Digitizing the Historical Periodical Collection at the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library in East Jerusalem

The Arab Press in Palestine developed at the turn of the twentieth century and proliferated for several decades despite restrictions imposed under the Ottoman Empire and during the British Mandate Period (1917-1948). Hardcopies of the early newspapers and periodicals are rare and access to them at a few Palestinian municipal or private libraries is limited. The Al-Aqsa Mosque Library holds one of the largest collections of Palestinian historical newspapers and periodicals. The collection provides a unique and rich source of information about the history of Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Access to the collection is limited and brittle paper copies have been rapidly deteriorating. This paper provides an overview of the digitization project aimed at preserving the historical periodical collection located at the AlAqsa Mosque Library

Islamic Political Thought: Reviving a Rationalist Tradition

This work develops the foundations of an Islamic argument for secular, liberal democracy from within the Islamic discursive tradition. First, it challenges the presentation of contemporary Islamic political thought as a unified, continuous development of the classical canon by showing the influence of the now marginalized medieval rationalists in the development of Islamic political thought. The classical rationalist concern with divine justice forced the founders of Sunni orthodoxy to state their epistemologies and their positions on ethical ontology. The orthodox positions, and their related methods of legal-juristic reasoning, are shown to be incapable of accommodating the modern Islamic positions on political representation, slavery, and just war. This leads to the second argument of the work, that the modern Islamic discourse is better understood as a reflection of the central concern with justice and its rationalist epistemology and ethical ontology we find in the writings of classical rationalists. This argument is made by examining the works of three classical rationalists, a theologian, a philosopher, and a historian. Their political positions, shaped by their rationalism and concern with justice, challenged their orthodox contemporaries, and provide substantive critiques of the classical political accommodations, methods of politico-legal reasoning, and hence, of modern Islamist political projects. The final chapter reveals how far the mainstream of Islamic political thought has deviated from the classical discourses, since the 19th century, by adopting the language and ideals of the European Enlightenment. This shift is presented as a triumph of classical rationalism over literalism, whose epistemological foundations and ontological implications have yet to be acknowledged and appreciated.