الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

That word nowadays is used only in a sociological sense. It covers the mass of productions – cinematographical, musical, theatrical, literary, etc. – that fills what is set apart as ‘leisure time’. There is very little conception of value here (value for ‘what’ – the ‘what’ is not on the map), or even of taste. Anything that can get on to the stage, so long as it’s saleable, is considered valid. The result is that the odd good thing is lost in a heterogeneous mass of triviality, and that culture, as such, has no significance whatever in the general scheme of things : culture as paideia has no existence. So, to radicalize: At the individual level, culture implies a conception of human being, a working at the self as temporary manifestation of human being, and a mental horizon of maximal potentiality. With luck, depending on the variability of history, one can be born into a context that has all these things in place and that favours such full individual development. With less luck, one may have to gather in the elements and itineraries of such a complete context oneself. I’m speaking of luck, but the question is debatable. Since even the best cultural contexts can run down into conventionality and custom, there may be a distinct advantage in having to gather in substance and cartography for oneself. It could be also that such a potentially common field configurated by an individual (a universal, individual, not restricted to ‘person’) may be found more inspiring, more enlivening to others than an established tradition. In the preceding section of this extravagant essay, I evoked a Mediterranean context, maybe the last and most subtle signs of it. When, in the second half of the twentieth century, Fernand Braudel composed his massive study of the Mediterranean, it was largely out of nostalgia for a closed, identifiable, definitely contoured context. But, as Braudel himself well realised, since the sixteenth century, the world has been Atlantic,

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