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ISBN: 9780415445788
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Price: $7.76 / Rs652.00
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Paperdback
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MUHAMMAD IQBAL
Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism
by Javed Majeed
Publication Date: 2009
Extent: 162 pages
The Book:
Illustrating how Muhammad lqbal's notion of an Islamicised selfhood is expressed through the interplay between poetic tradition and creative innovation in his verse, this book examines the aesthetics of self-hood and selflessness in his poetry - Urdu and Persian. It argues that lqbal defined an Islamic postcolonial agency against both Western colonialism and significant notions of self in Islamic mysticism. Iqbal's political aesthetic stages a complex set of relationships between the modern 'West' and a reconstructed Islam. This is particularly evident in the cosmopolitan and eclectic style of his works of prose such as The Development of Metaphysics in Persia (1908) and The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1934) in which the boundaries between Islam and the West become porous. These flexible boundaries are even more evident in his recasting of Islamic Hellenism. Offering an insight into how Iqbal expresses an Islamist geopolitical imagination in his work through the mutually reinforcing tensions between pan-Islam and Indian Muslim separatism, the book evaluates how that imagination was defined against the geopolitics and racial thinking of Western colonialism.
The Author:
Javed Majeed is Professor of Postcolonial Studies, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. He was Smuts Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge from 1989 to 1992, and Lecturer in Urdu and Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 1992 to 1999. His previous publications include Autobiography, Travel and Post national Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and lqbal (2007); Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India (1992); and the co-authored volume Hali's Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam (1997). He has also published a range of articles and essays on British India, Urdu literature, and colonial/postcolonial literature in English.
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