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

This paper takes as its starting point the identification of the element of risk as a structural condition of advanced industrialization. The concern here is less with the ‘systematically produced hazards’ of ‘risk society’ (those matters which are, at least to some degree, open to political, scientific and ethical deliberation), than with something more fundamental–what is termed the complex interaction of human and natural systems. The argument is that the human condition-and, by extension, the range of possible social futures- is coming to be conditioned by global dynamics that fall outside of the calculation of risk and, indeed, sometimes outside of timely human comprehension. Even as the range and power of actors with global reach or potential impact has increased, there has also been a proliferation of new centres of power, competence, authority and allegiance, reflected in the burgeoning literature on global governance. Whether the new modes of regulation and control suggested in much of the global governance literature are likely to be equal to the task of sustaining the globalized and globalizing world we have made for ourselves comprises the second half of the paper.‬

The argument presented in this paper develops in relation to three interrelated themes. It begins by considering the current LIS-dominated discourse on democracy and democratization, which argues that democratic values and practices are essential to human freedom and peace. However, as I next observe, the urgency to democratize is mediated through the power of the State. Moreover, in the current conjuncture, the objective of democracy is integral to the construction of what may be described as postmodern formations of political and economic power. These are appearing as a transmogrification of preceding orders, creating a New Leviathan which, from many positions, might seem to be predicated on constant war, rather than the production of peace and the conquest of human misery. The ordering dynamic of the New Leviathan is one of continual fracture, an expanding plane of contested sovereignties of various kinds. I describe this dynamic, which forms the paper’s third theme, as one of Wild Sovereignty. Here, I expand upon Giorgio Agamben’s discussion ofHomo Sacer, which considers a concept of sovereignty defined in terms of one’s relation to ‘bare life.” Wild sovereignty as a dimension of the New Leviathan is radically productive of regions and spaces of bare life in which more and more People are thrust to the very edges of existence as a consequence of the contesting forces of constituting power in its wild sovereign form‬.

Numerous pilgrims and travellers report that the tombs of the Arab prophets are much longer than the tombs of ordinary people, ranging from ten to fifty metres in length. Little has been written on these long tombs despite their frequent mention in a variety of sources and the clear association between the Arab prophets and the giants of antediluvian times. This paper proposes a broad theoretical context within which to interpret the long tombs of prophets in the Hadramawt and in other locales throughout the Near East and Africa. Rather than providing a systematic overview, this paper highlights a number of details that link Islamic examples with those from other religious traditions, including classical Greece and the ancient Near East. It examines some of the different explanations given for the lengths of particular tombs with the goal of reaching a larger conception of how these long tombs are related to Islamic models of prophethood and the spread of religion. The comparison of various traditions suggests that the long tombs are to be understood as part of an Islamic mythology of the origins and development of civilization from the time of Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden to the era of the Prophet Muhammad and beyond.

Islamic scholarship records a large number of accounts featuring sayings by Christian monks (both monastics and ascetics) and their encounters with Muslim ascetics and mystics. On one level, these accounts attest to the fact that the perception of Christian monks as holy figures in the Near East survived into the early Islamic period and that they were still acknowledged for their spiritual authority and aura in Muslim circles well into the fifth/eleventh century. The continuity of this recognition indicates the degree of its diffusion among Muslim scholars. On another level, these accounts reinforce the conclusion that encounters between Christian monks and Muslim ascetics and early mystics must have played a role in the emergence of particular attitudes, views and practices within Islamic ascetical and mystical traditions.

