Thursday, November 26, 2009

Abdal Hakim Murad - "Ishmael and the Enlightenment’s crise de coeur"

Just found this article and book in the library!

Tim Winter, ‘Ishmael and the Enlightenment’s crise de coeur: a response to Koshul and Kepnes,’ in Basit Bilal Koshul and Stephen Kepnes (eds.), Scripture, Reason, and the contemporary Islam-West encounter: studying the ‘Other’, Understanding the ‘Self’ (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 149-175.

From the preface:
The Muslim thinker, Tim Winter (Abdul Hakim Murad) takes on Koshul's claim that Islam and modern Enlightenment culture have important affinities that make continuing dialogue and interactions possible, beneficial, and necessary. Winter puts the issue starkly, "Islam did not produce the modern world" and its discontents. Islam did not produce an ideology that curtails cultural difference in the name of a "global monoculture." Islam did not produce a "world without God." Given this, Islam might very well serve God and humanity best by remaining modernity's "other." Winter's piece is far more complex than we have presented it. Along the way, he shows that Islam has always been part of the "West" and he also outlines subtle ways in which Enlightenment modernity and Islamic thought did and could continue to intersect. However, the real power of the chapter remains its prophetic critique of the continuing march of Western capitalist and secular modernity that threatens to swallow up all particular cultures and the world itself. Winter displays the best of the penetrating thought of many Islamic intellectuals today that simply will not stand the march of Western modernity without at least getting in its way through an extended and deep cultural critique.

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