are possible within this field of research. A distinction is made between the strictly empirical approaches of the various disciplines on the human and social sciences of religion on the one hand, and the schools concentrating on the objective meanings of symbolism and religious experience on the other. A third kind of approach seeks the significance of religious phenomena for particular groups of people, that is to say their subjective meanings. Such different approaches evidently lead to different concepts of what Religionswissenschaft is: (a) a special branch of existing disciplines, (b) a distinct discipline concentrating on religious data; or (c) a field of research whose specific subject-matter is the religious meanings of specific data for specific groups of people. It is fair to say that the study of religion at present has become a multidisciplinary and multiperspective field of studies.A third kind of insight concerns the instrumental nature of the concepts of religion(s) which are used in the scholarly study of religion. Just as for a long time non-western cultures were described in terms of western cultural values and in relation to the image which the researcher had of his own culture, non-western religions were described for a long time according to religious notions of western Christianity. Non-western peoples’ religious activities and expressions were seen according to the parameters of what at a given time was understood in Europe by religion. The conceptualization of non-Christian and non-western forms of spirituality has been heavily indebted to western theological categories and intentions. In this light the study of religion can no longer be considered as a given parcel of knowledge – the accumulation of facts or the application of one conceptual model – but as a particular way of questioning data which have religious meanings, beside other ones, for particular people. For this study we need an open general concept of religion; strict definitions of religion can only be given in a limited sense and for the sake of specific investigations.Finally we learn to see not only the study of religion but also religion itself as a human reality and form of activity, whether people follow or resist a religious tradition more passively or whether they articulate or oppose a religion more actively. Parallel to art and literature but in its own ways religion conveys meanings; as in art and literature, the nature of a given religion is less important than how it is interpreted and affects peoples’ lives.Conclusion: Without personal motivations this kind of study would risk becoming meaningless, at least to the people carrying it out. Without adjustment of methods and techniques of research it would not be scholarly. Without theoretical reflection it would lack lucidity. Without searching for meanings it would fail to account for the meaning-giving dimension of religion

Le Renouveau islamique vu à travers un Fest-schrift

Waardenburg Jacques. Le Renouveau islamique vu à travers un Fest-schrift. In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, n°50/2, 1980. pp. 191-204

Human Rights, Human Dignity and Islam

No abstract availabl