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After the dossier entitled Remembering Abu Zayd, our tribute to the great Egyptian philospher who died in July continues. These are new contributions from his friends and colleagues.
World Philosophy Day in Iran? No thank you. This is a list of Resetdoc readers and friends who have signed the appeal addressed to UNESCO's President Irina Bokova by Giuliano Amato, Giancarlo Bosetti e Ramin Jahanbegloo, to prevent the 2010 World Philosophy Day being held in Iran.
In this Europe it makes no sense to close the borders, to play the game of good insiders and bad outsiders, to defend ethnic and cultural purity, to demonise everything alien. We, a group of concerned citizens, invoke the political responsibility of Europe’s opinion-makers and political leaders. We demand the cessation of the politics of fear and engagement in the politics of hope. It is this sense of urgency that prompts this Manifesto - an appeal to all those living in Europe, those concerned for its present and its future, to join us in imagining and implementing an inclusive politics befitting the 21st century. To add your name as a signatory, please email Pep Subirós: pepsubiros at gmail dot com.
Abu Zayd was one of those great intellectual figures, whose lives and writings have taught to all of us that we can understand each other. His outstanding and unparalleled research on the teaching of the holy texts beyond the literal meaning of words written in the cultural context of centuries ago, has demonstrated that religions never are an obstacle to the recognition of the fundamental rights of each human being.
Abu Zayd’s death is a loss for humanity as a whole and a bigger loss for people in the Islamic world, who believe in the importance of freedom of thought as one of the tenets and prerequisites of modernity, democratization, rule of law and human rights. The story of Abu Zayd has many parallels with Averroes’death in Marrakesh. Averroes, himself a rationalist, committed the crime of thinking. His strictly rationalist views on religion collided with the more orthodox views of the political institution established by the Almouahads in Morocco.
How the Jamaat-e-Islami developed and transformed itself within the boundaries of a modern pluralistic democracy, the Indian democracy, is the subject Irfan Ahmed has devoted his research to. To write this book, Irfan Ahmad conducted extensive fieldwork in several small Muslim towns near Delhi, and he describes the gradual process of change and openness, following in particular the development within Jamaat’s universities and their student organisations SIMI and SIO.
Over the last decade, conflicts arisen from ethnic, religious, political and more purely "economic" reasons - for the possession of natural resources and territories - have shown an escalation of global dimension. Further, recent history demonstrates that armed conflicts originated in a specific part of the world do not remain confined to it, but tend to affect the rest of the world and tend to spread through ways typical of the “globalization of the economy".
On April 2nd in Nantes, a 31-year-old woman wearing the niqab while driving her car was fined by the police for violating traffic laws. According to the policeman who stopped her, her attire did not permit her to ‘drive comfortably.' The result was a very lively debate with an angry exchange between Tariq Ramadan and Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux. The government’s anti-burqa draft law, however, has been welcomed positively by the Association for the Defence of Women’s Rights “Ni putes, Ni soumises” (neither prostitutes nor submissive). Only a few days ago Belgium passed a law forbidding the full veil in all public places.
«I was in Israel as a visiting professor at the Meitar Center of Advanced Legal Studies – writes Seyla Benhabib, philosopher and professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University – and I watched in disbelief and pain as Turkey, the country of my birth threatened at one point to go to war against Israel - a country I feel deep affection for, whose politics I have followed since the 1968 War, where many members of my family, including one sister, lives and where my Father is buried. Israeli social and political forces are at a stalemate: whether one advocates a one-state or a two-state solution certainly matters but there are deeper cultural, economic, and theological forces at work which make it highly unlikely that a viable solution can be found soon to the quagmire in Israel-Palestine.»
Inequality is a deplorable reality in the lives of many women in Egypt regardless of their socio-economic status, however it is most visible in poor communities throughout the country. In such communities, domestic violence is considered a right and not a violation.
«As we read in Matthew 5:13, religious believers are told: "You are the salt of the earth." The phrase means that religious believers are expected to be neither identical with the "earth", nor to be removed from it. In this sense, they are meant to be neither worldly-secular nor radically anti-worldly or anti-secular (thus perhaps post-secular).»
«I thought here we are in a mosque in the United States, and in the nation's capital no less, and the mosque authorities, as self-identified, call in municipal security forces to eject a bunch of women just because they wanted to pray in the main congregational space. Absurd. Is this where our tax dollars should go? To defend gender segregation? I had thought the days of segregation were long gone in this country. I asked myself: Who owns God's house anyway?».
The Egyptian intellectual Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a member of Resetdoc’s Board of Directors, has no doubts; the worst enemy of freedom of thought in the Arab world is “the Catholic marriage between Islam and politics.” It was this marriage that last December induced Kuwaiti authorities, under pressure from Islamist members of parliament, to refuse him entry at the border after previously giving him a visa. “This is the first time it has happened,” said Abu Zayd. On the day he was refused entry, the liberal theologian was obliged to get back on a plane at Kuwait City’s Sheikh Saad Airport, where he had earlier landed to speak at the Women’s Cultural Social Society about the manner in which women are seen in Shari’a and in the Koran and the reform of the Islamic school of thought.
