Religion and literature, identity and individual : resetting the Muslim-Christian encounter

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualty of a paradigm shift in the thinking about the global order from the political-ideological bi-polar worldview of the Cold War era to a multipolar world marred by the prospect of culture wars along civilisational fault lines shaped by religiously-informed identity politics. On the back of 9/11 and other atrocities perpetrated by violent extremists from Muslim backgrounds, in particular relations with Muslims and the Islamic world are coined in binary terms of us-versus-them. Drawing on earlier research on cosmopolitanism, cul-tural hybridity and liminality, this article examines counter narratives to such modes of dichotomous thinking. It also seeks to shift away from the abstrac-tions of collective religious identity formations to an appreciation of individual interpretations of religion. For that purpose, the article interrogates the notions of cultural schizophrenia, double genealogy and west-eastern affinities developed by philosophers and creative writers, such as Daryush Shayegan, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Navid Kermani. V prvih dveh desetletjih 21. stoletja so medreligijska srečanja postala žrtev pa-radigmatskega premika v razmišljanju o globalnem redu s politično-ideološkega bipolarnega svetovnega nazora obdobja hladne vojne proti multipolarnemu sve-tu, zaznamovanemu z možnostjo kulturnih vojn na civilizacijskih prelomnicah, ki so jih zarisale z vero prepojene identitetne politike. Po terorističnih napadih 11. septembra in drugih grozodejstvih, ki so jih zagrešili nasilni ekstremisti iz musli-manskih okolij, se zlasti odnosi z muslimani in islamskim svetom oblikujejo v okviru binarnega razločevanja mi-oni. Na podlagi predhodnih raziskav o kozmo-politizmu, kulturni hibridnosti in liminalnosti avtor v prispevku preučuje narative, nasprotne tovrstnemu dihotomnemu načinu razmišljanja. V prizadevanjih, da bi se odmaknil od abstrakcij oblik kolektivne verske identitete k zavedanju o indivi-dualnih interpretacijah religije, prevprašuje pojme kulturne shizofrenije, dvojne genealogije in afinitet do Vzhoda in Zahoda, ki so jih razvili filozofi in predstav-niki ustvarjalnega pisanja, denimo Daryush Shayegan, Abdelwahab Meddeb in Navid Kermani.