CLASSICAL AND MODERN ASPECTS OF POLITICAL THOUGHT OF HASAN KAFI PRUŠČAK

Abstract

UDK 28-256
         821.163.4(497.6).09 Pruscak H.K

The article deals with cultural significance of the first multilingual edition of “Principles of Wisdom for the Order of the World” (Usulu’l-Hikem fi Nizami’l-Alem), the most imporantt work of Hasan Kafi, the significance of which surpasses by far an occasional character. Cultural significance of multilingual edition of Kafi’s renowned work “Principles of Wisdom for the Order of the World” is far more than a collection of historical facts and cannot be reduced to a contemplative unit of single significance. Pivotal value of Kafi’s work is contained actually in its openness to a free contemplative act which is to be found in Western Europe only after the seventeenth century, and which in later times, according to the author of the article, has been lost in many Muslim nations. In this the author sees a multiple sense of “later life “of Kafi’s work during the last four centuries. The article stresses upon some relevant points and examples of Kafi’s contemplative and critical position which oblige us today to a historical abridgement of a long chain of events, concepts and memories that have imbued, deformed and exalted Kafi’s original thought and which is exactly what makes us see in Hasan Kafi a thinker that obliges us with contemplative reasons and historical activism that for him and his contemporaries may have had a different meaning.