Can Muslims Befriend Non-Muslims? Debating al-walāʾ wa-al-barāʾ (Loyalty and Disavowal) in Theory and Practice

This article analyzes the polemic on the concept of al-walā? wa-al-barā? (commonly translated as “loyalty and disavowal”). While existing academic literature focuses on the usages of this concept by jihad activists, the article centers on the role “loyalty and disavowal” plays in debates between contemporary salafī and wasa?ī jurists and theologians, specifically in their conflicting agendas for Muslims living as minorities. Salafīs, relying on several qur'anic verses and Prophetic traditions, promote an understanding of “loyalty and disavowal” that requires Muslims to refrain from befriending or loving non-Muslims, or imitating their beliefs and customs. Relying on counter-verses and traditions, in particular Q 60.8, wasa?īs have interpreted the concept of “loyalty and disavowal” more narrowly, arguing that it applies only to non-Muslims who fight against Muslims; as part of their integration-oriented doctrine for Muslims in the West, they have in recent years dedicated considerable efforts to refuting the salafī interpretation of al-walā? wa-al-barā?. The article examines the juristic methodologies utilized in the debate, and how it has affected religious decisions (fatwās) on Islamic life in Western societies.     

Psychiatric pain and deliberate suffering

In public opinion and in medical practice the suffering of psychiatric patients is often considered self‐induced. Freudian psychoanalysis embraced this notion but managed to reconcile it with the pleasure principle only by positing an instinctual craving for death, to which Freud reduced instances of deliberate and repetitive suffering. In a simultaneous but separate line of thought, he also reduced all habits, including self‐destructive ones, to masturbation and all inhibitions of constructive drives to inhibitions of masturbation. This article explores this seeming paradox.

The transition from a paranoid‐schizoid position to a depressive one begins with the dawning assumption of ownership of certain aspects of one's being, with the correlative attribution of other aspects to the world outside the self. Inevitable errors in this process create tensions that may be discharged by suffering, either by atonement or by assuming ownership of the pain that one's dependency might otherwise inflict on one's objects. Eros serves Thanatos to preserve self‐ownership. Pragmatically, owning one's fate can feel more important than enjoying it, a fact the author dubs the “Principle of Ownership”; and illustrates with a number of literary and clinical vignettes.

The idea that psychiatric suffering is self‐induced contributes to the stigma that so commonly attends it. Ironically, this same idea makes psychological treatment possible: if painful adjustments replace relationships, then new relationships may have the power to correct them.     

Simone Weil on Labor and Spirit

This essay argues that Simone Weil appropriates Marx's notion of labor as life activity in order to reposition work as the site of spirituality. Rather than locating spirituality in a religious tradition, doctrine, profession of faith, or in personal piety, Weil places it in the capacity to work. Spirit arises in the activity of living, and more specifically in laboring—in one's engagement with materiality. Utilizing Marx's distinction between living and dead labor, I show how Weil develops a critique of capital as a “force” that disrupts the individual's relation to her own work by reducing it to the mere activity of calculable “production.” Capital reduces labor to an abstraction and thereby uproots human subjectivity, on a systemic scale, from its connection to living praxis, or what Weil calls spirituality. Life itself is exchanged for a simulacrum of life. In positioning living labor as spiritual, Weil's work offers a corrective to these deadening practices.     

The Buddhist Roots of Watsuji Tetsurô's Ethics of Emptiness

Watsuji Tetsurô (1889–1960) is famous for having constructed a systematic socio‐political ethics on the basis of the idea of emptiness. This essay examines his 1938 essay “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ and the Dialectics of Emptiness in Buddhist Philosophy” and the posthumously published The History of Buddhist Ethical Thought (based on lectures given in the 1920s), in order to clarify the Buddhist roots of his ethics. It aims to answer two main questions which are fundamentally linked: “Which way does Watsuji's legacy turn: toward totalitarianism or toward a balanced theory of selflessness?” and “Is Watsuji's systematic ethics Buddhist?” In order to answer these questions, this essay discusses Watsuji's view of dharma, dependent arising, and morality in Hīnayāna Buddhism. It then proceeds to Watsuji's fine‐tuning of the concept of emptiness in Mādhyamika and Yogācāra Buddhism. Finally, this essay shows how Watsuji's modernist Buddhist theory connects to his own systematic ethical theory. These two theories share a focus on non‐duality, negation, and emptiness. But they differ in their accounts of the relations between the individual and the community, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between hermeneutics and transcendence. These findings give us hints as to Watsuji's origins, pitfalls, and possibilities.     

