Project Of Modernity Research Articles

Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt (by Hilary Kalmbach)

Reviewed by: Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt by Hilary Kalmbach Haggag Ali Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt Hilary Kalmbach Cambridge University Press, 2020, 288 pages. Hilary Kalmbach explores a marginalized, and misrepresented, chapter in the cultural history of modern Egypt; i.e., the role of Islamic knowledge and education in shaping Egyptian national consciousness and cultural identification.1 In a lucid and passionate style, Kalmbach critically approaches the role of education in promoting a permanent process of cultural hybridization. Drawing on social theory, she presents a complex, nonreductive, and nonpoliticized analysis of the role of Islamic knowledge in the making of modern Egypt, with particular emphasis on Egypt's first teacher training school, namely, Dar al-'Ulum (The House of Knowledge), founded in 1872 to prepare top graduates of al-Azhar and religious schools to teach Arabic and primary school subjects in Egyptian civil schools with alternative pedagogies and a combination of civil and religious subjects. The book attempts to reevaluate the role of this institution, using it as a window through which to view processes of sociocultural change in Egypt, particularly the role of Islamic knowledge in shaping state, society, and culture. It uncovers and criticizes implicit and explicit misunderstandings and misrepresentations caused by dominant narratives and their rhetoric of rigid divisions and boundaries. Kalmbach's book can be best read against Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and Ambivalence (1991).2 The latter underlines the fact that the core of the European project of modernity lies in its ambition to establish universal uniformity through launching a war against ambivalence, i.e., through enforcing ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural homogeneity. This colonial ambition has led, in the final analysis, to a growing atmosphere of intolerance to difference. It is in this sense that Kalmbach's book is a defense of ambivalence as a positive aspect of being-in-the-world, particularly hybrid education and its ability to diverge deliberately from Western modes of knowledge production and transmission. It is precisely for this reason that Kalmbach attempts to underline the benefits and advantages of ambivalence (hybridity), arguing that European knowledge was not blindly and entirely copied by Egyptians, but "adapted to fit local needs through a process of localisation, translation, or indigenisation" (p. 22). [End Page 118] This selective process led to the creation of novel and influential hybrids, thanks to social actors that constructed, crossed, and changed sociocultural boundaries, even though they represented a largely unrecognized and marginalized group. In her attempts to counter colonial biases and their internalization by Europhile Egyptian modernists, Kalmbach uncovers the complex relationship between civil and religious systems of education in Egypt, criticizing the sharp distinction between orality and literacy, as well as the underestimation of aural, embodied, and person-to-person modes of knowledge transmission of Islamic pedagogy. This embodiment, as Kalmbach points out, is not a mere process of recitation, commentary, and memorization, but a virtuous act in and of itself, since it is expected to be transformed by both teachers and students into an embodied practice, into a form of life, into a mode of being-in-the-world, one that directs the sensibilities of the "ensouled body," as Talal Asad would describe it.3 Islamic education might have bestowed such functional benefits as employment, prestige, and social mobility, yet Islamic excellence and leadership must have required demonstration through embodiment and performance, or, to borrow Paul Ricoeur, a movement from text to action. It is in this way that the key authorities and repositories of Islamic knowledge are the people and not the written texts (p. 66). It is precisely for this reason that Islamic revivalism in Egypt from the late nineteenth century onward was not confined to the revival of Arabic literature, or the reform of Arabic language instruction, but included also the spreading of Islamic practice through grass-root associations (jam'iyyat). Due to her positive perception of Egyptian modernity as a plurality of complex and interrelated projects—as opposed to colonial western modernity and its monistic notion of progress—Kalmbach does not foreground the accompanying negative processes and consequences of modernity throughout the book: dehumanization, quantification, instrumentalization, bureaucratization, standardization, homogenization, institutionalization, functionalization, and reification...

