scholarly journals Der Gottesstaat des Esad Bey: Eine Muḥammad-Biographie aus der Sicht eines jüdischen Konvertiten zum Islam unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Dimension des Politischen

1970 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Farid Hafez

Esad Bey’s theocratic state. A Muḥammad biography from the perspective of a Jewish convert to Islam with special consideration for the political dimension.This paper analyses the political dimension of the Muḥammad biography written by Esad Bey (1905–1942), a.k.a. Leo Noussimbaum, a Jewish convert to Islam, who lived and worked as a writer in Berlin/Germany. Esad Bey, a Baku-born (Azerbaijan) Jew, who became a Muslim in an early stage of his life, had written 16 books at the age of 30, one of which became a world-bestseller. Esad Bey was a mostly unkown public figure until Tom REISS finished the first well researched biography in 2008; yet he still continues to relatively unkown to Muslim audience. The biography of Muḥammad was the second biography of Esad Bey, following his initial biography on Stalin.The biography, that was published in 1932 in German language, is highly influenced by it’s time, the concurring ideologies of fascism and communism as well as the pan-Islamist thinking of Esad Bey. In a time of social assimilation of Jews, Esad Bey chose to emphasize his Muslim identity inwardly as well as outwardly through wearing the traditional Ottoman Fez. The biography Mohammed is the product of a sīrah influenced by the traditional writing of Muslims and that of Orientalists. On one side, Esad Bey tries to make his Western readership of the 1930s more sympathetic to Islam, while on the other side it reads very much as a cry to Muslim political renewal. Focus of his narration is the state that is characterized in many different ways (theocratic, despotic, socialist, democratic, etc.). This papers aims at analyzing his under-standing of the theocratic democratic Islamic state as told in his biographical writing.

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-130
Author(s):  
Annette Aronowicz

AbstractThis essay examines the contrast between two conceptions of the universal, one represented by the modern State and the other by the Jewish people. In order to do so, it returns to the collection of essays on Judaism Levinas wrote in the approximately two decades after the Second World War, Difficult Freedom. Its aim is to focus specifically on the political dimension within this collection and then to step back and reflect on how his way of speaking of the political appears to us a full generation later. As is well known, Levinas's approach to the political has a way of escaping that realm, while nonetheless remaining relevant to it. This is what we shall try to capture and to evaluate.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quraysha Bibi Ismail Sooliman

This paper considers the effect of violence on the emotions of IS fighters and the resultant consequences of those emotions as a factor in their choice to use violence. By interrogating the human aspect of the fighters, I am focusing not on religion but on human agency as a factor in the violence. In this regard, this paper is about reorienting the question about the violence of IS not as “religious” violence but as a response to how these fighters perceive what is happening to them and their homeland. It is about politicising the political, about the violence of the state and its coalition of killing as opposed to a consistent effort to frame the violence into an explanation of “extremist religious ideology.” This shift in analysis is significant because of the increasing harm that is caused by the rise in Islamophobia where all Muslims are considered “radical” and are dehumanised. This is by no means a new project; rather it reflects the ongoing project of distortion of and animosity toward Islam, the suspension of ethics and the naturalisation of war. It is about an advocacy for war by hegemonic powers and (puppet regimes) states against racialised groups in the name of defending liberal values. Furthermore, the myth of religious violence has served to advance the goals of power which have been used in domestic and foreign policy to marginalise and dehumanise Muslims and to portray the violence of the secular state as a justified intervention in order to protect Western civilisation and the secular subject.


Author(s):  
Anatolii Petrovich Mykolaiets

It is noted that from the standpoint of sociology, “management — a function of organized systems of various nature — (technical, biological, social), which ensures the preservation of their structure, maintaining a certain state or transfer to another state, in accordance with the objective laws of the existence of this system, which implemented by a program or deliberately set aside”. Management is carried out through the influence of one subsystem-controlling, on the other-controlled, on the processes taking place in it with the help of information signals or administrative actions. It is proved that self-government allows all members of society or a separate association to fully express their will and interests, overcome alienation, effectively combat bureaucracy, and promote public self-realization of the individual. At the same time, wide direct participation in the management of insufficiently competent participants who are not responsible for their decisions, contradicts the social division of labor, reduces the effectiveness of management, complicates the rationalization of production. This can lead to the dominance of short-term interests over promising interests. Therefore, it is always important for society to find the optimal measure of a combination of self-management and professional management. It is determined that social representation acts, on the one hand, as the most important intermediary between the state and the population, the protection of social interests in a politically heterogeneous environment. On the other hand, it ensures the operation of a mechanism for correcting the political system, which makes it possible to correct previously adopted decisions in a legitimate way, without resorting to violence. It is proved that the system of social representation influences the most important political relations, promotes social integration, that is, the inclusion of various social groups and public associations in the political system. It is proposed to use the term “self-government” in relation to several levels of people’s association: the whole community — public self-government or self-government of the people, to individual regions or communities — local, to production management — production self-government. Traditionally, self-government is seen as an alternative to public administration. Ideology and practice of selfgovernment originate from the primitive, communal-tribal democracy. It is established that, in practice, centralization has become a “natural form of government”. In its pure form, centralization does not recognize the autonomy of places and even local life. It is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, but it is also widely used by democratic regimes, where they believe that political freedoms should be fixed only at the national level. It is determined that since the state has achieved certain sizes, it is impossible to abandon the admission of the existence of local authorities. Thus, deconcentration appears as one of the forms of centralization and as a cure for the excesses of the latter. Deconcentration assumes the presence of local bodies, which depend on the government functionally and in the order of subordination of their officials. The dependency of officials means that the leadership of local authorities is appointed by the central government and may be displaced.


Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.


2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-244
Author(s):  
Espen Hammer

Hegel's philosophy of religion is characterized by what seems to be a deep tension. On the one hand, Hegel claims to be a Christian thinker, viewing religion, and in particular Christianity, as a manifestation of the absolute. On the other hand, however, he seems to view modernity as largely secular, devoid of authoritative claims to transcendence. Modernity is secular in the political sense of requiring the state to be neutral when it comes to matters of religion. However, it is also secular in the sense of there being no recourse to authoritative representations of a transcendent God. Drawing on Charles Taylor's view of secularization, the article focuses on the second strand of his religious thinking, exploring how Hegel can be thought of as a theorist of secularization. It is claimed that his dialectic of religious development describes a process of secularization. Ultimately, Hegel's system offers a view of the absolute as immanent, suggesting that an adequate account of religion will necessarily have to accept secularization as the end-point of spirit's development. This is how the tension between religion and secularization can be resolved.


Author(s):  
Emilios Christodoulidis ◽  
Johan van der Walt

This chapter traces the tradition of critical theory in Europe in the way it has informed and framed legal thought. A key, and distinctive, element of this legal tradition is that it characteristically connects to the state as constitutive reference; in other words it understands the institution of law as that which organizes and mediates the relation of the state to civil society. The other constitutive reference is political economy, a reference that typically grounds this tradition of thinking about the law in the materiality of the practices of social production and reproduction. It is in these connections, of the institution of law to the domains of the state and of the political economy, that critical legal theory locates the function of law, and the emancipatory potentially it affords on the one hand, and the obstacles to emancipation it imposes, on the other.


1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dawson

Are there worthwhile values and ideals which flourish in the procedures of the state but wither in the transactions of the market? Are there equitable and fulfilling social relationships which are nurtured in the economic sphere but crumble in the political world? There is clearly some truth in the claim that at least in certain circumstances market systems inculcate in people not only ‘honesty and diligence, but also sensitivity to the needs and preferences of others’ (Gray, 1992, p. 24). On the other hand, it is difficult to deny the appeal of a tradition of thought which attaches moral superiority to the non-market ideals and values epitomised in the gift relationship. Titmuss (1970), for example, objected to treating blood as a commodity in part because it undermined the sense of fraternity or community which a system of voluntary blood donors enhanced. A contemporary statement of this position holds that gift values differ from commodity values in being ‘tokens of love, admiration, respect, honor, and so forth, and consequently lose their value when they are provided for merely self-interested reasons’ (Anderson, 1990, p. 203).


Administory ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-206
Author(s):  
Anna Gianna Manca

Abstract The paper deals with the question of the administrative districts in an overall Prussian perspective and emphasizes, above all, the central political role played by the provincial districts and their main authorities within the spaces of the state and of administrative activity. On this basis, it will be possible to adequately appreciate the revolutionary but unsuccessful attempt to abolish them in 1848 by the liberaldemocratic wing of the Constitutional Commission of the Prussian National Assembly, as has not yet been accomplished within the existing historiography. First, the origins of the spatial-territorial division of Prussia existing around the middle of the 19th century are discussed. Within this framework special attention has been paid to the introduction of a provincial division, which led to that organization of internal administration into four instances under the minister (provinces, governmental districts, districts, municipalities) which was a peculiarity of the Prussian political and administrative spatial division compared with the other states of the German Confederation. Questions such as those of the basic division of the state’s space are so radical that they are usually raised with some prospect of success only at the foundation of states or during revolutions. Immediately afterwards, they tend to be included in the list of ›depoliticized technicalities‹, although they retain their fundamental importance for ensuring the political and administrative continuity of the state.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 104-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Nunes

The paper identifies three recent lines of interpretation of the politics that can be derived from Deleuze and Guattari, all of which share a way of reading the dualisms in their work that can be traced back to how they understand the actual/virtual partition, and to an alleged pre-eminence of the virtual over the actual. It is argued that this reading is not only inaccurate, but obscures the political dimension of Deleuze and Guattari's work. Clarifying the latter requires a reinterpretation of the dualisms involved (as dyads rather than binaries), of the relation between virtual and actual (as a formal distinction where one acts back upon the other), and the drawing of a clear distinction between what Deleuze calls a ‘transcendent exercise’ of thought and sensibility and the properly metaphysical exercise that sets up the distinction between virtual and actual. What then appears is an image of Deleuze's and Guattari's thought that is far more concerned with practical questions and with a situated political practice of intervention.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 195-200
Author(s):  
Fyodor A. Gayda

 The article is devoted to conservative projects of reforming the State Duma, which was established in Russia in 1906. Those projects can be divided into two groups. Some projects were proposed by Russian nationalists (M.O. Menshikov, I.P. Balashov), who supported Stolypin and claimed to be one of the two main forces of the parliamentary majority. Nationalists sought to preserve the legislative powers of the Duma and stressed that the reform was supposed to strengthen parliamentarism. The projects of the nationalists proposed only partial adjustments to the parliamentary system, but still changing the Basic State Laws (in other words the coup d’état). The government did not support this path. The other projects were initiated by right-wing conservatives (L.A. Tikhomirov, K.N. Paskhalov, prince V.P. Meshchersky). Right-wing conservatives proposed turning the Duma into a legislative institution. This completely changed the political configuration and eliminated the “The Third of June” system. Both nationalist and right-wing projects were rejected by the government, albeit for different reasons: either due to their indeterminate character (nationalist projects) or due to their radicalism (right-wing projects). The ministers invariably considered the reorganization of the Duma more difficult than finding ways to cooperate with it.


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