Decisions of Identity: Feminist Subjects and Grammars of Sexuality

While Sarah Hoagland's conception of a lesbian ethic offers a promising route toward articulating an ethics of resistance, her notion of self in community does not provide a conception of “subject” capable of both embracing political action as fundamental to personal life and explicitly recognizing cultural, ethnic, and sexual multiplicity as central to ethical decision-making. Such a notion can be found, however, in the remarks of later Wittgenstein concerning the “language games” of describing.     

“ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AN S.S. OFFICER”: THE HOLOCAUST BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION IN ELSA MORANTE'S LA STORIA

The twentieth-century Italian Jewish novelist Elsa Morante's La Storia, published in 1974, is rarely included in the canon of Holocaust literature today, yet contains considerable content regarding the Italian experience of the Holocaust. In this essay I examine how Morante's proclaimed artistic principles, in particular her notion of “verità poetica”, “poetic truth”, and “storia”, “history” or “story”, affect her depiction of the Holocaust. I also trace what I term an “anxiety of absence” in La Storia, which I believe explains not only Morante's use of characters who are unreliable witnesses to the Holocaust as it unfolds in Rome, but also explains her ultimate swerve away from her artistic ideals and her problematic use of historical sources.     

Lacuna in Sankara studies: A thousand teachings (Upadeśasāhasri)

In an important text, A Thousand Teachings, sometimes overlooked by scholars, Sankara expounds non‐dualist religion. This article analyses Sankara's thought for its theoretical and practical perspectives. First, the discussion views non‐duality from the viewpoint of ignorance. This pluralistic/dualistic perspective obscures the unenlightened seeker's vision of the Ultimate Truth. Secondly, the study examines Sankara's introduction of a transitional idea, Unevolved Name‐and‐Form (avyākrte nāmarūpe). Such an idea assists the seeker's intellectual progress from the state of ignorance to a rational understanding leading toward nonduality (Advaita Vedānta). Finally, the exposition clarifies Sankara's expression of the “knowledge of Brahman”. This fulfilling wisdom affects a transformation of the life experience of the unenlightened. Subsequently disciplined in meditation (parisamkhyāna), the persistent seeker develops into an experiencer of the non‐duality (advaitavāda).     

RELIGIOUS HYPOTHESES AND THE APOPHATIC,RELATIONAL THEOLOGY OF CATHERINE KELLER

In one of its most urgent folds, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible juxtaposes negative theology with relational theology for the sake of thinking constructively about today's global climate of religious conflict and ecological upheaval. The tension between these two theological approaches reflects her desire to unsay past harmful theological speech but also to speak into the present silences about the (perhaps im)possibility of a future that is not only to be feared. Suffusing Keller's Cloud is the related (perhaps im)possibility of living out one's life in conversation with a religious tradition having accepted the nonknowing character of its wisdom. Here, I develop the notion of “hypothetical faith” as an epistemic posture that commits itself to some particular religious tradition even as it acknowledges the unverifiability of that tradition's deepest truths. Understood as operating at the opposite end of the testability spectrum from science, religion‐as‐hypothesis provides a way of saying and unsaying one's tradition at the same time.     

ABSOLUTE ACTION: DIVINE HIDDENNESS IN KIERKEGAARD'S FEAR AND TREMBLING

This article reads Fear and Trembling constructively as a theological work. Abraham's faith is a lived movement irreducible to either ontology or epistemology. Faith is an action that waits upon what it alone could never accomplish. This is absolute action. In Abraham's case, he offers up Isaac to death with the absurd expectancy that Isaac will be returned. This double movement is a doxological abandonment of oneself and one's world to God that waits expectantly to receive them back as gifts. It is these dynamics of faith that show God to be hidden, precisely within the intimate drawing near of God. The article concludes with a constructive gesture toward an “apophaticism of action.”     

