Difference between revisions of "User talk:NonZeroSum"
NonZeroSum (talk | contribs) |
NonZeroSum (talk | contribs) |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
| − | + | Having said that, the most profound long term transformations least in my view, in the Muslim world today, occur through the actions of middle class professionals and religious intellectuals. They take charge of their faith, organize people, popularize ideas, and seek to persuade large and diverse audiences they rethink religion outside traditional boundaries, even if they deny they're doing so. They master rapid technological ships. Organized movements and affinity. Groups and work often as teams with different skills. That's one thing that comes with being middle class is I'm using the term behind the scenes and recognize the institutional challenges of persuading diverse audiences. I was delighted to hear. Sheikh Abdul Fattah speak today because in his language with the background that I think you would agree might be a little bit different than mine. He very clearly set out much of what I'm going to say in a very different language. Mainstreaming results in presenting Islam as an integral and acceptable part of civic life, participation in mainstreaming best thought of more as a process than as a specific outcome requires the development of concrete skills and aptitudes. Again, think about what Sheikh Morocco. Was saying this morning the outcome of mainstreaming increased levels of civility and tolerance, or its very opposite is far from certain. Since the rise of digital communications, the mix of how people communicate had received the common good. Al Maslaha Dalama has been significantly transformed. One path to understanding how the digital age shapes ideas and practices is to look to the distant past and how. Earlier, big ideas took hold and then to look at how the digital age affects how we think today. So let me go to 7th century Arabia, this distant as perhaps we can get. To the ties that bind the multiple and layered bonds of loyalty and obligation that range from parents and kin, spouses, town and tribe, and the wider community of believers in 7th century Arabia, the Koran added the firmest tie, Al Orawa Luka. This tie linked individual believers to God. At least in principle, this firmest link proceeded, but did not replace. Other times, Al Urwa and Woodka in the 7th century, with its emphasis on equality and personal responsibility among believers, was remarkably modern in the high degree of commitment. Involvement and participation expected from the rank and file members of the. Yet to the original audiences in 7th century Arabia, the firmest tie again did not always appear more immediate and compelling than tribal and kin. Loyalties. Upon Mohammed's death in 632, the period of the so-called ryda, or apostasy, many tribes. Considered themselves released from submission to Islam. In other words, ties of tribe and loyalty negotiated by the early Islamic community were incompletely realized. Akabri records hadith in which a member of the many Rabia met with Musaylimah bin Habib or Museum. Al Qaeda tab, also from the Benny Rabia. The visitor asked the Mosima who comes to you and mosima answered Rahman. In lighter and shadows misleading my replies in shadows. The visitor then says I testify that you are a liar and that Muhammad is telling the truth, but a liar of the rabiah is better for us than a true prophet of the Mudar, which, of course, is Mohammed's tribe. Of course, the conditions in which the firmest tie was realized and actually took precedence over the other ties have been a core question throughout Muslim history. The first news in the 7th century of the firmest tribe was spread solely by word of mouth, with reliable information and the equivalent of today's. Fake news, often hard to untangle. To make a leap of many centuries in a different context, in the summer of 1789 in the French countryside, rumors spread about vengeful aristocrats bent on the destruction of peasants property. These rumors were absolutely untrue. The great fear is this period is now. Known in France tipped France into revolution with the flurry of fact free gossip and. Today, of course, rumors fly much faster. Word of mouth is buttressed by an array of digital and electronic media, and the search for reliable accounts is more difficult than ever before. The smartphone. I'm just going to show you a smartphone. This is a dumb phone, may level the playing field between the producers and consumers of ideas and practices, but it also makes for short attention spans. If we look at the most profound changes in how ideas get communicated, there's three major drivers that have influenced how ideas move through society and across geographical and linguistic boundaries. The 1st is the greater ease of travel travel can be for the Hajj, as well as visits. To regional shrines for commerce or for labor migration, or from the necessity of war or regional conflict. Pilgrimage and migration for economic purposes. Have equally profound effects, not all of which are intended on the religious imagination. As the late safaris Haq Ansari observed over 2 decades ago, the boundaries between the West and the rest are no longer exclusively territorial. A second driver is mass education, which has meant the spread of literacy enlarged to large numbers of people, women and men throughout the world. I vividly recall traveling in small towns and villages throughout the Arab world in the 1960s in Afh. A small town in southern Iraq, Diwaniya Province in 1968. An afternoon male habit was to sit in a coffee shop