Recent Issues – Page 11 – Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

The information and communications technologies (ICTs) revolution in the Arab world coincides with an era of political turbulence marked by a wave of Islamic political activism, the reinflamed Palestinian-Israeli conflict and, most dramatically, the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States and the subsequent American ‘war on terrorism.’ All of this is taking place against a background of globalization and its profound multiple effects on Arab societies. This essay begins with a sketch of ICT development in the Arab world. It contends that ICT is accelerating the erosion of the state’s ability to frame identities and loyalties and is opening the door to transnational political action. Exogenous transnational action affects Arab societies, but transnational forces arising in the Arab and Muslim worlds can have global effects, with attacks on American territory serving as an extreme example. The essay goes on to describe the changing political terrain in the Arab world and the development of networks as powerful structures for contestation, with attention being drawn to the particular successes of Islamist networks. American assertiveness after 11 September has deepened the contradictions in Arab politics and society. The essay concludes with ten propositions concerning the relationships between ICT, political identities, networks and American ‘imperial’ behaviour.‬

What follows represents the skeleton of a larger thesis and a larger study. The thesis has three integral elements. The first element is historiographic; it involves the question of the conventional boundaries separating the history of science from the history of religion. Breaching these boundaries, at least in the case of the history of Arabic alchemy, is warranted, I argue, not only because of the peculiarities of our historical data, but also because it extends the domain of our explanation and illuminates many otherwise obscure issues. The second element of the thesis is that the Jabirian theory of the ẓāhir and the bāṭin is not grounded in Greek alchemy: in a complex manner, its sources lie rather in Shīʿī metaphysics. The third and final element, which is least developed here, concerns the vicissitudes of the doctrine of the occultum and the manifestum in Latin alchemy. I suggest, tentatively, that the ẓāhir-bāṭin of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān explains the Latin doctrine much better than the ekstrophê theory of the Greek alchemists— which would mean that the roots of the occultum and the manifestum are to be found in Shīʿī metaphysics and not in the Greek alchemical tradition.‬

According to many accounts, the present day is a time of increasing borderlessness or the breaking down of boundaries. This treatment argues that it is a time when borders are being redefined and redrawn. Examining transnationalism requires a combination of long-term and holistic views. The long-term view brings into question the newness of transnationalism. The holistic view signals that increasing transnationalism in communication, production, consumption and travel is accompanied by the emergence of new borders (as in rising restrictions on migration) and new politics of risk containment (for example, in relation to conflict areas). As some boundaries fade, others emerge that are new and/or internal; moreover, the advantages that accompany the erasure of borders are not evenly distributed. With globalization comes a new dialectics of borders. This may be understood as a process of hierarchical integration, in which integration (the spread of global capitalism and its political influence and cultural radius) fosters borderlessness, while hierarchy imposes new boundaries and forms of stratification.

” This paper considers the interdependence of history, historiography, ideology and identity in modern Lebanon. It argues that historical consciousness, viewing and writing are based, to varying extents, upon (collective) memory, recovery, or invention of history, which has resulted in the construction of many historical myths. Despite the claim of some historians to have overcome the gap between socio-religious identity and supra-confessional, secular identity, most works of history are subject to the tension between confessionalism and nationalism. ‘Religious coexistence’ has not been replaced by ‘national coalescence.’ This dilemma becomes especially evident when looking at the different interpretations of the major controversial issues in Lebanese history, such as the question of Lebanon’s ‘uniqueness,’ the role of specific historical figures and so on. While books from the Mandate period revolved around either a Lebanonist or an Arabist attitude, some written after independence focused upon the necessity of confessional coexistence and, eventually, upon the deconstruction of historical myths and the cultivation of a non-confessional vision of history. Such endeavours were largely overshadowed by the civil war, when the bulk of writings once again served only to mirror and defend the confessional affiliations and political outlooks of their authors. However, some new historiographical trends have taken shape during the last twenty years, particularly since the 1990s, as a small number of scholars have begun to employ fresh approaches and sources to counteract rigid perceptions of Lebanon’s past and present.”

