"Modernity", "Tradition", and the Battleground of Gender in Early 20th-Century Damascus

2012 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Gelvin
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Structures

AbstractIn early 20th-century Damascus, a group of religious scholars who called themselves mutadayyinūn (the "very pious") and who claimed to represent an Islamic "orthodoxy" launched a journal, al-Haqā'iq, to expose the crimes of the mutafarnijūn (the "overly Frankified") and to agitate for a return to "true Islam". According to the mutadayyinūn, the mutafarnijūn were introducing into the Ottoman Empire practices borrowed from the West and were thus abetting a Western conspiracy against the empire and Islam. Among the practices the mutadayyinūn found particularly irksome were those that threatened "traditional" and "scripturally-dictated" customs relating to gender, such as veiling and the seclusion of women. What becomes clear through an analysis of the debate, the reasons for its prominence on the pages of al-Haqā'iq, and the method and style of argumentation adopted by the mutadayyinūn, however, is that despite their claim to be the upholders of tradition, the mutadayyinūn relied on the same epistemic assumptions as those they castigated. Thus, unbeknownst to them, they were engaged in the process of inventing a religio-political synthesis coherent with contemporary social and political structures and institutions. The traces of this religio-political synthesis, later adopted or reinvented by others, remains embedded within the structures and institutions of the contemporary Syrian state.

Tribute and Trade

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
Economic Interactions

In the 18th and 19th centuries, relations between China and the West were defined by the Qing dynasty’s strict restrictions on foreign access and by the West’s imperial ambitions. Cultural, political and economic interactions were often fraught, with suspicion and misunderstanding on both sides. Yet trade flourished and there were instances of cultural exchange and friendship, running counter to the official narrative. Tribute and Trade: China and Global Modernity explores encounters between China and the West during this period and beyond, into the early 20th century, through examples drawn from art, literature, science, politics, music, cooking, clothing and more. How did China and the West see each other, how did they influence each other, and what were the lasting legacies of this contact?

Casting Off Egyptian Ḥanafism: Sharīʿa, Divorce, and Legal Reform in 20th-Century Egypt

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Samy Ayoub
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Divorce Law ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Judicial Reasoning ◽  
The Government

AbstractThis article explores an important debate on divorce law in early 20th-century Egypt between the sharīʿa judge Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir (d. 1958) and the adjunct to the last Shaykh al-Islām of the Ottoman Empire, Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (d. 1952). The debate is centred on Shākir’s argument that triple divorce (three pronouncements of the divorce oath in one utterance, deemed irrevocable according to the Ḥanafī school) should be treated as a single revocable divorce, a position that the Ḥanafī school rejects. The Egyptian divorce law was changed on 10 March 1929 to embrace the revised position, supported by the government, that a triple divorce counts as a single divorce, thereby making it revocable. Shākir argued that the official adherence of the sharīʿa courts to the preponderant opinions (al-rājiḥ) of the Ḥanafī school was one of the key obstacles to meaningful legal reform in this case. Despite his declared following of the Ḥanafī school, Shākir dismissed Ḥanafī legal norms and authorities, and advocated an urgent break with the control of the Ḥanafī legal school on the process of judicial reasoning in the Egyptian sharīʿa courts. To further demonstrate this dynamic, I take up a close reading of a court decision on whether custody payments (ujrat al-ḥaḍāna) include housing support (sakan), or if the latter is a separate calculated expense. Shākir not only ruled in opposition to the Ḥanafī preponderant position but also rejected the late Ḥanafī authority Muḥammad Amīn ʿĀbidīn’s (Ibn ʿĀbidīn, d. 1836) effort to harmonize the school’s position on this matter. I propose that Shākir was an iconoclastic Ḥanafī.

The ideology of the Black Hundreds in Russia in 1905-1917

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxim Lvovich Razmolodin
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Extreme Right ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian People ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right

This monograph reveals the conservative essence of the Black Hundred movement and its ideology aimed at the protection of Christian and national traditions in Russia in 1905-1917. This task is solved on the basis of an analysis of the origins, foundations of the theoretical constructs and programs of the extreme right monarchist parties in comparison with the system of views of Russian nationalists. The subjects for consideration are a set of basic ideological principles, postulates and provisions of ideologies of the Black Hundred organizations; the Orthodox religious foundations of the right monarchist ideology; conservative bases of political problematics and the problem of "Russia – the West"; approaches to the definition of nation (nationality); Imperial and national perspectives; the role and place of the Russian people; attitudes to pogroms and terrorist methods of struggle. The research proposes a system of criteria for the identification of party and personal affiliation to the Black Hundred spectrum in Russia the early 20th century, allowing a clear border to be drawn with nationalist (including fascist) parties. The urgency for this research has been caused by a poor development in the historiography. Intended for historians, sociologists, political scientists.

The Evolution of Third-Party Mediation in Sharīʿa Courts in 19th- and early 20th-century Central Asia

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Sartori
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Direct Involvement

AbstractWhile in the Ottoman Empire reconciling disputing parties insharīʿacourts occurred without the direct involvement of state officials, in modern Central Asia functionaries appointed by the ruler’s chancellery acted as mediators and mediation procedures were consistent with the state’s intervention in the resolution of a conflict. This ended with Russian colonization. Conflict resolution was left to thesharīʿacourts; mediation continued to be important but state appointees were no longer officially involved in bringing it about. The Russian colonial and Soviet administrations made the community responsible for seeking amicable settlements. Only afterwards did they realize how easy this made it for local groups to circumvent the state’s supervision.

