“The Reign of God Has Come”: Eschatology and Empire in Late Antiquity and Early Islam

Arabica ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (5) ◽  
pp. 514-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Shoemaker

For much of the 20th century, scholarship on Muḥammad and the beginnings of Islam has shown a reluctance to acknowledge the importance of imminent eschatology in earliest Islam. One of the main reasons for this resistance to eschatology would appear to be the undeniable importance of conquest and political expansion in early Islam: if Muḥammad and his followers believed that the world would soon come to an end, why then did they seek to conquer and rule over so much of it? Nevertheless, there is no real contradiction between the urgent eschatology revealed by the Qurʾān and other early sources on the one hand, and the determination of Muḥammad and his followers to expand their religious policy and establish an empire on the other. To the contrary, the political eschatology of the Byzantine Christians during the sixth and early seventh centuries indicates that these two beliefs went hand in hand, offering important contemporary precedent for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam.

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 235-241
Author(s):  
Barbara Klonowska

This article reviews the recent monograph by Maxim Shadurski, The Nationality of Utopia. H. G. Wells, England, and the World State (New York: Routledge, 2020) in the context of utopian studies on the one hand, and the political ideas of the nation state vs. world state on the other.


Author(s):  
Marin Terpstra

Abstract In this article I explore different ways of imagining distinctions in the form of borders and on the attitudes that people assume towards them. A distinction is primarily a cognitive operation, but appears as such in human communication (people talking about differences and identities), and in constructions that shape the material space people live in (borders, buildings, and the like). I explore two extreme positions, the one de-intensifying distinctions by focusing on their logical and contingent forms, the other intensifying distinctions by making them a potential cause of conflict. The first one is exemplified by Spencer Brown’s and Niklas Luhmann’s reflection on the logical and sociological aspects of distinctions; the second one by Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘the political’ and its key notion of the distinction between friend and enemy. Both positions are relevant to understand a major debate and struggle in the world of today between liberal cosmopolitans and authoritarian nationalists. I show in what way both positions are aspects of the human condition, and what makes that alternately the one or the other is stressed.


1912 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 41-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. A. Berry ◽  
A. W. D. Robertson

IN our communication to the Royal Society of Victoria of the 11th March, 1909 (1), describing our recent discovery of forty-two Tasmanian crania hitherto quite unknown to the world of science, we stated that “one of the earliest purposes to which it is proposed to utilise the present material is the determination of the relationship of the Tasmanian to the anthropoids and primitive man on the one hand, and to the Australian aboriginal on the other hand. Schwalbe's study of Pithecanthropus erectus (2) may serve as a basis for the former purpose, and Klaatsch's recent work (3) for the latter, though it must be remembered that innumerable authors have contributed to both subjects.” The present work is the fulfilment of the first part of this undertaking, namely, the determination of the relationship of the Tasmanian to the anthropoids and primitive man.


Author(s):  
Santiago Bertrán

Este artículo explora los aspectos filosóficos y éticos de la literatura de Javier Marías a la luz de la filosofía de Julián Marías y la literatura de Marcel Proust. Las ficciones de Javier Marías nos presentan una serie de personajes que se demuestran como agudos observadores que interpretan el mundo para entenderlo mejor y para orientarse en él. Este artículo defiende el argumento que esta tarea hermenéutica se extiende también a la propia poética de Javier Marías, la cual refleja dos conceptos esenciales no del todo bien estudiados hasta la fecha: por una parte, lo que Marías, tomando prestado un término de su padre, Julián Marías, denomina "pensamiento literario", un concepto que entiende la escritura como una de las herramientas más poderosas que tiene el autor de explorar y entender la realidad; por otra parte, el concepto de "reconocimiento", una noción muy próxima a la poética de Marcel Proust que describe la experiencia cognitiva por la cual el lector 'se ve' o 'se reconoce' a sí mismo en la narración. Al investigar estas poéticas visuales y sus implicaciones éticas se descubre el contexto metafísico y ontológico al cual se aproxima la obra mariesca, que no es otro que el paradigma filosófico de la "realidad radical" establecido por Ortega y Gasset a comienzos del siglo XX.   This article examines the ethical and philosophical aspects of Javier Marías’s literature in light of the philosophy of Julián Marías and the poetics of Marcel Proust. Javier Marías’s fictions famously present us with a series of characters that prove to be acute observers, interpreting the world both to understand it better and to orientate themselves within it. I argue that this hermeneutical approach extends to Marías’s poetics, which reflect two main concepts not yet well studied: on the one hand, what Marías, borrowing a term from his father, the philosopher Julián Marías, calls ‘pensamiento literario’, which describes creative writing as one of the most powerful tools the author has to explore and understand reality; and on the other, his idea of ‘reconocimiento’, a concept which echoes Marcel Proust’s poetics and which defines the sympathetic process by which the reader ‘sees’ or ‘recognises’ him or herself in the narrative. In investigating these ‘visual’ poetics and their ethical implications, we will discover the metaphysical and ontological context intrinsic to Marías’s narrative, which is based on the philosophical paradigm of the ‘realidad radical’ established by José Ortega y Gasset at the beginning of the 20th Century.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-518
Author(s):  
Wang Gungwu

