Calendar

In many histories of philosophy, Islamic philosophers have appeared primarily as messengers, safeguarding Aristotle’s writings for a few hundred years until European philosophers were ready to rediscover them in the middle ages. But despite its near erasure from Western histories of philosophy, a robust philosophical conversation has carried on in the Islamic world from the middle ages to the present day. On Wednesday, March 30th at 7:00 P.M., Ajay Chaudhary (founding Director of the awesome Brooklyn Institute for Social Research) joins Brooklyn Public Philosophers to help bring us up to speed on modern Islamic philosophy by introducing us to the work of the 20th century Iranian political philosopher Jalal Al-e Ahmad.

Here’s a bit more about Dr. Chaudhary’s talk, in his own words:

Islamic Modernism: Philosophy, Politics, and the Strange Case of Jalal Al-e Ahmad

Many philosophers and historians of philosophy will be aware of seminal Islamic philosophers like Ibn Rush (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), or al-Farabi who appear like non-European apparitions in the “Western canon” as a magical connective tissue between early Christian philosophy and the sudden emergence of Catholic Aristotelianism in the middle ages. And then, just as mysteriously, the history of philosophy is exorcized, the Muslims exeunt, and the philosophical canon happily marches back “on course” through Descartes, Kant, and on to today. The extraordinary influence of Averroes in the history of European thought – for example, his innovations in the discussion of free will – becomes a mere footnote. Islamic philosophy is reduced in some modern accounts to a mere “transmission” of Greek thought and often is assumed to more or less end with al-Ghazali and his rigorous challenge to many schools of philosophy in favor of both mysticism and legal reasoning. But – shocking as it may seem – Muslims did not in fact stop thinking.

In this talk, we will explore Islamic thought after this period and especially modern political thought. First, I will briefly give an account of “what happened” in Islamic philosophy long after Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazali had faded, the extraordinary trajectories taken by Islamic thinkers, and the particular challenges posed for philosophy – even comparative philosophy – by the Islamic tradition (insofar as it is even fair to treat as a “the” or “one” tradition). Islamic philosophy occupies an extremely awkward position for contemporary Anglo-American and Continental traditions. Unlike many South and East Asian traditions, Islamic philosophy is perhaps a little too close to home for Western philosophers—a competing tradition that sees itself as the natural continuation of Greek thought and in near constant conversation with “Western” philosophy, not merely from classical sources like Plato and Aristotle and Late Antiquity sources like Plotinus but up through the modern period and into contemporary conversations. There are extraordinarily thorny issues: when and why is a particular philosophy identified as “Islamic”? Is this a confessional category? Must all Islamic thought be theological in nature? There are myriad Muslims and individuals of Muslim derivation who do philosophy that is recognizable within Anglo-American and Contintental traditions. Surely, they should not all be counted – and many would not personally identify – as “Islamic Philosophers”, and yet this poses a perplexing question: why are certain philosophical texts marked not as “philosophy” but as “cultural artifacts”, not to be considered for their arguments but as social scientific or literary ‘evidence’?

Second, to unravel some of these dilemmas and simultaneously introduce one of the most fascinating Islamic thinkers of the 20^th century, I will discuss the political philosophy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and address his contributions to political thought and Islamic thought. While Al-e Ahmad is virtually unknown in the United States and Europe by all but specialists, he has been extremely influential in Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian thought. Al-e Ahmad falls exactly along the fault lines described here: he was not a formal philosopher but rather a novelist and – most influentially – a pamphleteer and essayist (the history of political philosophy being particularly full of these kinds of works). He was a non-believer but was well acquainted with popular Islamic philosophy and thought, Shii seminarian theology, and 20^th century European thought – especially Marxism, liberalism, and existentialism – and wrote drawing on all of these backgrounds. His most famous contribution to modern political thought is defining and popularizing the concept of gharbzadegi, a Persian neologism that can be loosely translated as West-strucken-ness. This term – translated more commonly if less accurately as “occidentosis” or “westoxication” – was originally coined by the Iranian Heideggerian philosopher Ahmad Fardid and has had extraordinary afterlives not only in Iranian political thought but throughout the Muslim world and indeed, even beyond. In Al-e Ahmad’s hands, the term transformed from one of an expression of existential angst into a serious attempt to take the geographies, histories, material practices, and concepts of non-Western, particularly Islamic societies, seriously as building blocks for universalistic political philosophy. Indeed, Al-e Ahmad’s book Gharbzadegi is as much a critique of European politics, Islamic religiosity and quiescence, as it is a diagnosis of a particular political condition in places like Iran. Often mistaken as a proto-Khomeini or an Islamic Heidegger – or both – we will examine Al-e Ahmad’s work in comparative perspective with thinkers particularly in the Marxian tradition like Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci whose works are more complementary to Al-e Ahmad while paying close attention to Al-e Ahmad’s unique contributions to political philosophy. Examining Al-e Ahmad will give us a window not only into one fascinating version of modern Islamic political philosophy but will help us understand the perplexing place of Islamic thought in the broad global scope of contemporary philosophy.

As usual, we’re meeting in the Info Commons lab at the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Tell your friends/students/teachers/strangers! Bring a date! Bring someone with whom you disagree about cultural imperialism/American foreign policy in the Middle East!

See you there, I hope!

