Videos
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7 December 2010«We need to examine what we mean by religion and by democracy, and which kind of religion is compatible with which democracy. We should not talk about Islam but Islams, not Christianity but Christianities, not liberal democracy but liberal democracies – says in this Resetdoc videointerview Benjamin Barber, president and director of the international NGO CivWorld at Demos and author of Jihad vs. McWorld and Consumed – There is a natural and healthy tension between religion and the state, but at the same time there is a complementarity between them. Despotism doesn’t need religion, liberty does.» - Alain Touraine 16 November 2010«The category of immigrant is invented by and for the lowest part of the society, and immigrants are “invented” as scapegoats for issues they are not responsible for,» French sociologist Alain Touraine says in this Resetdoc video-interview. «Today in Europe the main preoccupation is not people coming from Arab countries—he adds—but from Eastern Europe.» (If you can’t watch our video, please go to our Youtube page)
- 1 November 2010«At the social and political level, religion can be a source of either integration or division, depending on how one defines the religious values – says in a Resetdoc video-interview Ibrahim Kalin, foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – The experience of democratization in Turkey is also that of a democratization of the religious discourse, and I see a great movement among the more conservative and tradional religious communities in Turkey: they are embracing the values of democracy, civil liberties and human rights.»
- Irfan Ahmad 29 September 2010“Muslim intellectuals living in the West, in Europe, have started revising their premises, but it is the European liberals who are not willing to revise theirs,” says Indian Philosopher Irfan Ahmad. And the immigrants themselves, the minorities, how do they feel? “Offer[ing] them equality by asking them to sacrifice their religious particularity” can’t be the way. “More democratization and opening is needed.”
- 20 August 2010«Modernity is a multiple thing and various civilizations have adapted to modernity in completely different ways,» says Professor David M. Rasmussen of Boston College in this Resetdoc video-interview , «Islam has the political resources within it to deal with the modern world. The global principle of justice has to be the principle of toleration.»
- 8 July 2010The last interview with Nasr Abu Zayd in which the great philosopher speaks of his childhood in Egypt, his education, his life as a professor and his battle for a liberal Islam.
- Giuliano Amato 17 June 2010«Resetdoc was created in times when fear of Huntington’s predictions coming true seemed to be quite real and imminent. Fighting against the clash of civilizations was feasible. I saw our association as a sort of bet on Babel,» says the former Italian Prime Minister and member of Resetdoc’s Board of Governors in this Resetdoc video-interview. «Is Babel a sort of tragedy that we are comdemned to, or is it the complete opposite, with diversities living with each other and somehow enriching one other by remaining together?»
- 3 June 2010«Are we talking too much about Religion? I think rather that we should step back and think about why so many political questions are being framed in terms of religion. Controversies around the hijab, the headscarf, in Europe and in Turkey occupy an analogous position to the battles over abortion in the Unites States,» says American critical theorist Nancy Fraser in this Resetdoc video-interview. «In both cases you have a kind of media spectacles around these issues. They are framed in very polarizing ways, and they have a way of sucking up all the oxygen in the atmosphere. They obscurate for example the feminist questions on social rights and health care.»
- 24 May 2010«Islam is being integrated into the West, but just as religion, not as a different culture,» says Olivier Roy, French scholar of Islam, in this Resetdoc interview. «Each country has to recognize Islam just like other religions. We need to integrate Islam within the existing framework and we should have a more open view of the relations between the state, the public sphere and religion. This, precisely because the new religious movements are first of all the expression of individual beliefs and not those of institutions.»
- Nader Hashemi 11 May 2010«Does the term secularism refer to the disestablishment of religion, to atheism, to anti-clericalism, to the robust and complete separation of religion and politics or more narrowly to the separation of the institutions of religion from the institutions of the state? We need some clarity,» says Nader Hashemi, assistant professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and the author of Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy (Oxford University Press) in this Resetdoc video-interview. «There are multiple histories of secularism, both in the Western tradition and in the non-Western world. In most Muslim societies today, when people think of secularism, they do not associate it with freedom, democracy or human rights, but with dictatorship and failed economic paradigms.»
