The concept of happiness is an equally important topic of discussion in both Islamic and Western philosophy. This article presents a comparative analysis of happiness concepts from Islamic as well as Western points of view. The article aims at discovering the influence of al-Ghazali (a medieval Muslim scholar of Sufi persuasion) upon Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, a present-day Malaysian Muslim philosopher, concerning the philosophy of happiness. It also focuses on the Aristotelian philosophy of happiness, underscoring the discussion from his seminal book The Nichomachean Ethics, and includes an in-depth study of happiness as discussed by modern Western philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. The study follows a qualitative, non-empirical, textual and contextual analytical approach, which comprises several texts and journal archives composed by the aforementioned scholars and philosophers from the ancient medieval period to the present. The analysis reveals that Islamic philosophy always underscores happiness in this present life and the eternal life after death, while Aristotelian pagan philosophy stresses happiness only in this sublunary life. The study also argues that virtue is a predominant aspect necessary to attain happiness in the worldly life and in the afterlife.

Historicism and Presentism are two recent, mostly discussed phenomena in the area of Shakespearean studies. While historicists like Stephen Greenblatt argues that historicism pursues historical aspects to explain a text and keeps away present-day political, social and cultural affairs to avoid the misunderstanding of it, the presentists like Terence Hawkes advocates that Presentism offers an unending dialogue between present and past, which is deeply rooted to the present. In addition, Presentism is the re-evaluation of the historical facts upon which our early modern understanding depends. Therefore, Presentism could be an excellent idea to interpret the appropriacy of early modern literature, especially Shakespeare’s oeuvre. This paper, however, elucidates Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, from both historicist and presentist points of view, which looks especially at the way Shakespeare views gender while applying these both approaches. This article also clarifies the reasons for selecting this text for explicating Shakespeare from these two approaches. Finally, this study advocates for combining these two approaches, which might offer a better way to understand Shakespeare’s works and to make him more relevant today.