Critical-Progressive Muslims: On Islamic hermeneutics, Gender and Interreligious Dialogue

  The excerpt below is taken from a recently published academic chapter  - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-99-3862-9_13 Introduction: Jihad as an Obstacle to Interfaith Understanding and Practice     Probably one of the most contentious ideas, with a long and controversial historical pedigree, is the doctrine of jihad . It is considered a major threat to international order by the global north and a civilizational threat to western-liberal democracies (Cook, 2005 ; Egerton, 2011 ; Kepel, 2009 ;Li, 2020 ; Polk, 2018 ; Turner, 2014 ). Moreover, the term jihad has been used as one of the constellations of concepts that are emblematic of the threat (some) Muslims residing in the West are considered to pose to the liberal-democratic order of western societies (Egerton, 2011 ; Kepel, 2017 ; Tibi, 2014 ). As noted by Afsaruddin ( 2022 ), the term jihad , especially since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has become ubiquitous in non-academic mass media and...

 The below is the summary of some of the main arguments in the book Theory of perception     The theory of perception in process thought posits that perception is inherently perspectival, suggesting that our experience of the world is mediated through subjective participation and personal valuation. However, it contends that there exists a possibility of apprehending the world in its objective state, independent of subjective perspectives and evaluations (p. 90).       Epistemologically, this theory asserts that knowledge originates from experiential engagement rather than abstract ideation (p. 91). It underscores the primacy of direct encounters and interactions with the world as the foundation of understanding, prioritizing experiential immediacy over conceptual constructs.       Perception is characterized as possessing imaginative and creative dimensions, implying that it entails acts of interpretation (p. 93). It posits that our perc...