Democracy and ethical values from Islamic perspective

Inefficiency or inadequateness of Western liberal democracy at home is not the problematic of the rest because they have not experienced it yet! ‘Minimal democracy’ is the problematic of the residents of authoritarian countries. Most of Muslim majority countries are under authoritarian regimes. They struggle to achieve the primary and minimal standards of democracy. The minimal democracy is the necessary condition for providing morality, ethics, justice, fairness, freedom, equality and rule of law. The record of Western liberal democracy for the rest in both periods – colonialism and postcolonialism – is not defendable, neither in support of democracy and human rights abroad nor in support of peace, morality and ethics in the globe. Comparing coexistence of Islam and democracy, Muslim conservatives, Muslim fundamentalists and Orientalists support inconsistency of Islam and democracy, and Muslim reformists advocate their consistency. Almost all of the so-called Islamic law are appropriate to the context of early Islam and do not fit the modern context. According to ethical-based Shari’a, democracy is the best available means for serving the moral purposes of Islam. Democracy offers the greatest potential for promoting justice, protecting human dignity, human freedom and emancipation. In this perspective, Shari’a, that is, ethical virtues, moral norms and standards of life are permanent, immutable, unchangeable and timeless. They are universal aspects of Islam. The Ethical-based Shari’a supports democracy strongly.

Sindh in Karachi: A topography of separateness, connectivity, and juxtaposition

From imperial ‘unhappy valley’, to decapitated province, commercial capital, and 21st century megacity, this article reflects on relations of separateness and connectivity between Sindh and its capital city Karachi. These culminated in Pakistan’s post-Independence years, in official and political language, governances of national, provincial and city division, and political rhetoric and violence. The article asks what else might be uncovered about their relationship other than customary alignments and partitions between an alien urban behemoth and a provincial periphery. It develops a topographical view to refer to the physical arrangement of environments but also people’s profane, spiritual and political connections and losses involving place and dwelling. This is expanded through examples of land appropriations involving urban real-estate development, environmental migrations and displacement, the idiom of the hijra and Sufistic devotion, and ethnic nationalist and religious extremism. The article questions ways losses of ground and attachment might unite people across provincial divides in an alternative, forward motion of cohabitation. It reveals a multi-layered historical tracing of ways that Sindh, as it is lived in Karachi and vice versa, digresses and wanders through deep cross-regional dynamics and developments. These create new departures from self and place, and rebuff the tendency to centre ‘other’ knowledges as the starting-point and epistemology for studies of Karachi and Sindh. Last, Karachi is a useful optic for thinking about continuities of colonialism and postcolonialism, crisis and fracture in South Asia; ways these are infused with planetary urbanization dynamics, and local, regional and national developments that resist easy universalism.

Introduction

This introduction defines the new term “constellational modernism” to describe Egyptian modern art. As opposed to the vagueness of global and the restrictive idea of transnational, constellational explains the finite nature of Egyptian modernism’s connection abroad as well as the way artists visualize these connections in their artwork. Second, Seggerman discusses the role of Islam in this constellation. These artists and artworks acknowledge Islam (as an idea and as a practice), but they refuse to be defined by it. Third, Seggerman positions Egyptian modernism as part of the rich intellectual framework of the Nahda movement, meaning that these cultural producers were deeply embedded within a wider movement that grappled with ideas of modernity, modernization, tradition, colonialism, and postcolonialism. Lastly, Seggerman defines what modern, modernity, and modernism mean in the context of this book. These redefinitions destabilize the ideas of both a singular modernity and easy plural modernities, and instead pinpointing the overlapping and dyssynchronous connections within a constellation of modernisms.

Postcolonial Transformations in Africa in the Twentieth Century

This chapter examines Africa’s transformation process, in which colonialism and postcolonialism are considered to be of prime importance in view of the fact that Africans fell victim to the transatlantic slave trade. The second chain of the African disaster was initiated due to the political and economic conquest by European imperialists. African societies, including their traditional authorities, were often degraded to simply tools, a state of affairs which was due to the different types of colonial administration. The new and independent states were mostly ill-prepared for democratically and economically stable systems. In the course of the following thirty years nearly all countries became hotchpotches of autocracies and consequently any measures of development were bound to fail. Rather surprisingly, various stages of democratization processes still began to be formed in the 1990s. In the long term, systems were caught in a grey zone between autocracy and democracy. Currently, between eight or nine countries are considered to be true democracies. Still quite ambivalent, however, is the current economic situation, because on the one hand exploiting raw materials certainly meant strong growth rates above the population rate, but on the other hand resources turn out to be a curse of massive corruption or even cruel civil wars.

Colonialism and Postcolonialism

Colonial powers used electronic media and communication technologies to assert and extend control over spaces as well as attempt to influence the “hearts and minds” of colonized people, colonial settlers, and Europeans in the metropole. Colonized people adapted and repurposed these technologies, often toward anticolonial ends. In the early mid-19th century, the telegraph effectively became the “nervous system of empire,” collapsing distances and enabling colonizers to surveil and dominate colonized people and institutions from the metropole (with varying degrees of success). In the early 20th century, new media forms like wireless radio were used to “educate” and “civilize” colonial subjects, entertain and relieve the anxiety of settlers, and spread propaganda in the colonies and the metropole about the benefits of imperialism. These technologies helped to build both deliberate and accidental, colonial and anticolonial, transnational networks. Some of those networks assisted in anticolonial political mobilizations, particularly in India, where the telegraph was accessible to the public and facilitated nationalist organizing, and Algeria, where radio helped to galvanize support for the revolutionary FLN. Postcolonial media landscapes hold the histories of colonial power asymmetries; we see present-day continuities in the concentration of ownership of media and communication technologies among racial and economic elites, and in the Eurocentrism of dominant regimes of representation.