This book discusses the general problematic of Islam and democracy and the ideas of certain Iranian religious modernists on the issue. Examining the development of religious intellectualism in post-revolutionary Iran, it presents Abdolkarim Soroush's novel approach to this pertinent topic.
An Iranian scholar and political scientist examines the role of religion in Iranian culture and politics through the twentieth century and beyond. Islamism and Modernism captures the metamorphosis of the Islamic movement in Iran leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, as well as its changing influence in the country today. Its analysis ranges from encounters with Great Britain and the United States in the 1920s to today’s struggles between reformers and hardliners. Capturing the views of four generations of Muslim activists, Farhang Rajaee describes how the extremism of the 1960s gave confidence to Islam-minded Iranians and radicalized the Muslim world. Presenting thought-provoking discussions of religious thinkers such as Ha’eri, Burujerdi, Bazargan, and Shari‘ati, along with contemporaries such as Kadivar, Soroush, and Shabestari, Rajaee sheds light on contemporary Islamic thinking in Iran. A comprehensive study of politics, religion, society, and identity, Islamism and Modernism offers crucial new insight into the aftermath of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution—and its ramifications— for the newest generation of Iranians to face the crossroads of modernity and Islamic discourse.
This book focuses on the history of Christianity in Persia and the present-day relationship that Muslims in Iran have taken toward people of other faith traditions. The book provides a comprehensive and readable introduction to a fascinating history with important contemporary ramifications for interfaith and intercultural studies.
This book offers an exploration of aspects of the subject, Islam and Human Rights, which is the focus of considerable scholarship in recent years predominantly from Western scholars. Thus it is interesting and important to have the field addressed from a non -Western perspective and by an Iranian scholar. The study draws on Persian language literature that addresses both theological and legal dimensions of the theme. The work is also distinctive in that it tackles three areas that have been largely ignored in the literature. It undertakes a comparative study of the laws of several Muslim States with respect to religious freedom, minorities and the rights of the child. The study offers an optimistic vision of the fundamental compatibility of Islam and international human rights standards.
A former presidential advisor offers a new road map for creating an effective global authority that respects and understands the many forces that now shape relations among people and nations. Basic safety, human rights, and global social issues, such as environmental protection are best solved cooperatively, and Etzioni explores ways of creating global authorities robust enough to handle these issues as he outlines the journey from "empire to community."
The book is concerned with one of the most important issues in Persian culture, that is to say a broadly conceived idea of sacrifice and martyrdom. At present, it is contained in the concept of shahadat, which arouses much controversy in the Western world today. In successive chapters, the author discusses the origin and evolution of this concept in Persian culture, the process of shaping attitudes conducive to the attainment of readiness for shahadat and the role of this concept in propaganda, as well as presenting its modern-day interpretation. The basic research material was provided by political and religious publications of contemporary Iranian authors, including Ali Shari‘ati, Morteza Motahhari, Ruhollah Khomeini and Abdolkarim Soroush, who have exerted a significant influence on the formation of the Iranian consciousness. The book is an interdisciplinary publication. The author refers to philology, literary studies, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and, interestingly, to the psychology of emotions in order to explicate the traditional Persian system of upbringing and shaping the readiness for martyrdom and sacrifice. The book shows the idea of shahadat as part of the Persian cultural paradigm, which, due to religious and literary tradition, has influenced the shaping of Iranian identity over the centuries and, as a result, it has affected social and political attitudes of the Iranian people. The book is mainly directed to Iranologists. Nevertheless, it will also be of interest to anthropologists, psychologists of culture, sociologists and philosophers due to its interdisciplinary character.
Neither the title of the 35th Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, nor its timing and location were coincidental — The Moral Fabric in Contemporary Societies being discussed in 2001 in Poland, a country which had experienced two totalitarianisms in the previous century. The events of the new millennium thus far demonstrate that history is aimless unless the societies who are its agents have moral goals or visions which they pursue. The contents of this volume constitute the best evidence of a belief in the universality and importance of moral issues for the social sciences. The deliberations here cover the notion of trust, proceed with the issue of economic inequalities, discuss multiple modernities as a response to imposed modernization, debate postcommunism and corruption, and, finally, examine genocide and its social consequences. The book opens and closes with reflections on the theoretical aspects of what constitutes the moral fabric today.
This publication reveals the thinking of a group of Indonesian Muslim activists known as the Persatuan Islam. The group entering national debates in the period from 1923 to 1957 about the role that religion was to take in the emergence of an independent Indonesia.
This fascinating microhistory, crafted from documents and oral narratives, provides a rare portrait of pre-1950 rural Yemen while showing how religiously subordinated Jewish villagers strove to pursue their interests without forgoing the protection of the dominant Muslim majority.
“Riveting . . . a side of Iran that is often misrepresented by the world’s media—[an] insightful, captivating book.” —San Francisco Chronicle Taking the reader inside Iran’s key institutions, Geneive Abdo and Jonathan Lyons argue that the 1979 Iranian revolution, long viewed in the West as the pursuit of an imagined medieval Utopia, was in fact a political movement designed to modernize Islam. Twenty years later, a power struggle between conservative and reform elements provoked a clash that has destabilized the country and limited Iran’s ability to integrate with the world community. Answering Only to God challenges the prevailing Western belief that the Islamic world is an undifferentiated mass of disaffected and dangerous fanatics or that a Western-style democracy will soon transform this ancient land of Shi’ite and Sufi tradition. Instead, the authors explore the controversial view that beyond their quarrel with the West, stemming from decades of exploitive foreign policies, the real struggle in Iran is between reformers and conservative mullahs.