Movement, space and the logic of the gift: Reflections on Milbank and the African religious archive

This article reflects on how the contemporary relationship between movement and space can be reversed so that movement regains priority over space in the experience of life. Its key argument is that movement has potential to take priority over space but only via the logic of the gift. The logic of the gift has potential to undermine the privilege colonial modernity accords to space over movement because its conception of exchange challenges exchange as a construct of economic logic central to the experience of modernity. The article focuses on the gift as is found in the work of John Milbank and the African religious archive. It tries to show that along with Milbank’s imagination of the gift, the gift as a construct of the African religious archive stands to contribute in the fight against the continuing alienation brought about by the project of modernity. This is because it imagines the sacred dimension primarily via the terrain of the family.Contribution: This article contributes to a reading of capitalism via the logic of the gift as a construct of the African religious archive and does so by borrowing from the work of theologians. In doing so, it tries to present a different way of thinking about gift giving in relation to the African religious expression, which has until the recent past been dominated by anthropologists.

The problem of demarcation of modernity and social reality after modernity philosophical dialogue)

This article discusses the conditions for delimitation of modernity and futureculture, as well as the concept of modernity. Vadim Belyaev claims that what the author refers to as futureculture, in fact does not go beyond the boundaries of modernity; these are rather the processes of promodernity and countermodernity. Vyacheslav Maracha polemicizes with Belyaev’s statements. Belyaev substantiates his critical rhetoric, gives characteristics to his interpretation of modernity, and claims that the author did not explain the thesis on the completion of modernity and the establishment of futureculture. The author partially agrees with the criticism and provides additional arguments: characterizes the definition of modernity used by him; distinguishes between the new worldview, semantic reality of culture, and projects of modernity, realization of these projects and objective reality results from implementation of the projects of modernity and responses to new challenges of the time, as well as construction of the social institutions of modernity. The latter statement is illustrated on the example of the formation of state institution, the study by Martin van Creveld “The Rise and Fall of the State”. The conclusion is made that all plans and fundamental structures of modernity (worldview, semantic reality of culture, projects of modernity, social institutions) can no longer ensure normal flow of modern life, but rather generate problems and social destructions. Objectively, modernity has been reborn and is nearing completion. The author formulates certain ideas and meaning that reveal the formation of the future culture.

Women Writing the American Artist in Novels of Development from 1850–1932: The Artist Embodied

Women Writing the American Artist in Novels of Development from 1850–1932: The Artist Embodied

Letter from Brazil

The research addresses a previously unknown segment of the journalist and art dealer Pietro Maria Bardi’s trajectory by highlighting the centrality of the publishing issue in his activity as an organizer of artistic culture. Starting from the letters exchanged with the publisher Valentino Bompiani from 1946 – date of Bardi’s arrival to Brazil, together with Lina Bo – to the early 1950s, the paper traces the common projects, between Italy and South America, in a transnational perspective, thus opening new insights into Bardi’s role within the coeval illustrated art publishing industry and better focusing the planning of his early Brazilian years at the head of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s modernist project.

Habermas, democracy and the public sphere: Theory and practice

A fil rouge goes through Habermas’s decade long research. It is the idea that Reason and rationality permeate human societies and may lead human action towards emancipation, if aptly elaborated through the filter of theoretical reflection. Theory must pick up on this rational core and turn the intrinsic rational potential inherent to modern societies into a self-consciously pursued ‘project of enlightenment’. This introduction to the special issue ‘Habermas, Democracy, and the Public Sphere: Theory and Practice’ shows how Habermas’s work in different scientific domains contributes to the construction of the ‘project of modernity’ from the many angles that such a complex project requires. The public sphere is, in Habermas’s theory, the societal domain in which communicative interactions have a chance to make Reason come to bear on human societies and lead them on the path to social and political emancipation. The contributions to this special issue focus therefore on the public sphere and illustrate the evolution of the concept in Habermas’s work and its relation to democracy at national and supranational level.

Modernist Projects of Community-Based Urban Farms in Residential Areas—A Review of Agrarian Cooperatives in the Context of Contemporary Urban Development

This paper concerns the issue of food systems in the context of urban development. It describes relevant residential area ideas that integrate cities with food production, such as agrarian cooperatives. In the first section, modernist projects of residential areas linked with urban farms are reviewed, considering cooperative movement and the Industrial Revolution. This review shows that the aim of these historical projects was self-sufficiency and sustainability, based on local food production and broad areas covered by vegetation. They are considered to be a contemporary residential model. The second part of the paper discusses contemporary projects of farms within estates. The study demonstrates that the production of goods under urban agriculture goes beyond private goods, such as food produced for market or own use. The examples discussed show that urban farming performs key functions in residential architecture.