The Al-Sābiū’n (the Sabians) in the Quran: An Overview from the Quranic Commentators,Theologians, and Jurists

The term ‘al-Sābiū’n,’ as literally employed in the Qur’ānic commentaries, denotes “peoples who shift from one religion to another” or “peoples who take on a new religion other than their own.” This term is the plural of sābī’ and it derives from the root sabā, which signifies “turn to” or “lean towards to.” The term al-Sābiū’n as applied in the Qur’ān indicates various technical meanings, since almost all commentators of the Qur’ān and the earliest scholars have left the identification of al-Sābiū’n vague. Such a vague identification is plausible, since al-Sābiū’n is represented by a conglomerate of various views comprising remnants of sects who were oriented to cultic practices, ancient heathen sects of several nationalities, namely Greeks, Persians, and Indians, and sects who were Neo-Platonic in their origin and character. This article thus has a distinct purpose. It attempts to exhibit the features of the Sabians as perceived and conceived by the Quranic Commentators, Theologians, and Jurists. It is hoped that the article will provide a preliminary yet clear understanding of the Sabians as interpreted by themselves.     

Judith Butler's Critique of Violence and the Legacy of Monique Wittig

Although Judith Butler's theorization of violence has begun to receive growing scholarly attention, the feminist theoretical background of her notion of violence remains unexplored. In order to fill this lacuna, this article explicates the feminist genealogy of Butler's notion of violence. I argue that Butler's theorization of violence can be traced back to Gender Trouble, to her discussion of Monique Wittig's argument that the binary categorization of sex can be conceived as a form of discursive violence. I contend, first, that Butler starts to develop her notion of “gender violence” on the basis of her reading of Wittig, and second, that Butler's more recent writings on military violence and the ethics of nonviolence build on her early interpretation of Wittig. On the basis of my reading, I suggest, in contrast to recent criticism, that Butler's later critique of violence is not at odds with but rather expands upon her prior work on violence.     

Experience and the Absolute other

In Experience and the Absolute (2004) and other works, Jean‐Yves Lacoste develops a phenomenology of a way of life he calls “liturgy,” in which one refuses one's being‐in‐the‐world in favor of a more basic form of existence he calls “being‐before‐God.” In this essay I argue that if there is indeed such a thing as being‐before‐God, Lacoste has not sufficiently considered the possibility that it is characterized in part by a disturbance of one's being‐in‐the‐world similar to, or perhaps even identical with, the disruptive encounter with the human other that constitutes the self as responsible according to Levinas's unique notion of ethics. Lacoste's dismissal of Levinas, evidently based on a misunderstanding of what Levinas means by the word “ethics,” leads him to overlook the potential relevance of Levinas's ideas to his phenomenological project at a number of significant points in his work.     

Mary Astell: Defender of the “Disembodied Mind”

This paper demonstrates how Mary Astell's version of Cartesian dualism supports her disavowal of female subordination and traditional gender roles, her rejection of Locke's notion of “thinking matter” as a major premise for rejecting his political philosophy of “social contracts” between men and women, and, finally, her claim that there is no intrinsic difference between genders in terms of ratiocination, the primary assertion that grants her the title of the first female English feminist.     

Settling on what we are: The central place of the sense‐of‐self in education,and the implication of the concepts of the teleon and telentropy for the development of the sense‐of‐self

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the centrality of the development of a person's sense‐of‐self in his or her personal growth, and so to justify why educators should deliberately focus the attention of learners on the development of their own senses‐of‐self.

We describe the sense‐of‐self as a person's working hypothesis of what he or she is, as a functioning being. (This is in contrast to the notion of self‐concept, which is composed of the beliefs and evaluations that one has about oneself as a person in a social context.)

To illustrate the centrality of the sense‐of‐self we introduce two associated concepts—the teleon and telentropy. Teleons are “purposeful action patterns,” which may be regarded as the defining characteristic of any living system, including human beings.

Telentropy is similar to entropy (encountered in physics and chemistry), but instead of dealing with the level of disorder in externally described systems, it represents the level of informational confusion existing within an organism regarding its own true nature.

We discuss the implications of the concepts “teleon” and “telentropy” for a person's educability, using examples from daily life and educational institutions.

We provide a number of suggestions for the revising of educational practice to foster the development of the sense‐of‐self in learners. This we demonstrate to have potentially beneficial effects of the general stress levels of society.     

