Zakāt in Imāmi Shī'ī jurisprudence, from the tenth to the sixteenth century A.D.

1981 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Calder

Māwardī said of zakāt that it was paid ṭahratan li-ahlihā ma'ūnatan li-ahl al-sahman, as a purification for the donor and a support for the recipient. It has thus a dual aspect. As a social tax it provides for the transfer of wealth from certain productive classes of society to certain poor or non-productīve classes. As a religious duty it is of essentially the same type as ṣalāt, ḥajj, etc., afarīḓa 'ala l-'ayn. Like these it is a ritual whose correct performance involves an attention to precise details of quantity (naṣāb), timing (al-ḥawl), and intention (niyya) which may be irrelevant or even inimical to the optimum fulfilment of the social aim.

Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto

Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.


1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.


1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo

When George Balandier proposed his theoretical approach to a colonial situation, the colonization of language was not an issue that piqued the interest of scholars in history, sociology, economics, or anthropology, which were the primary disciplines targeted in his article. When some fifteen years later Michel Foucault underlined the social and historical significance of language (‘l'énoncé*’) and discursive formation, the colonization of language was still not an issue to those attentive to the archaeology of knowledge. Such an archaeology, founded on the paradigmatic example generally understood as the Western tradition, overlooked the case history in which an archaeology of discursive formation would have led to the very root of the massive colonization of language which began in the sixteenth century with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.


1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-488
Author(s):  
Charles D. Sheldon

Merchants in the Tokugawa period were placed at the bottom of the shinōkōshō hierarchy of samurai-peasants-artisans-merchants. This social hierarchy was produced by a combination of social reality at the time Japan was unified in the late sixteenth century and an ancient Chinese physiocratic theory, never taken very seriously, in practical ways, in China. Once the country was unified, the social mobility of the previous years, of a kind which permitted men of ability to climb from the lowest ranks to join the military nobility—Hideyoshi is the prime example of this mobility—was viewed, by Hideyoshi above all others, as a cause of prolonged chaos and internecine warfare. With the argument that war had been abolished and common people therefore no longer needed weapons, Hideyoshi carried out his ‘sword-hunt’. He thus established the most fundamental of the class distinctions, between the samurai, the ruling class, who now enjoyed a monopoly of bearing arms, and the common people, who were henceforth expected simply to produce the food and other necessities of life, and to pay their taxes, which remained high even though warfare was supposedly ended.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEMMA ALLEN

AbstractThis article reveals how the ambassadress became an important part of early modern diplomatic culture, from the invention of the role in the early sixteenth century. As resident embassies became common across the early modern period, wives increasingly accompanied these diplomatic postings. Such a development has, however, received almost no scholarly attention to date, despite recent intense engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of early modern diplomacy. By considering the activities of English ambassadresses from the 1530s to 1700, accompanying embassies both inside and outside of Europe, it is possible not only to integrate them into narratives of diplomacy, but also to place their activities within broader global and political histories of the period. The presence of the ambassadress changed early modern diplomatic culture, through the creation of gendered diplomatic courtesies, gendered gift-giving practices, and gendered intelligence-gathering networks. Through female sociability networks at their host court, ambassadresses were able to access diplomatic intelligence otherwise restricted from their husbands. This was never more true than for those ambassadresses who held bonds of friendship with politically influential women at their host or home court, allowing them to influence political decision-making central to the success of the diplomatic mission.


1975 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Brady

In Jakob Burckhardt's classic vision of the emergence of a new, individualistic consciousness in Renaissance Italy, the artist took his place behind the tyrant as one of the early escapees from the crumbling prisons of medieval corporate institutions. Although the picture of his progress from craftsman to free professional is more nuanced and qualified in the recent literature, the Italian artist continues to enjoy his reputation as one of the few permanent beneficiaries of the Renaissance. As the Wittkowers have written: “But the new day came when artists began to revolt against the hierarchical order of which they were an integral part—a day when they regarded the organization meant to protect their interests as prison rather than shelter.”1 At Florence, where artists first achieved a new self-consciousness as theorists and men of letters, private patronage supplied the wealth for a new level of status, higher than that of the craftsman, and weakened the ties of guild life. Not that Florentine artists of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invariably became either successful businessmen or bohemians—though both types could be found there and elsewhere in Italy—nor did they revolt against corporate institutions altogether. But their new organization, the Accademia del Disegno, resembled the old guild structure only superficially and was, as its name suggests, a professional association uniting the artistic crafts rather than a type of guild.2 If the sixteenth century Italian artist lacked the social prestige of the lawyer, the notary, or the physician, neither was he any longer lumped together with the cobbler, the stonemason, or the apothecary.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-539
Author(s):  
P. K. YASSER ARAFATH

AbstractThis article examines the relations between trade, faith, and textual traditions in early modern Indian Ocean region and the birth of Arabi-Malayalam, a new system of writing which has facilitated the growth of a vernacular Islamic textual tradition in Malabar since the seventeenth century. As a transliterated scriptorial-literary tradition, Arabi-Malayalam emerged out of the polyglossic lingual sphere of the Malabar Coast, and remains as one of the important legacies of social and religious interactions in precolonial south Asia. The first part of this article examines the social, epistemic and normative reasons that led to the scriptorial birth of Arabi-Malayalam, moving beyond a handful of Malayalam writings that locate its origin in the social and economic necessities of Arab traders in the early centuries of Islam. The second part looks at the complex relationship between Muslim scribes and their vernacular audience in the aftermath of Portuguese violence and destruction of Calicut—one of the largest Indian Ocean ports before the sixteenth century. This part focuses on Qadi Muhammed bin Abdul Aziz and his Muhiyuddinmala, the first identifiable text in Arabi-Malayalam, examining how the Muhiyuddinmala represents a transition from classical Arabic theological episteme to the vernacular-popular poetic discourse which changed the pietistic behaviour of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar.


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