Modernidad y anarquía: sobre lo colectivo en las crónicas de Rafael Barrett

Along with its notion of ​​progress, the project of modernity is regularly criticized by environmental thinkers. However, at different times in the 20th century, some conceptions emerged that see in this project the possibility, ultimately, of achieving full integration between nature and humanity. This article presents the reflections of the Spanish-Paraguayan anarchist and modernist chronicler Rafael Barrett (1876-1910) with the aim of presenting the elements of an environmental thought as part of the modern project. The article begins with key concepts of modernity present in Barrett's chronicles. From then on, I propose a dialogue with Bruno Latour's notion of "the collective" and two possible readings of Barrett's work that turn out to be contradictory: while he considers a common and shared world between human and non-human beings, he locates human being in a hierarchical position that enables them to make decisions about other living beings. Finally, he proposes the anarchist notion of individuation as one that transcends the contradiction and that allows to affirm this hierarchical place to achieve integration with nature.

ПОНЯТИЯ «НАЦИЯ», «НАЦИОНАЛИЗМ», «НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЕ ГОСУДАРСТВО» КАК ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ ПРОЕКТА МОДЕРНА

The article is devoted to an analytical review of scientific research literature on the problems of defining the concepts of "nation", "nationalism", "nation state" as basic for understanding the essence of the project of modernity in the XXI century. The aim is to fix the content of the terminological apparatus on the problems of the national and to align the research priorities in accordance with the modern trends of the globalizing world. The study identifies the relevance of the topic research, reveals the technologies for constructing the concept of "nation" in foreign scientific research of the 19th - 20th centuries, analyzes the concepts of "nationalism" and "nation state" in the context of a modern project.

Against the factory school of modern times: the need of a paradigmatic rupture

Despite the accelerating change at all levels of life, demanding a plethora of new intelligent systems, formal education continues to resemble a box, created during Industrial Revolution and only modestly changed since. The technicist curriculum and the public school remain a modernist project, boxing in students and constraining their imaginations.
 It is not worth investing in intelligent technologies if education is not taken into account, creating new flexibilities for people’s behaviours and attitudes. A paradigm shift in the area of education and teacher education is a must.
 The aim of this presentation is to share my concern about the inadequacy of the “black-and-white” mental organisation caused by the knowledge boundaries of various disciplines in hierarchical order, characteristic of the modernist curriculum implemented at schools, and the real need for a global and interdisciplinary methodological approach focused on the greatest problems of humanity.

Building Simultaneity in Fascist Italy

The politics of modernist furniture design and architectural interiors in Italian films of the 1930s are addressed in Building Simultaneity in Fascist Italy: Film, Furniture, and the Reframing of the Nation. By examining set designs as well as writings by architects, critics, and film theorists (including Edoardo Persico, Carlo Enrico Rava, and Rudolf Arnheim), Ignacio G. Galán analyzes how the modernization and stylization of interiors featured in film aligned the project of modernism with that of Fascism. This article reassesses the relationship between architecture and politics in Italy, exploring how the broadcasting ofmodernist furniture and interiors throughout the national territory contributed to the Fascist program of regenerating Italian society and helped to shape connections among Italian households. Galán describes these connections as “simultaneities,” drawing on film theory as well as on theories of nationalism. Such connections were critical to the development of Fascism in Italy, helping to shape the community of the nation and helping Italians to negotiate its violent inclusions and exclusions.

