Rethinking Islam & the West: A New Narrative for the Age of Crises

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The speaker was for more than twenty years a Middle East analyst with the BBC World Service. He is the author of two earlier books, The Muslim Revolt: A Journey through Political Islam and The Poisoned Well: Empire and Its Legacy in the Middle East.

Researcher at TRT World Research Centre and a PhD candidate in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonizing movement. The paper approaches the decolonizing movement as one of the most crucial points in anthropological thinking, as long as it can go beyond filling the gaps in genealogies by engaging with non-Eurocentric scholarship and, additionally, by carrying the critical angles to the ways it engages with those non-Eurocentric scholarships. Lastly we look at Art. Kepler focuses on the effects on Architecture mostly and how the buildings of today seem almost otherworldly when compared to the classical, undoubtedly beautiful architecture from the past. It’s not uncommon today for people to wonder in stunned disbelief as to why an Architect designed a modern building in a certain way, yet this isn’t the necessarily the case for traditional wonders and purposeful architecture. Again, Keeler argues, the reason for this drastic change is the focus of the gaze from the spiritual to the worldly. CIS Public Talks – Melissa Gatter on “ Time, Power, and Aid: Book talk and discussion on displacement in Jordan, Spain, Morocco, and Bangladesh‘The Visual Culture Seminar Series – on ‘ New York, Lahore: In Dialogue with Shahzia Sikander and Salman Toor.‘ But what Ahmed Keeler remarkably says in this book is that perhaps the fundamental understanding that progression is the factor of success is wrong. He mentions instead that we should be living according to the principle of Balance, known in Arabic approximately as 'Mizaan'. Global Jihad tells the story of four distinct jihadi waves, each with its own program for achieving a global end: whether a Jihadi International to liberate Muslim lands from foreign occupation; al-Qa’ida’s call to drive the United States out of the Muslim world; ISIS using “jihadi cool” to recruit followers; or leaderless efforts of stochastic terror to “keep the dream alive.” Robinson connects the rise of global jihad to other “movements of rage” such as the Nazi Brownshirts, White supremacists, Khmer Rouge, and Boko Haram. Ultimately, he shows that while global jihad has posed a low strategic threat, it has instigated an outsized reaction from the United States and other Western nations. Anand’s research and teaching focus on the religious and cultural traditions of South Asia, specializing in the anthropological study of contemporary Islam, Indian popular culture, and inter-religious relations between Muslims and Hindus. This talk argues that we can identify one genre of texts, brief annalistic histories, which were being compiled as early as the first half of the 2th hijrī century (c. 710-760 CE) and which were then incorporated into the great later compilations like al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 310 AH/923 CE) History of Prophets and Kings. It proposes a method for reconstructing one of these, a history written by the Egyptian jurist al-Layth b. Saʿd in the 120s AH/740s CE. By inspecting the kind of information al-Layth’s recorded and assessing it alongside al-Layth’s connections, we can identify the political and intellectual contexts in which the earliest formal collection of Islamic historical record was cultivated.

From Konkan to Coromandel – Dr Tiziana Lorenzetti on “ The Vīraśaivas / Liṅgāyats of 12th century Karnataka: Conflict, Transformation, and the Genesis of a New Creed’‘ At times I felt the book depicted Islamic history with rose tints and at times I felt it went off course.

