Norman Anderson and the Christian Mission to Modernize Islam

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Secular Modernity ◽  
Christian Discourse ◽  
Insight Into

Western Christians in the twentieth century viewed Islam through a lens of social and political concerns that would have appeared novel to their medieval and early-modern predecessors. Concerns about the predicament of secular 'modernity' infused Christian discourse with distinct assumptions that shaped engagement with Islam in fundamentally new ways. J. N. D. (Norman) Anderson (1908-94), a highly influential British Christian scholar of Islam, embodied this new orientation in his commitment to 'modernize' Islam. Anderson's engagement with Islam as a missionary, intelligence agent, scholar of Islamic law and advisor to various Muslim governments, spanned multiple decades and continents. As well as shaping Western understandings of Islamic law and its application, he was involved in debates about the end of the British Empire and the transformation of Christian missions following formal decolonization. Because of Anderson's location at the intersection of so many different debates concerning Islam, his life provides unique insights into the ways in which Christians reconfigured their response to Islam in the last century. Given Christianity's continued influence on British and American ideas about Islam, this study provides crucial insight into the persistent focus on 'modernizing' and 'secularizing' Islam today.

Theological Constructions of Scottish National Identity

2019 ◽  
pp. 288-302
Author(s):  
Doug Gay
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
Theological Ethics ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Reformation

This chapter reflects theologically on the historical development of theological constructions of Scottish identity, considering disputed assessments of ‘nationalism’ in the light of insights from both political theology and theological ethics. It explores how early modern developments, from the Reformation through to the Unions of 1603 and 1707, continued to be reflected and refracted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions. It traces the influence of two world wars, decolonization, and the end of the British Empire on the development of contested public theology accounts of Scotland’s twenty-first century history, in which arguments for devolution and independence continue to play a leading role.

Inquiring into Empire: Princeton Seminary’s Society of Inquiry on Missions, the British Empire, and the Opium Trade, Ca. 1830‐1850

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-219
Author(s):  
Jason Bruner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Global State ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
The North ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Christian Missionary

AbstractPrinceton Seminary was intimately involved in the North American foreign missions movement in the nineteenth century. One remarkable dimension of this involvement came through the student-led Society of Inquiry on Missions, which sought to gather information about the global state of the Christian mission enterprise. This paper examines the Society’s correspondence with Protestant missionaries in China regarding their attitudes to the British Empire in the years 1830‐1850. It argues that the theological notion of providence informed Princetonians’ perceptions of the world, which consequently dissociated the Christian missionary task with any particular nation or empire. An examination of the Society of Inquiry’s correspondence during the mid-nineteenth century reveals much about Protestant missionaries and their interactions with the opium trade and the results of the First Opium War (1839‐1842). Princetonians’ responses to the opium trade and the First Opium War led ultimately to a significant critique of western commercial influence in East Asia. In conclusion, this paper questions the extent to which commerce, empire, and Christian missions were inherently associated in nineteenth century American Protestant missionary activity.

Application of Statutes of Limitations to Islamic Banking: The Case of Malaysia

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69
Author(s):  
Aishath Muneeza ◽  
Zakariya Mustapha
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Islamic Banking ◽  
Legal Action ◽  
Qualitative Research Methodology ◽  
The Right ◽  
Limitation Of Action ◽  
Insight Into

Limitations of action designate extent of time after an event, as set by statutes of limitations, within which legal action can be initiated by a party to a transaction. No event is actionable outside the designated time as same is rendered statute-barred. This study aims to provide an insight into application and significance of Limitations Act 1950 and Limitation Ordinance 1952 to Islamic banking matters in Malaysia as well as Shariah viewpoint on the issue of limitation of action. In conducting the study, a qualitative research methodology is employed where reported Islamic banking cases from 1983 to 2018 in Malaysia were reviewed and analysed to ascertain the application of those statutes of limitations to Islamic banking. Likewise, relevant provisions of the statutes as invoked in the cases were examined to determine possible legislative conflicts between the provisions and the rule of Islamic law in governing the right and limitation of action in Islamic banking cases under the law. The reviewed cases show the extent to which statutes of limitations were invoked in Malaysian courts in determining validity of Islamic banking matters. The limitation provisions so referred to are largely sections 6(1)(a) and 21(1) Limitations Act 1953 and section 19 Limitation Ordinance 1953, which do not conflict with Shariah viewpoint on the matter. This study will prove invaluable to financial institutions and their customers alike in promoting knowledge and creating awareness over actionable event in the course of their transactions.

