This article goes behind stereotypes of Muslim veiling to ask after the representational structure underlying these images. I examine the public debate leading to the 2004 French law banning conspicuous religious signs in schools and French colonial attitudes to veiling in Algeria, in conjunction with discourses on the veil that have arisen in other western contexts. My argument is that western perceptions and representations of veiled Muslim women are not simply about Muslim women themselves. Rather than representing Muslim women, these (...) images fulfill a different function: they provide the negative mirror in which western constructions of identity and gender can be positively reflected. It is by means of the projection of gender oppression onto Islam, and its naturalization to the bodies of veiled women, that such mirroring takes place. This constitutes, I argue, a form of racialization. Drawing on the work of Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and Alcoff, I offer a phenomenological analysis of this racializing vision. What is at stake is a form of cultural racism that functions in the guise of anti-sexist and feminist liberatory discourse, at once posing a dilemma to feminists and concealing its racializing logic. (shrink)

What does Husserlian phenomenology have to offer feminist theory? More specifically, can we find resources within Husserl’s account of the living body ( Leib ) for the critical feminist project of rethinking embodiment beyond the dichotomies not only of mind/body but also of subject/object and activity/passivity? This essay begins by explicating the reasons for feminist hesitation with respect to Husserlian phenomenology. I then explore the resources that Husserl’s phenomenology of touch and his account of sensings hold for feminist theory. My (...) reading of Husserl proceeds by means of a comparison between his description of touch in Ideas II and Merleau-Ponty’s early appropriation of this account in the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as through an unlikely rapprochement between Husserl and Irigaray on the question of touch. Moreover, by revisiting the limitations in Husserl’s approach to the body—limitations of which any feminist appropriation must remain cognizant—I attempt to take Husserl’s phenomenology of touch beyond its initial methodologically solipsistic frame and to ask whether and how it can contribute to thinking gendered and racialized bodies. The phenomenology of touch, I argue, can allow us to understand the interplay between subjective, felt embodiment and social-historical context. In opening up Husserl’s account of touch to other dimensions—intersubjective and affective—sociality is revealed as residing within, and structuring of, touch. Such touch can allow us to think embodiment anew. (shrink)

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” and Bergson’s Matière et mémoire and “La perception du changement,” I ask what resources are available in vision for interrupting objectifying habits of seeing. While both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty locate the possibility of seeing differently in the figure of the painter, I develop by means of their texts, and in dialogue with Iris Marion Young’s work, a more general phenomenology of hesitation that grounds what I am calling “critical-ethical vision.” Hesitation, I argue, stems from (...) affect and leads to critical memory. In hesitation, the seeming coincidence between my habits of seeing and the visible is decentered, revealing these habits and their social reference as the constitutive horizon of my field of vision. Hesitation, then, provides the phenomenological moment within which vision may become at once critically watchful, destabilizing its objectifying habits, and ethically responsive, recollecting its affective grounds. The critical and the ethical are here inseparable. Critically, this vision is an awareness of the structures of invisibility, diacritical and habitual, social and historical, to which my vision owes—dimensions which institute particular ways of seeing and being as norm while eliding others. Ethically, this is the recognition of how seeing is already seeing with others—others whose affective influence is operative within vision, even as their existence is reductively represented or denied. (shrink)

I argue that representations of the Muslim woman in the Western imaginary function as counter-images to the patriarchal ideal of Western woman. Drawing upon the work of Frantz Fanon (and supplementing it with a consideration of the role of gender), I show how the image of the veiled, Muslim woman is both othered and racialized. This “double othering,” I argue, serves: (i) To normalize Western norms of femininity. The social control of women and their bodies by liberal society is hidden. (...) Gender oppression is rather projected onto Muslim women, and identified with their societies, while remaining invisible within Western society. Western womanhood is taken to be “free” of such oppression. (ii) To deflect attention away from Western patriarchy, and promote complicity on the part of Western women with this society rather than other women. (iii) To represent Western femininity as an ideal that solicits women’s complicity universally. The attempt is to establish the superiority of Western society and its gender norms and morally justify the domination of other societies (in the name of civilization and the liberation of women). (shrink)

An exposition of Islamic mysticism by a Sufi scholar.

