The scandal of ecstasy: communication, Sufi rites, and social reform in 1930s Morocco

Modern Islamic reformists in Morocco condemned ecstatic Sufi trance rites as heterodox spectacles. But if the heterodoxy of these rites remains self-evident, the still common reformist critique of spectacle begs historical explanation. This article proposes that a main theme of post-1930 nationalist reformism in Morocco was communication and its containment. In this period, new reformists – “Young Moroccans” and “New Salafis” – fixated upon the power of ecstatic rites to connect and coalesce the urban underclasses and to elicit recognition from the colonial state and an emergent global audience. Just as new reformists sought to use technologies of mass communication, including the newspaper and camera, to speak to and for “the People,” they chafed at the global renown these same media lent to public Sufi spectacles. Examining Moroccan print media in 1930s Fez, I show that anti-Sufi critiques were primarily neither doctrinal nor anti-colonial; new reformists aimed, rather, to domesticate the popular connective force of ritual as well as the enhanced power of these picturesque rites to speak for the nation.

Muslim women, middle class habitus, and modernity in Indonesia

This article asks how pious religious practices, which are often highly gendered, and implicated in diverse formulations of “the modern” in non-Western contexts. Based on ethnographic research among women members of Indonesia's Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), I argue that PKS women’s pious practices are part of the creation of a particular kind of middle class subjectivity. An examination of two constitutive elements of this habitus, clothing and marriage, reveals how these pious Islamic practices enact class and gender difference, and simultaneously produce “modern” selves. While scholars have shown that gender is an important axis for class difference, I extend this argument to suggest that gendered forms of piety are key ways class in which distinctions are embodied and expressed. Yet the habitus of PKS women is just one of several competing Islamic habitus in Indonesia. The question of which habitus is most culturally legitimate, I maintain, turns on the hegemony of particular understandings of piety and ideas about how modernity should be defined–issues which remain unresolved in contemporary Indonesia.

现代性的运作机制:反思性唯我主义

反思性唯我主义是现代性的运作机制;现代性的一些基本现象,技术主义、资本主义、自由主义和历史主义只有根据反思性唯我主义才能得到恰当的理解;要克服现代性的困境即普遍的异化现象和虚无主义,首先要克服反思性唯我主义。     

现代化与后现代化的两难抉择——当代新儒家的理论困境及其出路

在中西文化问题上,由于当代新儒家采取了理性主义态度,从而使其不仅不是文化保守主义的,而且也没有陷入传统与现代之间的纠结。当代新儒家在"如何在中国实现代化,而又要避免西方现代化弊端"的问题意识中,既表现出强烈的现代性,又具有显明的后现代品格。由于当代新儒家对中西文化的不平等定位,在某种程度上加大了现代化与后现代化之间的理论冲突。但这种冲突并不是不可克服的,因为在当代新儒家身上有一种优秀的后现代品质,即理性主义的文化态度,而这一点与建设性的后现代主义表现出极大的一致性。只要当代新儒家能够继续以开放的、多元的、理性的文化态度来审视现代化与后现代化的问题,就可以像建设性的后现代主义一样,把现代性与后现代性统一起来。     

Ethics,Alterity, and Psychotherapy: A Levinasian Perspective

Current psychologies of religion reflect the modernist context in which they are situated. Religion is reduced to what is researchable, generalizable, individual and “thin.” This essay suggests that a psychology of religion which takes seriously the implications of Emmanuel Levinas’s emphasis on ethics and the alterity of the Other would result in a different model of psychotherapy. Levinas’s view of the Other as the trace of the transcendent radically changes our understanding of the client within the therapeutic relationship. Levinas begins with ethics and so healing would be, by implication, an ethical enterprise. In a highly secularized, individualized, objectivized culture, a therapy which recognizes the sacred, which models how to view the Other as transcendent, and which does not presume to know, is a gift to the client.     

Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? The Muhammad cartoons and Danish political culture

During and after what became known as ‘the cartoon crisis’ in the early months of 2006, many observers noted how the crisis should be understood as an expression of a growing Islamophobic tendency in Danish society. While such an interpretation undoubtedly is correct it fails to explain how both this Islamophobic tendency and the crisis must be seen as contemporary expressions of a long-lasting estrangement in Danish society between forces respectively sympathetic and adverse to modernity. In this article it is argued that Muslims in the Danish context today have become signifiers of current modernity, in the shape of globalization. This perspective provides a clearer understanding of the dynamics of the crisis in the Danish context as it explains why publishing the cartoons made sense to many groups in Denmark who came out both for and against this act.