This paper analyzes the relationship between international and internal migration and ethnic relations in Kenya in the colonial and post-colonial periods respectively. Under colonial rule (1895-1963), white immigrant farmers alienated large chunks of land from indigenous Kenyans; while the latter were conveniently consigned to the so-called ‘African Trust Lands,’ the immigrants throve as commercial farmers in the ‘White Highlands.’ In time, existing strife between whites and Africans intensified, culminating in a series of events that included the Mau Mau rebellion. When independence finally came, in 1963, the alienated land was transferred to local Kenyans through the settlement of landless peasants and legislation permitting land purchases on the basis of ‘ willing buyer-willing seller.’ In this way, the Rift Valley, the heartland of white settlement, attracted large-scale in-migration of new farmers, mostly Kikuyu from Central province. In 1991-93, at a time when Kenya was going through a democratic transition, this development sparked off ethnic conflict between African Kenyans. Nevertheless, Kenya has managed to become a strong multi-ethnic society in which lively political manoeuvring has taken place, but without plunging the country into the turmoil that characterizes the region.

This article considers the ways in which Chinese Muslims depicted themselves as central both to Chinese society and to the Muslim world in Chinese Muslim texts of the early modern period. Through the creation of origin myths attributing the Muslim presence in China to the direct interventions of the Prophet Muḥammad and the Chinese imperium, Chinese Muslims used their condition of displacement—that is, their separation from the heart-Lands of Islam—as the pivot for an identity linking them simultaneously to China and to the Muslim world. The article suggests that this use of displacement is a direct inversion of the position of early Arab travellers in China. In the writings of al-Sīrāfī and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, for example, China is depicted as exotic and wholly foreign, a place where Muslims necessarily long for their distant home. In later Chinese Muslim writings, however, the Muslims of China emerge as vital both to the origins of Islam and to the integrity of the Chinese state. Displacement, a lamentable condition for al- Sīrāfī and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, becomes the basis for a unique identity in Chinese Mushm myths of origin.

FIRST §: AN AUTHOR, SUCH AS MYSELF, can only be grateful when a leading historian of Arabic science takes one of his books so seriously as to write a long review article on it. Professor George Saliba calls The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West “a refreshing and welcome contribution” to the field “documenting . . . a whole array of the achievements” of Arabic/Islamic (and Chinese) science in the ongoing project of modern science (143, 144). At the same time, Professor Saliba raises a host of issues, not all of equal importance, nor even connected to the main thesis of my book. In this reply, I shall present my comments under four headings with the intention of making the themes and thesis of my book evident to the reader. These headings address the main issues raised in Saliba’s essay, namely, the nature of ‘modern’ science, the possibility that economic factors have played a significant role in its rise, innovation in Arabic/Islamic astronomy after Ibn al-Shatir and the fourteenth century, and the nature and role of free inquiry.

FIRST §: THIS EXCHANGE WITH PROFESSOR HUFF brings to mind the time-honoured Arabic adage about the goat that remains a “goat, even if it flies,” which is often used to refer to people who retain their opinions despite being shown evidence to the contrary. In my review article on his book, The Rise of Early Modern Science,1 I tried to take each of the constituting hypotheses that Professor Huff proposes for the rise of modern science and find either a counter-example or a corrective fact that might sharpen the arguments in a book that I essentially liked. But Professor Huff has apparently taken offence at my well-intentioned critique, going so far as to accuse me of “defensiveness” and of “oppos[ing] the idea that past and present human communities, institutions, governments and so on ought to grant greater freedom of expression, inquiry and action to their participants” (emphasis mine). It seems that I touched a raw nerve, one that may best be characterized as Western chauvinism, since I prefer not to use his own term, “triumph”-alism. And I feel the urgent necessity of clearing my name before he goes on to accuse me of a lack of patriotism, as is quickly becoming the fashion these days.

Compte rendu du livre de Pierre Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de vivre : Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I. Davidson (Paris : Albin Michel, 2001), 281 pp., Pb. €18.29, ISBN 2 226 12261 3.

This paper advocates the view that there is a permanent interpenetration between the cultural constituents of human mental activity; and that, despite the unity of the mind, these constituents are not necessarily coherent for they are in permanent transformation. Indeed, mental activity gives birth to multiple competing and conflicting interpretations of events and attitudes; and, in every part of this activity, there is the intervention of belief. Science does not possess firm grounds to control faith, for its constructs change with time. Moreover, faith also manifests itself in different beliefs and no belief may be proven to be more fully and absolutely reliable than any other. Hence, all of the different beliefs can offer only partial images of divinity, owing to the diversity of cultures and historical conditions, but not a complete representation. It follows from this that the reasonable attitude consists in letting everyone experience faith in the way that he or she conceives it and in encouraging reflection and communication among the holders of competing world-views.