The main problems faced nowadays in Europe by young immigrants are traditional racism, based the colour of a person’s skin, and widespread anti-religious sentiments. This is the opinion expressed by Olivier Roy, professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Scieneces Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His most recent book, “La Sainte Ignorance” (2009), speaks of religious revivalism as the consequence of globalisation and a crisis of cultures.
“Italy has made no choices as far as the issue of cultural integration is concerned, addressing the subject of immigration only from the perspective of public order or the economy.” Renzo Guolo is a professor of Sociology of Islam at Turin University’s Faculty of Political Science and a professor of The Sociology of Cultural Processes at Padua University’s Faculty of Humanities and Philosophy. The subjects of his research include contemporary extremisms, relations between politics and religion, the sociology of Islam and cultural pluralism in contemporary societies. We met with him in Turin at the Conference entitled G2 Muslims: the rights and duties of citizenship of second generation young Muslims.
Interview by Sara Hejazi.
A country with an stoppable demand for change and one where not even “state terrorism” has managed to triumph over those opposing it. That is the Iran that PD Senator and President of the Senate’s Human Rights Committee Pietro Marcenaro saw. The Senator has just returned from a private visit to the Islamic Republic. With its mass protests, conflict affecting both the clergy and the ruling classes, as well as international pressure about its nuclear programme, this country seems to be at a crossroads. “It is our great responsibility,” says Marcenaro, “to listen to these people and not abandon those fighting for freedom.”
During a meeting held with students protesters from the Berchet High School in Milan, ResetDoc interviewed the Corriere della Sera leader-writer and correspondent Gian Antonio Stella, fresh from the success of his recent book Negri, froci, giudei & co. L’eterna lotta contro l’altro, a history of racism in Italy. This subject is currently headline news after recent events in Rosarno, a municipality in the Province of Reggio Calabria, that was the setting for clashes between central-African immigrants and members of the local community.
“In Iran we are seeing a back to front revolution with the upper-middle classes protesting against a governing power managed by the poorer and less-educated classes, the main recruitment group for the basiji and for President Ahmedinejad’s base of support.” According to Karim Mezran, director of the Centre for American Studies and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of International Advanced Studies in Bologna, this is however a “leaderless protest” organised by a generation that has only known the Islamic Republic and that sees Moussavi and Karroubi as reference points, “certainly not as leaders.”
Interview by Ernesto Pagano.
Several moderate and reformist parties which had been regarded as members of the family of the Revolution are now being castigated as counter-revolutionary. Now – however – is the worst time for the U.S. government to pursue a policy of engagement, as the regime in Iran is at its worst; it should have tried when the Iranian regime was at its best, that is during the Khatami presidency (of course the Iranian fundamentalist groups were opposed to it at the time).
Opposing Teheran’s candidature to host the next World Philosophy Day does not mean inflicting “philosophical sanctions” on Iran, nor does it mean “boycotting” a UNESCO initiative in the name of an assumed “priority of democracy over philosophy.” Marcello Veneziani is mistaken when in Il Giornale he attributes such ideas to those who, like Giuliano Amato and the members of Resedoc’s scientific committe, emphasise it would be grotesque to make a place “in which one can risk one’s life in the name of one’s ideas” the capital of doubt and critical debate. Veneziani is wrong, because if it is true that philosophy is exalted wherever humankind needs saving, it is equally true that it is certainly not the executioner who concedes a philosopher’s right to citizenship. What is at stake is understanding who or what could guarantee a free exchange of ideas between participants, should they meet in November 2010 in the capital of Ahmedinejad’s regime. Veneziani himself perhaps?
“In Asia female disempowerment is still a big issue and the history of the region is constantly marked by ethnic and religious clashes.” That is why Kamal Ahmad founded the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, where the leadership potential of women is cultivated and a new sense of tolerance is taught. In this interview he speaks of his project and of how, thanks to scholarships, women from all over Asia learn to aspire to have different lives than their mothers.
A professor of Arab Language and Literature at ‘La Sapienza’ University in Rome, Isabella Camera D'Afflitto is one of the most important Arab language scholars in Italy. For many years she also taught at the Oriental Institute in Naples and now writes for newspapers, publishers and magazines to promote knowledge of Arab literature in Italy. She is a member of the prestigious international jury at the Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture promoted by UNESCO, an award she herself was a finalist for in 2003. In 2006 she won the Grinzane Cavour Award for translations and the Cairo Literary Award for Translation. She has translated some of the greatest Arab authors, among them Nobel Prize winner Nagib Mahfuz, ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif, Ghassan Kanafani, Emil Habibi and Latifa Zayyad.
The European Union has confirmed its characteristic of being an “economic giant” and a “political dwarf” and its weakness – that should decrease thanks to the Lisbon Treaty – in speaking effectively with “one voice”, only way to weigh in the renewed international context. How can we explain its marginal role?