where a literate tribal leader read aloud the afternoon newspaper that arrived from Baghdad. I saw similar scenes in Upper Egypt and southern Morocco the same year before. The wide spread of literacy in small towns and rural areas in some regions, even the Arabic spoken word failed to reach many Arabs. If they possessed only their regional dialect now of course the more widespread mastery of formal Arabic allows more people to talk back in public space than was possible in an earlier era. 3rd the new communications media have become increasingly interactive in the past. The proliferation of video cassettes and CDs combined with satellite broadcasting loosened the hold of state of state broadcasters over the imagination. Of large numbers of people. Before Internet and mobile communications were widely available, the proliferation of photocopiers and fax machines allowed competing messages to be readily communicated independently of authorized channels and distributed among networks of like like minded people, cell phones. And especially smartphones combined with the wide array of means of communicating via the Internet. Make the older, top, bottom controlled of messages less effective than it was in an earlier era. In the 1970s, the humble audio cassette, easy to duplicate, concealed and smuggle, facilitated the rise of new and dissident voices beyond the written, printed and photocopied word. Since the advent in the 1990s of the Internet age, communication has become even easier. And over the last 15 years, Platts platforms such as Facebook, introduced in 2004, Twitter 2006 and what's up 2009 have further facilitated the competition over religious and political authority? Religious innovation does not advance through technological change alone. One needs people adept in seizing the opportunity. The technical innovation offers, and the ability to work with others in new and not fully predictable ways to mainstream religious innovation. Mainstreaming involves 4 major skills. First, it requires intellectuals who take charge of developing ideas and using them to persuade large audiences, especially where organized non governmental movements are strongly discouraged or monitored. The second set of skills is the overt public organizing of people and communicating effectively. States, including both open and totalitarian ones, depend on middle class professionals just as successful. Religious and civic movements try to. Sell the ideas and practices of certain ways of putting faith to work in society. There's a country neighboring to here. I'm not going to name it where I know the Chief Police censor. He would go to book fairs to determine which books should be censored in his country. However, he had the books and he had what I called. In my field notes. The censors book club so that his friends, a wide circle of friends, could read the banned books that they would get from him. It's nice to see sensors helping distribute words that are supposed to be banned. Unfortunately, not all sensors. Are intellectuals? 1/3 related skill is working quietly behind the scenes to further an interest or cause where weak forms of civic empowerment are linked to strong forms of structure, such as in some countries where major state sponsored initiatives are underway to use the Islamic studies. Curriculum of primary and secondary schools to create a template for inculcating values of critical thinking, gender parity and religious tolerance. A final skill is that of publicity trumping secrecy. Trump is a good verb in English. It's recently been discouraged in use, but I leave that to the translators to explain publicity can overcome suspicion. It contributes significantly to normalizing new ideas and practices. It also encourages the objectification to maldor of religious ideas and practices, ideas that were primarily implicit become explicit. One result is that certain questions come to be foregrounded in the consciousness of large numbers of believers. Questions such as this, what is my religion? Why is it important to my life and how do my beliefs guide my conduct? Objectification does not mean seeing religion is a uniform or monolithic entity, although for some that's precisely what it is. Or they say it is. These explicit and objective questions are distinctly modern ones, even if some people legitimate their practices by asserting a return to the past, the digital age has profoundly affected the meaning and context of the public sphere and religious belief and practice within it. Just as writing and print created often and unanticipated new forms of community in the past and transformed authority and social boundaries, so has the digital age. Increasingly open and accessible forms of communication make contests over the authoritative use of the symbolic language of Islam. As with other religious beliefs and practices, increasingly global and open, the struggle over people's imaginations now involves both. Heightened competition and contest over both the interpretation of symbols and a struggle over the control of image of the institutions, formal and informal, that produce and sustain them. To conclude, the mainstreaming of Islamic ideas and practices contributes to increasingly public Islam, in which religious scholars self-described religious authorities, non religious intellectuals such as the late Sadiq Jalal Adam of Syria. Sufi orders mothers, students, workers, engineers and many others contribute to civic debate in public. In this public capacity, Islam makes a difference in configuring the politics and social life in large parts of the globe and not just among self-described religious authorities. Thank you very much. | |
