Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Irfan Ahmad
Enlightenment thinking construed “universal” as only “to all,” not “from all.”
non-Westerners were construed as empirical objects, not thinking subjects.
The blueprint for conversion stemmed from the Enlightenment ideas of the “civilizational infantilism” of the non-West and the obligation to “better the world”
To unpack critique is to enunciate the cultural milieu it relates to. Critique is connected to a form of life the full meaning of which presupposes and is inseparable from death.
I argue that the Enlightenment was not a break from Christianity as commonly understood but its reconfiguration whereby the West/Christianity/Europe enacted an immunity to protect itself from any critique while subjecting all others—“the Rest,” as it were—to critique.
Michael Dillon (1996, 28) contends that “Western political thought has been impelled by its metaphysical determination to secure the appropriate theoretical grounds and instrumental means by which security itself could be secured.
The question, then, is, Where do insecurity and fear come from? That is, How is security in philosophy secured by way of nurturing communitas in a people? It is done, among others, through calls to expel and terminate that which is classified as the “foreign, strange . . . (and) outlandish”
Commenting on Dillon’s book, Thomas Dumm (qtd. in Dillon 1996, ii) described security not as “a mere matter of geopolitical boundary maintenance, but as the dark heart of the western logos.”
Kant’s Enlightenment as a project of security with boundaries.
the stabilization of metaphysics is undertaken by erecting “the proper boundaries within which it can maintain itself” by thwarting “uncertainty”
Like other rituals, zakāt qua zakāt is valid only if and when it is based on the niyya (intent) of the giver, thereby making it a voluntary contribution for the sake of Allah.
contrast
Kant uses Islam to show contrast with Christianity. In doing so he is willing to distort Islam though ignorance is the most generous interpretation.
Geography, where Kant wrote: “Humanity achieves its greatest perfection with the White race. The yellow Indians have somewhat less talent. The Negros are much inferior.” People in hot lands are “exceptionally lazy” and “timid.” And women in Burma felt proud that Europeans impregnated them
Arabian (Moorish) blood,
shows in his taste an origin that is partly non-European.
they demonstrate that Islam was a key cultural figure in relation to which Kant built his philosophy as security. The Orient must be kept out for it disoriented Kant, his philosophy as much as the culture he worked in and for.
(Ernst 2011; Al-Beruni 2002).
A deeper analysis thus shows that Kant’s systematic erasure of non-European philosophy made his philosophy and reason missionary to offer only one option: conversion—either to Christianity, civilization, secularism, individualism, rationality, cosmopolitanism, and modernity, or to the Enlightenment (Ahmad and Turner 2015; see below).
“Islam and Arabs through the Eyes of Encyclopédie: The ‘Other’ as a Case of French Cultural Self-Criticism,” Rebecca Joubin (2000)
To Denis Diderot (d. 1784), editor-in-chief of the Encyclopédie, Muhammad was “the greatest enemy that human reason has ever known.”
Voltaire, in Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète
an archetype of fanaticism against which nearly all discourses of reason were conducted.
The philosophes mobilized Islam to shape an ethnic identity of Europe/Christians as hostile to and distinct from Islam.
Assigning the trope of reason to Christianity/Europe and that of fanaticism/unreason to Islam was an equally political-ethnic act.
Aufklärung and les Lumières were not a denunciation but an immanent critique of Christianity.
the premise of a “secular” Enlightenment opposed to Christianity is likewise untenable.
(Barnett 2003; van Kley 2012; Gorski et al. 2012; Hudson 2005; Milbank 2013; Outram 2005; Van der Veer 2001).
What the Enlightenment did was to reevaluate, not reject, Christianity.
(Firestone and Palmquist 2006,
(Carson 2012,
(Rasch 2009,
Christianity remains the pivot—if only (in)visible—not only of Western discourse (including academic ones) about itself but equally for the non-West/non-Christians,
Caputo (2013,
“We can define modernity as the construction of the category of the ‘category.’”
(Anidjar 2015a).
My argument so far has been that the Enlightenment and its reason were rooted in a distinctly local political anthropology. The Enlightenment’s reason was a boundary-making and category-creating mo(ve)ment: civilized versus uncivilized, rational versus irrational, European/Western versus non-European, pure race versus mixed, traditional versus modern, reason versus fanaticism, and so on.
the Enlightenment was a local but gigantic project of ethnicity
Sherman Jackson (2005, 154–55) observes that “the Western provenance of the modern neologism ‘Islamic’” connotes “both geography and ethnicity” as a tool “to demarcate the boundary between the West and a particular set of ‘others.’”
(Joas 2012),
(Bellah 2005; Boy and Torpey 2013; Casanova 2012; Salvatore 2007; Thomassen 2010; Van Ess 2006).
(Shariati 1979; Rahnema 2007).
Muslims hold that since Muhammad was the final prophet, the mission of reform and the renewal of God’s message, after Muhammad’s death, lay with the ‘ulema, regarded as heirs to the prophets.
Immanent critique,
immanent critique
Immanent critique,
Based on a revisionist reading of David Hume, “the defender of Church establishment,” Milbank placed a greater significance on “feeling.”
Unlike the Enlightenment dualism between heart and reason, mind and body, intellect and affect, in Islam, the Arabic and Urdu term qalb encapsulates both intellect and feelings.
Christianity;
While critiquing western firms of dualism, she sets up her own duality of Christianity versus Islam. This seems to be, at least, part of her reason for insisting that the Enlightenment was reform movement of Christianity.
the very idea of the “West,” the identity of which is predicated on producing the category of the “non-West,” often assumed and asked to imitate the West in order to join the march of “civilization.”
Bernal, Keane, and Herzfeld
