The Iraqi spectres of Marx

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhsin J. Al-Musawi
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Emancipation ◽  
Narrative Poem ◽  
Intelligence Service ◽  
Shed Light

This reading attempts to trace the awareness and mention of Marx in Iraqi writing, focusing on some signposts that also shed light on the intellectual history of Iraq since 1914. It argues its case through an exploration of texts and recollections to present another side of this history as a controversial narrative of multiple positions and contentions. If the spectre of Marx shocked conservatives and was widely manipulated in Cold War politics, its theoretical permeation of an Iraqi discourse of social justice cannot be ignored. Almost every Iraqi narrative, poem, or essay speaks of the need for equitable balance of power, social justice, and social and political emancipation. To have these concerns materialize, there has been a need for some organized forum, a party, society, or a forum. British intelligence service began to trace the specters of Marx early on, and held all, even nationalists, suspect. The trepidations of the Empire were well conveyed in the reports of its agents in Iraq.

scholarly journals Messianism, rationalism and inter-Asian connections: The Majalis-i Jahangiri (1608–11) and the socio-intellectual history of the Mughal ‘ulama

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinne Lefèvre
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
State Building ◽  
Specific Role ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Intellectuals ◽  
Shed Light

Relying on the Majalis-i Jahangiri (1608–11) by ʿAbd al-Sattar b. Qasim Lahauri, this essay explores some of the discussions the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27) conducted with a wide range of scholars, from Brahmans and ʿulama to Jesuit padres and Jewish savants. By far the most numerous, the debates bearing on Islam and involving Muslim intellectuals are especially significant on several accounts. First, because they illuminate how, following in the steps of his father Akbar (r. 1556–605), Jahangir was able to conciliate his messianic claims with a strong engagement with reason and to turn this combination into a formidable instrument for confession and state building. These conversations also provide promising avenues to think afresh the socio-intellectual history of the Mughal ʿulama inasmuch as they capture the challenges and adjustments attendant on imperial patronage, depict the jockeying for influence and positions among intellectuals (particularly between Indo-Muslim and Iranian lettrés), and shed light on relatively little known figures or on unexplored facets of more prominent individuals. In addition, the specific role played by scholars hailing from Iran—and, to a lesser extent, from Central Asia—in the juridical-religious disputes of the Indian court shows how crucial inter-Asian connections and networks were in the fashioning of Mughal ideology but also the ways in which the ongoing flow of émigré ʿulama was disciplined before being incorporated into the empire.

Order and Theology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
William Bain
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Theoretical Investigation ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
International Order ◽  
Medieval Theology ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Claim ◽  
Modern Thinking

This chapter introduces political theology as an approach to interpreting and analysing the idea of order. The central claim is that widely held conceptions of international order, for example, a multitude of states organized in terms of a spontaneous balance of power or relationships self-consciously constructed through will and consent, reflect intellectual commitments that originate in medieval theology. Specifically, the chapter argues that modern thinking about international order is mediated by rival theories of order that arise out of medieval dispute about the nature of God and the extent of his power. Two overriding objectives guide this investigation. The first is to provide a better intellectual history of late medieval and early modern traditions of thought and to illuminate how they shape contemporary thinking about international order. The second is to conduct a theoretical investigation of international order in terms of its presuppositions. This involves interrogating the conditions and assumptions that render the idea of international order intelligible as what it is. Uncovering this theological inheritance repositions widely shared beliefs about the place of theology in modern international thought, the debates that define the theoretical cartography of the field, and the kind of knowledge that explains the idea of international order.

scholarly journals RAYMOND WILLIAMS'S “STRUCTURE OF FEELING” AND THE PROBLEM OF DEMOCRATIC VALUES IN BRITAIN, 1938–1961

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1133-1161
Author(s):  
STUART MIDDLETON
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
Democratic Culture ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This article traces a history of the literary critic and theorist Raymond Williams’s idea of the “structure of feeling”, the formation of which is situated within debates about the place of artistic and moral values in democratic politics during the 1940s and 1950s. It demonstrates that the “structure of feeling” was intended to circumvent an equation of collective normative legislation with totalitarianism in the early cultural Cold War, by conceiving the definition of values as a process upon which all individuals in a society were always, necessarily, engaged. In articulating this quasi-democratic account of the production of artistic and moral standards, Williams also sought to escape the various theories of “minority culture” that dominated literary and cultural criticism in mid-century Britain. However, his concept of the “structure of feeling” required him to maintain a privileged role for artistic and intellectual arbiters, which constrained his vision of a properly democratic culture. In conclusion, the article argues that the problem of “democratic values” that Williams addressed in his work of the 1950s was a major factor in the marginalization or exclusion of moral criticism from political argument in Britain after 1945, and suggests that this passage of intellectual history may therefore be of considerable importance to contemporary debates about the lineages and reform of, in a broad sense, neoliberal political economy.

STRATEGY AS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1007-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL ISAAC
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strategic Thought

The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-centuryrealpolitik, and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of international relations and war studies, intellectual historians have, for the most part, left the matter to the experts. The strategic maxims of Clausewitz and Liddell Hart may fascinate IR theorists, political scientists, and military historians, but they seldom fire the imaginations of tender-minded historians of ideas. The two books under review challenge such preconceptions. They ask us to consider the history of Cold War strategic thought in a wider conceptual frame. Buried in the history of strategy, they suggest, are some of the central themes of postwar social and political thought.

The New History of Cold War Alliances

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vojtech Mastny
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Warsaw Pact ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Shed Light

Efforts to document the full histories of the Nor h Atlantic Treaty Organiza-tion (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact are still hindered by key obstacles. NATO documents from 1965 onward remain closed to researchers, as do many War-saw Pact military records that were carted off to Moscow in 1991. Despite these gaps, newly declassified materials from both East and West have shed light on how the two alliances helped shape the Cold War. This article takes note of some of the more important recent scholarship on NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

scholarly journals Against the Modern World

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-110
Author(s):  
Ali Hassan Zaidi
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
North America ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Perennial Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslims In Europe ◽  
Muslim Scholars

One effect of 9/11 has been that Muslim voices, which until then had beenmostly ignored, are increasingly reaching a wider audience of other Muslimsand non-Muslims. In Europe and North America, this has meant that selfidentified“progressive” Muslim scholars who emphasize social justice, aswell as “traditional” Muslims who emphasize Islam’s spiritual or esotericdimension, have been contributing in a much more vocal manner to the contemporaryinterpretation of what it means to be Muslim. Since most of theleading figures presented herein are Sufi Muslims of a particular strand ofesoteric Islam, this book helps fill an important lacuna concerning the developmentof the traditionalist position – a position that has been voiced bysuch Muslim scholars as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Martin Lings.Sedgwick promotes the book as a biography of René Guénon (1886-1951) and an intellectual history of the traditionalist movement that heinaugurated in the early twentieth century. Guénon’s movement combineselements of perennial philosophy, which holds that certain perennial problemsrecur in humanity’s philosophical concerns, and that this perennialwisdom is now only found in the traditional forms of the world religions ...

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