Description:
The intellectual discourse of Muslim elites born and educated in a Western environment gives impetus, sometimes not entirely consciously, to the debate on the critical potential of the public sphere. This new Islamic critique suggests that the Western public spheres lose their cohesive force and political thrust and practically dismantle into fragmented, disparate, and alienated discourses under increasing transnational pressures because they have never questioned their normative secular underpinnings. This new critical insight implies new modes of public participation and occasions a transformation of the traditional notion of public sphere as it has been described by prominent Western theoreticians of modernity (such as Jurgen Habermas). The debate between the classical Western approach to "public sphere" and modernity and the "new" Islamic critique of it (via Tariq Ramadan, Fethi Benslama, and Malek Chebel) is at the center of this paper.