The Impossible State

Author : Wael B. Hallaq
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231530862
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Impossible State written by Wael B. Hallaq and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the "Islamic state," judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernity's moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations. The modern state not only suffers from serious legal, political, and constitutional issues, Hallaq argues, but also, by its very nature, fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim. By Islamic standards, the state's technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance, and today's Islamic state, as Hallaq shows, has done little to advance an acceptable form of genuine Shari'a governance. The Islamists' constitutional battles in Egypt and Pakistan, the Islamic legal and political failures of the Iranian Revolution, and similar disappointments underscore this fact. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the ulama (Muslim clergymen). Providing Muslims with a path toward realizing the good life, Hallaq turns to the rich moral resources of Islamic history. Along the way, he proves political and other "crises of Islam" are not unique to the Islamic world nor to the Muslim religion. These crises are integral to the modern condition of both East and West, and by acknowledging these parallels, Muslims can engage more productively with their Western counterparts.

Author : Victor Cha
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062906445
Total Pages : 479 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Impossible State written by Victor Cha and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Impossible State, seasoned international-policy expert and lauded scholar Victor Cha pulls back the curtain on provocative, isolationist North Korea, providing our best look yet at its history and the rise of the Kim family dynasty and the obsessive personality cult that empowers them. Cha illuminates the repressive regime’s complex economy and culture, its appalling record of human rights abuses, and its belligerent relationship with the United States, and analyzes the regime’s major security issues—from the seemingly endless war with its southern neighbor to its frightening nuclear ambitions—all in light of the destabilizing effects of Kim Jong-il’s death and the transition of power to his unpredictable heir. Ultimately, this engagingly written, authoritative, and highly accessible history warns of a regime that might be closer to its end than many might think—a political collapse for which America and its allies may be woefully unprepared.

Author : Wael B. Hallaq
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231547382
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Restating Orientalism written by Wael B. Hallaq and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Edward Said’s foundational work, Orientalism has been singled out for critique as the quintessential example of Western intellectuals’ collaboration with oppression. Controversies over the imbrications of knowledge and power and the complicity of Orientalism in the larger project of colonialism have been waged among generations of scholars. But has Orientalism come to stand in for all of the sins of European modernity, at the cost of neglecting the complicity of the rest of the academic disciplines? In this landmark theoretical investigation, Wael B. Hallaq reevaluates and deepens the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project. Refusing to isolate or scapegoat Orientalism, Restating Orientalism extends the critique to other fields, from law, philosophy, and scientific inquiry to core ideas of academic thought such as sovereignty and the self. Hallaq traces their involvement in colonialism, mass annihilation, and systematic destruction of the natural world, interrogating and historicizing the set of causes that permitted modernity to wed knowledge to power. Restating Orientalism offers a bold rethinking of the theory of the author, the concept of sovereignty, and the place of the secular Western self in the modern project, reopening the problem of power and knowledge to an ethical critique and ultimately theorizing an exit from modernity’s predicaments. A remarkably ambitious attempt to overturn the foundations of a wide range of academic disciplines while also drawing on the best they have to offer, Restating Orientalism exposes the depth of academia’s lethal complicity in modern forms of capitalism, colonialism, and hegemonic power.

Author : Wael B. Hallaq
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231550553
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reforming Modernity written by Wael B. Hallaq and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reforming Modernity is a sweeping intellectual history and philosophical reflection built around the work of the Morocco-based philosopher Abdurrahman Taha, one of the most significant philosophers in the Islamic world since the colonial era. Wael B. Hallaq contends that Taha is at the forefront of forging a new, non-Western-centric philosophical tradition. He explores how Taha’s philosophical project sheds light on recent intellectual currents in the Islamic world and puts forth a formidable critique of Western and Islamic modernities. Hallaq argues that Taha’s project departs from—but leaves behind—the epistemological grounds in which most modern Muslim intellectuals have anchored their programs. Taha systematically rejects the modes of thought that have dominated the Muslim intellectual scene since the beginning of the twentieth century—nationalism, Marxism, secularism, political Islamism, and liberalism. Instead, he provides alternative ways of thinking, forcefully and virtuosically developing an ethical system with a view toward reforming existing modernities. Hallaq analyzes the ethical thread that runs throughout Taha’s oeuvre, illuminating how Taha weaves it into a discursive engagement with the central questions that plague modernity in both the West and the Muslim world. The first introduction to Taha’s ethical philosophy for Western audiences, Reforming Modernity presents his complex thought in an accessible way while engaging with it critically. Hallaq’s conversation with Taha’s work both proffers a cogent critique of modernity and points toward answers for its endemic and seemingly insoluble problems.

