Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret S. Graves
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Final Consideration

The conclusion places the art of the object into an expanded field, where it is shown to be contiguous with other visual and verbal artforms including architecture, painting, poetry, and rhetoric. It locates the peak of the allusive object in the pre-Mongol Middle East and speculates about its decline in the later medieval and early modern periods. It also considers the change in meaning that the subjects of the book have undergone as they transition from being objects of use to objects of display. The conclusion ends with final consideration of the nature of allusion and its implications for the intelligent art of the object.

Science Studies and Early Modern Ottoman Science

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 584-587
Author(s):  
B. Harun Küçük
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
The State ◽  
The West ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Local Perspective ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Geographies Of Science ◽  
Middle East History

This short essay focuses on three issues: how science studies may facilitate the rapprochement between the philological study of scientific texts and Middle East history; how it may help us reconsider ambiguous if not “black-boxed” terms such as the “state,” “Islam,” and the “West”; and finally, how it may build thematic and theoretical bridges with other histories and geographies of science currently emerging from a more global, and not merely local, perspective.

Judaism and Violence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eisen
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Identity Theory ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Middle East Conflict ◽  
Modern Judaism

This Element explores the potential in Judaism to incite Jews to engage in violence against non-Jews. The analysis proceeds in historical fashion, with sections devoted to the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic Judaism, medieval and early modern Judaism, and modern Zionism. The last topic is given special attention because of its relevance to the current Middle East conflict. This Element also draws on insights from social psychology to explain Jewish violence - particularly Social Identity Theory.

Doctoring the Body and Exciting the Soul: Drugs and consumer culture in medieval and early modern Iran

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 554-617
Author(s):  
RANIN KAZEMI
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

AbstractThis article focuses on the development of early modern consumerism in a part of the Middle East that historians of consumer culture are yet to fully explore. Making use of a wide variety of unexplored and underexplored original sources, the article contends that early modern consumer culture in Iran was grounded deeply in the ever-widening patterns of exchange and use that had developed slowly over the course of the previous centuries. The discussion below takes the growing popular interest in a few key psychoactive substances as a useful barometer of the dynamics of mass consumption, and chronicles how the slow and ever-expanding use of alcohol, opium, and cannabis (or a cannabis-like product) in the medieval period led to the popularity of coffee, tobacco, older drugs, and still other commodities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim here is to use the history of drug culture as an entry point to scrutinize the emergence of early modern consumerism among the elites and the non-elites in both urban and rural areas of the Middle East. In doing so, this article reconstructs the cultural and social history of recreational drugs prior to and during the early modern period, and elucidates the socio-economic context that helped bring about a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the Safavid state (1501–1736).

Footprints and Faith: Religion and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 169-183
Author(s):  
Alexandra Walsham
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Dome Of The Rock ◽  
Tangible Evidence

The idea that divine beings, holy people and magical creatures leave behind permanent marks of their immortality on the surface of the earth is common to many cultures and spiritual systems. Throughout history curious hollows, cavities, and coloured stains on stone and rock have been explained as tangible evidence of the presence and intervention of deities, saints, prophets, angels and demons. The folk motif of the miraculous impression of a foot, hand or limb finds frequent expression within Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Footprint shrines and cults abound in the Middle East, India, south-east Asia and China, from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and Qadam Sharif in Delhi to Phra Sat in Thailand. Variously revered as the footmark of Buddha, Siva, Adam and St Thomas the Aposde, Sri Pada in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most compelling emblem of the polyvalency of this intriguing phenomenon and its capacity to range across the full spectrum of religious traditions.

scholarly journals Scribal and Commentary Traditions at the Dawn of Print: The Manuscripts of the Near Eastern School of Theology as an Archive of the Early Nahḍa

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 402-437
Author(s):  
Salam Rassi
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Muslim Intellectuals ◽  
Longue Durée

Abstract This article focuses on the Arabic manuscript collection of the Near Eastern School of Theology (NEST). The NEST library contains several manuscripts that were donated, copied, or read by important Christian-born intellectuals of the nahḍa. Given these men’s role in the emergence of modern publishing in the Middle East, I examine the intersections between their scribal and printing activities. I also discuss works of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in the NEST’s collection. Most of these are by late medieval and early modern authors and contain extensive commentaries and glosses. This commentary culture was a key site of learning throughout the early modern Ottoman Empire and endured among Christian as well as Muslim intellectuals of the nahḍa movement. The persistence of these scribal and intellectual traditions reveals a longue durée of Islamicate scholarly traditions that is only beginning to be understood by historians of Arab modernity.

The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Key Players ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Turkey ◽  
Folk Islam

The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East today. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, making up around fifteen percent of the country’s population, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Historians have typically treated Kizilbashism/Alevism as an undifferentiated strain within the hazy category of “heterodox folk Islam.” Several aspects of their history therefore remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order. Among other things, it argues for a readjustment in focus from pre-Islamic Central Asia to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of the Middle East when exploring genealogies of popular Islam in Anatolia, and of Kizilbashism-Alevism, in particular. While the Kizilbash constitute the focus of the book, its findings may open new avenues of research in the study of other “heterodox” communities in the Islamic world by alerting historians to the potential of Sufism to provide a basis for social order and give rise to distinct communities.

Gender and Ottoman Social History

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Başak Tuğ
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Past Experiences

Starting with Said's critique of Orientalism but going well beyond it, poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of modernity have challenged not only one-dimensional visions of Western modernity—by “multiplying” or “alternating” it with different modernities—but also the binaries between the modern and the traditional/premodern/early modern, thus resulting in novel, more inclusive ways of thinking about past experiences. Yet, while scholars working on the Middle East have successfully struggled against the Orientalist perception of the Middle East asthetradition constructed in opposition to the Western modern, they often have difficulties in deconstructing the traditionwithin, that is, the premodern past. They have traced the alternative and multiple forms of modernities in Middle Eastern geography within the temporal borders of “modernity.” However, going beyond this temporality and constructing new concepts—beyond the notion of tradition—to understand the specificities of past experiences (which are still in relationship with the present) remains underdeveloped in the social history of the Middle East.

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