Religion and Spirituality Categories
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THE LIBRAL CONCIENCE
₨ 9,730IN RECENT YEARS, the battle between liberalism and theocracy has taken center stage around the globe. To many it is a dispute that can only end in a confrontation of competing values and worldviews. In this bold new work, Lucas Swaine combines discussions of political philosophy and real-world events to provide solutions to this seemingly intractable conflict. By opening a dialogue between theocracy and liberalism and offering strategies for interacting with politically ambitious theocrats, Swaine offers new and vital perspectives on the role of religion in liberal, multicultural societies.
Swaine begins by exploring the nature and development of theocratic communities and the moral and political challenges they pose to liberal societies. He argues that in their treatment of theocratic communities, liberal societies have failed to uphold their own stated principles of religious toleration. They have also neglected to formulate a suitable schema for treating theocratic communities ensconced in liberal democracies and to provide reasons for theocrats to affirm liberal institutions. Swaine calls upon liberals to redefine and reassert the fundamental importance of liberty of conscience.
By doing so, liberal societies will reinvigorate their own traditions, while also assuaging religious conflict. In addition to philosophical arguments, Swaine proposes a new legal standard that offers theocratic communities quasi sovereignty within liberal democracies.
Theocrats also have much to gain from embracing liberalism and the principle of liberty of conscience. Swaine argues that liberalism can be made more appealing to the values and concerns of theocrats if the liberal commitment to freedom of conscience is clarified and modified and if liberals take a fresh approach to conceptualizing and promulgating liberal principles, institutions, and laws.
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IN SPITE OF THE GODS
₨ 3,230Yet the subcontinent’s spectacular growth is taking place against the backdrop of a society that has yet fully to come to terms with liberal modernity. Emerging India continues to be beset by deep contradictions: it is a fully fledged nuclear weapons state with almost 40 per cent of the world’s malnourished children; a growing economic powerhouse with an enduring anti-materialist philosophy; it plays host to some of the world’s most cutting-edge research and development, and yet is home to one of the most intolerant religious chauvinist movements in the world.
In this groundbreaking book, which is scholarly and entertaining in equal measure, Edward Luce draws on his extensive personal experience of India to present a compelling snapshot of a country undergoing a remarkable transformation that will increasingly affect the rest of the world? We meet the people who are forging this very distinctive rising power — politicians, industrialists, activists and ordinary Indians of every caste. Luce moves beyond the surface anarchy and apparent contradictions of today’s India to present an incisive but sympathetic perspective on an increasingly nationalistic democracy that will gradually rival Chine — and possibly the’ United States — on the global stage over the coming decades. For all its complexity and many-layered histories, one thing is certain: India’s fate matters.
₨ 6,460 -
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ASSERTIVE RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES
₨ 3,460Arising out of a seminar at Jamia Millia Islamia in October 2003, this volume addresses an aspect of Indian society which has been a matter of widespread concern: the working, that is, of major institutions — some Hindu, some Muslim — whose ideologies and positions have been socially separative: These institutions— Arya Samaj, the seminary at Deoband, RSS, Tablighi Jamaat — have been active for several generations now. While their ostensible functions are ‘religious’ or ‘cultural’, which seem innocent enough, for their (implicitly or explicitly separative) agendas, these have worked: out low cost forms of organization and activity which have given them a rather formidable expansive dynamic, which has significant transnational dimensions in each case. Their activities and campaigns have often been aggressive, sometimes prone to violence; and these have served, may be unintentionally, to provoke each other, thereby giving the other side justification for its own contentious activities, as if in collective self-defence. The mutual provocations have, over the decades, confirmed for both sides a sense of their own victimhood.
These social mechanisms have had significant social and political consequences — yet have remained largely off the radars of public attention. It is a complex theme; and this volume presents many facets from different angles. Several contributors employ a long term historical perspective; and also a comparative one, reaching out to Europe, another major region where the mutual relations between major religious traditions have also been problematical for a very long time.
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FOUNDING THE FATIMID STATE
₨ 9,530This book is the most important primary source on the emergence of the Fatimid state in the early years of the tenth century. Its author, al-Qadi al-Nu’man, was an official historian of the Fatimids and an eminent exponent of Ismaili jurisprudence, as well as being perhaps the most prolific and versatile of all the Fatimid thinkers.
The Iftitah is al-Nu’man’s major historical work, and records in detail the background to the establishment of the Fatimid state, first in the Yemen and then in North Africa. It is based on official archival and biographical documents that were accessible to the author at the time, and which have not survived. It is thus a highly significant source on the religious, social and political conditions which prevailed when the Fatimids began to consolidate their rule. In charting the circumstances in which the Fatimid state came into being, this book will be of major interest and value to students of early medieval history and Islamic studies.
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SUFISM IN THE WEST
₨ 7,430With the increasing Muslim diaspora in post-modern Western societies, Sufism – intellectually as well as sociologically – may eventually become Islam itself due to its versatile potential. Although Sufism has always provoked considerable interest in the West, no volume has so far been written which discusses this aspect of Islam in terms of how it is practised in Western societies.
Bringing together leading international authorities to survey the history of Islamic mysticism in North America and Europe, this book elaborates the ideas and institutions which organize Sufism and folk-religious practices. The chapters cover:
the orders and movementstheir social baseorganization and institutionalizationrecruitment-patterns in new environmentschannels of disseminating ideas, such as ritual, charisma, and organizationreasons for their popularity among certain social groupsthe nature of their affiliation with the countries of their origin.
Providing a fascinating insight into how Sufism operates within different spheres of society, Sufism in the West is essential reading for students and academics with research interests in Islam, Islamic history and social anthropology.
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NATURAL SYMBOLS
₨ 520Written against the backdrop of the student uprisings of the late 1960s, this text took seriously the revolutionary fervour of the times. Instead of seeking to destroy the rituals and symbols that can govern and oppress, the author claimed that if transformation were needed, it could only be made possible through better understanding.
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A PEACEFUL JIHAD
₨ 4,840Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book examines how the Islamic community in Java, Indonesia, is actively negotiating both modernity and tradition in the contexts of nation-building, globalisation, and a supposed clash of civilizations. The pesantren community, so-called because it is centered around an educational institution called the pesantren, uses education as a central arena for dealing with globalization and the construction and maintenance of an Indonesian Islamic identity. However, the community’s efforts to wrestle with these issues extend beyond education into the public sphere in general and specifically in the area of leadership and politics. The case material is used to understand Muslim strategies and responses to civilizational contact and conflict. Scholars, educated readers, and advanced undergraduates interested in Islam, religious education, the construction of religious identity in the context of national politics and globalization will find this work useful.