Plagiarism as an illusional sense of authorship: The effect of predictability on source attribution of thought

Previous studies have shown that contextually high-predictability ideas are essential for one to sense the authorship of thoughts and that having the sense that one came up with an idea of one's own, instead of through hearing of another's idea, results in the feeling that one has output the ideas. In this study, we investigated the effects of an idea's predictability on the misattribution of another's thought to oneself. The participants were asked to write down two original ideas about how to use various objects while avoiding the duplication of another's ideas that had been presented beforehand in an input–output phase. In the monitoring phase (1 week and 1 month after the input–output phase), the participants were asked whether each idea had been generated by them, by another, or not generated at all. We found that a high-predictability idea is likely to be regarded with the notion “I generated the idea.” This tendency increased with time, suggesting that participants were more likely to have a sense of authorship when high-predictability ideas were presented. We also discovered that they were more likely to conclude that the source of high-predictability ideas was the “Self.” We discussed the results from the viewpoint of the participant's sense of agency as well.     

Reason and Sensibility: The Ideal of Women's Self-Governance in die Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft

It is standard in feminist commentaries to argue that Wollstonecraft's feminism is vitiated by her commitment to a liberal philosophical framework, relying on a valuation of reason over passion and on the notion of a sex-neutral self. I challenge this interpretation of Wollstonecraft's feminism and argue that her attempt to articulate an ideal of self-governance for women was an attempt to diagnose and resolve some of the tensions and inadequacies within traditional liberal thought. ¹ 1 I use the terms “autonomy” and “self-governance” interchangeably in this article, although only the latter term was used by Wollstonecraft. My tendency, however, is to stick with Wollstonecraft's own term.
     

Binding,narcissistic pathology and the psychoanalytic process

This article discusses the question of truth claims in psychoanalysis, revolving around the concepts “construction”, “reconstruction”, “historical truth” and “narrative truth”. In Part I of the article, these concepts are discussed in an historical context, in particular, Freud's view, the narrative tradition and some of Bion's ideas. In Part II, an attempt is made to synthesize these concepts. It is argued that the constructed character of the unconscious has to be integrated into the patient's reconstruction of his/her life story. The psychoanalytic project enables the patient to create a new narrative that claims to possess historical validity. It is important in this context not to understand the notion of “history” objectivisticallv as if it were a question of revealing certain objective historical facts. Instead, it is suggested that the connection between the present understanding of the past and the past as it was experienced in the past should be understood as a fusion of horizons. Finally, the necessary function of consciousnesslself-consciousness for the psychoanalytic project of acquiring knowledge about one's unconscious is pointed out.     

The Dwelling Places of Self-Experience

Instead of dichotomizing psychic life as either intrapsychic or interpersonal, I suggest we think in terms of a continuum of self-experience from the most private or interior to the most public or exterior. I articulate four “domains”—phenomenologic, intrapersonal, interpsychic, and interpersonal—that constitute this spectrum of self-experience. Each domain lends a specific quality to one's internal life, and together (but in varying proportions) they constitute the psychic dwelling place unique to a given individual. This article illustrates how the variability among our patients in their habitual dwelling places may explain their diverse responses to differing analytic stances, interpretive approaches, and indeed, different analysts. A clinician's awareness of his or her own personal proclivity toward a more interior or more exterior orientation helps promote optimal contact with the patient's psychic life.     

Masks and Faces in the Setting at the Time of Coronavirus

The “health emergency” forced analysts to seek new ways of continuing with analysis. The article focuses, in particular, on the changes brought about in the setting by the presence of the sanitary mask, following a line that begins with the theme of the “mask” in the collective uses of human cultures, and develops through the Jungian concept of persona, as opposed to the “face” that may convey an authentic image of oneself. A clinical vignette illustrates the issues that the mask raises in the setting by obstructing the communication of emotions. When there is no transformative processing of concrete data, “unmasking” can also lead to an uncanny encounter and to moments of darkness and confusion in analysis, when the analyst experiences the kind of “unconscious identity” between therapist and patient that Jung defined as nigredo. The article is intended as a contribution to the analytic community's current reflections on the new and unforeseen challenges encountered in analysis at the time of the Coronavirus. It is possible to learn from these experiences with a view to integrating new elements and thus modify one's own internal setting, the compass with which each analyst orientates himself.