For the past three decades, student movements in most countries in the world have been beaten back, but there are signs that some may be returning. In response to the Arab Spring, students participated fully in Tahrir Square and beyond. The student elections in Egypt that followed, however, seem to have been divided according to the various links that each student group had with the political groups contending for state power, like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists on the one side, against secular and revolutionary groups on the other. It is not certain if the student elections really reflected the overall mood of the country or whether they were simply shaped by political protagonists outside the campuses.


1972 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 71-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Thompson

Only twice in the early seventeenth century, in 1624 and 1640, was the ‘political nation’ in England united. On both occasions, the determination of policy was surrendered by an unwilling king and the assistance of Parliamentary leaders sought. Both led to war and a sharpening of domestic political conflict. But such similarities were no more than superficial. The war which was envisaged in 1624 was foreign and external; the one which ensued in 1642 was civil and internal. In 1624, the co-operation of the Parliamentary leaders was freely solicited; in 1640, there was no alternative. The initiative which lay with Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham at the earlier date was in the hands of the Earl of Bedford, Pym and St John in November 1640. One was a prelude to the period of ‘Personal Government’, the other, ultimately, to that of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.


Mäetagused ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
Merili Metsvahi ◽  

The article gives a short overview of the Estonian werewolf tradition in the 16th and 17th centuries and a glimpse into the 19th–20th-century werewolf beliefs. The image of werewolf of the earlier and later periods is compared. The differences between the images of these two periods are explained with the help of the approaches of Tim Ingold and Philipp Descola, which ground the changes in the worldview taking place together with the shift from the pre-modern society into modernity. The mental world of the 16th–17th-century Estonian and Livonian peasant did not encompass the category of nature, and the borders between the human being and the animal on the one side and organism and environment on the other side were not so rigid as they are in today’s people’s comprehension of the world. The ability to change into a wolf was seen as an added possibility of acquiring new experiences and benefits. As the popular ontology had changed by the second half of the 19th century – the human mind was raised into the ultimate position and the animal was comprehended as being inferior – the transformation of a man into an animal, if it was seriously taken at all, seemed to be strange and unnatural.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 979
Author(s):  
Marco Demichelis

Christology and monotheism have been dogmatically linked in the long history of Islam-Christian dialogue since the beginning of the 8th century. The Qur’an, in an analytical perception of religious otherness, specifically in relation to Christianity, assumed a dual discernment: on the one hand, it adopts a sceptical position because Christians are assimilationist (2: 120, 135, 145; 5: 51), sectarian and made Jesus the son of God (4: 171; 5: 14–19, 73; 9: 30; 18: 4–5; 21: 26); on the other hand, they are commended over the Jews and ‘Isa ibn Maryam has been strengthened with the Holy Spirit by God himself (2: 59, 62, 87, 253; 3: 48; 5: 47, 73, 82, 85, 110). The importance of enforcing the consciousness of a Quranic Christology, specifically where it concerned the potential influence that Christological doctrines such as adoptionism and monoenergism had on early Islam in late antiquity, where it was based on the proto- Islamic understanding of Jesus, and where it was rooted in Patristic orthodox-unorthodox debates, fell into oblivion. How was the Quranic canonization process affected by the ongoing Christological debates of the 7th century? Could Heraclius’ monoenergism have played a concrete influence on Quranic Christology? And in which way did early Kalam debates on God’s speech and will remain linked to Quranic Christology?


2002 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Goran Mijic

This essay concentrates on scientific-rationalist discourses entering massively the realm of literature at the beginning of the 20th century. They open new horizons revealing phenomena unknown before on the one side, but they also obscure the world around us providing convenient screen from painful truths on the other. This paper tries to demonstrate how technological discourses move the reader from a highly visual receptive position to a pure cognitive realm of symbolic representations with its own dynamics. The scientific-rationalist discourses produce a new parallel reality, a scientific haze tending to withdraw from visual representation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 391-398
Author(s):  
Kirill A. Solovyov

The article is devoted to the political views of F.D. Samarin, his conception of the political system in Russia before 1905, constitutional reforms of 1905–1906 and Stolypin’s reforms. The author demonstrates how Samarin tried to adopt the Slavophile doctrine to the situation of the beginning of the 20th century. At that he had to carry on polemics both with the opponents of the Slavophilism and its supporters. On the one hand, this fact stresses Slavophilism diversity and its inner heterogeneity. On the other hand, it shows the nature of the Slavophile doctrine itself that resembled more the historiographic approach to researching the past than a well-structured political conception. Giving meaningful political content to Slavophile ideas depended fully on every single representative of the Slavophile intellectual heritage.


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