``No particular Islamic institution - legal, philosophical, or mystical - has an exclusive prerogative deciding who a Muslim is. It is Muslims themselves, in the plurality of their class, gender, and racialised identities - who are now (as they have always been) on a vastly variegated and open-ended highway making that decision for themselves - a decision between them and their creator, them and what they hold to be sacrosanct in their mind and hearts. Particularly disqualified to make that decision for masses of millions of Muslims are the byproducts of Muslim encounter with European colonialism, now ranging from the deeply invested ideological power mongering by Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, the Wahhabis, or their Shia clerical counterparts. Partaking equally in the exclusively juridical dimension of Islam, and violently dispensing with others, these ideologically driven enclaves of power have laid a false totalising claim on the entirety of Islam that needs to be categorically dismantled.'' Hamid Dabashi
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/2012121814265982159.html For the above, I sort of get what Dabashi is driving at, but then not sufficiently. So I went looking around. I like videos because the freedom of the spoken word can flow around ideas without making them so limited. You can make a preliminary sketch or series of sketches with blocks and shapes without any but a few details Below is a link to a video with Hamid Dabashi as the main spokesman with Anthony Alessandrini, and moderator David Harvey. It's part of a book pushing, the book The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. http://vimeo.com/40891176 He sketches out two major blocks which are interesting whether they are real or not and that is Hannah Arendt's concept of public space and Leon Trotsky concept of permanent revolution. These joined in some conceptual manner that is an alternative to statism, the formalities of the legal structures of constructing a definitive state. Dabashi emphasises the transnational character of events in the general region, which is the point to looking at different sorts of concepts outside the state as something of organizing shapes. I realize this is very vague, but its interesting to think along those tracks. Hence the entrance of the question what is a Muslim? Well, I am arguing with myself over this, because sooner or later, you have to get down to the business of creating a formal structure of a state within which all these flows are as free as possible to manifest and generate a society beyond these frames. We are in our own crisis since the capital elite have taken over these governmental structures and broken them, cut them adrift from their moorings within society ... CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
