| Fundamentalist and Religious life in the West
By Shokat 07/12/2005 At 10:28 To capture the complexity of the relationships among legal orders and semi-autonomous legal fields, Religion introduces the concept of 'interlegality'. Using cartographic metaphors, gives an ebullient account of a view in a passage quoted at the start of this essay: "...not the legal pluralism of traditional legal anthropology, in wich the different legal orders are conceived as separate entities coexisting in the same political space, but rather, the conception of different legal spaces superimposed, interpenetrated, and mixed in our minds, as much as in our actions, either on occasions of qualitative leaps or sweeping crises in our life trajectories, or in the dull routine of eventless everyday life."
By inducing believers to identify with an abstract, deterritorialised and homogeneous egalitarian community of believers fundmentalism provides an alternative group identity that does not impinge upon the individual life of the believer, precisely because such a community is imagined and has no real social basis. The individual can take part in a little-valued but real social life among non-believers. Restricting religion to an imagined space allows one to live de facto in a secular world (that is, the real Western World, on wich the believer has little leverage).
But the negative side is that non-believers societies are also full of haram things. Avoidance is a prerequisite for maintaining a true religious life. Fundamentalist reject both assimilation and integration. In many instances conservative believers and the Right-Wing are on the same side; calling for an end to compulsory coeducation, rejecting anything that could even come close to being a'free will marriage'.Of course there may be some request by fundamentalist that seem (and are) unacceptable, all of them revolving around women's rights. In any case of the gender debate, as some have seen, it is the West that defines the space of the debate. Often debates on Islam are no more than debates on the meaning of the West. The debate occurs within a single 'cultural' framework: that of the West. Many fundamentalist are aware of this and try to prevent any debate and interaction, putting the sharia forward as the real dividing line, with the consequence that they can live not in the West but in a ghetto. The quest for a strict application of the pejorative territories aims to re-create an absolute otherness that has no possible concrete application on a social basis. Even if strict fundamentalist reject integration into Western societies, the bulk of conservative believers are eager to integrate but want to push for right-wing values that they can share with other citizens, whatever their faith. It is a pathological global consequence to spillover an alternative critic on these Western solidarity groups in a conflict trading hood....
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 Email:: shokat.saleem@lycos.com
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Fascism sees the salvation in giving [the]masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. -
That the last months indeed had a particular structure of feeling will be selfevident to anyone who lived through them - a structure that set certain limits on experience, action, and modes of inquiry. Participants and critics at the time observed that what seemed to matter more than developing a vision of the future, effective forms of action, political strategy, theoretical coherence, or even a majoritarian politics, was the ur-moment of political and cultural expression. "This was a mood, militating against academic pomposity or theoretical prolixity; regarding detached analysis with skepticism, preferring participation and experiental recollection; trusting the spontaneous and expressive as against the calculated and measured."
The last months were a time, not for 'reflection,'but for'evocation.'I use expressivism to describe the sea change in Indian/Pakistan civilization at the end of the application maps of boulder...
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Differneces are born when reason is not fully awake or falls asleep again; this was the unspoken credo wich lent credibiliy to the unclouded trust that post-Enlightment liberals vested in the human individual's capacity for immaculate conception. We, the humans, are endowed with everything that everybody needs to select the right path which, once selected, would prove to be the same to us all. Different choices are the sediment of history blunders - the outcome of a brain damage variously called prejudice, superstition or false consciousness. Unlike the eindeutig verdicts of reason wich is the property of each single human being, the differences in judgement have collective origins; schizophrenic acculminated love mirrors...
That credo was forced into the open only by liberalism's critics. There was no shortage of them, charging the liberal interpretation of the Enlightment's legacy with either getting things wrong or making them wrong. The Indian/Pakistan contemporary communitarians say much the same, only using different terms; it is not the 'disembedded'and 'unencumbered' individual, but a language user and a schooled/socialized person who 'self-asserts' and 'self-constructs', The vision should not be clear but imagined in self-contained communities of solidarity groups on inspiring latterment.
The Individual is Free !
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Fundamentalist use Western categories in their quest for an objective Muslim community and could Islamise such categories by returning to traditional Muslim concepts such as the millet.
The convergence between the traditional Islamic concept of millet and the Western definition of a minority group is facilitated because the derogatory status of the non-Muslim millet has been largely abolished by modern Middle Eastern states and India/Pakistan.
Muslims, Hindus and Christians do not view one another as inferior and are ruled by their own personal status. Each tayfa (the present term for millet)has its own court. In this sense Western concepts of multiculturalism and minority rights groups are called upon to promote a legal status for a Muslim community in the West, by stressing either the ethnic or the religious basis for such a community.
In fact ethnicisation of religious identity is not just keeping a by-product of Muslim immigration to the West, or simply a phenomenon to be found only among Muslims. A typical case is that of the Pakistani Mohajir, meaning the Muslims who performed hijra from India to Pakistan after 1947. They came from diverse ethnic backgrounds, used Urdu as their lingua franca, but might speak different languages. -
Indeed the opportunity for so many Muslim ethnicities to remove together, undivided by silly nationalist agendas, has after a long time reproduced in ghetto-microcosm a truly global Ummah. Now if this truly global Ummah can articulate a vision Of Islam free from cultural artifacts, then I can begin to see a true turn toward an co-Islamic identity.
Ummah means a community built around certain values. For example, the founders of this country left colonialism and came here with certain values. They did not find room to implement those values in a post-colonial map, so they decided to find another place. They came here with their values to build this country. This is an Ummah, and not a nation, because nation is built around a piece of postwar land, and not values...I differentiate the fundamentalist failure in Western enviroments acculturaion with racist/fascist dogmas in an apprehend to some capital Refugees !
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