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1They refused to see him. At 11:30 a.m., less than an hour after a confrontation with a

policewoman, and without telling his family, Bouazizi returned to the elegant double-storey

white building with arched azure shutters, poured fuel over his body, and set himself on fire.

2To observers these revolutions were the result of popular expressions demanding a modern

democratic state and citizenship conceived as an autonomous, self-constitutive, and tradition

free individual.

3Secular and liberal political parties within both countries complained that the religious political

parties exploited and manipulated the masses in the name of religion and gained their vote by

demonizing secular and liberal parties as the enemies of God.

4This is a good example of how the debates were reduced into mere binary by defining

contemporary conditions in the third world in term of abstract conditions of European historical

experience; where the third world is seen as embodying aspect of Europes past.

5For example, building on the influential academic achievements of Edward Said in the

Orientalist approach to Islam, Samira Haj is not satisfied with the scholars fidelity to a

traditional, secular, progressive, humanist approach with its commitment to a secular liberationist

project.

Tradition is more appropriately conceptualized as discourses extended through times, as a framework of

inquiry rather than a set of unchanging doctrines or culturally specific mandates. To put the same point in

another way, what appears to scholars as a commitment to fixed, essentialized tenets that must be preserved

at all costs is rather a framework of inquiry within which Muslims have attempted to amend and redirect

Islamic discourses to meet new challenges and conflicts as they materialized in different historical eras

What distinguishes this definition of tradition from the standard formulation of tradition is that traditions

refers not simply to the past or it repetition but rather to the pursuit of an ongoing coherence by makingreference to a set of texts, procedures, arguments, and practices. This body of prescribed beliefs and

understandings (intellectual, political, social, practical) frames the practices of Islamic reasoning. It is these

collective discourses, incorporating a variety of positions, roles, and tasks that form the corpus of Islamic

knowledge from which Muslim scholar (alim) argues for and refers to previous judgments of others, and

from which an unaltered parent teaches a child. It is from within this tradition of reasoning that claims are

made and evaluated and are either rejected or accepted as Islamic.

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