Naipauls Among the Believers and Beyond Belief
In October 2001, Sir Vidia Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.339 Nalpaul speaks with a unique voice, whether it be in his fiction or his travelogues. He once observed that 'I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading'.340 Jason Cowley assessed his work as follows His books are haunted by solitude and disciplined by a need to understand the anxieties of the decolonised world. Long ago, dissatisfied with the limitations of fiction, Naipaul liberated...
Semiotics and Eco Sign
Professor Umberto Eco born in 1932 , Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, is the primary architect and high priest of semiotics in contemporary times.413 He has a huge intellectual range. His novels - The Name of the Rose,414 Foucault's Pendulum,415 The Island of the Day Before,416 Baudolino417 - have become as popular on airport bookstalls as his more serious philosophical works on semiotics have in the intellectual atmosphere of the academy. His essays and pieces of collected...
Reading the Phenomena of Christianity
Phenomenology may loosely, but lucidly, be described as the unadorned 'science of the Object'. We noted, earlier, useful definitions of the term as 'science of appearances or appearings', 'a theory of intentionality' and 'the study of phenomena in the sense of the ways in which things appear to us in different forms of conscious experience'.218 We noted Heidegger's view that phenomenology was the gateway to ontology, and that the latter was only possible because of the former.219 We surveyed,...
Islam Sources of Authority and Right Doctrines
We stressed earlier that obedience to God's authority and man's lawful, God-given authority are fundamental leitmotivs in both Islam and Christianity. For the Muslim, the text of the Qur'an is the divine fons et origo of doctrine suppemented by that part of the hadith literature which is deemed to be wholly reliable. The sacred text of the Qur'an is considered to be utterly incomparable and cannot be duplicated.281 The text, and the God from whom it emanates not in a Neoplatonic sense are...
Mircea Eliade the Sacred and Islam
Mircea Eliade was certainly aware of the religious and political significance of the founder-Prophet of Islam, Muhammad c. 570-632 . Indeed, the subtitle of the third volume of his A History of Religious Ideas is From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms. It is in this work that he provides one of the closest and most extensive insights into his thinking about Islam and the sacred.506 His sources are varied but, by the date of publication in i9 5, already somewhat dated. They range from A. J....
Gilsenans Recognizing Islam
Gilsenan's classic and immensely readable Recognizing Islam was the product of much 'material drawn from personal experience of Islam' and an attempt 'to recreate the surprise of the moment when my work really began, that moment when realization collided with illusion in South Arabia'.25 His themes range classically and widely from 'the formation and transformation of power and authority within Muslim societies' through an assessment of the 'ulama' to 'the sense of a world turned inside Many of...
Eickelmans Moroccan Islam
Eickelman's volume also now ranks as a major modern classic of Islamic anthropology. It has been much admired. The Times Literary Supplement described the work as 'a very thoroughly researched, sensitively interpreted, elegantly and readably presented case study'.306 It was the product of fieldwork undertaken in the Moroccan pilgrimage centre of Boujad and its surrounding areas from October 196 to June 1970.307 As a study of 'popular' or 'folk' Islam, it focuses in particular on the North...