| − | |||
| − | |||
Revision as of 10:15, 31 July 2024
Having said that, the most profound long term transformations least in my view, in the Muslim world today, occur through the actions of middle class professionals and religious intellectuals. They take charge of their faith, organize people, popularize ideas, and seek to persuade large and diverse audiences they rethink religion outside traditional boundaries, even if they deny they're doing so. They master rapid technological ships. Organized movements and affinity. Groups and work often as teams with different skills. That's one thing that comes with being middle class is I'm using the term behind the scenes and recognize the institutional challenges of persuading diverse audiences. I was delighted to hear. Sheikh Abdul Fattah speak today because in his language with the background that I think you would agree might be a little bit different than mine. He very clearly set out much of what I'm going to say in a very different language. Mainstreaming results in presenting Islam as an integral and acceptable part of civic life, participation in mainstreaming best thought of more as a process than as a specific outcome requires the development of concrete skills and aptitudes. Again, think about what Sheikh Morocco. Was saying this morning the outcome of mainstreaming increased levels of civility and tolerance, or its very opposite is far from certain. Since the rise of digital communications, the mix of how people communicate had received the common good. Al Maslaha Dalama has been significantly transformed. One path to understanding how the digital age shapes ideas and practices is to look to the distant past and how. Earlier, big ideas took hold and then to look at how the digital age affects how we think today. So let me go to 7th century Arabia, this distant as perhaps we can get. To the ties that bind the multiple and layered bonds of loyalty and obligation that range from parents and kin, spouses, town and tribe, and the wider community of believers in 7th century Arabia, the Koran added the firmest tie, Al Orawa Luka. This tie linked individual believers to God. At least in principle, this firmest link proceeded, but did not replace. Other times, Al Urwa and Woodka in the 7th century, with its emphasis on equality and personal responsibility among believers, was remarkably modern in the high degree of commitment. Involvement and participation expected from the rank and file members of the. Yet to the original audiences in 7th century Arabia, the firmest tie again did not always appear more immediate and compelling than tribal and kin. Loyalties. Upon Mohammed's death in 632, the period of the so-called ryda, or apostasy, many tribes. Considered themselves released from submission to Islam. In other words, ties of tribe and loyalty negotiated by the early Islamic community were incompletely realized. Akabri records hadith in which a member of the many Rabia met with Musaylimah bin Habib or Museum. Al Qaeda tab, also from the Benny Rabia. The visitor asked the Mosima who comes to you and mosima answered Rahman. In lighter and shadows misleading my replies in shadows. The visitor then says I testify that you are a liar and that Muhammad is telling the truth, but a liar of the rabiah is better for us than a true prophet of the Mudar, which, of course, is Mohammed's tribe. Of course, the conditions in which the firmest tie was realized and actually took precedence over the other ties have been a core question throughout Muslim history. The first news in the 7th century of the firmest tribe was spread solely by word of mouth, with reliable information and the equivalent of today's. Fake news, often hard to untangle. To make a leap of many centuries in a different context, in the summer of 1789 in the French countryside, rumors spread about vengeful aristocrats bent on the destruction of peasants property. These rumors were absolutely untrue. The great fear is this period is now. Known in France tipped France into revolution with the flurry of fact free gossip and. Today, of course, rumors fly much faster. Word of mouth is buttressed by an array of digital and electronic media, and the search for reliable accounts is more difficult than ever before. The smartphone. I'm just going to show you a smartphone. This is a dumb phone, may level the playing field between the producers and consumers of ideas and practices, but it also makes for short attention spans. If we look at the most profound changes in how ideas get communicated, there's three major drivers that have influenced how ideas move through society and across geographical and linguistic boundaries. The 1st is the greater ease of travel travel can be for the Hajj, as well as visits. To regional shrines for commerce or for labor migration, or from the necessity of war or regional conflict. Pilgrimage and migration for economic purposes. Have equally profound effects, not all of which are intended on the religious imagination. As the late safaris Haq Ansari observed over 2 decades ago, the boundaries between the West and the rest are no longer exclusively territorial. A second driver is mass education, which has meant the spread of literacy enlarged to large numbers of people, women and men throughout the world. I vividly recall traveling in small towns and villages throughout the Arab world in the 1960s in Afh. A small town in southern Iraq, Diwaniya Province in 1968. An afternoon male habit was to sit in a coffee shop where a literate tribal leader read aloud the afternoon