After more than 40 years of practice, the Islamic finance industryis composed of products with claim of Islamicity but questionable on theirShariʽah credentials. The industry is increasingly exposed to cynicism anddecline in popular interest. This paper restates the essence of riba prohibitionfrom an economic perspective. It evaluates the Shariʽah scholars approach tovalidation of contracts as well as the monetary authorities’ attitude towards theShariʽah content of Islamic finance transactions. It points out the advantagesof Islamic finance within an Islamic macroeconomic environment. It (...) looks intothe problem of convergence of Islamic finance to conventional finance, andreasons behind the convergence. This study finds that several violations of thetrue paradigm of Islamic finance are because of its advantages being all externaland impossible to internalize. The paper concludes with some proposals forchecking the convergence. (shrink)

Many question whether Islam and science can be compatible. In the first six hundred years of Islam, Muslims addressed all fields of knowledge available to them with unprecedented zeal and contributed immensely to the knowledge that became the precursor of the Renaissance in Europe. The Tatar invasion in the thirteenth century and the total destruction of Baghdad, the Muslim capital of knowledge and science, followed by the crusades, the ensuing hostility between East and West, and Western colonialism of Muslim countries (...) led to a distrust of all knowledge emanating from the West. Such distrust closed the doors to ijtihad, a dynamic method in Islamic jurisprudence for addressing change, new demands, and new acquired knowledge, even though the Qur'an challenges Muslims to think, contemplate, understand, comprehend, and examine everything around them—tasks that bring humankind closer to God as they find methods to apply God's laws of justice and equity to the benefit of all humankind. Islam is the religion of yusr (ease) and not ‘usr (hardship). The creation of the world was for human benefit and use. Innovation for such beneficial use and application is a must. (shrink)

This paper examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy of time in light of his critique and reconceptualization of Edmund Husserl’s early time-analyses. Drawing on The Visible and the Invisible and lecture courses, I elaborate Merleau-Ponty’s re-reading of Husserl’s time-analyses through the lens of Rudolf Bernet’s “Einleitung” to this work. My question is twofold: what becomes of the central Husserlian concepts of present and retention in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, and how do Husserl’s elisions, especially of the problem of forgetting, become generative moments (...) for Merleau-Ponty’s thought on time? The answer passes through the logic of institution as the “retrograde movement of the true” (Henri Bergson) and through unconsciousness as disarticulation of the perceptual field, as Merleau-Ponty attempts to detach Husserlian concepts from the philosophy of consciousness and rehabilitate them within an ontology of time. (shrink)

al-juzʼ 1. Min alif ilá sīn. -- al-juzʼ 2. Min shīn ilá yāʼ.

Errors have been the concern of providers and consumers of health care services. However, consumers' perception of medical errors in developing countries is rarely explored. The aim of this study is to assess community members' perceptions about medical errors and to analyse the factors affecting this perception in one Middle East country, Oman.

Falsafat wa-ḥayāt Abī Hāshim al-Jubbāʼī wa-madrasatuh -- al-Tawallud ʻinda al-Muʻtazilah.

Sociopolitical philosophies such as feminism, postcolonialism, and environmentalism can interact with traditional African cultural practices in dynamic and complex ways. This paper employs Val Plumwood's ecofeminist deconstruction of dualism to analyze the relationship between traditional and modern culture in postcolonial African literature, with a focus on the practice of bride price as depicted in the 1974 play, The Challenge of Fende by Cameroonian author Victor Musinga.

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein has entered the philosophical canon , an entrance that has served to reify interpretations of his work. In this essay I refer to recent books by Richard Eldridge (1997) and Phillip Shields (1998) which allow us again to see The Philosophical Investigations as something more than a stultifying relic. Specifically, these authors, by reading Wittgenstein's work not merely as text but also as performance, allow us to enact our own liberating performances of that work. To engage in such (...) enactments of freedom is the essence of philosophical education in the sense established by extra-canonical writers such as Socrates and the Stoics, on the one hand, and Emerson and James, on the other. At least this is so if my use of the work of classicist Pierre Hadot, on the one hand, and brief reference to literary critic Richard Poirier, on the other, is at all successful in illuminating theses from Eldridge and Shields on the nature of Wittgensteinian philosophy. (shrink)

al-mujallad al-awwal. al-Qayim al-īmānīyah wa-al-qiyam al-ijtimāʻīyah -- al-mujallad al-thānī. al-Qiyam al-akhlāqīyah -- al-mujallad al-thālith. -- al-Qiyam al-siyāsīyah wa-al-idārīyah wa-al-qiyam al-iqtiṣādīyah -- al-mujallad al-rābiʻ. al-Qiyam al-ʻilmīyah wa-al-qiyam al-ṣiḥḥīyah wa-al-bīʼah wa-al-qiyam al-wajdānīyah wa-al-jamālīyah.

_Islamic Ethics and the Trusteeship Paradigm_ offers a highly relevant and needed introduction to the various interpretations and applications of the trusteeship ethical theory as developed by the Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane (b. 1944). يُقدم كتاب "الأخلاق الإسلامية ونسق الائتمانية" دراسات نقدية مقارنة للنظرية الأخلاقية الإسلامية المعاصرة كما طورها الفيلسوف المغربي طه عبد الرحمن (و. 1944م)، وتتميز هذه الدراسات بأنها تأتي من حقول وتخصصات متعددة.