Syrian thinker Ali Ahmed Saeed (Adonis) diagnoses Islam's ambiguous relationship with violence, which has become the most prominent manifestation in the media of societies and conference symposiums, stressing that Islam today is no longer a feature of "dormant worlds living in a stagnant cultural and social time", but rather a bloc that is liable to explode and refuses to be stereotyped. And unconditional submission to the will of sweeping globalization based on economic integration and the political and cultural hegemony of victorious liberalism since the end of the twentieth century and ecstatic that it has discovered the keys to salvation that lead to a happy end to history as its missionaries claim.
The author of (Islam and Violence) explained that Islam, through the radicalism of some of its followers, has become a security burden on the liberal world and the new projects of hegemony in isolation from the avant-garde cultural face represented by Western cultural elites that revealed, in a critical-deconstructive manner, Western centralism and the will to hegemony that leads it through that. Valid criticism that unveiled cultural relativism.
Adonis believes that the concern of movement Islam is to arrest history, shackle progress, obliterate subjectivity, and eliminate the unknown dimension in oneself and the world. What necessitates the liberation of the world and existence from the domination of the founding text and the emancipation of knowledge from the prior, pointing out that a religious vision based on structural violence cannot be based on modern civil life or respect for human rights, by virtue of the isolation of its official institutions from the values of enlightenment and humanism that were at the basis of the modernity project. The huge one.
Adonis held the monotheism responsible as a historical and cultural institution. Its greatest concern is the elimination of cultural pluralism in the Mediterranean space and the suffocation of the culture of questioning and the adventures of the mind.
He argues that every totalitarian vision carries the germs of tyranny and unilateralism that excludes the different, suppresses heterogeneity, and obliterates pluralism. At that time, a closed totalitarian vision cannot celebrate respect for the other who is culturally different or politically democratic except through a “cultural breach” and a radical criticism of it. He considered the traditional Islamic position, which is based on the final Islamic vision of the world and things, a clear call to violence that poses serious problems for the world today, indicating that understanding the present of Islam needs to be viewed as history, an institution and authority, and the tribal structure and the lust for domination and money with what accompanied that emerged clearly. Among the violent practices, the most prominent of which was the exclusion of the other, the killing of opponents, and the pursuit of different thought. It revolves around the political authority that imposes its own reading of the sacred text in a way that serves it and justifies its orientations and actions.
He went on to say that the origin of Islam was not devoid of historical (genealogy) that linked it to civilizational, economic and political contexts that made it a product of the struggle over tribal influence in the Arabian Peninsula first and the Mediterranean basin later. Trade was an important factor in this, as was the obsession with power central. Islamic monotheism was born as the establishment of monotheism on earth and was, in this way, the establishment of an imperialist world devoid of cultural, intellectual and political pluralism. Monotheism remained an ideology for the emerging empire and a usurpation of the cultural mosaic of the world, adding that the matter is not only related to Islam, but rather to every totalitarian ideological system in which there is no place for the different.
And he asked (the godfather of Arab modernity): Did the violence practiced in the name of Islam today come from the founding texts of this religion, or from the reality that Muslims live in? From the vision that Islam devoted to existence, the world, women and the other? Or from the tragic miserable history that made Muslims victims who seek their salvation in clinging to identity and purifying themselves from the world, stressing that relying on the founding texts of a culture may not help us much in understanding its complex present or understanding its ambiguous relations with the other, as the texts do not produce history and cannot be considered First causes – in the philosophical and metaphysical sense – control the threads of cosmic chaos dominated by violence in the name of religion today, being itself a product of history and deep anthropological structures that determined the destinies of relationships between human beings and the totality of symbols that will constitute the foundational stories of human experience in existence. It is likely that terrorism today is not based on a reference. The Qur’an is isolated from the actual history of Muslims who remained subject to Western persecution and colonialism on the one hand, and victims of the tyranny and corruption of the Arab national state on the other hand.
Presented by: Ali Al-Rubai @Al_ARobai
