Juridical Pan-Islam at the Height of Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-257
Author(s):  
Nurfadzilah Yahaya

Abstract Located at the intersection of four regions, the Middle East, East Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia, Afghanistan is a country whose legal history is sure to be diverse and exciting at the confluence of multiple legal currents. In the book Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires, Faiz Ahmed shows how Afghanistan could be regarded as a pivot for Islamic intellectual currents from the late nineteenth century onward, especially between the Ottoman Empire and South Asia. Afghanistan Rising makes us aware of our own assumptions of the study of Islamic law that has been artificially carved out during the rise of area studies, including Islamic studies. Ahmed provides a good paradigm for a legal history of a country that was attentive to foreign influences without being overwhelmed by them. While pan-Islamism is often portrayed as a defensive ideology that developed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century in reaction to high colonialism, the plotting of Afghanistan's juridical Pan-Islam in Ahmed's book is a robust and powerful maneuver out of this well-trodden path, as the country escaped being “landlocked” mainly by cultivating regional connections in law.

Folklorica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Dorian Jurić

This article presents three short passages describing coffee and coffeehouse culture among Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims in the late nineteenth century. These texts are drawn from manuscripts collected by lay, Croatian folklore and folklife collectors who submitted them to two early collecting projects in Zagreb. The pieces are translated here for the first time into English and placed into historical and cultural context regarding the history of coffee culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider Ottoman Empire as well as the politics of folklore collection at the time. By using the Pan-Ottoman concept of ćeif as a theoretical lens, I argue that these early folklorists produced impressive folklife accounts of Bosniak foodways, but that these depictions inevitably enfolded both genuine interest and negative by-products of the wider politics of their era.


1970 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald M. Reid

In the late nineteenth century, when American boys were devouring the success stories of Horatio Alger and cultivating the prescribed virtues of thrift and industry in hopes of jumping from rags to riches overnight, boys on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean were dreaming similar dreams. The Christian boy of the Levant was particularly drawn to such success stories. His decision for a business career was not entirely of his own choosing, for as members of a Christian minority in a Muslim land his ancestors had long been excluded from the most prestigious official careers of the Ottoman Empire–the bureaucracy, the military, and the Muslim religious profession. Since these choice callings were reserved for Muslims, thedhimmî subjects of the Sultan had no choice but to concentrate their energies on banking and trading, shopkeeping and shipping. Making the best of the situation, the indigenous Christian of the Ottoman Empire threw himself into these business careers and sometimes amassed such a fortune that he came to occupy unofficial positions of considerable influence. Often his position as agent and protégé of a European shipping house gave him a decided advantage over Muslim merchants. Increasing the toehold given to it by the Capitulations agreements, Europe made its power increasingly felt in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, and the protégé of a European power could no longer be treated arbitrarily by Ottoman authorities.


1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Ingram

Weak states can control strong states, provided the weak can persuade the strong to admit, that they are vitally interested in their integrity and independence. In the late nineteentli century everybody understood the influence of the Ottoman Empire upon British policy, and the influence of Austria-Hungary upon Imperial German policy in the near east. In the heyday of the Great Powers of Europe it was not expected tliat orientals should aspire to similar influence: their futures would be decided by Europeans. Until the work of Robinson and Gallagher revealed the extent to which the khedive of Egypt controlled Lord Cromer, the history of late nineteenth century imperialism was written from this assumption.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


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