Embracing Islam: Okakura Tenshin at the Limits of His Alternative Orientalism
This paper scrutinizes the entangled encounters between the early twentieth-century Japanese cultural theorist Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 (1863–1913), Euro-American Orientalist cultural norms, and Islam. It argues that Okakura overlooked Islam as a dominant religion in Asia. While Okakura questioned the existential justification of Japanese visual culture and its ambiguous position between East and West at the turn of the twentieth century, he viewed Islam through a Christian ideological lens and positioned it in binary opposition to polytheistic beliefs in Asia, chiefly Buddhism. Okakura’s failure to embrace Islam as a religion of Asia was therefore due to the fact that Islam emerged in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of the universal category of "world religions," and was not properly understood as an indigenous tradition of the non-Western world alongside Buddhism and Hinduism.
Copyright (c) 2023 Yuka Kadoi
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Copyright (c) 2023 Yuka Kadoi
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Nicht-kommerziell 4.0 International.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
