Understanding mental illness in the modern world entails grasping two issues: 1) how mental illness is defined over time and across cultures and who does the defining, and 2) accepting the recent evidence that the causes of many mental problems lie outside a person's head, e.g. in the realm of culture and society.
This paper begins by reviewing the history of modern universities, noting their changes in terms of societal demands and the availability of funding and with an eye toward understanding their different roles and new outcomes. Based on this understanding, the paper then raises questions about the relevance of curricula to the needs and concerns of our students, communities and societies.
It is important to recognize the possibilities of globalization as well as the challenges. As a business venture, it does not bode well for most of humanity, if the WTO and other trade agreements are any indication. One way to combat this is to "go global" with a resistance movement, that is create or link up with movements that are already identifying the problems of economic globalization and join their efforts.
TV has provided a way for people to consume images and ideas that the ordinary person would not have access to in the course of a typical life. However, while this might sound like a benefit -- and we are constantly reminded of this alleged benefit by the industries themselves -- TV is not simply about seeing new things. It is primarily about selling.
What makes a particular sound art "Islamic." I have to say that any comments I make on this are indebted to the late scholar of music, Lois Lamya al-Faruqi, who really helped to define an Islamic epistemology of music. Rather than using Western categories of analysis, she developed categories that were descriptive of the sound arts based on Islamic principles and proceeding from the Quran.
There is an effort afoot all over the world to "reform" education. The overall message is "west knows best, we lead and you follow." More specifically, practically everyone in the West has realized that the old factory schooling system they have been using for a hundred years is obsolete intellectually. Socially, the move away from government to corporate control calls for privatization.
There are two different types of consumerism. One is associated with shopping and advertising, the other with consuming in general, which can include consuming ideas, thoughts, practices, behaviors, what have you. On one level, a consumer society is that which likes to shop a lot, but on another level a consumer society is a derivative society, one that has no sense of itself other than what it consumes, and this can be with respect to knowledge, education, technology and many other things.
The idea of "knowledge is power" has well served the Western world elite over the centuries, and some of the most brutal wars have been fought to protect its exclusivity. It still underwrites the international system of recolonization we are calling Western development. But this just makes it more difficult to see why Bacon's dictum is today splattered all over the mental environment.
Even the most casual observers of current events will notice a tension between Western civilization and Islam. This tension is often made explicit in Western public discourse about "Islamic fundamentalism" and the "clash of civilizations." Similarly, Muslim public discourse often focuses on the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the destruction of places like Bosnia and Iraq.
[Kalim Siddiqui, Political thought and behaviour of Muslims under colonialism, London: The Muslim Institute, 1986. This was the keynote paper presented at the Muslim Institute World Seminar on ‘Muslim Political Thought during the Colonial Period’, London: August 6-9, 1986. It was reprinted as the introduction to Kalim Siddiqui (ed), Issues in the Islamic Movement 1985-86, London and Toronto: The Open Press, 1987, and in Zafar Bangash (ed), In Pursuit of the Power of Islam: Major Writings of Kalim Siddiqui, London and Toronto: The Open Press, 1996.]
[Kalim Siddiqui, Nation-States as obstacles to the total transformation of the Ummah, London: The Muslim Institute, 1985. This was the keynote paper presented at the Muslim Institute's World Seminar on ‘The Impact of Nationalism on the Ummah’, London, July 31-August 3, 1985. It was reprinted as the introduction to Kalim Siddiqui (ed), Issues in the Islamic Movement 1984-85, London and Toronto: The Open Press, 1986. It was also reprinted in M. Ghayasuddin (ed), The Impact of Nationalism on the Muslim World, London: The Open Press, 1986, a compilation of papers presented at the Muslim Institute seminar, and Zafar Bangash (ed), In Pursuit of the Power of Islam: Major Writings of Kalim Siddiqui, London and Toronto: The Open Press, 1996.]
Occidentosis is the best known and most influential work of the Iranian intellectual and writer, Jalal Al-i Ahmad. In a sense, it is the record of a personal journey to a new understanding of Iranian society and history, but since it aroused a widespread and enthusiastic response (to the degree that the coined word of its title permanently entered the Persian language), it may also be regarded as a document of the ideological ferment that ultimately led to revolution.To summarize, Gharbzadagi cannot be presented as a decisive and pioneering work of revolutionary thought, fully in tune with the historical forces that were to bring about revolution. Nonetheless, it has a solid if modest claim to lasting attention, as the record of an eloquent diagnosis of the major ill of Iranian society by one whose life was devoted to constant, sincere, and solicitous reflection on the state of his countrymen and who contributed to a partial reorientation of the Iranian intelligentsia.
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