The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUNIL KUMAR
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Persian Literature ◽  
Prior Service ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe consolidation of the Delhi Sultanate coincided with the Mongol devastation of Transoxiana, Iran and Afghanistan. This paper studies the Persian literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries invested as it was in the projection of the court of the Delhi Sultans as the ‘sanctuary of Islam’, where the Muslim community was safe from the marauding infidel Mongols. The binaries on which the qualities of the accursed Mongols and the monolithic Muslim community were framed ignored the fact that a large number of Sultanate elites and monarchs were of Turkish/Mongol ethnicity or had a history of prior service in their armed contingents. While drawing attention to the narrative strategies deployed by Sultanate chroniclers to obscure the humble frontier origins of its lords and masters, my paper also elaborates on steppe traditions and rituals prevalent in early-fourteenth-century Delhi. All of these underlined the heterogeneity of Muslim Sultanate society and politics in the capital, a complexity that the Persian litterateurs were loath to acknowledge in their records.

Islam and Colonial Rule in Lagos

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Olakunle A. Lawal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
Southwestern Nigeria ◽  
Urban Settlement ◽  
Islam And Politics ◽  
British Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
Process Of Urbanization

IntroductionThis essay provides an explanation of the dynamics of the interactionbetween Islam and politics by placing emphasis on the role played byMuslims in the collision of traditionalism and British rule as colonialismtook root in Lagos. The focus is on the development of a political schismwithin the nascent Muslim community of metropolitan Lagos at the startof the twentieth century up until the end of the 1940s. It highlights therole of Islam in an emerging urban settlement experiencing rapid transformationfrom a purely rural and traditional center into a colonial urbancenter. The essay is located within the broader issues of urban change andtransition in twentieth-century tropical Africa. Three major developments(viz: the central mosque crisis, the Eleko affair, and the Oluwa land case)are used as the vehicles through which the objectives of the essay areachieved.The introduction of Islam into Lagos has been studied by T. G. O.Gbadamosi as part of the history of Islam in southwestern Nigeria. Thisepic study does not pay specific attention to Lagos, devoted as it is to thegrowth of Islam in a far-flung territory like the whole of modem southwesternNigeria. His contribution to a collection of essays on the historyof Lagos curiously leaves out Islam’s phenomenal impact on Lagosianpolitics during the first half of the twentieth century. In an attempt to fillthis gap, Hakeem Danmole’s essay also stops short of appreciating the fundamentallink between the process of urbanization, symbolized in this caseby colonial rule, and the vanguard role played by Muslims in the inevitableclash of tradition and colonial rule in Lagos between 1900 and 1950.

Perfection Makes Practice

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 98-100
Author(s):  
Muhamad Ali
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Psychological Dimension ◽  
South Sulawesi ◽  
Complex Dimensions ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of

Studies of Islam in Southeast Asia have sought to better understand its multifacetedand complex dimensions, although one may make a generalizedcategorization of Muslim beliefs and practices based on a fundamental differencein ideologies and strategies, such as cultural and political Islam.Anna M. Gade’s Perfection Makes Practice stresses the cultural aspect ofIndonesian Muslim practices by analyzing the practices of reciting andmemorizing the Qur’an, as well as the annual competition.Muslim engagement with the Qur’an has tended to emphasize the cognitiveover the psychological dimension. Perfection Makes Practice analyzesthe role of emotion in these undertakings through a combination ofapproaches, particularly the history of religions, ethnography, psychology,and anthropology. By investigating Qur’anic practitioners in Makassar,South Sulawesi, during the 1990s, Gade argues that the perfection of theQur’an as a perceived, learned, and performed text has made and remade thepractitioners, as well as other members of the Muslim community, to renewor increase their engagement with the holy text. In this process, she suggests,moods and motivation are crucial to preserving the recited Qur’an and revitalizingthe Muslim community.In chapter 1, Gade begins with a theoretical consideration for her casestudy. Drawing from concepts that emphasize the importance of feeling andemotion in ritual and religious experience, she develops a conceptualizationof this engagement. In chapter 2, Gade explains memorization within thecontext of the self and social relations. She argues that Qur’anic memorizershave a special relationship with its style and structure, as well as with thesocial milieu. Although Qur’anic memorization is a normal practice for mostMuslims, its practitioners have learned how to memorize and recite beautifullysome or all of the Qur’an’s verses, a process that requires emotion ...

Staging Romance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Spatial Grammar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter explores the mostly overlooked history of romance on the early modern stage. Analysing the geographies of two little-known plays, Clyomon and Clamydes (1580s?) and Guy of Warwick (early 1590s?), it argues that, in its imaginative openness and its flexible staging of space, the early modern theatre was the ideal environment in which to stage romance’s extravagant spatial and ethnographical imaginings. Further, the chapter demonstrates how a theatrical tradition of clowning enabled these late-Elizabethan dramas to contest the values of the very romance-worlds they had established. It closes with a fresh reading of Francis Beaumont’s parody of romance, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, arguing that the play satirizes dramatic romance’s spatial grammar as well as its narrative strategies.

At the Edge of Reformation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Linehan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.

scholarly journals The Reception of Petrarch’s Africa in Fascist Italy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Asad Abijuwa Agbamu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Second Punic War ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

AbstractIn his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.

Camera Papae: problems of Papal Finance in the later Middle Ages

1953 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Peter D. Partner
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Private Person ◽  
History Of

Boniface VIII probably spent some half a million gold florins on the acquisition of lands for the Caetani. But of that money not a word is said in the Introitus and Exitus volumes, the main account books of the Apostolic Chamber. Where was it accounted for and from whence did it come? The pope had certain special sources of income which would not ordinarily be reckoned in the main account books, and of these, some could properly be termed his fortune as a private person, while others attached to his office as pope. There was the private fortune which he had before he assumed the tiara. There were the incomes of benefices personally reserved to him, gifts made him by prelates and laymen, legacies, sometimes the goods of deceased prelates, and the so-called ‘private visitations’ and ‘secret services’. Later in the fourteenth century many other sources were tapped for the benefit of a secret fund, and all in all the sums which it disposed of were formidable and sometimes enormous. The ends to which the money was directed were as various as the characters and policies of the pontiffs: it was used for nepotistic ends on a princely scale, as a mere convenient subsidiary to the main financial machine, as a war account, as a means of making enormous loans to lay rulers, or simply as a petty cash account. The earliest records of the secret accounts to survive are from the midfifteenth century, but the large sums involved, and its covert but great importance in papal policy in general make the earlier history of this institution as interesting as it is obscure.

The Preparation of a Bio-Bibliographical Survey of Persian Literature

1972 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-186
Author(s):  
Yu. E Borshchevsky ◽  
Yu. E. Bregel
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Late Development ◽  
Persian Literature ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Iranian Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bibliographical Survey ◽  
Eastern Turkestan ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Source Materials

The history of literature in Persian has not been sufficiently studied although it is almost twelve centuries old, and was at times in widespread use in Afghanistan, Eastern Turkestan, India, Turkey and the Caucasus, as well as in Iran and Central Asia. The comparatively late development of Iranian studies and the condition of source materials are to blame for this situation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document