L'Islam contemporaneo. Sfide e Riflessioni tra modernità e modernismo

[Autom. eng. transl.] This essay is the result of a year and a half (2014-2015) of work, confrontation, a study that the undersigned has carried out with other Italian researchers within a project entitled “Conoscere il Meticciato. Govern the Change "and that the Oasis Foundation of Milan, under the patronage of the Cariplo Foundation, concluded during the month of December 2015. By rearranging the thoughts, expanding the reflections, reconstructing historical-religious paths, this essay aims to deepen the exacerbated perception that the Middle East has evaluated being "Modernity", that is the historical phase in which the European National State decrees a military-economic superiority in relation to the whole world favoring de facto the colonial phase. It will therefore be essential to favor a de-constructive path of concepts such as "secularization", "political Islam", "secularism", "Ridda and Takfir" etc. to distinguish what Europe before and the United States then established to be its "true" meaning in relation to a non-West. If in the second half of the nineteenth century colonial Europe had established, through the writings of Ernest Renan, Islam was a religion devoid of free will, rationality and critical sense - all aspects that clearly emerge in Averroé et l'Averroisme ( 1882), in Études d'Histoire Religieuse (1857) and in Histoire Générale et Systèmes Comparés des Langues Sémitiques (1855), the contrast between Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935) and 'Alī' Abd al-Rāziq - respectively authors of the famous “ al-Khilāfah aw al-imamā al- 'uzmā ”(The Caliphate or the Imamate superior) and“ Al-Islām wa l-Usūl al-Hukm ”(Islam and Government Sources) - would have decreed that this faith disdains the separation between religion and political power, in fact proclaiming the Islamic inability to form a secular society. These simplifications are still today the basis of "Western" thinking about Islam, or rather about that unicum that one imagines to be the religion in question. In one of his last interviews E. Said (d. 2003), the famous author of Orientalism (1991), stated that 25 years after the publication of his essay, the cultural image that the West had assumed in relation to this religion had not only deteriorated due to the simplification of the new forms of media language, from Hollywood cinema to the internet, but had in fact convinced the Muslims themselves that the Euro-American vision of the Islamic world was the correct one; the creation of "Daesh-Isis" and the proclamation of the "Caliphate" is the absolute sublimation of this thought, because it confirms not only that the "Clash of Civilizations" is inevitable, but necessary to eradicate the anti-Modernist anomalies from the world. The intent of this work is to investigate and explain what are the dynamics underlying the ongoing simplification process - resulting in a "deformed" vision of the other, which continues from the XX, and therefore a radicalized and widespread Islamophobia - whose only goal is to identify common enemies, reawaken hidden fears and legitimize new forms of unconventional warfare, as happened in the past.