Secularism and its Enemies

The following is intended to suggest a fairly simple contention concerning a number of interconnected propositions made in connection with the debates on modernity and secularism. None of these propositions is particularly novel, nor is this the first time that they have been put forward. Yet the issues raised have remained with us and become all the more pressing; I can see that points that were made, against the flow, more than two decades ago, now stand out more cogently than ever, and are being revisited, rediscovered or simply discovered by many. The simple contention I wish to start with concerns Islamism, often brought out emblematically when secularism and modernity are discussed. Like other self-consciously retrogressive identitarian motifs, ideas, sensibilities, moods and inflections of politics that sustain differentialist culturalism and are sustained by it conceptually, Islamism has come to gain very considerable political and social traction over the past quarter of a century

Secularism in the Arab World: Contexts, Ideas and Consequences

Explores secularism and secularisation in Arab societies since the mid-19th century. This book is a translation of Aziz al-Azmeh’s seminal work Al-\u27Ilmaniya min mandhur mukhtalif that was first published in Beirut in 1992. Both celebrated and criticised for its reflections on Arab secularisation and secularism in the modern history of the Arab World, it is the only study to date to approach its subject as a set of historical changes which affected the regulation of the social, political and cultural order, and which permeated the concrete workings of society, rather than as an ideological discussion framed from the outset by the assumed opposition between Islam and secularism. The author takes a comprehensive analytical perspective to show that an almost imperceptible yet real, multi-faceted and objective secularising process has been underway in the Arab world since the 1850s. Traces the concrete secular transformations in Muslim societies which occurred at particular times and by specific social agencies Explores how secular changes influenced the functioning of different strata and groups, and the central attitudes of their members Devotes considerable attention to religious reform in the broader context of the developments studied, and of the ideological, political and institutional religious reactions to both Includes a new Preface by the author to introduce the English translationhttps://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_intranslation/1003/thumbnail.jp

Muslim KingShip: Power ans the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities

xvii,296 hal.;21 c

Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies

The book opens with an attempt to identify and describe a number of distinctive features which compose the elementry principles of Arabic thoght in Middle Ages.1,29

Secularism and its Enemies

The following is intended to suggest a fairly simple contention concerning a number of interconnected propositions made in connection with the debates on modernity and secularism. None of these propositions is particularly novel, nor is this the first time that they have been put forward. Yet the issues raised have remained with us and become all the more pressing; I can see that points that were made, against the flow, more than two decades ago, now stand out more cogently than ever, and are being revisited, rediscovered or simply discovered by many. The simple contention I wish to start with concerns Islamism, often brought out emblematically when secularism and modernity are discussed. Like other self-consciously retrogressive identitarian motifs, ideas, sensibilities, moods and inflections of politics that sustain differentialist culturalism and are sustained by it conceptually, Islamism has come to gain very considerable political and social traction over the past quarter of a century

Postmodern Obscurantism and the 'Muslim Question'

A vast culture, and indeed a vast industry of misrecognition, has been put in place, all the more firmly since September 11, as much by advocates of Islamism as by western opinion, expert and inexpert, purporting to find, over and above the complex and multiple histories and present conditions of Muslim peoples, a homogeneous and timeless Islam, construed as a culture beyond society and history, a repository of 'meaning'. This, it is maintained, informs all significant thoughts and actions of real or putative Muslims at all times and places (any contrary evidence being treated as an anomaly). Thus these super-Islamized beings are supposed to create Islamic economies unlike all economies; Islamic political systems with bizarre and irrational principles; Islamic forms of knowledge whose anachronism makes them either charming or repellent, according to taste; Islamic sensibilities of a pronounced distemper; Islamic dress and coiffure; Islamic law as clear, univocal, and barbarous as it is Levitically strict--in short, a total and totalizing culture which overrides the inconvenient complexity of economy, society and history

Histoire et narration dans l'historiographie arabe

History and Narrative Arabic Historical Writing. A. Al-Azmeh. This article proceeds from the assumption that the world as expressed in historical writing obeys rules distinct from those that animale the world in its immediate empirical unfolding. It is argued that historical narrative has stronger affinities with mythological and other narratives than it has with the world as such. Medieval Arabic historical writing is then analyzed with the aim of showing how it is that narrative rules generate and structure specific profiles of events and of the concatenation of events. In this light, a study is mode of the annalistic mode of historical narrative, which is considered here as the prototype of all chronological narrative. From this, conclusions are drawn pertaining to the relation between "real" causality and the causal modes prescribed by the narrative structure of chronological historical writing.Al-Azmeh Aziz. Histoire et narration dans l'historiographie arabe. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 41ᵉ année, N. 2, 1986. pp. 411-431

Islams and modernities/ Al-Azmeh

vii, 156 hal. ; 23 cm