The Changing Face of Irish Ireland: Séamus Ó Grianna's and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's Fictions of the Donegal Gaeltacht

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-380
Author(s):  
Ríona Nic Congáil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Insight Into

Séamus Ó Grianna and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, whose lifespans overlapped only briefly, rank among the most prolific Irish writers of the twentieth century. Their bilingualism, moreover, offers them access to two languages, cultures, and viewpoints. Their shared interest in the Donegal Gaeltacht during the revivalist period, and their use of fiction to explore and represent it, provide their readers with a remarkable insight into the changing ideologies of twentieth-century Ireland, and particularly Irish-Ireland, touching on broad issues that are linguistic, cultural, political, gendered, and spatial. This essay begins by analyzing the narrative similarities between Ó Grianna's Mo Dhá Róisín and Ní Dhuibhne's Hiring Fair Trilogy, and proceeds to examine how both writers negotiate historical fact, the Irish language, the performance of Gaelic culture, the burgeoning women's movement, and the chasm between rural and urban Ireland of the revival. Through this approach, the essay demonstrates that the fictions of these two writers reveal as much about their own agendas and the dominant ideas of the epoch in which they were writing, as they do about life in the Donegal Gaeltacht in the early twentieth century.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

The Anthropological Lens

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Accountability ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Local People ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Encounters ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Insight Into

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) is widely considered the most influential British anthropologist of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his seminal works on South Sudanese ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (OUP 1937) and The Nuer (OUP 1940). In these works, now classics in the anthropological literature, Evans-Pritchard broke new ground on questions of rationality, social accountability, kinship, social and political organization, and religion, as well as influentially moving the discipline in Britain away from the natural sciences and towards history. Yet despite much discussion about his theoretical contributions to anthropology, no study has yet explored his fieldwork in detail in order to get a better understanding of its historical contexts, local circumstances or the social encounters out of which it emerged. This book then is just such an exploration, of Evans-Pritchard the fieldworker through the lens of his fieldwork photography. Through an engagement with his photographic archive, and by thinking with it alongside his written ethnographies and other unpublished evidence, the book offers a new insight into the way in which Evans-Pritchard’s theoretical contributions to the discipline were shaped by his fieldwork and the numerous local people in Africa with whom he collaborated. By writing history through field photographs we move back towards the fieldwork experiences, exploring the vivid traces, lived realities and local presences at the heart of the social encounter that formed the basis of Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

The Authority of the Sunnah According to the Qur’anic Text

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 48-72
Author(s):  
Ahmad Eldridge Cleaver
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Law ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Judicial Role

This study analyzes what the Qur’an ascribes to the Sunnah of Muhammad and highlights the existence of indicators within the Qur’anic text as to the Sunnah’s significance, role, and legal authority. Insight into its place and role is researched according to the Qur’an, and answers are sought as to its significance in Islamic law and thought. The answers presented are the ones found in the Qur’anic discourse circulating around Muhammad. The analysis, which examines thirty-five Qur’anic verses that mention Muhammad, is organized according to several themes, among them obedience to God and to Muhammad and the latter’s judicial role.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Leftist Newspapers and Periodicals

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-37
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Beck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Price Information ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Search Function ◽  
Advanced Search ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Pdf Format ◽  
Database Content ◽  
Insight Into

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Leftist Newspapers and Periodicals is a source for leftist publications (mostly newspapers), largely published in the twentieth century. Here, the user can access articles in PDF format from 156 national and international publications. Navigating this database and the documents therein can be easily done, but articles cannot be magnified or reduced, which may prove problematic with PDFs of old newspapers. Database content can be found through browsing or by using a basic and/or advanced search. The browse and basic search options here are understandable, but the advanced search is not self-explanatory and can possibly confuse the user. As a consequence, a new user of this database will probably benefit from instruction in its use from either the vendor or someone else familiar with this resource. However, when this search function is used properly it can produce numerous, on-point results for any query. The same is true of the basic search and browsing features, though they tend to produce larger lists of results that are less on-point than the advanced search. The vendor did not provide specific price information for this review, only indicating that pricing is determined by an institution's size and number of users. As this provides potential subscribers with very little insight into the cost of acquiring this resource, its advised that they contact ProQuest for a price quote tailored to their own institution. Its licensing agreement is the same as those used for all ProQuest databases and is average in its composition (though somewhat longer than average). The quality and quantity of content in this resource is notable, and it will certainly be of use to those looking for articles from leftist newspapers and periodicals. However, the definition of “leftist” here may be problematic for some users! Communist and Socialist publications are certainly available in this database, but those for Anarchists, Social Democrats, and other leftists are not.

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