Ali

Explanation

Ali is presented as the model of the just imam and the highest symbol of moral legitimacy for some Muslims. In the book, he stands as the counterpoint to Mu’awiya, that is, as a model of legitimacy derived from justice rather than from domination.

Mentioned in

• Four assumptions governing traditional interpretation
• War acts indicating violence
• The expansion of education remained quantitative
• The opening verses as a general prelude
• Classical Islam takes shape through struggles over legitimacy and authority
• Islam and politics are studied historically and critically
• Making use of the human sciences
• Modern education after independence
• Education, Arabization, and the growth of tradition hinder cognitive openness
• Qur’anic and prophetic discourse is powerful because it is suggestive and capacious in meaning
• Islamic authority was founded on the intertwining of religion and politics
• Authority in Surat al-Tawbah
• The Qur’anic sura is read as a multi-unit symbolic structure
• Divine sovereignty and political legitimacy
• Legitimacy after the Prophet’s death
• Returning to the linguistic foundations of revelation
• Al-Fatiha reveals the interaction of Qur’anic discourse and its transformation into a canon
• Al-Fatiha is read as an interactive discursive structure between God and human beings
• Creative actors and guardians of rigidity
• The Qur’an needs a critical historical reading
• The Qur’an produces an inclusive discourse, but historically it operates through exclusion
• The Qur’an is read historically and linguistically in its original moment
• Lived values and imposed norms
• The founding past is inscribed in consciousness
• Metaphor is a fundamental element in religious meaning
• Later theological meanings
• Religious norms do not match everyday practice
• Modern knowledge is blocked when the intellectual weakens and schooling and politicization dominate
• Religious knowledge operates within overlapping symbolic and value systems
• Religious and social knowledge overlap and are not separable
• Affective knowledge is the basis of religious consciousness
• Revelation is a Qur’an in human language, yet it carries superhuman layers
• Analyzing Qur’anic discourse reveals the formation of the community and the transfer of authority through human mediation
• Mobilizing resistance requires a social language, not a scholastic discourse
• Religious disintegration, violently and slowly
• Distinguishing authority from legitimacy
• Distinguishing the religious intellectual from the modern intellectual
• Rejecting the divinization of Islamic reason
• The symbolism of Qur’anic discourse
• Surat al-Kahf as a symbolic discursive structure
• Ali as the model of the just imam
• The absence of the term violence from the Qur’an
• The failure of a material reduction of the human being
• Understanding Qur’anic discourse requires preserving its plurality before reducing it to legislation
• The revisability of meaning
• Reading the Qur’an is renewed when revelation is understood as a historical symbolic discourse that liberates meaning and religion from orthodoxy and politicization
• The communities of the Book were subject to a single book
• The limitations of social sciences in history
• The responsibility of Muslim intermediaries
• Critique of projecting present-day standards backward