The Invention of a Populist Islamic Leader: Badr Al-dìn Al-Hasanì, the Religious Educational Movement and The Great Syrian Revolt

Arabica ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-139
Author(s):  
Itzchak Weismann

AbstractBadr al-Dìn al-Hasanì (1850-1935) appears in the biographical literature of Syria as its foremost man of religion from World War I to the Great Revolt. This article examines his life and work within the context of the gradual shift of the Syrian ulema of his day from the older "politics of notables" to a new strategy of popular mobilization. It argues that Badr al-Dìn's image was "invented" during the early Mandate by disciples in search of legitimization for their populist agendas of an Islamic educational system and agitation against French rule. They accordingly presented him as a self-standing scholar who transcended all religious divisions, reprimanded "unjust" rulers and supported the Arab cause. This "romantic" image of Badr al-Dìn was to prevail over the alternative image of him as an accommodating religious notable which emerges from the French sources.

1999 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-238
Author(s):  
Ivo Schneider

In the first years after World War I there was a strong reaction against science and technology in Germany that was backed by the Lebensphilosophie and Anthroposophie movements. This sudden change in public opinion was not the result of new concepts and convictions that did not exist before; rather, the spectrum of opinions in the Weimar Republic continued those of the Wilhelminian period. However, the strength of critical voices was increased substantially as a result of the defeat in the war and its consequences. It may be that the enfranchisement of women in Germany in 1918 at least indirectly influenced the substantial shift in opinion after 1918. The continuity of a critical attitude towards science and technology from 1870 to 1933 seems deeply rooted in the German educational system and among the leaders of society, stemming from the so-called Bildungsbürgertum.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-45
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Szudarek

Abstract In February 1914, the Agricultural Associations of Housewives, operating in the Eastern provinces of Prussia since the 1890s, were subordinated to organisations responsible for the development of agriculture in Prussia, which were dominated by conservatives and noble landowners. This came about on the initiative of some influential agrarians, who, in this way, wanted to strengthen their influence in rural areas, as well as to include the women’s agrarian movement in combating the outflow of labour from agriculture. The women’s organizations, having been politicized in this way and adopted by agrarian leaders after 1908, were to implement a new strategy for preventing the migration of rural population to cities. This is as a resulted of the partial support for Heinrich Sohnrey’s programme and his concept of improving the quality of life in rural areas. Elisabet Boehm, the founder of the associations, from the very beginning of their existence, sought to cooperate with agricultural organizations. She believed that this would be the only way for members to gain access to the expertise for implementing the main point of the association’s agenda, i.e. the professionalization of women’s work in rural areas. The article focuses on explaining the circumstances that led to the interest of the agrarians in the women’s agrarian movement and its inclusion in the reform programme for rural prosperity launched just before the war and showing that the cooperation was primarily aimed at using the associations to strengthen their influence in rural areas.


Author(s):  
Thomas Grillot

This chapter applies the insights of the previous chapters to the examination of the role of patriotism and veterans in shaping Indian policy from the 1920s. It shows how, for veterans and non-veterans alike, Native American participation in World War I was an opportunity to ask the state and the general public for moral and material recognition. Although they derived few tangible benefits from this mobilization, the ability of veterans to claim the attention of non-Indians allowed them to accumulate a level of political savvy and social capital rarely encountered in their communities. The 1920s were a testing time for Native patriots and a testing ground for a new strategy. In the process, they asked troubling questions: Could Indians be freed from BIA supervision? And with what consequences? Patriotism suggested new answers to what was, after all, the core of the “Indian problem.”


2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.


Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.


Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document