scholarly journals Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s Concept of Religion: An Islamic Appraisal

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 258-279
Author(s):  
Ayesha Qurrat ul Ain
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Intellectual Discourse ◽  
Islamic Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
Comparative Religions ◽  
The One

In the vein of many Western scholars of comparative religions, Wilfred Smith also realizes the difficulty implicated in defining religion but he is unique in daring to call for discarding religion, arguing that the concept is inadequate. According to him, the inadequacy of the concept leads to the intellectual dilemma of the relation between many religious traditions and the One Ultimate Reality, the historical change and abiding truth, the world and God. The solution to such a dilemma is to revise the categories of intellectual discourse in the field of theology/religious studies and move towards a better alternative. These alternatives should aim to depict human religious life in a more adequate and universal way. Hence, Smith suggests splitting the esoteric and exoteric dimensions of religion and proposes for them the categories of faith and cumulative tradition respectively. Primarily, this research seeks to explore the significance of Smith’s critique of religion as well as the practicality and utility of the alternative categories i.e., faith and cumulative tradition in the modern global scenario from an Islamic perspective.

Psychology from Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic Perspectives

1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fouad A-L.H. Abou-Hatab
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Islamic Perspective ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
Western Psychology ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

This paper presents the case of psychology from a perspective not widely recognized by the West, namely, the Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic perspective. It discusses the introduction and development of psychology in this part of the world. Whenever such efforts are evaluated, six problems become apparent: (1) the one-way interaction with Western psychology; (2) the intellectual dependency; (3) the remote relationship with national heritage; (4) its irrelevance to cultural and social realities; (5) the inhibition of creativity; and (6) the loss of professional identity. Nevertheless, some major achievements are emphasized, and a four-facet look into the 21st century is proposed.

Sermons as Practical and Linguistic Performances: Insights from Theory and History

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-144
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Historical View ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Marking Time

Abstract Sermons lend themselves to ambiguous identification in the study of religions. On the one hand, they are easily recognisable practices, delivered on particular days of the week, or when special occasions or needs arise. They are usually given in clearly defined places at clearly defined times. They are given by designated or recognized individuals that vary according to the respective religious traditions. On the other hand, sermons are speech performances that may and often do vary from one occasion to the next. While prone to a certain formalism, sermon speech acts are open to variation from time to time, and from preacher to preacher. To extend the possibilities offered by sermons for reflection and analysis, I explore some of the theoretical insights suggested for sermons in ritual studies and from the history of sermons within religious traditions. There is no consensus within ritual studies, but there are some useful ideas and suggestions that cover and extend the practices and speech acts that constitute sermons. More significantly, I found the longue durée of the sermon in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to be more resourceful. The historical view of the sermon in comparable religious traditions brings forth enduring elements such as reading texts, employing rhetoric, producing effects (including affect), signifying and challenging authority, and marking time and space. More than the theoretical models for rituals from anthropology and religious studies, this historical perspective brings out the value of the practices and speech elements that constitute sermons.

Al Fārūqī between the History of Religions and Islamic Theology

Numen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract Ismāʿīl Rājī al Fārūqī (1921–1986) played a considerable role in the academic study of Islam as it was developing in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper is a critical examination of how he employed the categories of religion and religious studies in his scholarly, dialogical, and Islamist work. The paper follows his ideas of religious traditions, their truth claims, and ethical engagement in the world. For Al Fārūqī, these constituted the main foundations of all religions, and provided a distinctive approach to the study of religions. Al Fārūqī was critical of the then prevailing approaches, asserting that they were either too subjective or too reductionist. He offered an approach to the study of religions based on a Kantian approach to values. Al Fārūqī’s method and theory, however, could not escape the bias and prejudice that he tried to avoid. Following his arguments, I show that his reflections on religion and its systematic study in academia charted an approach to religions, but also provided a language for a particular Islamic theology that delegitimized other approaches, particularly experiential ones, in modern Islam.

The Female Pole of the Godhead in Tantrism and the Prakrti of Sāmkhya

Numen ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Jacobsen
Keyword(s):  
Female Identity ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe dualism of the consciousness principle (puruṣa) and the material principle (Prakrti) in the Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya (Yoga) traditions of religious thought has often been thought of as a dualism of a male and a female principle. Contrary to what is often assumed however the material principle of Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya does not possess a female identity. This paper argues that the identification of the Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya Prakrti with a female principle among scholars is due to a very selective use of evidence and too much dependence on later sources, especially the Tantric religious systems in which the female-male polarity was utilized for the interpretation of the ultimate reality, the structure of the world and the means to attain liberation. The way the Tantric religions utilized the Sāmkhya dualism of Prakrti and puruṣa to illustrate the female-male polarity of ultimate reality illustrates the manner in which the Tantric religions reinterpreted elements of earlier systems of religious thought and transformed them according to their own purpose and the process of borrowing and synthesizing of what had come before them typical of the Hindu religious traditions.

scholarly journals THE DIALOGUE OF RELIGIONS AND ONTOLOGICAL INCOMPLETENESS Of a HuMAN Being

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 5-11
Author(s):  
E. V Maksimova
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Global World

