Islam and the Challenge of Civilization

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A01=Abdelwahab Meddeb
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Author_Abdelwahab Meddeb
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B06=Jane Kuntz
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HRH
Category=QRP
COP=United States
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Ibn Arabi
ijtihad
islam
jihad
Koran
Language_English
monotheism
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Price_€50 to €100
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Sufism

Product details

  • ISBN 9780823251230
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 29 Apr 2013
  • Publisher: Fordham University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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Abdelwahab Meddeb makes an urgent case for an Islamic reformation, located squarely in Western Europe, now home to millions of Muslims, where Christianity and Judaism have come to coexist with secular humanism and positivist law. He is not advocating “moderate” Islam, which he characterizes as thinly disguised Wahabism, but rather an Islam inspired by the great Sufi thinkers, whose practice of religion was not bound by doctrine.
To accomplish this, Meddeb returns to the doctrinal question of the text as transcription of the uncreated word of God and calls upon Muslims to distinguish between Islam’s spiritual message and the temporal, material, and historically grounded origins of its founding scriptures. He contrasts periods of Islamic history—when philosophers and theologians engaged in lively dialogue with other faiths and civilizations and contributed to transmitting the Hellenistic tradition to early modern Europe—with modern Islam’s collective amnesia of this past. Meddeb wages a war of interpretations in this book, in his attempt to demonstrate that Muslims cannot join the concert of nations unless they set aside outmoded notions such as jihad and realize that feuding among the monotheisms must give way to the more important issue of what it means to be a citizen in today’s postreligious global setting.

Abdelwahab Meddeb (1946-2014) was novelist and poet who taught comparative literature at the Université Paris X (Nanterre). Meddeb published more than twenty books in French. His La maladie de l’islam, winner of the Prix François Mauriac, has been translated into English as The Malady of Islam.