scholarly journals Islamism and Social Reform in Kerala, South India

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 317-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
FILIPPO OSELLA ◽  
CAROLINE OSELLA

AbstractThis paper critiques ethnographic tendencies to idealise and celebratesufi‘traditionalism’ as authentically South Asian. We perceive strong academic trends of frank distaste for reformism, which is then inaccurately—and dangerously buttressing Hindutva rhetoric—branded as going against the grain of South Asian society. This often goes along with (inaccurate) branding of all reformism as ‘foreign inspired’ orwah'habi. Kerala'sMujahids(Kerala Naduvathul Mujahideen [KNM]) are clearly part of universalistic trends and shared Islamic impulses towards purification. We acknowledge the importance to KNM of longstanding links to the Arab world, contemporary links to the Gulf, wider currents of Islamic reform (both global and Indian), while also showing how reformism has been producing itself locally since the mid-19th century. Reformist enthusiasm is part of Kerala-wide patterns discernable across all religious communities: 1920s and 1930s agitations for a break from the 19th century past; 1950s post-independence social activism; post 1980s religious revivalism. Kerala's Muslims (like Kerala Hindus and Christians) associate religious reformism with: a self-consciously ‘modern’ outlook; the promotion of education; rallying of support from the middle classes. There is a concomitant contemporary association of orthoprax traditionalism with ‘backward’, superstitious and un-modern practices, troped as being located in rural and low-status locations.

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 590-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cengiz Tomar

AbstractIbn Khaldun is one of most discussed social philosophers in the modern Arab World. The most important reasons for this are that he lived in a time of crisis that resembles the one that Muslims find themselves in at the present time, that his thoughts have found approval from Western scientists, and that they possess modern characteristics. It is for these reasons that the thought of Ibn Khaldun, from the 19th century onwards, have given rise to a wide variety of interpretations, including pan-Islamism, nationalism, socialism and other ideologies that have found interest in the Arab world. In this article, after examining the heritage of thought bequeathed by Ibn Khaldun to Arab culture, starting from the time in which he lived, we will try to evaluate interpretations of the Muqaddimah in the modern Arab world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Akmal Hawi

The 19th century to the 20th century is a moment in which Muslims enter a new gate, the gate of renewal. This phase is often referred to as the century of modernism, a century where people are confronted with the fact that the West is far ahead of them. This situation made various responses emerging, various Islamic groups responded in different ways based on their Islamic nature. Some respond with accommodative stance and recognize that the people are indeed doomed and must follow the West in order to rise from the downturn. Others respond by rejecting anything coming from the West because they think it is outside of Islam. These circles believe Islam is the best and the people must return to the foundations of revelation, this circle is often called the revivalists. One of the figures who is an important figure in Islamic reform, Jamaluddin Al-Afghani, a reformer who has its own uniqueness, uniqueness, and mystery. Departing from the division of Islamic features above, Afghani occupies a unique position in responding to Western domination of Islam. On the one hand, Afghani is very moderate by accommodating ideas coming from the West, this is done to improve the decline of the ummah. On the other hand, however, Afghani appeared so loudly when it came to the question of nationality or on matters relating to Islam. As a result, Afghani traces his legs on two different sides, he is a modernist but also a fundamentalist. 


Author(s):  
Muhammad Nasir

This article discusses the history of Minangkabau in the 19th century AD. One of the themes of 19th century Minangkabau history is the Islamic reform movement promoted by religious groups commonly called the Padri movement. One of the central issues of the Padri movement was eradicating the habit of drinking alcoholism that occurred in Minangkabau society. The habit of smoking the drug that comes from boiling opium certainly indicates the existence of the drug on a large scale. Therefore, this article will present a picture of the opium trade in Minangkabau in the 19th century from upstream (providers) to downstream (dealers). It is hoped that this article will be useful as an explanation for the habit of smoking made in the Minangkabau community at that time.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Holt

