Psychoanalysis And The Challenge Of Islam

In this title, the author demythifies both Islamic and western ideas of Islam by addressing the psychoanalytic root causes of the Muslim world's clash with modernity and subsequent turn to fundamentalism. It reveals an alternate history of Islam and looks at its future development.

This pioneering volume brings together scholars and clinicians working at the intersection of Islam and psychoanalysis to explore both the connections that link these two traditions, as well as the tensions that exist between them. Uniting authors from a diverse range of traditions and perspectives, including Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Object-Relations, and Group-Analytic, the book creates a dialogue through which several key questions can be addressed. How can Islam be rendered amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation? What might an ‘Islamic psychoanalysis’ look like that accompanies and questions the forms of psychoanalysis that developed in the West? And what might a ‘psychoanalytic Islam’ look like that speaks for, and perhaps even transforms, the forms of truth that Islam produces? In an era of increasing Islamophobia in the West, this important book identifies areas where clinical practice can be informed by a deeper understanding of contemporary Islam, as well as what it means to be a Muslim today. It will appeal to trainees and practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as scholars interested in religion and Islamic studies.

Ewing examines the competing forces behind the formation of a modern western subjectivity in the context of Sufi religious meanings and practices in Pakistan.

Through a dual engagement with the unconscious in psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, Stefania Pandolfo’s unsettling and innovative book reflects on the maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and testimonies of contemporary patients and therapists in Morocco, Knot of the Soul offers both an ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair and a philosophical and theological exploration of the vicissitudes of the soul. Knot of the Soul moves from the experience of psychosis in psychiatric hospitals, to the visionary torments of the soul in poor urban neighborhoods, to the melancholy and religious imaginary of undocumented migration, culminating in the liturgical stage of the Qur’anic cure. Demonstrating how contemporary Islamic cures for madness address some of the core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she reveals how a religious and ethical relation to the “ordeal” of madness might actually allow for spiritual transformation. This sophisticated and evocative work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.

Omnia El Shakry challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blended psychoanalytic theories with concepts from classical Islamic thought in a creative encounter of ethical engagement. Drawing on scholarly writings as well as popular literature on self-healing, El Shakry provides the first in-depth examination of psychoanalysis in Egypt and reveals how a new science of psychology - or "science of the soul," as it came to be called - was inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. She explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law.

Attempting to advance knowledge about Islam and to create the possibility of a dialogue between Islam and psychoanalysis, The Crescent and the Couch brings together a distinguished panel of Muslim and non-Muslim contributors from the fields of history, religion, anthropology, ...

Contemporary psychology is highly influenced by positivism and scientific naturalism. Psychological studies make efforts to control the variables and provide operational definitions of subjective constructs in order to reach the most concrete conclusions. Such efforts are admirable in natural sciences since they have led to a better life. But, this worldview has deprived contemporary psychology of more qualitative sources of knowledge like waḥy (revelation). The present book introduces Islamic psychology as a paradigm, which can apply waḥy knowledge and consider religious/spiritual dimensions of humans in scientific exploration. The first part discusses the possibility, foundations, and characteristics of Islamic psychology. The second part introduces research methodology in Islamic psychology. The third part reviews the Quranic theory of personality and highlights the concept of shakeleh. Finally, the fourth part presents the theories and methods of religious psychotherapy in the Islamic tradition. Each part provides introductory content for readers interested in Islamic psychology.

"As Professor Fazlur Rahman shows in the latest of a series of important contributions to Islamic intellectual history, the characteristic problems of the Muslim modernists—the adaptation to the needs of the contemporary situation of a holy book which draws its specific examples from the conditions of the seventh century and earlier—are by no means new. . . . In Professor Rahman's view the intellectual and therefore the social development of Islam has been impeded and distorted by two interrelated errors. The first was committed by those who, in reading the Koran, failed to recognize the differences between general principles and specific responses to 'concrete and particular historical situations.' . . . This very rigidity gave rise to the second major error, that of the secularists. By teaching and interpreting the Koran in such a way as to admit of no change or development, the dogmatists had created a situation in which Muslim societies, faced with the imperative need to educate their people for life in the modern world, were forced to make a painful and self-defeating choice—either to abandon Koranic Islam, or to turn their backs on the modern world."—Bernard Lewis, New York Review of Books "In this work, Professor Fazlur Rahman presents a positively ambitious blueprint for the transformation of the intellectual tradition of Islam: theology, ethics, philosophy and jurisprudence. Over the voices advocating a return to Islam or the reestablishment of the Sharia, the guide for action, he astutely and soberly asks: What and which Islam? More importantly, how does one get to 'normative' Islam? The author counsels, and passionately demonstrates, that for Islam to be actually what Muslims claim it to be—comprehensive in scope and efficacious for every age and place—Muslim scholars and educationists must reevaluate their methodology and hermeneutics. In spelling out the necessary and sound methodology, he is at once courageous, serious and profound."—Wadi Z. Haddad, American-Arab Affairs

Explores the genesis of Islam for insight into the nature of ideological transformation.