伊斯兰社会福利思想浅析

伊斯兰社会福利思想是在伊斯兰教的信仰体系下,用来指导团体和个人从事各种旨在改善和提高人民生活水平的社会福利实践的思想。这一思想如今仍然在很大程度上影响着穆斯林的福利实践。本文从救助性和发展性两个方面对伊斯兰教社会福利思想做了简单的探讨。     

Autonomy and radical evil: a Kantian challenge to constitutivism

Properly understood, Kant’s moral philosophy is incompatible with constitutivism. According to the constitutivist, being subject to the moral law cannot be a matter of free choice, and failure to comply with it is to be understood as a deficiency in one’s integrity as an intentional agent. I reconstruct Kant’s arguments to the conclusion that immorality, moral evil, consists in choosing to give one’s unity as an intentional agent supremacy over the moral law, and that one’s being subject to the moral law must be one’s own free choice. And I explain how Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, according to which we cannot be subject to the moral law without actually being morally evil, protects this conclusion from entailing the denial of the unconditionally binding character of moral principles, which character constitutivists correctly identify as the central concern of Kant’s – or any – moral philosophy.     

‘It’s Not Just about Faith’: Narratives of Transformation When Moving Out of Islam in the Netherlands and Britain

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the narratives of people with Islamic backgrounds in the Netherlands and Britain who have moved out of Islam. Rather than focusing primarily on ‘leaving faith’ (i.e. a predominantly negative and religiously centred approach), it will present four types of thematic trajectories that consider the broader life-worlds and experiences of the interlocutors. These themes will illustrate the relative weight of the religious voice in trajectories, rather than presupposing the centrality of religion in one’s (former) identity or trajectory. It will thereby display a broader understanding of the interlocutors’ experiences as being in a negative relation to religion alone: not only religious, but also political, social, ethnic and gender boundaries provided the contexts in which people moved out of Islam. The themes (‘religious break’, ‘social break-away’, ‘the entrance’ and ‘unconscious secularization’) will be illustrated by four case studies. A fifth case will be presented to illustrate the potency of the intertwinement of the themes.     

Governing Islam in French cities: defining ‘acceptable’ public religiosity through municipal consultative bodies

ABSTRACT

In recent years, European states have institutionalised relations with Islamic groups in the form of national Islam councils. Similarly, municipalities have set up more or less comparable bodies to address issues related to urban religious diversity. However, rather than being restricted to Muslim representatives, municipal consultative bodies usually incorporate a variety of religious actors. This contribution analyses three such bodies in the French cities of Rennes, Bordeaux, and Toulouse. Adopting a governance perspective and drawing on qualitative fieldwork, I argue that by providing concrete advice on how to address religious issues, these bodies define what are considered ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ public religious expressions, ultimately influencing normative ideas about laïcité. Moreover, I argue that the history of relationships between religious and municipal authorities and the political culture of the cities, among other factors, shape these local processes, thereby emphasising the distinct role of cities and urban actors in governing religion.     

The veil and its materiality: Muslim women’s digital narratives about the burkini ban

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2016, around 30 French cities banned the burkini—swimwear used by Muslim women that covers the entire body and head—from public beaches. French authorities supported the ban by claiming that the burkini was unhygienic, a uniform of Islamic extremism, and a symbol of women’s oppression. Muslim head-coverings, including the burkini, are religious objects whose materiality points to complex semantic meanings often mediated in Internet discourses. Through a qualitative analysis of visual and textual narratives against the burkini ban circulated by Muslim women, this article looks at the way digital media practices help counteract stereotypes and gain control of visual representations. Muslim women focus on two main topics: 1) they challenge the idea of Muslims being ‘aggressors’ by describing the burkini as a comfortable swimsuit not connected with terrorism; 2) they refuse to be considered ‘victims’ by showing that the burkini holds different meanings that do not necessarily entail women’s submission. Muslim women’s digital narratives positively associate the materiality of the burkini with safety and freedom and focus on secular values rather than religious meanings.     

Translating Islam into the language of the Russian state and the Orthodox Church

ABSTRACT

This contribution analyses the discursive strategies exercised by Russia’s state-appointed Islamic authorities. It draws on a linguistic corpus that consists of speeches and sermons by Mufti Ravil’ Gainutdin, the head of a major Muslim Spiritual Directorate in Moscow. A multi-levelled analysis shows that the mufti’s lexical and rhetorical choices correspond to the discourse of the Russian Orthodox Church elites. This affinity is a discursive strategy that allows Gainutdin to position himself as the authoritative leader of Russia’s Islamic community and to construct Islam as Russia’s ‘familiar’ and ‘traditional’ religion.     

APPROACHING ISLAM: Comparative Ethics through Human Rights

A dialogical approach to understanding Islamic ethics rejects objectivist methods in favor of a conversational model in which participants accept each other as rational moral agents. Hans-Georg Gadamer asserts the importance of agreement upon a subject matter through conversation as a means to gaining insight into other persons and cultures, and Jürgen Habermas stresses the importance of fairness in dialogue. Using human rights as a subject matter for engaging in dialogue with Islamic scholars, Muslim perspectives on issues such as democracy, toleration, and freedom of conscience emerge. A capabilities approach to human rights, such as that developed by Martha Nussbaum, enables the coexistence of multiple religious ethical visions while insisting upon the need to protect and nurture essential human abilities.     

Interreligious dialogue groups and the mass media

ABSTRACT

Interreligious dialogues have received attention since they were introduced as a security policy and social pacification measure after the attack on 9/11. This essay examines the development of interreligious dialogue in Germany as well as the influence of media discourses on interreligious dialogue and asks to what extent they affect the motives, goals and modes of communication of both Muslim and non-Muslim participants. This analysis leads to the thesis that the mass media’s frequent security-policy framing of Islam within issues of integration, violence, and threat has developed interreligious dialogue groups as a space of face-to-face coping processes with the imagined religious conflict. Muslims attend it in order to put Islam in a different and positive frame. For the Christian participants this also presents the opportunity to reach a new relevance of religion in the public secular space.     

Comment by Arvind Sharma

Comments on:
JRE Focus on The 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, Journal of Religious Ethics 26.2 (Fall 1998)
"Rethinking Human Rights: A Review Essay on Religion, Relativism, and Other Matters" by David Little, Journal of Religious Ethics 27.1 (Spring 1999)     

Dionysian Spirit as “The Social Self”: Alfred Schutz’s Insightful (Mis)use of Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

Recent publications on Alfred Schutz suggest the importance of his musical thought for understanding his general viewpoint on intersubjectivity. Developing this proposition further, my article focuses on one aspect of Schutz’s writings on music: his attempts to amalgamate the aesthetic oppositions of the Dionysian/Apollonian by Friedrich Nietzsche and inner duration/spatialized time by Henri Bergson. Despite the seeming distortion of the initial meaning of the Dionysian impulse, I suggest that Schutz’s employment remains faithful to the aesthetic and cognitive theory of early Nietzsche. To substantiate this, I draw a link between Nietzsche’s early theory of aesthetic cognition and the neurophysiology of the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, the way Schutz applied the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition to the problem of musical communication made his musical thought prefigure some neuro-scientifically inspired discussions of the present-day, like the one on joint attention. Schutz tackled the key paradox: why the experience of music can be shared but not directly communicated.