Auwais Rafudeen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3424338 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Auwais Rafudeen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Auwais |
| FAMILY NAME | Rafudeen |
| SIGNATURE | RAFUDEEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Africa |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5443-1461 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
On the Possibility of Thinking Machines
Can machines think? This question has again come to prominence of late because of recent advances in Artificial Intelligence. But it is a question generated since at least the 1950’s because of Alan Turing’s seminal paper, “Computing machinery and intelligence,” and its famous “Turing test.” Turing in essence suggested that machines could think. His view has been reinforced in more recent times by philosophers such as David Chalmers. On the other…
On Sensibilities and Shamsy’s “Rediscovering”
While Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics importantly traces the events and individuals involved in the rise of print culture in the Arab world, particularly in an Egyptian context, and, even more tellingly, throws light on how Muslim reformers used this culture to reintroduce long forgotten classical Islamic works – a process which they deemed crucial in view of what they felt was a very problematic postclassical status quo and through w…
Abdul Hadi’s translations of Ahmad Raza
This article employs an internal logics approach, developed in a recent work by Sher Ali Tareen, to the study of the Barelwi school in South Africa. This approach ties metaphysics to practice. Specifically, the article addresses some works of the school’s founder, Ahmad Raza Khan, as translated by South African Islamic scholar Abdul Hadi Qadiri, in the light of this approach. It then extrapolates the insights of this approach to a recent article …
Contemporary study of religion
HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies is an acclaimed journal with broad coverage that promotes multidisciplinary, religious, and biblical aspects of studies in the international theological arena. The journal’s publication criteria are based on high ethical standards and the rigor of the methodology and conclusions reported
Cultivating the worshipful self in an algorithmic age
In a recent book, Secular Translations: Nation State, Modern State and Calculative Reason, Talal Asad is concerned with how the language of calculation and abstraction, inaugurated by modernity and accelerated by our current algorithmic reality, erodes the language of cultivated embodiment typical of religious worldviews and the virtues that such embodiment seeks to develop. These languages are predicated upon and cultivate different types of sel…
Perceptions of Race Among “Sunni” Black Muslims in Laudium, Pretoria
A number of black Muslims have joined the Barelwi, locally called “Sunni”, networks in South Africa and it is their experiences of race that we wish to examine in this essay. We shall analyze experiences relating to race among three Black “Sunni” (Barelwi) Muslims in South Africa. Given South Africa's tumultuous apartheid past, race continues to play a determinative role in personal, social and political relationships in the country. In exploring…
Covid-19 as archetype rather than event
For Eliade, linear time constitutes the metaphysical substrate of modernity. Consequently, the modern subject experiences time as an irreversible series of events occurring within an absolutised history. It is this subject that ‘makes’ that history. By extension, this time, and the history it valorises, cannot be transcended. This sets up the modern view against a premodern one where temporality is seen in multiple ways, allowing history to be tr…
Re-readings of major theorists of religion
HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies is an acclaimed journal with broad coverage that promotes multidisciplinary, religious, and biblical aspects of studies in the international theological arena. The journal’s publication criteria are based on high ethical standards and the rigor of the methodology and conclusions reported
Theorizing Sunniyat as a Mode of Being
Reflecting on thoughts by Talal Asad, this paper suggests an approach to theorizing Sunniyat – the approach to Islam taken by those commonly called “Barelvis” – in South Africa by focusing on sensibilities and dispositions. It specifically examines the kinds of sensibilities that are cultivated by adherents in their relationship to the Prophet as well as in their practice of everyday ethics. The aim is to shed light on the embodied nature of thes…
Building the Islamic moral self
Sufi Abed Mian Usmani (1898-1945) of Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal, authored some ten religious books in Urdu and Gujerati, which appeared to have a considerable impact on the local community there, as well as more broadly for South African Muslims of Indian descent, and even for some Muslims of India. However, apart from two academic contributions, his work and legacy remain largely unexplored. This essay aims to build upon those contributions by ana…
Human Nature, the Humanities and Neoliberalism
What is the purpose of studying the humanities? This paper suggests we need to revisit this fundamental question by reclaiming an older, pre-Enlightenment vision of the humanities – a vision premised on a different view of human nature and invested in the notions of contemplation, wisdom, virtue and universality. These are not amorphous notions but are associated with traditions through which they are practiced and realized. And when applied to t…
Practices and Knowledges
Talal Asad argues that, in tradition, religion is embodied in practices geared to producing particular virtues. This cultivates a subjectivity profoundly different to that engendered by modernity with its view of religion as privatised belief. This essay elaborates this Asadian theme. But it also argues, as a corollary to this theme, that these practices and virtues produce new states of the self, that is, new "knowledges", with their own metaphy…
Asad on the Secular
This paper examines a South African debate on legislating Muslim marriages in the light of anthropologist Talal Asad’s critique developed in his Formations of the Secular (2003). It probes aspects of the debate under four Asadian themes: (1) the historicity of the secular, secularism, and secularization; (2) the place of power and the new articulations of discourses it creates; (3) the state as the arm of that power; and (4) the interconnections …
Ritual and Political Critique
Shaykh ‘Abdullah ibn Qadi ‘Abdus Salam (lived 1712-1807), more commonly known as Tuan Guru, was chiefly responsible for the institutionalization of Islam in Cape Town. The intellectual matrix of this institutionalization was his massive compendium of Islamic writings that was to play a central role in shaping the theology and ritual practices of Cape Muslims. While this compendium contained apparently very different types of subjects – a very phi…
A parallel mode of being
A Parallel Mode of Being
No prominent works on this page.
