By Jörg Friedrichs · Thursday, August 8, 2013 Jörg Friedrichs’s “Global Islamism and World Society” appears in Telos 163 (Summer 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 The piece is an eye-opener on contestation between global Islamism and cosmopolitan world society. It develops a comprehensive understanding of the former as the communitarian mirror image of the latter. Global Islamism and cosmopolitan world society are presented as varieties of globalization. The objective is to understand global Islamism as a political project and to assess its chances of successfully competing against cosmopolitan world society. This is accomplished by a comparative assessment of the degree to which either of them can achieve social integration, which is a prerequisite for the success of any political project. World society thrives on established forms of political and legal integration, and is buttressed by integration via functional subsystems. Global Islamism relies on the expectation of strong communal engagement and the unapologetic exclusion of dissidents and outsiders. It turns out that global Islamism’s bolder discriminatory practices are a two-edged sword because they also lead to internal divisions, and that global Islamism is not stronger than world society with regard to sociability. Insofar as the integration of Muslims into a universal community of believers is even more utopian than the realization of cosmopolitan world society, global Islamism is at a serious competitive disadvantage and thus bound to be frustrated. Until that happens, conflict between global Islamism and world society will continue to pose significant challenges. It is hoped that these challenges may be better managed when both are recognized as rival globalization projects, and when their mutual incompatibilities are acknowledged.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, June 24, 2013 Telos 163 (Summer 2013) is now available for purchase in our store.
Profound change in society may involve shifting control of political power, the character of economic systems, or access to resources, but it can also have to do with the structures of meaning we bundle together in various understandings of culture. This issue of Telos looks at the explosive forces located specifically in the intangible dimensions of culture and how they may play out in revolutionary or counter-revolutionary processes.
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By Mohammad Rafi · Friday, April 19, 2013 The following paper was presented at the Seventh Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–17, 2013, in New York City.
 German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), constitutes one of the most important contributions to philosophy of the last century. Beyond having a defining influence on numerous fields of study within philosophy that include but are not limited to existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, Heidegger has often been viewed as “the most creative religious writer of the twentieth century” (Ireton, 243). It should thus not be surprising that his ideas were widely received and regarded by Iranian intellectuals and students before (and after) the Iranian Revolution of 1979. One of the main seeds of Heideggerian thought that blossomed particularly well in the Iranian context was his notion of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Used by Heidegger to draw ontological distinctions, authenticity inspired a politicized discourse—among its Iranian readers—on a return to an “authentic” self. The authenticity of the Iranian return to the self firmly grounded on a separation from imposed Western ideals. A tendency among Iranians toward the study of existentialism[1] in addition to Heidegger’s poignant critique of a decadent West cloaked in religious terminology made him an excellent partner to a group of Iranian intellectuals unsatisfied with a despotic monarch perceived to be antagonistic to Islam.
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By Adrian Pabst · Tuesday, February 12, 2013 Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation was certainly sudden but not altogether unexpected. During the pontificate of his predecessor, the then Cardinal Ratzinger seems to have advised the long-suffering Pope John Paul II to renounce the Petrine office. Crucially, in mid-2010 Benedict gave a strong indication that he was considering abdicating. On April 29, 2009, he left his pallium—the sign of Episcopal authority—on the tomb of Pope Celestine V in the Basilica Santa Maria di Collemaggio, in L’Aquila. In the same location Celestine had been crowned pontiff on August 29, 1294—an event that is commemorated as the festival of Perdonanza Celestinana in the earthquake-stricken city every August 28–29. It is unlikely that Benedict’s highly symbolic gesture was a random act. Clearly he felt a deep spiritual connection with the studious monk-pope Celestine, who abdicated in 1295.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, September 6, 2006 The process by which the Nazis rapidly removed potential regime opponents from the universities and the civil service came to be known as Gleichschaltung. Sometimes translated as “coordination,” the term is much harsher: all concerned are made the same, arranged in a single order, forced into uniformity. All that is different is made identical, and that which is non-identical is eradicated
The Associate Press now reports that Iranian President Ahmadinejad has called for a purge of secular and liberal faculty from the universities. In fact, precisely such a purge of liberals and leftists took place in the wake of the Islamic Revolution of 1979—which makes it even more curious that parts of the western left somehow still look to Iran as a positive anti-imperialist force—but some reformist elements have later reemerged. The current call for renewed attacks on intellectuals indicates an effort to amplify the regime’s extremist position. It surely shatters any hope that the recent release from prison of critical intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo (discussed here on August 31) would initiate a liberalization.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, September 5, 2006 Despite the approaching mid-term elections and the criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct of foreign policy, the left—domestically and internationally—has had a hard time in articulating an alternative positive vision. “Not Bush” only gets you so far: sooner or later a substantive alternative is needed to give opposition credibility. Facing turmoil (to say the least) in the Arab and Islamic world, what foreign policy would be preferable? Evidence demonstrates that neither “UN” nor “EU” is a believable response. But the problem is deeper than the pragmatics of current diplomacy.
The left (and liberal) imagination would prefer to cast the confrontation with Islamic extremism or, yes, Islamic fascism, as a matter of imperialism and “anti-imperialism.” The terminology constitutes a treasured legacy of the left, not only from Lenin’s account of imperialism and capitalism (which then permitted him and his successors to mask Soviet Russian expansionism as somehow “anti-imperialist”) but also from a more honorable resistance in the US and Europe to imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century.
In the meantime, anti-imperialism is today’s last hurrah of the traditional left. Having given up nearly all of its other principles, especially in the phase of multiculturalism and post-modernism, it drapes itself in the anti-imperialist flag as a way to remember its glory days. Hence the grotesque sight of the (extreme) left celebrating the reactionary forces of Hezbollah (ask about the role of women or the status of free unions).
The problem however is that the theory of anti-imperialism—probably insufficient already a century ago—is simply irrelevant today. Exactly which natural resources are being fought for in Afghanistan, that fabled land of plenty? Which advanced capitalist company really needs to export its “surplus capital” to the Sunni triangle? And which is the national liberation movement that leads Sunni to kill Shi’a in Pakistan?
None of these conceptualizations of empire and anti-imperialism is adequate to the current situation, which is very explicitly being driven by something else: either an ideological-religious fanaticism or, on a deeper cultural level, a desire for death. Let us consider the account most recently televised by our compatriot and now Al-Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn, otherwise known affectionately as “Azzam the American.” Gadahn, who has been sought by the FBI for several years aired an address on tajed.net on September 2. In it he articulates aspects of the Islamic-fascist critique of the West and, as has been widely reported, called for conversion to Islam. . . .
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