City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut

City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut

El discernimiento de espíritus en los cristianismos periféricos

El discernimiento de espíritus en los cristianismos periféricos

From Forest to Frame: Representation and Exception in the Regional Modernism of the Pacific Northwest

This essay examines how a small cottage built in 1915 on the Oregon coast became the Rosetta Stone of Pacific Northwest regional modernism. It places the historiographical project of regional modernism articulated in the 1970s alongside a history of timber in the region in order to understand how place was characterized, and designed, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Timber history situates architecture within a broader network, including different species of trees, the soil in which they grow, the practices and ownerships to which they are subject, the mills that transform them into timber, the ships that carry logs to Asia, and the caprices of the residential housing market towards which much of the lumber industry is oriented. These material relationships expose a complicated assemblage of place that has defined the Pacific Northwest regional style.

The Inevitable Contingency of Ethics on Theistic Foundations

In this article, the author examines the dependence of ethics on theistic foundations. The Western conception is that ethics is a result of a natural evolutionary process. The Modern West has never accepted or believed in any ethical system governed by religion, and modernity has tried to establish that the universal moral principles are independent of any metaphysical context. The modernity project and rising secularization have taken charge of the field, and religious significance has gone absent from the mainstream, on account of which many challenges have occurred in moral and ethical matters. We will also examine whether Modern Western Civilization has established an ethical code independent of religion and whether we should follow the Western Model, if any. Moreover, this article examines how ethics is a cause and consequence of the development of personality, and no ethical system is ever there without any religious foundations. Human beings are built on the essence of servitude, and virtues evolve from the foundation of servitude. Another area the article focuses on is the challenges faced by the Muslims and how Modern Western Civilization made morality appears as a result of social and psychological evolution. We also study the possibility and impossibility of Good without an omniscient and omnipotent authority. The absoluteness of moral principles and values and the necessity of consciousness are also discussed in this article.

Editors' Note

We are living through a grim moment of global convergences, from emerging contagious diseases and the looming threat of catastrophic climate change to insufferable forms of social oppression and authoritarian regimes of surveillance. We invite our readers to contribute reflections, considered scholarly meditations, or short notes “from the field” to help illuminate the ongoing turmoil of world historical crises.Meanwhile, our inaugural issue of 2021 begins with the section “The African-Soviet Modern,” which brings together interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the multiplex connections between Africa and the Soviet Union. Organized by Elizabeth Banks, Robyn d'Avignon, and Asif Siddiqi, the section investigates the distinctive ethos of African-Soviet projects of modernization and modernity that diverged from Western capitalist projects. The essays explore these projects in their own terms rather than as a state socialism destined to fail or a sideshow to particular national or nationalist histories. Andrew Ivaska's study of the circulation of exiles from Mozambique's FRELIMO insurgency, Banks's history of the troubled relationship between Soviet and Mozambiquan women's groups, Siddiqi's examination of Soviet satellite tracking stations in Africa, and Steffi Marung's genealogy of Soviet paradigms of geography and development all point to the distinctive temporalities and the methodological challenges posed by foregrounding underexplored Soviet transregional connectivities.The essays by Owain Lawson and Natalie Koch bring together political geography with environmental histories to investigate the workings of local, regional views of the land—and its rivers and deserts—from Lebanese hydroelectric engineers to Saudi desert dairy farmers in the section titled “The Geopolitics of Nature.” Their focus on the relationship between modern technopolitics and the natural landscape draws attention to the transnational links and international vectors that moved through the concepts and constructions these actors engaged with, from international financiers, urban planners, and development ideologues to desert geographers and agriculturalists.Finally, we end with the section “Political Aesthetics,” which comprises an essay on the affective feminism of contemporary Iranian art by Foad Torshizi and an original interview with the Palestinian artist Rana Bishara. As Lila Abu-Lughod's interview with Bishara makes so clear, regarding art as an active form of reconstitution as much as representation—or as a form of activism in its own right—highlights the aesthetic as much as political possibilities and perceptual movements it activates. Torshizi draws attention to the contemporary artist GhazalehHedayat's haptic visualities as aesthetic movements that interrupt acts of representation. Meanwhile, Bishara brings to life a variety of everyday objects and scenes that animate their embeddedness in contemporary Palestinian life under Israeli occupation and control and yet simultaneously integrate the experiences of dislocation and suffering they aesthetically represent, such as the use of barbed wire (ubiquitous in the landscape of occupied Palestine) wrapped around a melting ice cube in Hunger Strike/Ticking Freedom, which appears on the cover of this issue. As Bishara recalls so evocatively when describing her series Blindfolded Histories, these bittersweet juxtapositions arethemselves political acts as much as aesthetic representations: “Each time a viewer steps into the space,” she states, “there is movement. An emotion is released in this space of frozen moments from the brutal realities of our history.” Indeed, this evocative reanimation of collective memory and loss reminds us all of the power and beauty of art as activism.

