The New Orientalists

Almond, İan

doi:10.5040/9780755696154

Cited by 45 publications

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“…But Nasr would insist that ‗[W]hen Iqbal calls Plato -one of the sheep‖, he is following more the interpretation of Platonism by Nietzsche than by the Islamic philosophers themselves…' 38 Why would Iqbal, one could ask Mr. Nasr, for his opinion on Plato, rely more on Nietzsche, one who in his frequent associations between the Prophet Muhammad and Plato offers to us, as Almond points out, the Prophet Muhammad as an Arab Plato, ‗who had always considered Plato' to be an ‗instinctive Semite' (Semite von Instinkt) and a ‗symptom of decadence' (Verfall-Symptom). 39 Why shouldn't one trace the origin of Iqbal's opinion to the Sufis themselves, who are not exactly ‗Islamic philosophers', to Shams, Rumi's master, who would contemptuously reject Plato's claims to love: ‗the perfect philosopher was Plato. He lays claim to love…Are these the words of the accepted?…”

Section: Before Going Ahead Let Us Go a Little Backwardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophizing Tasawwuf: The Postmodern Cult of Sufism

Shafi¹

2011

JITC

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The paper is a critical study of some relatively recent Western approaches to tasawwuf. These so-called post-structuralist approaches, the deconstructionist being chief among them, seem to extend the earlier orientalist attempts, as that of Henry Corbin, Reynolds Nicholson or Pervez Morevidge, of philosophizing tasawwuf, thus turning it into one among various other ‗isms' conveniently available to the Western critical understanding. Reviewing Ian Almond's Deconstruction and Sufism and The New Orientalists, the paper argues that in their preoccupation with tracing apparent affinities between the deconstructive/ post-structuralist and the Sufi positions on the socalled ‗metaphysics of presence', what such studies often overlook is the epistemological difference between these two discourses. It remains a matter of some detailed discussion, which the paper does propose to attempt, to see that these recent critical approaches in the West, despite their avowed project of announcing the demise of philosophy, still somehow remain essentially complicit with the tradition of thought they look to dismantle. I There is a band of neo-orientalists around. And in their impressive presentation of tasawwuf, they are committing what I would term here as a ‗violent' act of ‗literary terrorism'. Lest my use of the terms ‗violent' and ‗terrorism' be confused with their more popular and prevalent political, militant and physical connotations these days, let me make a clarification right away. I have borrowed both these terms from a couple of the most representative postmodern thinkers, namely, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The purpose of such a borrowing is manifestly to restrict the connotations of these terms to a strictly intellectual domain. Without any intention whatsoever of anyway belittling the enormity of slaughter, blasts, hijackings and wars, ‗violence' and ‗terrorism' in the physical domain, one could say that the two acts, in their intellectual, that is, literary and philosophical manifestations, may be far more subtle, insidious and penetrating than their physical counterparts. ‗Fitnah is worse than slaughter', the Quran tells us (2: 191). Fitnah, Abdullah Yousuf Ali points out, can signify trial, temptation, tumult, sedition, oppression, even persecution as the ‗suppression of some opinion by violence…' (n. 239, 89, my italics). As one aim of this paper is to refresh in our hearts and memories the insistence of our Sufis that tasawwuf is not philosophy, it is significant to note that Derrida opens his essay Violence and Metaphysics, even before ruminating on the probable death of philosophy in the West, with a caption form Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. The quoted passage epitomizes the agony the West has gone through, and

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Section: Before Going Ahead Let Us Go a Little Backwardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophizing Tasawwuf: The Postmodern Cult of Sufism

Shafi¹

2011

JITC

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“…But "what exacerbates this very un-Kristevan essentializing is the way Kristeva appears to employ an eighteenth-century strategy of negative affirmation emphasizing the liberté of Europe against a despotic and oppressive East." 365 Here we see echoes of Saïd's Orientalism in this expression of the strength of the West against the Orient's weakness 366 : an entire, heterogeneous and constantly-changing tradition is reduced to a problem of fanaticism, while the European nation state is itself read selectively, idealized as a land of supposed gender and religious equality. Hence my agreement with Almond, that What is objectionable, in the vocabulary of a theorist of Kristeva's caliber, is the absence of sophistication and reflection in her remarks concerning the Muslim world, the blanket dismissive terminology she uses to describe its culture and believers, the remarkable degree to which she has failed to enter into dialogue with the planet's second largest faith, at a time when such sensitivity is precisely what is required.…”

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confidence: 95%

Islam's Turn on the Couch: The Psychoanalytic Theorizing of Muslim Identity in France

Sutton¹

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Christ leads to Mozart: …Christianity refines suffering into joy. Listen to the "Miserere Nobis" of the Mass in C Minor: the sacrifice resolves itself into serenity, then ecstasy. What an unexpected filiation! Allah's madmen, among others, should give this some thought." -Julia Kristeva 1 These are the words of acclaimed French feminist scholar and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, published in her 2006 collection of lectures and interviews entitled, This Incredible Need to Believe. 2 Most of the writings gathered in the volume center around what Kristeva dubs the "prereligious need to believe," which she considers to be both the foundation of human experience and a dangerous and potentially eruptive passion that requires maturation and mitigation. The analyst's text responds to whatshe views as the global crisis of "fundamentalism and the wars of religion," a challenge that she thinks reveals "a pressing need to radically reform humanism." 3 And yet her "redefinition" of humanism, radical as it may be in its acknowledgement of its religious roots, here takes the form of an exaltation of the magnificence of Christianity and its cultural products-including those that arose during the Enlightenment, in its very rupture from Christianity.

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Derrida and Islamic Mysticism: An Undecidable Relationship

Alpyağil¹

2014

A Companion to Derrida

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The New Orientalists

Cited by 45 publications

References 0 publications

Philosophizing Tasawwuf: The Postmodern Cult of Sufism

Philosophizing Tasawwuf: The Postmodern Cult of Sufism

Islam's Turn on the Couch: The Psychoanalytic Theorizing of Muslim Identity in France

Derrida and Islamic Mysticism: An Undecidable Relationship

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