In the mid-19th century, the Arabic novel emerged as a genre in Ottoman Syria and khedival Egypt. While this emergence has often been narrated as a story of the rise of nation-states and the diffusion of the European novel, the genre’s history and ongoing topography cannot be recovered without indexing the importance of Arabic storytelling and Islamic empire, ethics, and aesthetics to its roots. As the Arabic periodicals of Beirut and the Nile Valley, and soon Tunis and Baghdad, serialized and debated the rise of the novel form from the 19th century onward, historical, romantic, and translated novels found an avid readership throughout the Arab world and its diaspora. Metaphors of the garden confronted the maritime span of European empire in the 19th-century rise of the novel form in Arabic, and the novel’s path would continue to oscillate between the local and the global. British, French, Spanish, and Italian empire and direct colonial rule left a lasting imprint on the landscape of the region, and so too the investment of Cold War powers in its pipelines, oil wells, and cultural battlefields. Whether embracing socialist realism or avant-garde experimentation, the Arabic novel serves as an ongoing register of the stories that can be told in cities, villages, and nations throughout the region—from the committed novels interrogating the years of anticolonial national struggles and Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the ongoing history of war, surveillance, exile, occupation, and resource extraction that dictates the subsequent terrain of narration. The Arabic novel bears, too, an indelible mark left by translators of Arabic tales—from 1001 Nights to Girls of Riyadh—on the stories the region’s novelists tell.


Author(s):  
Arthur Hutcheson Bailey ◽  
Archibald Day

In a note in the introduction to Milne's Treatise on Annuities, the author remarks—“There can, I think, be no doubt but that the mortality is greater among the higher than the middle classes of society. They form too small a proportion of the population to have any sensible effect here; but it would be of importance to the Life Offices to determine the law of mortality among them.” Since the publication of this work, forty-six years ago, some attempts have been made to test the accuracy of this assertion, and to supply the desideratum; but none with which we are acquainted are by any means conclusive.


2013 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-31
Author(s):  
Maria Giovanna Stasolla

Abstract The second half of the 19th Century was in Florence a period of extraordinary and fruitful interest in the oriental world when the philological and oriental studies were promoted. Thanks to the fervour of these studies, in 1878 Florence was designated to host the 4th Congress of the Orientalists. The “Orient” excited curiosity and collecting passion to such an extent that we could argue that the legacy of the magnificent Medicean collecting was inherited by the private middle-classes. Moreover, the new cultural context contributed to transforming the taste, it gave rise to new styles in architecture as well as in decoration and generally in the applied arts. After examining these topics, we will focus our attention on a little known fact that we could describe as the rebuilt “Orient” for entertainment, that is to say the Florentine Carnival in 1886, an event of the “disquieting” exoticism by which Europe represented the Islamic world.


1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Thompson

Few Western students of the Arab world are as well known as the 19th-century British scholar Edward William Lane (1801–76). During his long career, Lane produced a number of highly influential works: An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), a translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1839–41), Selections from the Ḳur-án (1843), and the Arabic–English Lexicon (1863–93). The Arabic–English Lexicon remains a pre-eminent work of its kind, and Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is still a basic text for both Arab and Western students. Through his published work, Lane contributed substantially to the prevailing Western picture of the Arab world.


Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien

The black social gospel advocated protest activism within religious communities to resist America’s system of racial caste. Dorrien’s previous book, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, described the 19th century founding of this tradition as a successor to the abolitionist movement. The New Abolition ended just as King’s models of social justice ministry entered the story. Breaking White Supremacy describes the black social gospel luminaries who influenced King and the figures of King’s generation who led the civil rights movement.


1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam B. Sanjabi

Ever since the Persian intelligentsia first discovered French literature in the 19th century, it has remained fascinated with its various genres: first with the writings of the Philosophe, then with the Romantics, the roman aventure, the realists, and, in the mid-20th century, with the existentialists and the thèâtre absurde. Moliere's comedies, in particular, were the subject of great interest and the source of many adaptations in the secularizing Iran of the Constitutional period (1905–19) and the Reza Shah era (1921–41). These comedies, often staged with the government's blessing in the newly built playhouses in Tehran and other major cities, had a great impact on the ethos of the growing urban middle classes, who viewed theater-going as a chic habit with a moral essence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (38) ◽  
pp. 43-57
Author(s):  
Mohammed Naser Hassoon

Since Najib al-Haddad and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s first Arabic versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet at the end of the 19th century, the reception of Shakespeare in the Arab world has gone through a process of adaptation, Arabization, and translation proper. We consider the process of Arabization / domestication of Shakespeare’s plays since Najib al-Haddad’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s adaptation of Hamlet, to the achievements of Khalīl Mutran and Muhammad Hamdi. We underline, as particular examples of Shakespeare’s appropriation, the literary response of Ali Ahmed Bakathir, Muhammad al-Maghut and Mamduh Udwan, with a particular stress on Khazal al-Majidi and his adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. All these writers reposition Shakespeare’s plays in an entirely different cultural space.


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