A Parallel Mode of Being
A parallel mode of being
Ritual and Political Critique
Shaykh ‘Abdullah ibn Qadi ‘Abdus Salam (lived 1712-1807), more commonly known as Tuan Guru, was chiefly responsible for the institutionalization of Islam in Cape Town. The intellectual matrix of this institutionalization was his massive compendium of Islamic writings that was to play a central role in shaping the theology and ritual practices of Cape Muslims. While this compendium contained apparently very different types of subjects – a very phi…
Asad on the Secular
This paper examines a South African debate on legislating Muslim marriages in the light of anthropologist Talal Asad’s critique developed in his Formations of the Secular (2003). It probes aspects of the debate under four Asadian themes: (1) the historicity of the secular, secularism, and secularization; (2) the place of power and the new articulations of discourses it creates; (3) the state as the arm of that power; and (4) the interconnections …
Practices and Knowledges
Talal Asad argues that, in tradition, religion is embodied in practices geared to producing particular virtues. This cultivates a subjectivity profoundly different to that engendered by modernity with its view of religion as privatised belief. This essay elaborates this Asadian theme. But it also argues, as a corollary to this theme, that these practices and virtues produce new states of the self, that is, new "knowledges", with their own metaphy…
Human Nature, the Humanities and Neoliberalism
What is the purpose of studying the humanities? This paper suggests we need to revisit this fundamental question by reclaiming an older, pre-Enlightenment vision of the humanities – a vision premised on a different view of human nature and invested in the notions of contemplation, wisdom, virtue and universality. These are not amorphous notions but are associated with traditions through which they are practiced and realized. And when applied to t…
Building the Islamic moral self
Sufi Abed Mian Usmani (1898-1945) of Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal, authored some ten religious books in Urdu and Gujerati, which appeared to have a considerable impact on the local community there, as well as more broadly for South African Muslims of Indian descent, and even for some Muslims of India. However, apart from two academic contributions, his work and legacy remain largely unexplored. This essay aims to build upon those contributions by ana…
Theorizing Sunniyat as a Mode of Being
Reflecting on thoughts by Talal Asad, this paper suggests an approach to theorizing Sunniyat – the approach to Islam taken by those commonly called “Barelvis” – in South Africa by focusing on sensibilities and dispositions. It specifically examines the kinds of sensibilities that are cultivated by adherents in their relationship to the Prophet as well as in their practice of everyday ethics. The aim is to shed light on the embodied nature of thes…
Covid-19 as archetype rather than event
For Eliade, linear time constitutes the metaphysical substrate of modernity. Consequently, the modern subject experiences time as an irreversible series of events occurring within an absolutised history. It is this subject that ‘makes’ that history. By extension, this time, and the history it valorises, cannot be transcended. This sets up the modern view against a premodern one where temporality is seen in multiple ways, allowing history to be tr…
Re-readings of major theorists of religion
HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies is an acclaimed journal with broad coverage that promotes multidisciplinary, religious, and biblical aspects of studies in the international theological arena. The journal’s publication criteria are based on high ethical standards and the rigor of the methodology and conclusions reported
Contemporary study of religion
HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies is an acclaimed journal with broad coverage that promotes multidisciplinary, religious, and biblical aspects of studies in the international theological arena. The journal’s publication criteria are based on high ethical standards and the rigor of the methodology and conclusions reported
Cultivating the worshipful self in an algorithmic age
In a recent book, Secular Translations: Nation State, Modern State and Calculative Reason, Talal Asad is concerned with how the language of calculation and abstraction, inaugurated by modernity and accelerated by our current algorithmic reality, erodes the language of cultivated embodiment typical of religious worldviews and the virtues that such embodiment seeks to develop. These languages are predicated upon and cultivate different types of sel…
Perceptions of Race Among “Sunni” Black Muslims in Laudium, Pretoria
A number of black Muslims have joined the Barelwi, locally called “Sunni”, networks in South Africa and it is their experiences of race that we wish to examine in this essay. We shall analyze experiences relating to race among three Black “Sunni” (Barelwi) Muslims in South Africa. Given South Africa's tumultuous apartheid past, race continues to play a determinative role in personal, social and political relationships in the country. In exploring…
Abdul Hadi’s translations of Ahmad Raza
This article employs an internal logics approach, developed in a recent work by Sher Ali Tareen, to the study of the Barelwi school in South Africa. This approach ties metaphysics to practice. Specifically, the article addresses some works of the school’s founder, Ahmad Raza Khan, as translated by South African Islamic scholar Abdul Hadi Qadiri, in the light of this approach. It then extrapolates the insights of this approach to a recent article …
On Sensibilities and Shamsy’s “Rediscovering”
While Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics importantly traces the events and individuals involved in the rise of print culture in the Arab world, particularly in an Egyptian context, and, even more tellingly, throws light on how Muslim reformers used this culture to reintroduce long forgotten classical Islamic works – a process which they deemed crucial in view of what they felt was a very problematic postclassical status quo and through w…
On the Possibility of Thinking Machines
Can machines think? This question has again come to prominence of late because of recent advances in Artificial Intelligence. But it is a question generated since at least the 1950’s because of Alan Turing’s seminal paper, “Computing machinery and intelligence,” and its famous “Turing test.” Turing in essence suggested that machines could think. His view has been reinforced in more recent times by philosophers such as David Chalmers. On the other…
Sociology (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · History (8 works) · Education and Islamic Studies (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Islam (6 works) · Islamic Studies and History (5 works)