Diverse Subjects of Interpenetrations - Göle Nilüfer , Islam and Secularity: The Future of Europe’s Public Sphere (Durham, Duke University Press, 2015) and Musulmans au quotidien : Une enquête européenne sur les controverses autour de l’islam (Paris, La Découverte, 2015). (original) (raw)
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Th is article discusses two prominent and seemingly very diff erent schools of thought about the historical relationship of the West to Islam-the fi rst of which we might call a 'clash of civilizations' and the second an 'alliance'-in order to show the common roots of both in Christian dialectics. As an example of the fi rst school, the article focuses on Pope Benedict XVI's 2006 Regensburg lecture on the European synthesis of 'faith' and 'reason,' with its attempt to defi ne Islam as a religion of faith and not of reason. As an example of the second, it focuses on fi ve centuries of European debate over the contribution of Arabic poetry to the birth of a modern and rational European poetic subjectivity. Th e article suggests that dialectics of inclusion and exclusion are inseparable from each other, and concludes by pointing to some contemporary political implications of this inseparability.
The following text attempts to draw attention to the need of refining the terms Europe and Islam, since they have been used in a very vague manner in many debates and despite their uncertain definition are presented as linear opposites by many speakers. An important issue is the description of the aforementioned tension between generalized ideas and an exact reality. The first one is the image of an average / imaginary Muslim and the second one a real Muslim belonging to a specific cultural interpretation of Islam. The “imaginary Muslim” and the real one are in many texts, debates and polemics freely interchanged, which creates an interesting topic for Religious studies. Suitable tools of research include replications or changes of the traditional relations among Muslim minorities and majorities in the new environment of the countries of Western Europe. An important motive is the fixation (or redefinition) and the relegation of ones own identity rooted within a certain cultural interpretation of Islam. This process is applied within the contexts of institutionalization of religious organizations, the development of education, the construction of mosques and the designing of gravestones.
Critical Islam” Debating/Negotiating Modernity
The intellectual discourse of Muslim elites born and educated in a Western environment gives impetus, sometimes not entirely consciously, to the debate on the critical potential of the public sphere. This new Islamic critique suggests that the Western public spheres lose their cohesive force and political thrust and practically dismantle into fragmented, disparate, and alienated discourses under increasing transnational pressures because they have never questioned their normative secular underpinnings. This new critical insight implies new modes of public participation and occasions a transformation of the traditional notion of public sphere as it has been described by prominent Western theoreticians of modernity (such as Jurgen Habermas). The debate between the classical Western approach to "public sphere" and modernity and the "new" Islamic critique of it (via Tariq Ramadan, Fethi Benslama, and Malek Chebel) is at the center of this paper.