William Dalrymple (a Scottish travel writer and historian, whose work centres chiefly on the Indian subcontinent) in conversation with George Michell (who has researched and written on Early Chalukya temple architecture, surveys of town planning and Islamic buildings, studies of Hindu temple architecture and sculptureand in the 1980s and 1990s he co-directed an extensive survey of Hampi-Vijayanagara). According to Keeler, the crisis of the Islamic world and indeed of all humanity over the past 200 years is a product of the mistakes and wrongdoings of the modern Western world, not the Muslims; it is a result of the unlimited expansion of modern culture which has shattered all the traditional worlds from China and India to Christian Europe and indigenous America. He argues that the Islamic and other traditional civilisations have not fallen behind, but rather that the modern West has crossed a line that had never been crossed before. It has broken a balance taken by traditional cultures to hold the secret of natural stability and social harmony, and replaced it with the idea of unlimited “progress”. The progress of the modern world has come at the expense of immense human suffering and the constant threat of social and natural calamities. It has opened a pandora’s box, out of which emerged weapons of mass destruction, pollution, deforestation, increasing intensity of natural disasters, global warming, superbugs, the collapse of the family, the disappearance of childhood, an epidemic of addictions of all kinds, loneliness, and mental illnesses, terrorism, financial crises and more. The feeling that this path is taking us to a disaster grows every day. A path on which we race, ever faster.

I see this book as a successor of Sir Iqbal’s magnum Opus: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, and Gae Eaton’s Islam and the destiny of man. Elizabeth Urban is an Associate Professor of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in the first two centuries of Islamic history (7th–8th centuries CE). Her talk draws upon her award-winning first book, Conquered Populations in Early Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) , which explores how new Muslims of slave origins entered early Islamic society and articulated their identities within it. Dr. Urban’s work brings together three groups—freedmen, enslaved women, and the children of enslaved mothers—to explore how Islam transformed from a small piety movement into the doctrine of an expansive empire. Throughout the talk, she will highlight the important role that enslaved and freed persons played in shaping the meaning of foundational terms such as Arab and Muslim. This event will explore debates around the revival of the Caliphate and its relevance in contemporary Islamic politics. Dr Salman Sayyid from Leeds University, AbdoolKarim Vakil from King’s College London, and Dr Mahmood Chandia from the University of Central Lancashire bring their extensive research and knowledge to the discussion. This talk is part of the CRASSH series ‘Archives of the Disappeared’ which is an interdisciplinary research initiative for the study and documentation of communities, social movements, spaces, lifeworlds, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence. In this session Prof. Fahmy will be talking archives and quarantines, and will read the introduction and first chapter of his book, In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt.

It's not often that you come across a book that changes your worldview so drastically, but this was one of those books for me. From Konkan to Coromandel – D r Julia A.B. Hegewald on “ Reflections on Jaina and Vīra-Śaiva Interactions in the Art and Architecture of Karnataka‘‘

CIS Public Talks – Prof. Michael Cooperson on “ They cannot be imitated in English”: translating the Arabic Impostures of al-Hariri (d. 1122)’‘ CIS-DHF Malabar series– Katherine Kasdorf on ‘ Monumental Jinas and Networks of Prestige: Jain Temples of the Hoysala Capital’ In this book, Ahmed Paul Keeler examines the worldview, until comparatively recently unquestioned, of ever continuing human progress. The author directly connects the present ‘Age of Crises’ to an adherence to the myth of progress and the loss of balance in modern life; “the balance between the material and the spiritual, and between ourselves and the environment in which we live”. In this thought-provoking book, we are invited to examine the troubles we are experiencing and the tangled relationship between Islam and the West through a distinctive lens.He has spent his working life since the Festival in establishing and engaging with projects that explore and present Islamic culture as a holistic environmental manifestation. Residing in Cambridge for the last 22 years he has had a profound impact on a number of students passing through the University. At a time of growing instability he is now lecturing and participating in seminars encouraging us to judge the success of human culture through the criteria of Mizan, which is at the heart of the Islamic unfolding. The Rushdie affair brought the term fatwa into the Euro-American mainstream. But Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie was not the first modern controversy over a fatwa. According to one legal historian: “No fatwa had ever been the object of such a heated debate in the history of Islam.” Focusing on the sartorial object of European headgear, Dr. Youshaa Patel situates Abduh’s fatwa within a long tradition of inter-Muslim debates on imitating non-Muslims (tashabbuh) in public life, thus casting new light on contemporary debates in the West over visible expressions of Islam, from headscarves and beards to minarets and mosques.