Abstract
The reader is already familiar with my criticism on considering the study of culture as well as its application to Islam to be a kind of monopoly for cultural anthropologists.1 Hitherto, the exception of a small community of sociologists involved in cultural analysis2 has been admitted. It was not until the end of the Cold War that the dimension of culture and civilisation factually pertinent to international studies had caught the interest of scholars of this discipline. In the course of the justified rejection of Western universalism, however, a questionable fashion of relativism has evolved in cultural studies, becoming widely disseminated in the contemporary West. The pivotal argument has been that every culture is relative with regard to its own value system. It follows that no culture is in a position to provide objective criteria for critical judgement or a value orientation valid for other cultures. This self-defeating contemporary Western intellectual fashion of cultural relativism amounts to a popular school of thought that at times can be equated with a religious conviction among those who present themselves as postmodernists.
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Notes
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, 1973;
and Dale Eickelman, The Middle East: an Anthropological Approach, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1981.
See the survey by Adam Kuper, Culture: the Anthropologists’ Account, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis, Berkeley, 1987.
See also Peter Berger et al.,Cultural Analysis, New York, 1986.
It is important to ascertain that my views are different from those of Huntington, even though I acknowledge his primacy in the debate. See B. Tibi, Krieg der Zivilisationen, revised and expanded new edition, Munich, 1998 (first 1995), in particular chapter 7 of the new edition on Huntington; and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations New York, 1996.
Hedley Bull, ‘The Revolt against the West’, in Hedley Bull/Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society, Oxford, 1984, pp. 217–28.
For this idea and the supporting sources, see B. Tibi, Der wahre Imam. Der Islam von Mohammed bis zur Gegenwart, Munich, 1996 (3rd edition, 1998), in particular chapter 3.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA, 1986.
The Erasmus Foundation (ed.), The Limits of Pluralism: Neo-Absolutisms and Relativism, Amsterdam, 1994 (Gellner, pp. 163–6, Geertz pp. 167–72). See herein my contribution on Islamic neo-absolutism, pp. 29–35. I do side with Gellner (see note 8).
Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, London, 1992, p. 84.
Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols, Chicago, 1977, in particular, vol. 2: The Expansion of Islam.
M.S. al-Awwa, Fi al-nizam al-siyasi li al-dawla al-Islamiyya (On the Political System of the Islamic State), 6th edition, Cairo, 1983.
See chapter 6 on the nation-state in B. Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998.
Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939, Oxford, 1962.
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Berkeley, 1987 (see also note 40 below).
B. Tibi, ‘The Simultaneity of the Unsimultaneous: Old Tribes and Imposed Nation-States in the Modern Middle East’, in Philip Khoury/Joseph Kostiner (eds), Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, Berkeley, 1990, pp. 127–52; see also note 11.
Theodore von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization, New York, 1987.
B. Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam, Salt Lake City, 1988 and also by the author, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, Boulder, CO, 1990.
Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, Averroës on Intellect, New York, 1992.
Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, New York, 1982, chapter: ‘Science and Technology’, pp. 221–38;
and for a historical comparison Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam, Austin, TX, 1995.
Muhammed Abduh, al-Islam wa al-nasraniyya bain al-ilm wa al-madaniyya ( Islam and Christianity between Science and Civilisation), new printing, Beirut, 1983.
For references on this debate, see B. Tibi, ‘Culture and Knowledge: the Islamization of Knowledge as a Postmodern Project?’ in Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12, 1 (1995), pp. 1–24.
David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents, New York, 1998, pp. 503f.
B. Tibi, ‘The Worldview of Sunni Arab Fundamentalists: Attitudes toward Modern Science and Technology’, in Martin Marty/Scott Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms and Society, Chicago, 1993, pp. 73–102.
On this issue see the classic works by Franz Borkenau, Der Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild, new printing, Darmstadt, 1980;
and Edgar Zilsel, Die sozialen Ursprünge der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft, Frankfurt/M., 1976.
B. Tibi, Islamischer Fundamentalismus, moderne Wissenschaft und Technologie, Frankfurt/M., 1992 (new printing 1993 ).
Even the most respected reform-Muslim Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity, Chicago, 1982, fails to meet this challenge.
On the debate among intellectuals on asalah and turath, see Centre for Arab Unity Studies/Beirut (ed.), al-Turath wa tahadiyyat al-asr fi al-watan al-Arabi ( On Cultural Heritage and the Contemporary Challenges in the Arab World ), Beirut, 1985.
See Syed Alatas, Islam, Secularism and the Philosophy of the Future, London, 1985.
Z. Sardar, Exploration in Islamic Science, London, 1989.
See Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, Averroës on Intellect (referenced in note 17); and Tibi, Der wahre Imam (referenced in note 5); and on the Hellenisation of Islam W.M. Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Edinburgh, 1962, parts 2 and 3.
Leslie Lipson, The Ethical Crises of Civilization, London, 1993.
Hassan al-Sharqawi, al-Muslimun hukama wa ulama ( The Muslims as Scientists and as Wise Men ), Cairo, 1987, p. 12.
See Institute of Islamic Thought (ed.), Toward Islamization of Disciplines, Herndon, VA, 1989. For a critique see also my article referenced in note 20 above.
Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, London, 1992.
On this distinction, see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, Edinburgh, 1981. See also Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad. Der Islam und die christliche Welt Munich, 1999, chapter 3.
See William McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago, 1963; and more recently Gress, From Plato to NATO (referenced in note 21).
Everett Mendelsohn, ‘The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge’, in Mendelsohn (ed.), The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, London, 1977, pp. 3–26.
Shakib Arslan, Limatha ta’akhara al-Muslimun wa limatha taqadama ghairuhum ( Why Are Muslims Backward While Others Have Developed?), new printing, Beirut, 1965.
B. Tibi, Arab Nationalism: between Islam and the Nation-State, 3rd edition, London and New York, 1997.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Hatmiyat al-hall al-Islami (The Islamic Solution is Determined), 3 vols, Beirut and Cairo, 1970–88.
For more details, see B. Tibi, Conflict and War in the Middle East: from Interstate War to New Security, London and New York, 1998, chapters 3 and 4.
Anwar al-Jundi, Ahdaf al-taghrib fi al-alam al-Islami ( The Targets of Westernisation of the Islamic World ), Cairo, 1987.
On this subject, see John Kelsay, Islam and War, Louisville, KY, 1993, in particular chapter 5. Kelsay calls these ‘warriors of Allah’ (it is their own understanding: Junud Allah) ‘irregular soldiers’.
Mark Huband, Warriors of the Prophet: the Struggle for Islam, Boulder, CO, 1999 prefers a different label in the title.
See Kalevi Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, Cambridge, 1996; and chapter 11 in Tibi, Conflict and War in the Middle East (referenced in note 42).
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© 2001 Bassam Tibi
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Tibi, B. (2001). From Religious Belief to Political Commitment: the Fundamentalist Revolt against the Secular Order. Between Cultural Modernity and Neo-Absolutism. In: Islam between Culture and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514140_7
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