New Book by Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl: The Prophet's Pulpit: Commentaries on the State of Islam

In this collection of twenty-two Islamic sermons, Khaled Abou El Fadl, distinguished law professor and classically trained Islamic jurist, delivers incisive commentaries on the current state of Islam and the Muslim world from the symbolic pulpit of the Prophet of Islam. Part Qur'anic exegesis and part socio-ethical commentary, this volume showcases the knowledge, enlightenment, and dedication to justice that once propelled the Islamic civilization to great heights of human achievement. It attempts to illuminate the spiritual and ethical path forward for Muslims amid the challenges of injustice, oppression, and the rising tide of Islamophobia in our world.

https://www.amazon.com/Prophets-Pulpit-Commentaries-State-Islam/dp/1957063025/

Quotes from Professor Wael Hallaq's Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge: Part 2

 "Rather, it is the imposition of Western knowledge and Western views of the world on others, under the pretense of acting in the interest of 'civilization,' that makes the difference between ordinary historical conquests and their Western counterparts." (159)

"Not just the colonists and state officials but also 'Europeans almost without exception' [58] 'went out to seek the Easterners, not to learn from them, as behooves youth in the presence of old men, but to strive, by brutal or insidious means, to convert them to their own way of thinking' [59] through exporting schools and a Western system of education and through 'assimilation'" [60] (160)

"Worse of all, however, is the Orientalists' pretension to understand Eastern traditions better than the Easterners themselves." (161)

"The subversive author, on the other hand, interrogates the foundational assumptions and epistemological mainstays of the discursive formations as well as the larger system of power that sustains them." (174)

"For Said himself, the 'ancient' was a strikingly oppositional category for the modern, that which is irrelevant, obsolete, defunct, not a continuous quality that has, through centuries and millennia, maintained a human and insentient ecology tested by time. The ancient for Guenon and Massignon is a long-standing tradition that undergoes piecemeal change, securely, steadily, and safely, but one that insists on maintaining itself within a principled order, ruled, as it were, by high-order governing ethical precepts. The 'ancient' for Guenon, Massignon, and even some more recent anthropologists is the embodiment of tradition, one that operates by a principled logic, and one that extends its life into the modern, partaking in it and coping with its pressures. [4]" (181)

"The invention of nuclear weapons or of sophisticated military technology that wiped off the face of the Earth millions of innocent victims in the colonies, in Japan, and in Europe itself is not a neutral act of science or the result of neutral technological competence." (204)

"the ecological and environmental crisis in endemic to the very modern system producing it, which is to say that the crisis itself is systemic, not contingent" (233)

"For Scheler, modern man lacks a unified and coherent idea of who and what he is, and even more so lacks a unified and coherent of what he is capable of becoming." (254)

"The fight within the self is squarely about inverting, if not subverting, the entire value structures of modernity, amounting to a revolution not only against how we think but, more importantly, against who we, as humans, ultimately are." (254)

"Whereas mainstream Muslim intellectuals have moved from skepticism, as a distinctly epistemological impasse, to the absolute necessity of theism, the paradigmatic line of modern thinking moved from theism to the unavoidability of skepticism. [67]" (262)

Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

Quotes from Professor Wael Hallaq's Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge: Part 1

 "The liberal subject, as this book argues, is never the locus or focus of a restructuring critique, however much this subject has been culpable and complicit in contributing to modernity's crises. The problems are always seen to lie elsewhere, threatening and endangering that subject. but are never inextricably and structurally linked to that subject's constitution.' (5)

"I argue that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually produced particular and unprecedented kinds of knowledge that indeed made themselves substantively and inherently amenable to the manipulation of power, giving the latter its distinctive and complex meaning. [29] Once it constituted itself as sovereign and above nature, this form of knowledge opened the flood gates for the state to embark on the colossal nineteenth-century project of forming its subjects as citizens, and this by means of creating a number of 'engineering' institutions that brought out their potential. Of all these institutions, juridicality and the modern educational apparatus acquire immediate relevance to my narrative, for they were the means through which a new human subject, the object of modern forms of power, was constituted." (16)

"Indeed, my real argument is that Said did not grasp the true nature of modernity as a project, as a phenomenon, or as a unique occurrence in human history." (110)

"New European courts, new European schools, and new European-style adminisitrative and other institutions came to displace almost every sphere that the Shari'a and its related institutions had occupied. [154] The effect of these 'reforms' was not merely to displace the Shari'a and the 'traditional' institutions of Islam or just to secularize them, but to create a new subject, the citizen, who sees the world through the eyes of the modern state." (116)

"Through these and similar displacements, the subject was given a new formation, a new epistemology for living and for dealing with social others. The Muslim subject was being steadily transplanted out of a technology of care of the self and its inner psychological operations into an internally disciplined but externally formed citizen. The new state state technologies of training, discipline, and control came to seize the body and to create for it a new identity, a new human, a new way of being in the world. This was the colonized subject, a replica of his European forerunner I discussed earlier." (118)

"The project heavily invested in the production of cultural and academic discourse, in the creation of new subjectivities and European-like subjects. When the intellectually unremarkable Thomas Babington Macaulay famous said that the British in India need to create a 'class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.' [160] he was not speaking on behalf of the British alone. His statement captured Europe's colonial project in its entirety and, in light of my discussion earlier, Europe's own internal history over the two preceding centuries. Algeria, like India and everything else, including Europe itself, had to be refashioned." (120)

"The performativity of materialism's psychological and corporeal power amounts to the full weight of transformative processes that culminate in depriving the human faculties of the abilities to see beyond the immediate senses. Trapped in the sensible world of the here and now, modern Western 'man' has become self-enclosed in a locked system beyond which no other form of reality can be comprehensible. Accordingly, with its capitalism and attendant cultural value system, materialism ab initio precludes the possibility of understanding, much less appreciating, the manner in which other civilizations and cultures articulate, and live in, the world." (146)

"Western science has not just lost this continuity, but also exacerbated the discontinuity to a degree of exclusion; it has, in effect, taken the place of metaphysics and God himself, thereby dethroning religion and sitting in its place." (148)

Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).