Uncommunicative Communication: Competing Egyptian, Ottoman and British Imperial Ventures in 19th-Century Egypt

2014 ◽  
Vol 54 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-422
Author(s):  
Maurus Reinkowski
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Illustrative Case ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
The Way

The contribution “Uncommunicative Communication: Competing Egyptian, Ottoman and British Notions of Imperial Order in 19th-Century Egypt” by Maurus Reinkowski (University of Basel) sees Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th century as a particularly illustrative case of competing imperial ventures, in particular of the Egyptian, Ottoman and British states. Whereas the Egyptian imperial venture, prominent under Muḥammad ʿAlī in the 1820s and 1830s and revived under Ismāʿīl (r. 1863–1879) in the early 1870s, quickly degenerates into bankruptcy and finally British occupation from 1882 onwards, the Ottoman-British imperial competition continues until 1914. A particularly colorful example of how the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain – in the way of uncommunicative communication – strived to maintain respectively to enforce their notion of an appropriate imperial order is to compare of Aḥmed Muḫtār Paşa and Lord Cromer. Aḥmed Muḫtār, a high-ranking Ottoman officer, was sent in 1885 as Extraordinary Commissioner to Cairo, where he stayed until 1908. Muḫtār’s semi-exile in Cairo was characterized by factual powerlessness as he was completely overshadowed by Sir Evelyn Baring, the British consul general who was the factual ruler of Egypt between 1882 and 1907. Starting from the assumption that Aḥmed Muḫtār’s status in Egypt does not only reflect his personal isolation, but also the precarious imperial status of the Ottoman Empire, this paper examines Aḥmed Muḫtār’s presence and politics in Cairo as a case of both personal self-reassurance and imperial self-representation.


scholarly journals «BUREAUCRATIC YOKE» OF ST. PETERSBURG IN THE REFLECTION OF RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL CLASSICS OF THE LATE 19TH – EARLY 20TH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
V.N. Shulgin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
Moral Tradition ◽  
Peter The Great

The author proceeds from still in large measure incomprehensible phenomenon – the existence of the Russian pre-revolutionary intellectual and moral tradition, whose representatives, including N.M. Karamzin and other classics of «pochvennicheskoj» orientation (of «national originality»), sought to re-educate the St. Petersburg political class in the spirit of Russism. Therefore, they criticized the «bureaucratic yoke of Petersburg», which turned into a Westernization errors of Peter the Great in the form of borrowing from the West in the spirit of bureaucracy and state absolutism.

scholarly journals http://habibiaislamicus.com/index.php/hirj/article/view/215

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-61
Author(s):  
Lubna Farah ◽  
◽  
Abdul Bari Owais
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The West ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Muslim Culture ◽  
As If

This research is an attempt to trace and corelate the evolution of short story in the Arabic and Urdu languages besides highlighting contributions made by the most prominent pioneers and the trends prevailing in different eras of both the languages. The short story is one of the most famous and widely read genres of fiction that seems to answer almost everything near to the nature of human being and whenever it is narrated it feels as if, something exceptional has been created which contains substance of our inferred experience and transitory sense of our common, tempestuous journey of life. Irrespective of the prevailing belief that short story also belongs to the West, its roots in the Arabic language go back to the pre-Islamic times and especially the Golden Age of Islamic civilization which spans from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Anecdotes of the Bedouins and the rhymed Ma’qama were the early foundations of short story in the Arabic language. Then this art reached its epitome in the modern era by the big names like al-Manfaluti, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Haqqi, Ihsan Abdul Quddus, Yusuf Idris and Hasib Kayali. Likewise, the Urdu language that is a product of centuries long interaction between the native Indians and the invading Muslim culture, has borrowed the genre of short story form diverse sources. Then it was matured in the early 20th century by the pioneers like Rashid al-Khairi, Sajjad Haider Yaldram, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Mansha Yaad and Intizar Hussain.

scholarly journals On the issue of the synthesis of geopolitics and racialism in the early days of contemporary history

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Ruslan Abdurazakovich Abdurazakov
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Climatic Factors ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
Foreign Science ◽  
The U.S

The purpose of the research is the consideration of the problem of synthesis of racialism and geopolitics in the late 19th - the early 20th century and the substantiation of such a new concept in geopolitics as geopolitical racialism which hasn’t been used before neither in Russian nor in foreign science. To solve this task, the author applies the fundamental geopolitical dualism methods to the analysis of supremacist and imperialist mindset typical for scientific and sociopolitical life in Britain and the U.S. of the considered period, which became a core for the formation of Anglo-Saxon exceptionality, and formed the basis for the foreign policy of these states. The author arrives at the conclusion that until recently, Anglo-Saxonism was considered as a result of the Western elites’ fascination with the ideas of social Darwinism rather than as a geopolitical form of racism, since its analysis was mostly based on the peculiarities of “blood and descendance” of Anglo-Saxon peoples rather than on their “thalassocratic nature” or the influence of natural and climatic factors on their development. The differentiating feature of continental geopolitics was, vice versa, not only distancing from social Darwinism, but also the repudiation of the possibility of ultimate victory in the struggle between the West and the East. Theoretical and practical importance of the research consists in the fact that based on the analysis of the works of the Western authors of the late 19th - the early 20th centuries, both already known and left out in the cold, the author substantiates the definition and characteristics of geopolitical racism in its Anglo-Saxon variant, upholding the supremacy of maritime powers (thalassocracies) over land powers (tellurocracies) predefined by geographical factors, which in many aspects predetermined the development of the Western geopolitical mindset in contemporary history.

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