Overview

This book is a case study in the literary, psychoanalytic, and theological encounters between diasporic Muslim intellectuals and secular western modernity. It centres on the simultaneous search for the possibility of both a reformation of Islamic fundamentalism and a transformation of the exclusionary limitations of western public institutions. With roots in original research in the fields of comparative religion and cultural studies, and drawing on sources in English, French, and Arabic, the author introduces and elaborates the concept of ""Western-Islamic public sphere"". This concept defines what is at stake in the formative play of public representations where traditionalist foundations and modernist adaptations meet, clash, and produce discourse around their common disequilibrium. The Western-Islamic public sphere (which is secular but not secularist and which is Islamic but not Islamist), within which a critical Islamic intellectual universe can unfold, deals hermeneutically with texts and politically with lived practices. It emerges from within the arc of two alternative, conflicting, yet equally dismissive suspicions defined by a view that critical Islam is the new imperial rhetoric of hegemonic orientalism and the opposite view that critical Islam is just fundamentalism camouflaged in liberal rhetoric. This innovative and original scholarly apparatus offers a third view -- one that arises in its practice from ethical commitment to intellectual engagement, creativity, and imagination as a portal to the open horizons of conflictual history.

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9781845198381

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Dilyana Mincheva specializes in the study of Muslim intellectual history and thought. Her most recent research is engaged with the culturological study of religious change and the ways in which it particularly informs Islam's literary, artistic and political (self)-representations across of a variety of media. Dr. Mincheva is currently an Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Department of Trent University, Canada. She is the bearer of two international awards for research excellence (2012 and 2015) granted by the Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society.

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