الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Pathways to an Open World

arrive at a sense, an idea, of the universal via the sensitive and the singular. There was talk of a ‘dawn of being’, of ‘a single voice’ uniting rock and sky, of a paradisal paradigm on earth. Attempts, as I said, were made to put it down. But it runs like a silver stream of fine mental energy through the culture of Provence, and up into the works of, for example, Nietzsche and Rilke. What I have long had in mind is the setting up of something of this nature, with a similar kind of dynamic and radiance, in the considerably expanded context of today. 4. A Real Postmodern Project The word ‘postmodern’ has been used in so many futile ways, to cover so much production I consider totally insignificant, that it may seem ill- advised to use it in the kind of context I’m working at, the kind of space we’re trying to open. I employ it because, despite that ill-usage, it still seems to me a useful, at least transitional term. It was first used by Arnold Toynbee, at the end of his multi-volume Study of History , to designate the difficult area in which ‘navigators on the face of the waters of History’ would have to pilot their vessel before ‘making their way into more open waters beyond’. Having stated the difficulty, Toynbee himself had nothing much to offer. In place of anything like a project, he presents at most a palliative : a kind of Franciscan religiosity. I see very little advance on this in the various types of holistic mix that emerged from symposia such as those of Cordoba and Tsukuba, and which have been pushed forward since in various forms by those I think of as the ‘neo-prophets’, with, at their back, a whole host of publications inspired more or less by ‘New Age’ ideology. This holistic mix I’m referring to

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