Danial Mohd Yusof

Davutoglu's Paradigm , Winkel's Epistemé and Political Science in Malaysia

phenomenology and its terminology are utilised to justify the sociology of Islam and its essentialist response through the course of transcultural exchanges and sedimentation with the irreconcilable weltanshauung of the West. At the same time, the issue of structure and reliable knowledge is considered through the difficult relationship between revivalist religion and state politics where political legitimacy and the development of institutions is a feature of socio-political fact. Here, Malaysian political culture and democracy is used as an example. It makes out that socio- political realities, if not co-incidental with discourses of reliable knowledge and moral society, are representations of the conciliation of interests with specific value orientation with regards to alter- native conceptions of moral society. Keywordsparadigm, political theory, transculture, political culture, democracy

The Muslim World in Cyberia: Prospects for E-Governance and Digital Capacity Building

This chapter looks at the state of the Muslim world online and how digitalization, including the realm of online social networking, is contributing to new forms of social, cultural, economic, and political capital. It discusses how these types of capitals may contribute to new forms and dynamics of capacity building involving various stakeholders—governments, civil society organizations, think tanks, academia, and the citizen in a truly global context. The chapter explores the digital state of the Muslim world, sustainable strategies and policies for ICT development in Malaysia and Bahrain, a case study of the implications of ICT revolution and e-government on governance and development in Malaysia, and scenario planning and new visions of development for long-term policy formulation, intervention, and performance of the nation-state.

The discourse of power and knowledge in the social sciences and study of Muslim society

This article examines parallels between contemporary Western and Muslim thought. It proposes that there is congruence in Western and Muslim political thought on issues of soft foundationalism, negative theology, provisional truth claims and religious democracy to offset hegemonic tendencies. In the social sciences, specifically political science, the neutralization of ideology is also supported in response to concern about ideological encroachments into the discipline. In addition, the article discusses the residual issue of positivism and knowledge as social construction, i.e. the social sciences themselves as ideological with regard to the agnostic position of their methodology. This has implications for the study of religion, in this case Islam, and the fields problematic nomenclature, such as Islamism and, now, post-Islamism. This is explored through a discussion of the Arab Spring and Malaysian politics. The article concludes that similar concerns on the relationship between power and knowledge in contemporary Western and Muslim thought are beneficial to the social sciences and their study of the Muslim worlds transformation as a social and political phenomenon.

Parallels between contemporary western and Islamic thought on the discourse of power and knowledge

This paper examines parallels between contemporary Western and Islamic thought. It will propose that there is congruence between Western and Muslim political thought processes on issues of soft-foundationalism, negative theology, provisional truth claims and religious democracy, in order to offset hegemonic tendencies. This will be illustrated by a concise juxtaposition of the ideas of Davutoglu, Winkel, Sardar, Tariq Ali, Derrida, Foucault, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammed Arkoun and others. In the social sciences, namely political science, the neutralization of ideology is also supported in relation to the concern of ideological encroachments into the discipline by William E. Connolly, that echoes Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. This paper concludes that similar concerns on the relationship between power and knowledge in contemporary Western and Islamic political thought processes are beneficial to the study of Islam and its transformation as a social and political phenomenon.