Author : al-Haj Saleh
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1787380513
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Impossible Revolution written by al-Haj Saleh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a leftist dissident who spent sixteen years as a political prisoner and now lives in exile. He describes with precision and fervour the events that led to Syria’s 2011 uprising, the metamorphosis of the popular revolution into a regional war, and the ‘three monsters’ Saleh sees ‘treading on Syria’s corpse’: the Assad regime and its allies, ISIS and other jihadists, and Russia and the US. Where conventional wisdom has it that Assad’s army is now battling religious fanatics for control of the country, Saleh argues that the emancipatory, democratic mass movement that ignited the revolution still exists, though it is beset on all sides. The Impossible Revolution is a powerful, compelling critique of Syria’s catastrophic war, which has profoundly reshaped the lives of millions of Syrians.

Author : Mae M. Ngai
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400850231
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Impossible Subjects written by Mae M. Ngai and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-27 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Author : Wael B. Hallaq
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023116257X
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Impossible State written by Wael B. Hallaq and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the ÒIslamic state,Ó judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernityÕs moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations. The modern state not only suffers from serious legal, political, and constitutional issues, Hallaq argues, but also, by its very nature, fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim. By Islamic standards, the stateÕs technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance, and todayÕs Islamic state, as Hallaq shows, has done little to advance an acceptable form of genuine ShariÕa governance. The IslamistsÕ constitutional battles in Egypt and Pakistan, the Islamic legal and political failures of the Iranian Revolution, and similar disappointments underscore this fact. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the ulama (Muslim clergymen). Providing Muslims with a path toward realizing the good life, Hallaq turns to the rich moral resources of Islamic history. Along the way, he proves political and other Òcrises of IslamÓ are not unique to the Islamic world nor to the Muslim religion. These crises are integral to the modern condition of both East and West, and by acknowledging these parallels, Muslims can engage more productively with their Western counterparts.

Author : Victor D. Cha
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 184792235X
Total Pages : 548 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Impossible State written by Victor D. Cha and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much discussed and often maligned, precious little is known or understood about North Korea, the world's most controversial and isolated country. Victor Cha pulls back the curtain, providing an unprecedented insight into North Korea's history, the rise of the Kim family dynasty, and the obsessive personality cult that surrounds them.

Author : Jana Evans Braziel
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000636119
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Street Art and Activism in the Greater Caribbean written by Jana Evans Braziel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foregrounding street art in the capital cities of Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, this book argues that Antillean street artists diagnose the “impossible state” of the arrested present (colonized, occupied, or under dictatorship) while simultaneously imagining liberated futures and fully sovereign states. Jana Evans Braziel launches a comparative study of art, politics, history, urban street cultures, engaged citizenships, and social transformations in three Antillean capital cities—Havana, Cuba; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and San Juan, Puerto Rico—of the Greater Caribbean. The book includes a photo documentary archive of street art, murals, and installations by key muralists in these cities: Yulier Rodriguez Pérez, "Jerry" Rosembert Moïse, and Colectivo Moriviví (Chachi González Colón, Raysa Rodríguez García, and Salomé Cortés). Braziel offers art historical and geopolitical analyses of the urban street art in their cities of production, underscoring street art as political, economic, and environmental engagements (and not as exclusively aesthetic ones) with urban space and street life. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Caribbean studies, Latin American studies, and urban studies.

Author : Lee Walters
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191021342
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability written by Lee Walters and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability brings together fifteen original essays by experts in philosophy and linguistics. These specially written chapters draw on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at the University of Oxford. The contributors to this volume focus on the key topics to which Edgington has made many important contributions, including conditionals, vagueness, the paradox of knowability, and probability. Their insights will be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and psychologists working in philosophical logic, natural language semantics, and reasoning.