الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

I’ll simply round out these brief notes by submitting that, on the basis of geopoetics, we might be able to move from (blind, ruthless) Progress to (lucid, careful) Progradation and from Profit to Provision for quality of life. We might in fact be able to move into a new world very different from that New World, written with Capital(ist) letters that is, more and more obviously, only its caricature. 5. Open Conclusion In one of his essays, Plutarch evokes seven sages of antiquity who, in dark and troubled times, were steadfast bearers of the paideia (high ethical, intellectual, poetic culture). In the fourth century, the Latin poet of Bordeaux, Ausonius, picked up the idea in a long poem, Ludus septem sapientium . Parallel to this tradition, there’s a legend running through the Greco-Roman context, the Muslim context and the Christian context, that of the ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’. If the original place of claustration was Ephesus, the number of places dedicated to the Seven Sleepers – caves, crypts, oratories – was going to increase, to the extent that they can be found all over the Old World : in Cappadocia, in Jordan, in Kurdistan, in Algeria, in Tunisia, at Louvain in Belgium, at Falaise in Normandy, at Marseilles – there’s one only a few miles from where I live in Brittany. Interpretations have been various. At surface level, one can see in this story the attempt by various regimes, political and religious, to wall-up live thought, put it out of the way, underground (practically all the figures I evoke in this essay met up with something of this kind). But one can see in it also a willed undergrounding, for the undertaking of a long-term meditation – a long-term mental navigation : the seven sleepers came in fact to be represented as on a boat (which is why the ships of the Turkish fleet were dedicated to them).

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