newspaper that arrived from Baghdad. I saw similar scenes in Upper Egypt and southern Morocco the same year before. The wide spread of literacy in small towns and rural areas in some regions, even the Arabic spoken word failed to reach many Arabs. If they possessed only their regional dialect now of course the more widespread mastery of formal Arabic allows more people to talk back in public space than was possible in an earlier era. 3rd the new communications media have become increasingly interactive in the past. The proliferation of video cassettes and CDs combined with satellite broadcasting loosened the hold of state of state broadcasters over the imagination. Of large numbers of people. Before Internet and mobile communications were widely available, the proliferation of photocopiers and fax machines allowed competing messages to be readily communicated independently of authorized channels and distributed among networks of like like minded people, cell phones. And especially smartphones combined with the wide array of means of communicating via the Internet. Make the older, top, bottom controlled of messages less effective than it was in an earlier era. In the 1970s, the humble audio cassette, easy to duplicate, concealed and smuggle, facilitated the rise of new and dissident voices beyond the written, printed and photocopied word. Since the advent in the 1990s of the Internet age, communication has become even easier. And over the last 15 years, Platts platforms such as Facebook, introduced in 2004, Twitter 2006 and what's up 2009 have further facilitated the competition over religious and political authority? Religious innovation does not advance through technological change alone. One needs people adept in seizing the opportunity. The technical innovation offers, and the ability to work with others in new and not fully predictable ways to mainstream religious innovation. Mainstreaming involves 4 major skills. First, it requires intellectuals who take charge of developing ideas and using them to persuade large audiences, especially where organized non governmental movements are strongly discouraged or monitored. The second set of skills is the overt public organizing of people and communicating effectively. States, including both open and totalitarian ones, depend on middle class professionals just as successful. Religious and civic movements try to. Sell the ideas and practices of certain ways of putting faith to work in society. There's a country neighboring to here. I'm not going to name it where I know the Chief Police censor. He would go to book fairs to determine which books should be censored in his country. However, he had the books and he had what I called. In my field notes. The censors book club so that his friends, a wide circle of friends, could read the banned books that they would get from him. It's nice to see sensors helping distribute words that are supposed to be banned. Unfortunately, not all sensors. Are intellectuals? 1/3 related skill is working quietly behind the scenes to further an interest or cause where weak forms of civic empowerment are linked to strong forms of structure, such as in some countries where major state sponsored initiatives are underway to use the Islamic studies. Curriculum of primary and secondary schools to create a template for inculcating values of critical thinking, gender parity and religious tolerance. A final skill is that of publicity trumping secrecy. Trump is a good verb in English. It's recently been discouraged in use, but I leave that to the translators to explain publicity can overcome suspicion. It contributes significantly to normalizing new ideas and practices. It also encourages the objectification to maldor of religious ideas and practices, ideas that were primarily implicit become explicit. One result is that certain questions come to be foregrounded in the consciousness of large numbers of believers. Questions such as this, what is my religion? Why is it important to my life and how do my beliefs guide my conduct? Objectification does not mean seeing religion is a uniform or monolithic entity, although for some that's precisely what it is. Or they say it is. These explicit and objective questions are distinctly modern ones, even if some people legitimate their practices by asserting a return to the past, the digital age has profoundly affected the meaning and context of the public sphere and religious belief and practice within it. Just as writing and print created often and unanticipated new forms of community in the past and transformed authority and social boundaries, so has the digital age. Increasingly open and accessible forms of communication make contests over the authoritative use of the symbolic language of Islam. As with other religious beliefs and practices, increasingly global and open, the struggle over people's imaginations now involves both. Heightened competition and contest over both the interpretation of symbols and a struggle over the control of image of the institutions, formal and informal, that produce and sustain them. To conclude, the mainstreaming of Islamic ideas and practices contributes to increasingly public Islam, in which religious scholars self-described religious authorities, non religious intellectuals such as the late Sadiq Jalal Adam of Syria. Sufi orders mothers, students, workers, engineers and many others contribute to civic debate in public. In this public capacity, Islam makes a difference in configuring the politics and social life in large parts of the globe and not just among self-described religious authorities. Thank you very much.
