الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Pathways to an Open World

This term, ‘intellectual nomad’, I found in Spengler’s Decline of the West , but I immediately gave it more scope than Spengler envisaged. In Spengler, the intellectual nomad is a rather furtive character, wandering in the backstreets of the modern city, moving between nihilism and nirvana. I wanted to give him more space, more energy, and more light. If I could look back to those figures of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century — Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Fénelon – that Paul Hazard, in his study of 1935, The Crisis of European Conscience , called ‘heroes of the mind’, I wanted also to move out beyond the kind of repetitive criticism that the sensation and notion of crisis can so often degenerate into. As ‘intellectual nomads’ of the type I envisaged, not only enlightened, but spatial and energetic, I thought rather of the wanderer Nietzsche and the erratic Rimbaud. Intellectual nomadism meant moving, not only from country to country, but from culture to culture. Every culture is partial – developing some aspects, neglecting others. Intellectual nomadizing from one culture to another is necessary if one is to arrive at the notion of something that can be called a complete culture. What I had in mind also was a complete work : an œuvre , an opus . By ‘complete work’, I meant more than just a production line of books, content to take their place among other products coming off the conveyor-belt and subject to increasingly reductive market pressures. I meant the opening of a field, which would be expressed via essay, prose books of errancy and residence, and poem. The essays would provide a cartography. The prose books would present itineraries and places within that general mapping. And the poems would render the more exact and concentrated moments of the movement. Engaged in this travelling (physical and mental), in this work, the intellectual nomad has little inclination, or time, for platform performances, socio-intellectual debates, or oecumenical gatherings. As an intellectual, he is nomadic, not socio-political – he does not belong to the intelligenzia. He

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