This article examines the chain of events that facilitated an Islamic revivalamong second-generation Arab-American Muslims. Based upon research inmetropolitan Chicago, it argues against trends in the literature that describeWestern-born Muslims as foreigners, immigrants or, worse, anti-Western.Similarly, it argues against setting their religious experiences solely in a domes-tic context. The article begins by documenting the lack of religious institutionsand practices among immigrant Arab Muslims before the 1990s and the limitedreligious socialization of their American-born children. These conditionsemerged in part from secular trends in the immigrants’ homelands. By the1990s, a period of global Islamic revival, both immigrant and second-generation Arab Muslims found practiced Islam attractive, particularly its capacity to provide meaning and resilience for their own experiences in America. Individual decisions to embrace Islam as more than a fact of birth were facilitated by developments resulting from globalization and the creation of American Islamic institutions, yet were, at the same time, intensely personal choices rooted in local experiences. Although Islamic revival is global, its conduits should not be viewed as causal. The article engages findings by Yang and Ebaugh (2001) and Hirschman (2003), arguing that analyses of religiosity in the United States must take into account historical contexts. Religiosity is an intensely personal experience that must be explained at the intersection of the individual, the local and the global.

“Recent events in world politics have heightened public attention to the concept of risk in social life. In a world where danger and violence have become media commodities, it seems that risks to health and well-being have never been greater. However, because attitudes toward risk are learned cultural behaviour, ‘perception of risk’ has become more essential as a predictor of political and social behaviour than actual tangible risk. In this paper, I discuss contrasts between notions of personal and public risk from the standpoint of the societies of the United States, the Islamic Middle East and the Buddhist Far East. Though broad generalizations may be dangerous, the cultural styles in each of the three regions allow individuals and larger social groupings, such as corporations and governments, to engage in decision-making which seems rational in terms of the broad attitudinal frameworks dominant in these regions, but which may contrast sharply with the rational actions of individuals and groups in other regions. As the world becomes more integrated globally, knowledge of the differences in these perceptions and their concomitant implications for the actions taken by decision-makers will become increasingly essential to international understanding. As a case-study for this discussion, I focus upon the war in Iraq, highlighting reactions and attitudes in the United States, where risk is in proportion to fear; among Irag’s Islamic Middle Eastern neighbours, where risk is really ‘no risk; and among the nations of East Asia, particularly Japan, where risk is normative and drives the course of history.”

Despite the best efforts of many scholars, contemporary Middle Eastern politics is often understood as a battle between individuality, rationality and modernity, on the one hand, and group identities, religion and tradition, on the Other. Such images are current not only among external observers, but also among many of the participants in regional political activities. The perception of such a clash has real costs since it directs attention away from emerging syncretic approaches. In this paper, I examine two areas in which these two oft-claimed incompatible approaches have operated—constitutionalism and civic education. I seek to Show not only that syncretic approaches are possible, but that they have emerged and promise new possibilities for regional politics.

The first purpose of this paper is to Show how constructed knowledge always overcomes knowledge based upon observed science. The second is to Show how societies in neo-liberal industrial economies have, in late modernity, become very risk-aware. This high risk-awareness is a result of the campaigning of environmental and Other activists and the unprecedented ability to Share bad news rapidly through globalized information technology and the media. The resulting hyper-risk-aware societies are troubled as much by constructed risks as by real ones and there is confusion because risk can be more easily foregrounded and backgrounded by political imperatives than science-based arguments. These societies have also learned to be aware of the risks ‘manufactured’ by the processes associated With advancing modernity without being able to deal rationally With their causes. The Study uses cases from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) water sector to illustrate the consequences of these phenomena for water policy-making in the region.

This paper addresses notions of ‘risk’ in the context of HIV and AIDS. It looks at how ‘risk’ is understood from the position of researchers, including sociologists and epidemiologists, and from the position of persons at risk and it describes how these understandings are related to the ways in which rights and responsibilities are also understood. In its examination of these perspectives, the paper distinguishes between ‘traditional,’ ‘modern’ and ‘social’ public healths and the ideological or moral perspectives that underpin them. It also touches upon the ways in which globalization plays into this complex field and raises questions about patents and access to treatments. My argument is that, within the ‘modern’ public health, risk is understood as relating to the individual and that this construction or ‘selected form’ is one of the reasons for the failure of public health to control HIV.‬