Suchergebnisse

Due to the tremendous ideological stakes of the issue both before and after 1989, the impact of the October Revolution on the Romanian socialist movement was either exaggerated or minimized. If communist literature naturally emphasized the influence of the events in Russia among Romanian socialists, the anticommunist narrative limited its hold to some few radical leaders and to their immediate followers. This article goes beyond these biased perspectives by restoring the topic in its historical environment. Eventually, it tends to corroborate the communist "side of the truth": the changes undergone by the Romanian "proletarian milieu" back in the early 1920s, i.e. the radicalization of the socialist discourse, the mobility of the socialist leadership or the reorganization of the Socialist Party, confirm the significant weight of the October Revolution in the economy of Romanian socialism.

The positive, unifying ideological resources of liberal and progressive Islamic interpretations deserve more than ever to be exploited in the contemporary socio-political context. Their conceptual tools, principles and theses could solve the conflictual cleavage, politically manipulated, between Islam and Western modernity, without repudiating the references to an Islamic paradigm. Therefore, liberal and progressive Islamic understandings could avoid the recent superficial oscillation between two ideological -artificially constructed- extremes, namely either confining the discussions to the secular, colonialist or postcolonialist perspectives, or promoting the defensive opportunist neotraditionalist Islamic approaches, specific to the nationalist movements of the last century so-called Islamic revival. Liberal Islam does not fully adopt all liberal theses and does not obediently imitate Western philosophy. Liberal Islamic understandings are defined by the opposition against teocracy and by supporting the democracy. Women, minorities and non-Muslims' rights in Muslim-majority countries, freedom of thought and trust in human progress, are other essential tenets that are fundamented on contemporary understandings of the major Islamic sources. Trying to correct some excesses that the liberal Muslims were accused of, but maintaining the reformist tendencies, progressive Muslims' approach is centered on a "multiple critiqueˮ ‒ a simultaneous critique of the diverse discourses and communities in which Muslims are situated. Not only the authoritarian constructions of literalist, puritanist Muslims, the violation of human rights, freedom of expression and of religion, the oppression of women in some Muslim countries are condemned and deconstructed, but also some political, economic, intellectual hegemonic Western aspects of modernity. In Romania these contemporary tendencies of interpreting Islam are not yet represented at a community level.