Reading Ray: Avant-Garde and Transnationalism in Interwar Britain

The British modernist little magazine Ray: Art Miscellany (1926–1927) pioneered the combination of text and image in the vein of the Continental avant-gardes. Amid the surge of interest in periodicals within modernist studies, Ray has managed to escape broader attention. Its editor, Sidney Hunt, was an enigmatic figure and the magazine itself also eludes categorization, as it did not conform to the standards of English modernism, which were in the process of crystallising at the time of its publication and then dominated the scholarly consensus on artistic innovation during the interwar period. Focusing on the specificities of the magazine form and on Ray's explicitly interartistic and transnational ethos, this article locates Ray within the spectrum of British ‘modernisms’, while interpreting its manifest effort to introduce various European avant-garde movements to a British audience as part of a strategy to establish an alternative modernist project grounded in the ideals of the moribund Arts and Crafts tradition.

The Experience of Enchantment and the Sense of Wonder

ABSTRACT This paper begins by drawing on accounts of enchantment as wonder by three authors (Alain-Fournier, Aldous Huxley and J.R.R. Tolkien) to explore its basic characteristics and dynamics. It then draws a contrast with the disenchantment attending will and the will-to-power, noting the internal affinity of the latter with the project of modernity and its contrast with enchantment as a non-modern experience. It then proceeds to a critique of three influential philosophers’ portrayals of enchantment (Philip Fisher, Jane Bennett and Akeel Bilgrami, as well as Charles Taylor), which it faults for not paying closer attention to the implications of the experience of enchantment. It closes with a plea for philosophy aligned with the humanities rather than sciences.

Educating in Times of Pandemic: Images as Micropolitics of Epistemic Disobedience to the Modern and Humanist Epistemologies of the Global North

ABSTRACT In this article, we take the risk of reading the contemporary world based on images that have been published on social media during the pandemic crisis. By questioning the abyssal lines (SOUSA SANTOS, 2007) imbued and naturalized by the projects of Modernity and Humanism, the article discusses the ways in which nature invaded, in the middle of the pandemic, “this side” of modernity. The following section explores the undemocratic virus by problematizing the abyssal lines of social class differences. Then, in order to further complexify the stark differences between white supremacy and black genocide, the next section demonstrates that we have not overcome this historical crisis of humanity. Section five investigates the abyssal lines between access to education and the perpetuation of a project for education that secures the denial of its existence. In the conclusion, we explain the reasons that make us conceive of these images as procedural micropolitics that have the potential to construct “new modes of subjectivity” (GUATTARI; ROLNIK, 1996, p. 30) and suggest a pedagogy of visual literacy and its micropolitics and an epistemic turn in the notions of “crisis”.

Stratégies transnationales dans l’œuvre de Mircea Eliade

"Transnational Strategies in Mircea Eliade’s Writings. In this article, we will consider the techniques through which an important hallmark of Romanian culture, Mircea Eliade, negotiated his transnational strategies, in a continual back-and-forth movement between his place of origin and a larger, cosmopolitan context. Paradoxically, as proven by Paul Cernat, it is not exoticism that will lead to his treatises on the history of religions, but on the contrary, the return to Sambo’s room, as described in The Forbidden Forest novel. Moreover, the European modernist project, defended by Eliade, is in itself an antinomic project: exceptional avant-garde techniques succeed regressive strategies. The latter are based on the modern hermeneutics of meaning, developed by Eliade in his approach to the history of religions, which is an all-encompassing way of interpreting religious facts as hierophanies. Keywords: terror of history, antimodernist strategies, hierophany, autochthonism, transnational techniques "