Part 1: Quranic and Historical Foundations3

Chapter 3: Contention in the Self and in Society

After nations and empires, the book comes down to closer ground: a person’s own heart, their home, their neighbourhood. In the Quran the human being is neither a pure angel nor an unmixed devil, but a field on which the commanding self, the reproaching self and the self at peace contend. The family is the first social arena a person enters, where a generation carrying its experience and its fears meets a generation carrying its questions and its need to find out for itself. Society is a web of contentions between rich and poor, conservative and reformer, country and city, and these are its natural components rather than its defects. The chapter ends by asking how such contention can be turned from an explosion into a building.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

This chapter does not open with one of the numbered cases.

The Cases