What would it mean to imagine Islam as an immanent critique of the West? Sayyid Ahmad Khan lived in a time of great tribulation for Muslim India under British rule. By examining Khan's work as a critical expression of modernity rooted in the Muslim experience of it, Islam as Critique argues that Khan is essential to understanding the problematics of modern Islam and its relationship to the West. The book re-imagines Islam as an interpretive strategy for investigating the modern condition, and as an engaged alternative to mainstream Western thought. Using the life and work of nineteenth-century Indian Muslim polymath Khan (1817-1898), it identifies Muslims as a viable resource for both critical intervention in important ethical debates of our times and as legitimate participants in humanistic discourses that underpin a just global order. Islam as Critique locates Khan within a broader strain in modern Islamic thought that is neither a rejection of the West, nor a wholesale acceptance of it. The author calls this “Critical Islam”. By bringing Khan's critical engagement with modernity into conversation with similar critical analyses of the modern by Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre, the author shows how Islam can be read as critique.

This book presents a nuanced narrative on Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s (1817–1898) life and his invaluable contribution to the democratic consciousness in India. Based on extensive archival research and a close study of his writings, speeches, and addresses, it explores the life and works of Sir Syed in the broader context of socio-political debates in nineteenth-century India. A seminal figure who shaped modern India, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan is known as the pioneer of modern education among the Muslims in India. Reconciling faith with demonstrable truths, he contributed immensely as a member of the several apex bodies such as Vice-Regal Legislative Council, Royal Public Service Commission, Royal Education Commission, and Legislative Council of North West Provinces. The volume also explores the reformer’s views on issues like colonial law and administration, the concept of blasphemy, conversion, female education, religious beliefs, freedom of press, emancipation of women, Hindu–Muslim unity, Urdu–Hindi controversy, and reservation for Muslims. Thoughtfully and incisively written, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern India, Indian political thought, political philosophy, education, political science, colonial history, Islamic Studies, religious studies, Islamic law, biography, and South Asian studies.

In Sufism East and West, the contributors investigate the redirection and dynamics of Sufism in the modern era, specifically from the perspective of global cross-cultural exchange. Edited by Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh, the book explores the role of mystical Islam in the complex interchange and fluidity in the resonance spaces of “East” and “West.” The volume challenges the enduring Orientalist binary coding of East-versus-West and argues instead for a more mutual process of cultural plaiting and shared tradition. By highlighting amendments, adaptations and expansions of Sufi semantics during the last centuries, it also questions the persistent perception of Sufism in its post-classical epoch as a corrupt imitation of the legacy of the great Sufis of the past.

This volume examines Sayyid Ahmad Khan's life, his contribution, and legacy in the context of current times. The editors engage his writings, ideas, and activities to read and present his work critically, not as a biographical account of his life but approach his work keeping in mind the tumultuous political events and changes of the nineteenth century, after the failed revolt of 1857 when Indians were transformed into colonial subjects. The collective anxieties of the Indian communities, particularly the Muslims, cried out for a new local leadership; Sayyid Ahmad Khan rose up to this occasion etching the way forward for Indians, in general, and Muslims in particular. Sayyid Ahmad Khan's multifaceted work offers an important understanding for national thinking emerging from the location of the Muslim, but it is not a 'minority' voice with vested political interests rather a constructive and integrative voice of relevance even today for addressing difficult problems.

Modernism and Morality discusses the relationship between artistic and moral ideas in European and American literary modernism. Rather than reading modernism as a complete rejection of social morality, this study shows how early twentieth-century writers like Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, Kafka, Mann and Stein actually devised new aesthetic techniques to address ethical problems. By focusing on a range of decadent, naturalist, avant-garde and expatriate writers between 1890 and the late 1930s this book reassesses the moral trajectory of transatlantic fiction.

"This book reconsiders the relationship between aesthetics and theological ethics. The primary question it seeks to answer is whether artistic creativity is a morally relevant activity. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Aquinas, Choi argues that the arts are the cultural medium through which we can better understand what is morally possible, and that aesthetic objects can serve as snapshots of a particular community's perspectives on the good life. Art, in other words, offers glimpses not only into competing moral visions within society but also the extent to which these contested moral views are understood. The arts, in Choi's view, provide a way of assessing the limits and possibilities of moral reasoning, the contextuality of moral discernment, and the need for moral thinking that is dialogical and dialectical"--

The book proposes a set of original contributions in research areas shared by planning theory, architectural research, design and ethical inquiry. The contributors gathered in 2010 at the Ethics of the Built Environment seminar organized by the editors at Delft University of Technology. Both prominent and emerging scholars presented their researches in the areas of aesthetics, technological risks, planning theory and architecture. The scope of the seminar was highlighting shared lines of ethical inquiry among the themes discussed, in order to identify perspectives of innovative interdisciplinary research. After the seminar all seminar participants have elaborated their proposed contributions. Some of the most prominent international authors in the field were subsequently invited to join in with this inquiry. Claudia Basta teaches "Network Infrastructures and Mobility" at Wageningen University. Between 2009 and 2011 she worked as Coordinator of the 3TU Centre of Excellence for Ethics and Technology of Delft University, where she completed her post-doc research on the shared areas of investigation between risk theories, planning theories and ethical inquiry. Her main research interests concern the matter of assessing and governing technological risks in relation to sustainable land use planning. She wrote a number of journal articles and contributions to collective books on these themes. Stefano Moroni teaches “Land use ethics and the law” at Milan Politecnico. His main research interests concern planning theory and ethics. He is the author of a number of books and journal articles. Recent publications (as co-author): Contractual Communities in the Self-Organizing City (Springer 2012).

Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. In addition to making the case for a transnational model of modernism, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its incorporation of vernacular and folkways, and its engagement with embodied experience and intimacy offer not only an expanded account of modernist texts and commitments but a new way of thinking about what modernism is and can do.

Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism's unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.