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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Egypt

Notes on a Jewish Sufi

20 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Islam, Judaism, Politics, Prayer, South Asia, Sufism

≈ 6 Comments

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Abraham Maimonides, Ali Asani, Altaf Hussain Hali, Egypt, Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Harvard University, Israel/Palestine, Jay Harris, Moses Maimonides, Muhammad Iqbal, mystical experience

I don’t wish at the moment to weigh in on the terrible current conflict in Israel and Palestine, save to offer my condolences to anyone whose loved ones are hurt by its horrors. I salute those on either side who are still striving, in the midst of it all, for a world where both Jews and Arabs can go about their lives in peace and freedom. But I have no idea how to get there; if there is a way, it will require the complex and difficult work of diplomats and politicians more than philosophers, and ones who know that situation far better than I do. What I hope I can offer today is merely a bit of historical perspective. That is: most of us alive today have only known a world where Jews and Muslims make headlines for being at each other’s throats. But it wasn’t always that way.

The years of the Abbasid caliphate‘s reign in Baghdad, from the 8th to 13th centuries, are often considered the Muslim golden age, where Muslim societies were the envy of the world for their civilizational achievements from poetry to medicine. 20th-century South Asian poets like Hali and Iqbal looked back with envy and nostalgia to that golden age, lamenting how far they had fallen from it under British colonialism.

What’s less frequently noted is that that era was also a Jewish golden age.

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When marginalized people don’t say what we think they should

14 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Deity, Hermeneutics, Islam, M.T.S.R., Morality, Politics, Social Science

≈ 6 Comments

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Egypt, gender, Joseph Cheah, race, Saba Mahmood, United States

The late Saba Mahmood’s 2004 The Politics of Piety is a brilliant example of how to do philosophical ethnography. The book’s one flaw is its dense prose style, but even that may have been necessary in order to persuade its target audience: 2000s-era postmodern feminists, who tended to take six-syllable words as a sign of profundity. And while the typical vocabulary has changed significantly in the decades since she wrote it – from “resistance” and “agency” to “privilege” and “marginalization” – the kinds of views she is critiquing remain very widespread, and her critique has lost none of its power.

Mahmood is studying the da’wah piety movement among Egyptian Muslim women, including practices like wearing the veil. Other feminist scholars had studied such women before. But those scholars had insisted in defining their informants’ actions in the scholars’ terms rather than the informants’:

Some of these studies offer functionalist explanations, citing a variety of reasons why women take on the veil voluntarily (for example, the veil makes it easy for women to avoid sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the cost of attire for working women, and so on). Other studies identify the veil as a symbol of resistance to the commodification of women’s bodies in the media, and more generally to the hegemony of Western values. While these studies have made important contributions, it is surprising that their authors have paid so little attention to Islamic virtues of female modesty or piety, especially given that many of the women who have taken up the veil frame their decision precisely in these terms. Instead, analysts often explain the motivations of veiled women in terms of standard models of sociological causality (such as social protest, economic necessity, anomie, or utilitarian strategy), while terms like morality, divinity, and virtue are accorded the status of the phantom imaginings of the hegemonized. (16)

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A very brief survey of African philosophy

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Asian Thought, Christianity, Early Factions, Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Judaism, Metaphilosophy, Place, Supernatural

≈ 8 Comments

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Anton Wilhelm Amo, Arius Didymus, Augustine, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Hebrew Bible, ibn Khaldun, ibn Rushd, ibn Ṭufayl, John McDowell, Juli McGruder, Kwasi Wiredu, Morocco, Moses, Moses Maimonides, Philo of Alexandria, Placide Tempels, Plotinus, René Descartes, Tertullian, Tunisia, Zera Yacob

For the most part, the study of non-Western philosophy has tended to focus on the continent of Asia. There are many good reasons for this. More than half of humanity lives in Asia. And Asia has long, rich traditions of philosophical reflection that have survived and left their works to us – unlike the thought of Mesoamerican traditions, where so much was pillaged and destroyed by the barbarian Spanish invaders. Asia is not even one single context; I would argue that South Asian philosophy is in many respects more like Western philosophy than it is like East Asian. In particular I see no problem in maintaining an Asian focus in my own work, since it is the philosophies of Asia – especially Buddhism – that have left by far the biggest influence on me. One can love all wisdom, but one cannot inhabit all of it.

Still, when we do aspire to love all wisdom, it’s worth taking a look beyond both Asia and the West – at least what we usually think of as the West. There is considerably more to the world. The continent of Africa, in particular, may well overtake Asia in population by the end of this century. So perhaps it is particularly worth thinking about African philosophy.

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The appeal of Marcionite interpretation

13 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Deity, Early Factions, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Morality

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Augustine, Egypt, Hebrew Bible, Marcion of Sinope, slavery, Stonehill College, theodicy

For Augustine, evil is nothing more than the absence of good, as we would say cold is no more than the absence of heat. Not every contemporary Christian follows this idea exactly, but the majority would surely agree that the goodness of God is supremely powerful, with evil (whether personified as Satan or not) significantly lesser.

It was not always this way. Many early Christian factions – most famously the Manicheans, but also the Marcionites and many Gnostics – believed that there were two warring gods, one good and one evil. Continue reading →

Trusting in man, trusting in God

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Christianity, Deity, Epics, Faith, Free Will, Human Nature, Judaism, Morality, Prayer, Vedānta

≈ 40 Comments

Tags

20th century, Adolf Hitler, Augustine, Bhagavad Gītā, chastened intellectualism, Egypt, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hebrew Bible, hell, Krishna, Mahābhārata, Mañjuśrī, Pol Pot, Rāmānuja, Sigmund Freud, theodicy, Vishnu, Xunzi

I once heard someone – I don’t remember where – criticize humanism (however defined) in the following manner: “The problem with humanism is it leads you to deify man, and the evidence seems to be that man is not worthy of being deified.” The point resonates with me as I think about chastened intellectualism, the idea – which I associate with Freud as well as Augustine and Xunzi – that human beings tend naturally toward wrong behaviour. Individually, despite good intentions, I find it a constant struggle to be a good and happy person; collectively, the history of the 20th century is a dark litany of what happens when – as is too often the case – people’s intentions are less than good. It is difficult to have faith in humanity when humanity has not earned it.

The argument to this point is, I think, in perfect sympathy with Augustine. Human beings for him are invariably and inevitably flawed, in a way that makes them unworthy of our trust. Instead, Augustine wants to argue, we must place our trust in a truly perfect being, God. Augustine’s argument here underlies a great deal of conservative Christianity: even if church institutions and/or biblical scripture appear wrong to us, they are a better guide than our own weak and easily misled intellects.

For the moment, let us leave aside the question of how we know Church or Bible embody God, or even whether God exists. I think there is a far deeper question at issue here: even assuming he exists, how can we trust God? Continue reading →

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