Housamedden Darwish, PhD

The project focuses on certain aspects of language – thick normative concepts – considered objective factors of (mis)understanding in intracultural, intercultural and cross-cultural contexts, such as in the debate around the compatibility of (political) Islam and the secular paradigm.

In my dissertation, I focused on subjective factors of (mis)understanding, and suggested that the “ethics of dialogue or understanding” is important for mutual understanding in dialogue. However, such ethics, though necessary, are not sufficient to reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding. Objective factors are indispensable. The key concepts relevant to this study include, for example, ‘secularism’, ‘modernity’, ‘democracy’, ‘Islam’, ‘Shari’a’, ‘jihad’, ‘hijab’, and ‘civil state’. Most of these concepts are the outcome of specific historical, political or social circumstances in a given culture, but are nonetheless capable of traveling to other cultures. They also have an evaluative dimension, paving the way for many questions: what is the evaluative content or dimension of these concepts? How does the evaluative dimension relate to the descriptive one? Are these thick concepts fundamentally or inherently evaluative, as the semantic view maintains? Or are they only accidentally or unnecessarily evaluative, as expressed in the pragmatic view? If the evaluative and/or descriptive contents of a given concept can diverge completely from one culture to another, or from one context to another, can we still talk about the same concept?

Three research methods are employed to tackle these questions: conceptual analysis, philosophical analysis and textual and hermeneutical interpretation. While conceptual analysis focuses on the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the meaning, including its evaluation and its non-evaluative description, it is also important to consider its conceptual history to show how the meaning of the concept concerned is constructed and to identify the continuous and discontinuous base on which they were built. Moreover, a philosophical analysis is essential to comprehend a concept’s theoretical background, the judgments and presuppositions it implies, and its practical and theoretical relationships with other relevant concepts. Neither conceptual nor philosophical analyses could be carried out coherently without being accompanied by a hermeneutical interpretation of some of the basic texts of the given concept. A study of the meaning and the use of a concept in texts is valuable but not sufficient unless we consider its common and pragmatic meaning. The project also follows the historical development of the concepts relevant to the secular paradigm and the debate over their compatibility with (political) Islam, from the Arab Renaissance “Al-Nahda” until the present. This historical development helps to show why the aforementioned terms are thick concepts and to what extent there is (mis)understanding about their evaluative or normative significations and/or connotations, and how this (mis)understanding affects, to a large extent, the (dis)agreement between the protagonists (or antagonists) in the associated debate.