Orientalism, Occidentalism and Discourse of Modernity and Tradition

The book probes into contemporary Arab-Islamic thought on the question of tradition and modernity, continuity and renewal. It seeks to document significant contributions and philosophical underpinnings of some influential Arab-Muslim intellectuals in the last four decades. Their works center on the question of al-Nahda (the renaissance), modernity and how to handle the Arab- Islamic Turath(Tradition). These questions are still predominant in the contemporary imagining of intellectuals from different schools of thought, using different methodologies and models of thought. The book uses primary material from their works to explore modernity in a variety of discourses, dominant and marginalized, Islamist and non- Islamist. The religious and secular paradigmatic approaches have been in constant fissure and friction in their contests and contestations in the hermeneutics of Islam. In restricting the temporal frame of reference by narrowing its focus to discuss the approaches of four contemporary thinkers, it looks at the way these scholars have grappled this problematic using different methodologies and models of thought.