الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

We are far from the situation in which, within a small city-state, twenty- five centuries ago, a politician, Pericles ; an architect, Phidias ; and a poet, Sophocles, could meet on the heights of Atlas with the idea of giving a radiant form to the city, making it ‘the school of Greece’– a project demanding, certainly, politics, but, back of the politics, a paideia , a whole system of poetic and philosophical education. Nonetheless, it’s with something like this in mind that, as I understand the project, we are gathered here in Qatar, and it’s with the idea of going back beyond the merely political situations into the possibility of a re- grounding that I have conceived my contribution. Maybe, before going into East-West ground, I should present briefly, from the perspetives opened at this meeting, my own background. 1. Out of the West I was born and educated in a country, Scotland, that provided the first in-depth study and analysis of the modern amorphous, confused and conflict-ridden situation. I’m referring to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations . Because of this study of liberal capitalism, Smith has come to be known as ‘the founder of modern economy’. But Smith’s purpose in that book was analytical, not promotional. In other texts, written during his occupancy of the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, Smith made his thinking concerning the new situation clear : the minds of men would be ‘contracted and rendered incapable of elevation’, education would be ‘despised or at least neglected’, and heroic spirit would be ‘almost utterly extinguished’. Given this background and this perspectival awareness, I might have turned into a sceptic or a cynic (both of these attitudes can imply stimulating astringencies). Instead, I turned into an intellectual nomad.

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