Brooklyn Public Philosophers Spring Lineup:

4/27 – Lydia Goehr
(Columbia)
{music in context}

5/18 – Ian Olasov
(CUNY)
{moral talk in everyday life}

What role should religious conviction play in democratic policy-making? Features of modern democratic societies intersect to render this question both essential and problematic. Government policy in a democracy is supposed to reflect the will of the citizens, and in those societies citizens are free to practice any religion that they choose. So why shouldn’t democratic laws be based on, say, the moral teachings of the Bible, if the majority of the citizens desire it? Well, modern citizens often disagree about religion, both in terms of its truth and its relevance. Does this fact of religious disagreement mean that each citizen should avoid voting on the basis of their own religious conviction, or would that make modern democracy objectionably secular, inconsistent with the religious freedom a democratic society is supposed to secure? In this talk, Robert Talisse explores these questions and defends the view that, indeed, religious citizens have a moral duty to avoid voting on the basis of their religious conviction, but that this constraint is not inconsistent with freedom of religion.

Thursday, June 9 at 6pm. This event is part of the Philosophy Series at The Cornelia Street Café, located at 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014 (near Sixth Avenue and West 4th St.). Admission is $9, which includes the price of one drink. Reservations are recommended (212. 989.9319)

Robert B.Talisse is Jones Professor of Philosophy and Chairperson of the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in political philosophy, democratic theory, and ethics. He is the author of many scholarly essays and several books, including Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and, most recently, Engaging Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2016). Talisse earned his PhD in Philosophy in 2001 from the City University of New York.

The philosopher Moses Mendelssohn paved the way for Jewish entry into the German mainstream by promoting secular education and advocating for a pluralistic society in which Jews could enjoy civil rights while maintaining their traditions and faith. In the new volume Moses Mendelssohn: Enlightenment, Religion, Politics, Nationalism (University of Maryland Press, 2015) leading scholars explore the questions that shaped Mendelssohn’s life and occupied his mind: How compatible are faith and reason, religious loyalty and civic loyalty, religious commitment and cosmopolitanism? The book’s co-editor, Michah Gottlieb (NYU) will introduce a panel discussion on how these same tensions resonate in today’s world. With moderator Abraham Socher (Oberlin/Editor, Jewish Review of Books) and panelists David Sorkin (Yale) and Leora Batnitzky (Princeton).

Michah Gottlieb is Associate Professor of Jewish Thought & Philosophy at New York University. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Indiana University (2003) and has published widely on the theological and political Moses Mendelssohn and on Jewish approaches to the faith-reason debate, analyzing Jewish thinkers from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. Most recently, he has been writing on the role of the Bible in German Judaism.

Abraham Socher is a professor at Oberlin College in the Department of Religion and directs the Program in Jewish Studies. He is the author of The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Philosophy, Heresy (2006), and has published essays and reviews on topics in Jewish intellectual history, literary criticism and baseball. In 2010 he founded the Jewish Review of Books, which he continues to edit.

David J. Sorkin is Lucy G. Moses Professor of Modern Jewish at Yale University. His work is situated at the intersection of Jewish history and European history since the 16th century. He first examined the formation of Jewish culture in the German states in The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987). His Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) emphasizes the neglected Hebrew works. In The Religious Enlightenment:  Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008), he crossed confessional boundaries and national borders to reconceive the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion. He is currently writing a history of Jewish emancipation in Europe.

Leora Batnitzky is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2011). Her current book project, tentatively titled “Conversion Before the Law: How Religion and Law Shape Each Other in the Modern World,” focuses on a number of contemporary legal cases concerning religious conversion in the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, and India.

In the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, and they write out requests as if petitioning the state. At a time when a Hindu right wing government in India is committed to normalizing a view of the past that paints Muslims as oppressors, Anand Vivek Taneja’s Jinnealogy provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history.

The ruin, Firoz Shah Kotla, is an unusually democratic religious space, characterized by freewheeling theological conversations, DIY rituals, and the sanctification of animals. Taneja observes the visitors, who come mainly from the Muslim and Dalit neighborhoods of Delhi, and uses their conversations and letters to the jinns as an archive of voices so often silenced. He finds that their veneration of the jinns recalls pre-modern religious traditions in which spiritual experience was inextricably tied to ecological surroundings. In this enchanted space, Taneja encounters a form of popular Islam that is not a relic of bygone days, but a vibrant form of resistance to state repression and post-colonial visions of India.

Anand Vivek Taneja is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

Debashree Mukherjeeis an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University.  Her research and teaching centers on the history of modern South Asian visual cultures and industries, with a focus on late colonial Bombay cinema. Her current book project, “Parallel Action: Bombay Cinema and the Practice of Modernity,” presents a material history of early Bombay cinema (1920s-1940s) that privileges practice, circuits of work, and technologies of production, and draws inspiration from her own experience of working in Mumbai’s film and television industries in the early 2000s. Select publications include “Creating Cinema’s Reading Publics: The Emergence of Film Journalism in Bombay,” in No Limits: Media Studies from India (2013), “Scandalous Evidence: Looking for the Bombay Film Actress in an Absent Archive”, in Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinema’s Past and Future (2015), and “Tracking Utopias: Technology, Labor, and Secularism in Bombay Cinema,” in Media/Utopia (2016). Debashree is an Editor with the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

The Center for International History is housed within the Department of History at Columbia University. It provides a forum for discussion and to foster historical perspectives on international issues of contemporary intellectual concern. It draws upon the collective intellectual resources, not only of the faculty and graduate students of the Department of History, but also of scholars from anthropology, political science, sociology, law and other adjacent fields as well as policy-makers, journalists and other practitioners. Its aim is to feature speakers and events that transcend or transform the public/academic divide and which critically engage with the production and consumption of historical knowledge across divisions of class, race and gender in our global communities.