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Visitors in India often encounter the terms ‘communalism’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘socialism’. In this chapter, the author comments on their implications in every Indian problem as she understood them in Salam House. Communalism refered to seeing everything in the light of the interests of one's community. With respect to nationalism, one may understand it in the Indian sense by viewing it in relation to communalism. Nationalism in India had gone through two stages: first, all communalists are also nationalists today, and second, that which calls itself nationalist, and to which a considerable majority belong, has only now adjusted its internal political difference. Socialism in India has two aspects: socialism interpreted by the scriptures and socialism borrowed from Western ideologies and based purely on economic issues. Negative mysticism and occultism appear to be declining in India, although this does not mean that religion is also on the wane.

This chapter analyzes certain common genres and their relation to prevailing sociopolitical and cultural conditions in the Arab countries. From the conventions and subjects of the respective film genres, it is possible to gather information about the refusal or rehabilitation of indigenous culture, about myths and symbols contributing to the formation of identity, as well as about attitudes toward Western ideology and ideas such as socialism, materialism, laicism, and individualism. For this purpose some of the genres—precisely, literary adaptations, realist and historical films, and cinéma d'auteur—that seem to contribute notably to the construction, or deconstruction, of certain effective political discourses are examined. The close relation between literature and cinema is not an Arab peculiarity, but an international phenomenon.

This chapter examines the argument that human rights are Western in the context of the United Nations (UN): the notion of human rights in modern times seems to have arisen in the context of the UN. The UN is itself a formation of the West; human rights are thus Western in this institutional sense. It is, however, important to distinguish between the developments which followed World War I and those which followed World War II. The chapter concludes with the statement that the argument that human rights are Western because the institution associated with it—the UNO—is captive to Western interests and ideologies is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The notion that the West has its cultural and political roots in ancient Greece has long been a mainstay of discourses on national identity in Britain, as in other countries (primarily in Europe and North America) that imagine themselves as belonging to ‘the West’. This chapter examines how this supposition of a ‘Greek legacy’ or ‘Greek inheritance’ has been mediated through British television documentaries. Whether the legacy is used as a framing device for wider assessments of ancient Greek society, or is the focus of direct investigation, the notion of a legacy is sustained. However, at every turn the proposition is undercut. Assertions of similarity between ‘us’ and ‘them’ coexist alongside demonstrations of difference; or the legacy is a modern invention that serves social, political and psychological needs; or it can be problematic and undesirable. At the same time as its existence is maintained, the ‘Greek legacy’ is revealed to be a fiction, or even a fetish: a fantasy that hides its own lack. In a Britain (and Europe) marked by cultural diversity and political division, television exposes the untenability of an ideology that elides such differences by making us all ancient Greeks, whilst continuing to ascribe it power.

Within the context of Indonesia’s encounters with liberalism in late colonial and postcolonial times, this chapter examines Muslim discourses that are critical of both Western liberal ideology and its Islamist detractors. After problematizing the existing categories of Islamic neo-modernism, Liberal Islam, and Islamic liberalism, the chapter focuses on alternative discourses formulated by Muslim intellectuals from both traditionalist and modernist-reformist Islamic backgrounds during the Reformasi era when Indonesia transitioned from a military autocracy to a democratic system of governance. Islamic Post-Traditionalists draws on poststructuralism and postcolonial theory to offer an emancipatory trajectory for Indonesian Muslims in the twenty-first century, while modernist-reformist intellectuals have drawn on the social sciences to develop a new paradigm referred to as Transformative Islam. Instead of presenting sweeping ideas, this younger generation is more concerned with translating new regimes of knowledge into applied thinking about concrete issues, such as democratization, development, justice and battling corruption.