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Closing The Chasm: Al-Fārābī On Islam And Politics, Onur F. Muftugil
Closing The Chasm: Al-Fārābī On Islam And Politics, Onur F. Muftugil
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Much Islamic history evinces a separation between religious and political registers of thought and action. To be sure, these two registers always remained, to some extent, mutually intertwined since the origins of Islam. However, in about two hundred years into Islamic history, or, in other words, in the 9th century, the political register based on coercion began to mark itself off from the moral concerns associated with the religious register. Political authority acquired an increasingly absolute character. It focused more on ensuring the obedience of its subjects than the moral/religious purpose of creating a just society where even the weakest …
Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, And Religion In Colonial Egypt, Jeffrey Culang
Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, And Religion In Colonial Egypt, Jeffrey Culang
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is a conceptual history of Egypt’s national formation between the 1880s and the 1930s. This period involved the convergence of nationalism, colonial rule, missionary activity, and new modes of governance at the national and international levels. Drawing on state and missionary archival material, periodicals, legal compendia, laws, and parliamentary transcripts, and adapting methods developed by Reinhart Koselleck, I trace shifts within Egypt’s socio-political lexicon through processes of translation and demonstrate their effects upon social experience and political aspiration. I focus on a set of liberal-secular concepts critical to national politics—religious freedom, public interest, nationality, and the minority—as they …
Refractions Through The Secular: Islam, Human Rights And Universality, Zara Khan
Refractions Through The Secular: Islam, Human Rights And Universality, Zara Khan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Universal human rights (HR) are often theorized as philosophically neutral. Because they do not espouse any particular theory of the human being, it is argued, they can be reasonably appropriated by all. In this thesis, I explore HR’s universality claim, by focusing on the discourse’s secular foundation. In the universal human right to freedom of religion, I find a distinctly modern grammar of ‘religion,’ one that separates ‘religion’ from politics and power, law from morality, and the public and private realms. The modern concept of religion also espouses a secular theory of the human, insofar as the human is defined …