The history of the Islamic Republic of Iran—established in 1979 following the revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—is marked by a dense sequence of developments that have progressively altered its political and institutional configuration. These changes, however, have only sporadically been recognized by Western analyses, which have instead tended to perpetuate a more functional and instrumental stereotype based on the image of a monolithic, highly verticalized religious autocracy. While such a characterization was broadly accurate during the first decade of the Islamic Republic, it has undergone a profound transformation since 1989.
Vendors in the vicinity of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) supplement the distribution center in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, displaying the same goods Palestinian refugees receive from the UNRWA distribution centers. Many Palestinians receiving aid from UNRWA and other NGOs sell some or all of the aid in exchange for cash. These people have enough food but need money for daily expenses not covered by the aid provided to them. Recent United Nations report says Gaza could be “uninhabitable” in less than five years if current economic trends continue.
Whether “European Islam” is possible or not appears to be one of the controversial questions of our recent times. “Institutionalized ignorance” – in the words of Mohammed Arkoun – feeds mistrust, which in turn feeds fear. Fear becomes a prejudice, which in turn becomes a generalization; and generalizations are wrong. Thus, [institutionalized] ignorance is wrong. European arrogance seems to have forgotten the legacy of its earlier Enlightenment. Muslims’ moral order and Golden Age, long time passed, seems hijacked by terrorists. Wise moderates from both sides are needed more than any other times, and there are plenty of them. Bloody events in the name of politicized Allah, especially since the 1970s until the current horrendous massacres committed by the “Intolerant State” of ISIS nurture the stories that demagogues use to uphold their antagonistic views about each other.
I can still remember that Saturday, October 12th 2013. We were preparing to open our workshop on “Civil Society’s Role in the Success of National Dialogue” when, all of a sudden, a group of police officers came into the room and searched it thoroughly. We learned later that they had been warned about the presence of a suspicious object. Having started later than scheduled, the workshop was still in the middle of its opening session when a militia group invaded the conference hall to disrupt our work, incessantly chanting slogans against dialogue. We had invited the representatives of all the most important political parties, but the Nida Tounes (Call for Tunisia) representative had been prevented from entering.
Europe will welcome 160,000 refugees in 2015. Each member state will be called upon to receive a quota in proportion to their economic and demographic size. This is the proposal put forward by the EU Commission’s President Jean-Claude Junker in his ‘State of the Union’ speech on Wednesday. Germany has been promoting this plan and has been putting it into action for some time, giving the the states, the Länder, responsibility for sharing the burden of managing asylum seekers. They are allocated on the basis of the so-called “Königsteiner key”, a system created in the ‘50s and originally aimed at spreading over what was then West Germany the funds destined for research.
From Reset-DoC’s Archive – For people of the Maghreb, or at least for those who are interested in the intellectual life, 2010 will undisputedly be associated with the heaviest harvest of intellectual and political figures of the region. As if death plotted against the region and decided to take away the emblematic figures of a glorious period of intellectual and political life. Mohamed Abid Al Jabiri, Edmond Emran El Maleh and Abraham Serfaty from Morocco; Mohamed Arkoun and Tahar Ouettar from Algeria and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd from Egypt, took their leave in 2010. As much as these intellectuals’ works are widely studied in Western academia, especially in Europe and America, they remain unknown to large sections of the Arab world. Many factors inform this ignorance. First, the objective discontinuities that exist in terms of free circulation of knowledge between the Mashriq (the east of the Arab world) and the Maghreb (the west). Second, the historical jealousies that have always existed between the two sides of the Arab world. (This article was published on Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations in 2011)
The intellectual project undertaken by the Moroccan thinker and philosopher Muḥammad ‘Ᾱbid al-Ǧābirī, better known as Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1935-2010), considered one of the greatest Arab intellectuals of the century, would not be entirely “explored” if one did not also take into account his work involving a discourse on the Qur’an. So far, studies on his work emphasise the originality of his ideas that have proved to be decisive for the development of Arab thinking, for example the discovery of the three “cognitive orders” (bayān, ‘irfān and burhān), which have contributed significantly to the formation of Arab reasoning; just like the epistemological critique of Arab-Islamic cultural traditions (turāṯ) which resulted in a totally new perspective, thanks to an original approach in engaging with the past. The Muslim world was encouraged to reread, review and therefore also better understand its own cultural traditions so as to relate to modernity. But how could Islam’s relationship with modernity be re-established through the Koran and all the religious tradition gravitating around it? What is known of the “Koranic phenomenon”?
The late Egyptian theologian Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (10 July 1943 – 5 July 2010) was destined to be an Azharite sheikh, but the death of his father when he was fourteen, and the obligations of life led him to contribute to family household from an early age. However, he did not leave his scholarly thirst; he got his PhD in 1981 with a thesis on “The Philosophy of Interpretation: Mohi Eddin Ibn Arabi’s Method of Interpreting the Quran.” He belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood in Tanta in 1954, worked in Radio, and held lectureships and fellowships in Sudan, the USA, Japan, and the Netherlands; he received scholarly rewards for his works from Tunisia, Jordan and other international institutions. He was the student and colleague of the living famous philosopher Hassan Hanafi (b. 1935), whose project of the Islamic Left he (Abu Zayd) critiques especially in Critique of Religious Discourse (1990). He also met in scholarly discussions with contemporary philosophers-theologians like Sadeq al-Azmeh, Mohammed Arkoun, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Mohammad Amareh. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd will be remembered as a staunch rationalist and liberal theologian that defends three major values from within his own Islamic faith – reason, liberty, and justice. In his own words, “Islam truly liberated man”; to recover that achievement, re-interpreting the Sacred Text is a must for renewed liberation, based on considering “this-world” the essence of existence. This is an homage to his great contributions at the age of Arab-Islamic intellectual predicament, and political turmoil led by bloody hijackers of the Quran.
From 2004 onwards, with the EU moving eastward, anti-foreigner attitudes reappeared. The beliefs in Polish plumbers invading western regions, Bulgarian workers “stealing” jobs, and Rumanians (allegedly) promoting illegal activities became widespread in some European societies. This mirrors what happened in the past century, including in 1903 when a royal commission report on the so-called “alien immigration” to the UK discussed Central and Eastern European immigration (at the time mostly of Jews), and, to try to ban it, used words which sound very familiar to us: overcrowding, lack of jobs, and shortage of housing. These nationalist anti-immigrant tendencies resurface quite frequently in European history. The difference is how we approach them and how one frames public debates.
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