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Ed Webb

King Charles III's Admiration for Islam Could Mend Divides | Time - 0 views

  • Almost 30 years ago, then-Prince Charles declared that he wanted to be a “defender of faith,” rather than simply “Defender of the Faith,” to reflect Britain’s growing religious diversity. It created a bit of a storm in a teacup, as he had clearly not meant that he would be changing the traditional role so much as adding to it. The new King is a particular type of Anglican: one that on the one hand, is incredibly tied to the notion of tradition; but on the other, has shown a great deal of affinity for both Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam, two religions clearly outside the Anglican fold that he must now titularly lead.
  • the King has been quite public about his admiration for Islam as a religion, and Muslim communities, both in Britain and abroad.
  • Privately, he’s shown a lot of sympathy for where Muslims are in difficult political situations, both in Europe and further afield. Robert Jobson’s recent Charles at Seventy claims that the King has significant sympathies for the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, for example. It’s also claimed that he disagreed with dress restrictions imposed on Muslim women in various European countries.
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  • in 2007 he founded Mosaic, which provides mentoring programs for young Muslims across the U.K. He also became patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, where he gave his most famous speech, “Islam and the West” in 1993
  • If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owed to the Islamic world
  • “Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost. At the heart of Islam is its preservation of an integral view of the Universe.”
  • he also argues that the West needs Islam in the here and now. There does not seem to be a parallel in any other Western political figure.
  • the world will also get used to a Western head of state who sees Islam in quite a different light than the waves of populism across Europe and North America
Ed Webb

The White Christian West Isn't What It Thinks It Is - 0 views

  • Throughout what is commonly known as the West, there has been a slew of books, articles, and public interventions calling attention to the notion of a cultural crisis within. Such a phenomenon ought to be followed by self-reflection, self-interrogation, and retrospection. By and large, however, the past decade has seen far more of the opposite: The alarm surrounding crisis has been more of a call for “us” to attack and problematize “them,” which invariably leads to propositions such as “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board,” as Douglas Murray, a hardcore right-wing pundit, once argued—not to mention conspiracy theories that blame all the ills of the modern world on those who look different than “us,” meaning white Europeans, or, worse, pray differently than “we” do.
  • Ryan identifies the West as an intellectual space, rather than solely a geographical one. His model of what the West entails has three pillars: “the belief in a moral endpoint; the trio of republican values (liberty, equality, solidarity); and universalism.” Ryan correctly points out that all of these pillars are in crisis—and yet, the situation is, he argues, “not entirely hopeless.”
  • When it comes to conceptualizing themselves as a Western “us,” European Christendom has historically done so by positioning itself against the Muslims of the Mediterranean, be they Ottomans or Arabs
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  • a project that institutions such as the British Council have tried to bring to fruition, through enterprises like “Our Shared Europe” and “Our Shared Future,” which sought to uncover the huge amount of historical evidence that showed that Muslims and Islam played much wider historical roles internally in the West than was hitherto understood.
  • a form of Christianity that focuses on solidarity with the oppressed, rather than promoting tribalistic hate against the “other,” is precisely what Europe needs more of
  • If the West is to look for a better future, intellectuals ought to be transcending untenable readings of their history and looking for better ideas.
  • one could write an encyclopedia that focused only on the history of Muslim European communities and figures, be they in premodern Spain and Portugal or the Emirate of Sicily or indeed the many Northern and Western Europeans who became Muslims. Framing Islam as a newcomer immediately restricts the scope of discussion that is needed. And such framing leads to a focus on salvaging broken models rather than seeking a new model for the West.
  • Righting that wrong means not simply reimagining a new national myth to gather around, but Westerners forging a new narrative that dispenses with the historical marginalization of “them” in favor of creating what has always been a mythical “us.” What is needed is a new notion of “us” that emerges strongly and true, based on values and principles that the peoples of the West will be able to rally around in a cohesive manner for generations to come.
Ed Webb

"Whither a Muslim world?" - The Immanent Frame - 0 views

  • What is the “Muslim world?” Is it solely a descriptive term employed in the social sciences and humanities to name a shifting geographical boundary of Muslim-majority countries? Or, as its critics argue, is it a term that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a strategy to imagine a new transnational, religious unity at the end of empire?
  • precolonial forms of communal difference and interaction did not directly correspond to the kinds of intra- and inter-imperial claims concerning citizenship and belonging that were at stake in the formulation of the idea of the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  • Citizenship under British, French, or Dutch rule often came with the promise of integration into the “civilized” political order, yet with varying degrees of fulfillment and often dependent on whether the colonial subject had been sufficiently “educated” into Europe’s civilizational order
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  • As Aydın shows, the most prominent strategy in the making of imperial subjects, as well as citizens, was the notion of civilization and its twin, race—that is, racialization. In this way, Aydın echoes Partha Chatterjee, who forcefully argues that colonial power operates through a “rule of colonial difference,” where the colonized are embedded in social and political relations of inferiority vis-à-vis their colonial counterparts. For Chatterjee, this is done through emergent notions of race and practices of racial difference.
  • Aydın’s argument resonates with Chatterjee’s insistence on racial difference as a key component of imperial power and Scott’s critical revision that the creation of racialized subjects takes place through practices that change over time, adapting to new circumstances thus enabling the production of new kinds statements, arguments, and practices in turn.
  • While the idea of bounded entities, which are, supposedly, culturally and religiously distinct, has been subject to numerous revisions and criticisms, it has maintained a constant presence in news media and policy circles. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” narrative has reappeared in the likes of Donald Trump’s recent speech in Poland, where he questions, in racially and religiously coded terms, whether the “West has the will to survive,” or if its “civilization” can be “preserved”; these are strong indications of the lasting hold of imperial concepts on the imagination of policymakers and politicians even as we acknowledge a transformation in the historical conditions of their articulation.
  • assuming the adjective “Muslim” tells us something about the kinds of political actions one undertakes is not only delusional, but also dangerous for democratic politics.
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