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of ontological incompleteness of a human being in connection with the possibility of spiritual help from religious traditions. The author shows how the unified ontological substitution of spiritual existence with virtual reality is carried out in the global world. The article investigates the potential of interreligious dialogue in search for new forms of contact with the universal anthropological risks of virtualization, individualization and alienation of man from his spiritual needs. The experience of religious interaction, features of intra-religious life of communities and modern attitude of churches to each other and to people are analyzed on the basis of Religious Studies fieldwork in Russia, in the countries of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Morality and Religion

Philosophy ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 24 (88) ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
H. D. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Present State ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
The World ◽  
Internal Affairs ◽  
The One

Belief in the ultimacy and distinctiveness of ethical principles has been challenged in many ways to-day. The advance of science, especially in the fields of psychology and anthropology, has provided the relativist and the sceptic with many new weapons to put in their armoury; and the positivist has launched a very subtle attack. The present state of society, both in the internal affairs of the peoples of the world and in their inter-relations, has brought many moral principles into contempt. But there have also been notable advances, especially where more self-effacing virtue is concerned. Philosophers have also rebutted the attacks of the sceptic with peculiar incisiveness and vigour; indeed we know better to-day than at any other time just what we must hold if the objectivity of ethics is to be maintained. How the battle is going is by no means easy to determine. But there is one corner of the field, and that the one from which the most powerful attack of all may be delivered, which the upholder of the ultimacy of moral truths has left almost wholly undefended, so lightly does he estimate the danger from that quarter. That is the religious one. Account has been taken of the arguments of the sociologist and the Freudian psychologist, but it has been assumed, with astonishing naïveté, that religion is an ally to be wholly relied upon. But morality and religion have often been in conflict, and they seem to be so as much as ever to-day. For some of the most powerful forces in our religious life, and those which are in some ways most attuned to our needs, seem to be wholly inimical to the moral life. It is with this aspect of the vast problem of morality and religion that we can best concern ourselves in a course with the general title of “Moral and Political Conflicts of Our Time.”.

scholarly journals Ukrainian Religious Studies in the Context of World Religion Science

2006 ◽  
pp. 69-92
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Community ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Western Science ◽  
World Religion ◽  
The World ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The One ◽  
Scientific Atheism

Ukrainian religious studies has recently entered the world scientific community. Acquaintance with Western science, which has proven to be heterogeneous, often based on different methodological approaches and methodological means, has coincided with difficult internal transformations that have undergone all humanitarian knowledge in Ukraine after worldviews and political changes in society. In pursuit of its identity, domestic religious studies went, on the one hand, by contrasting itself with theology, and on the other, by distinguishing itself from scientific atheism. At first, the emergence of religious studies from the bosom of ideologized social science was more relevant. In the form of a critical study of religion, Soviet-era religious studies were included in scientific atheism. Therefore, religious studies came not as knowledge of religion, but as its critique.

scholarly journals The CeRIF is two years old

2001 ◽  
pp. 128-130
Author(s):  
Editorial board Of the Journal
Keyword(s):  
Web Site ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Data Bank ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
Electronic Data ◽  
The World

March 1 this year marks the 2nd anniversary of the establishment of the Center for Religious Information and Freedom in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Association of Religious Studies, a mother organization for the Center, identified the main areas of its activities, including collecting and analyzing information about freedom of religion in Ukraine and other countries; creation of an electronic data bank with the opening of its web site in Ukrainian, Russian and English; preparation and publication of informational and analytical (including periodical) materials, publications on the state of religion, religiosity and freedom of religion in the world; Providing various consultations on issues of religious life of a person and society

scholarly journals Floating territories of Religion(s): shifting paradigms, erratic theories, and volatile realities?

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Lionel Obadia
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Solid Ground ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

This paper attempts to outline the issue of “territory”, and other related conceptual categories such as “space”, in religious studies. Based on recent as well as older publications, it critically addresses current debates on the ambiguous status of “territory”. In such discussions, the world is generally described in terms of cultural and religious flows, subjected to deterritorialization processes. However, relocating “space” and “territory” to the forefront of Social Sciences and Religious Studies is urgent, as evidenced empirically and theoretically: it appears that opposing the shifting paradigms of “deterritorialization” on the one hand, and “spatial turn” on the other, stems from epistemological inaccuracies, rather than from a solid ground of empirically-observed religious realities. Hence, this paper offers a series of critical rejoinders to the opposed paradigms of “deterritorialization” and “spatial turn” in religious studies.

Religious Studies as a Science and Educational Discipline in Ukraine

2005 ◽  
pp. 108-117
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Models Of Teaching ◽  
Teaching Community ◽  
The World ◽  
Science Of Religion ◽  
The One ◽  
Foreign Science ◽  
Scientific Atheism

Ukrainian religious studies has recently entered the world scientific community and the educational process. Along the way, many difficulties awaited him. First, it was necessary to determine the content, structure, representation of Ukrainian religious studies, to navigate the world of foreign science of religion, in the existing teaching methods. Secondly, to outline the forms of entry of Ukrainian religious studies into the international scientific and teaching community. Acquaintance with Western science, which proved to be heterogeneous, based on various methodological approaches and methodological means, coincided with difficult internal transformations that underwent all humanitarian knowledge in Ukraine after world-view and political changes in society. In pursuit of its identity, domestic religious studies went, on the one hand, by contrasting itself with theology, and on the other, by actively distinguishing itself from so-called scientific atheism. As a result of these processes, domestic religious studies was eventually constituted as a coherent, structured science of religion, seeking to develop its own models of teaching religious studies.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document