The Fustat al-‘adala: a Unique Manuscript on the Religious Landscape of Medieval Anatolia

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-147
Author(s):  
Bruno De Nicola
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
The One ◽  
Christian Population ◽  
Religious Landscape

The particularities in the political development of medieval Anatolia after the arrival of the Seljuq Turks in the eleventh century resulted in a singular scenario in which a long but steady process of Islamization transformed medieval Anatolia with the majority Christian population into a mostly Muslim territory by the end of the fifteenth century. However, this process of conflict and accommodation affected not only the different religions present in the peninsula but also those confessions that coexisted and competed with each another within each of these religions. The religious diversity of the 13th to 15th cent. Anatolia has also reflected its textual production. Several significant works on kalam and fiqh, in addition to a variety of Sufi texts, were produced during this period. These works often deal with dogma, practices or traditions of their religious confession. But, generally, they do not offer much information on other religious confessions. The manuscript held at the Bibliothèque National de France (Supplément Turc 1120) contains a work which has been identified by Osman Turan as the Fustat al-‘adala and attributed to a certain Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Khatib. The uniqueness of this work is that a part of it is occupied with describing the different ‘heresies’ that were present in Anatolia at the time when the author lived, which appears to be during the lifetime of the last Seljuq Sultan of Rum, Ghiyath al-din Mas‘ud (d. 1308 AD). This introduction will look at this manuscript from both a codicological and thematic perspective. On the one hand, I will discuss certain aspects related to the production of the codex, its authorship and potential patronage. While on the other, the section on heresies contained in the text will be examined to explore what this work can tell us about the religious environment of medieval Anatolia.

The politics of the unities: tragedy and the Risorgimento in Byron and Manzoni

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Anthony Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The One ◽  
Original Approach

This chapter takes an original approach to Byron’s much-discussed engagement with the early Risorgimento by focusing not on biographical aspects, but rather on formal issues. It centres on The Two Foscari in the context of the highly politicised contemporary Italian critical debates about the dramatic unities. In this fashion, it teases out the political implications of Byron’s adherence to the unities by comparing his play to Alessandro Manzoni’s Il conte di Carmagnola, which programmatically violates them. Focusing specifically on the playwrights’ representations of the fifteenth-century mercenary leader, Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola, the chapter explores these writers’ use or abuse of the unity of time, in particular. In doing so, it throws light on, and contrasts, Manzoni’s Risorgimento agenda on the one hand and Byron’s generally sceptical attitude about leadership and uncertainty about social and political change on the other.

Machine Politics and Democracy: The Deinstitutionalization of the Argentine Party System

2008 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerardo Scherlis
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Political System ◽  
Party System ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Strategic Flexibility ◽  
Democratic Representation ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
The One

AbstractThis article contends that intra-party dynamics based on particularistic exchanges constitute a double-edged sword for a political system. On the one hand, they provide party leaders with strategic flexibility, which can be essential for their party stability and for the governability of the political system. On the other hand, in permitting office holders to switch policies whenever they consider fit, these dynamics render governments unpredictable and unaccountable in partisan terms, thus debasing the quality of democratic representation. The hypothesis is illustrated by recent Argentine political development.

Tolerance is theoretical and practical principles

1996 ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Mykhailo Babiy
Keyword(s):  
Religious Diversity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nodal Points ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The One ◽  
Ukrainian Society

Political ideological pluralism, religious diversity are characteristic features of modern Ukrainian society. On the one hand, multiculturalism, socio-political, religious differentiation of the latter appear as important characteristics of its democracy, as a practical expression of freedom, on the other - as a factor that led to the deconsocialization of society, gave rise to "nodal points" of tension, confrontational processes, in particular, in political and religious spheres.

Getting Over Athens

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Wiater
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Model ◽  
Dionysius Of Halicarnassus ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the ambivalent image of Classical Athens in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities. This image reflects a deep-seated ambiguity of Dionysius’ Classicist ideology: on the one hand, there is no question for Dionysius that Athenocentric Hellenicity failed, and that the Roman empire has superseded Athens’ role once and for all as the political and cultural centre of the oikoumene. On the other, Dionysius accepted Rome’s supremacy as legitimate partly because he believed (and wanted his readers to believe) her to be the legitimate heir of Classical Athens and Classical Athenian civic ideology. As a result, Dionysius develops a new model of Hellenicity for Roman Greeks loyal to the new political and cultural centre of Rome. This new model of Greek identity incorporates and builds on Classical Athenian ideals, institutions, and culture, but also supersedes them.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Market Model ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Economic Market ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Economic Market Model ◽  
The One ◽  
Religious Landscape

The most important conclusions of this summarizing chapter are the following: The religious landscape of Eastern Europe is more diverse than that of Western Europe. The cases of Poland and the GDR confirm the hypothesis that there is a link between the diffusion of functions and the growth in the importance of religion. The strong processes of biographical individualization that occurred in the post-communist states did not necessarily intensify individual religiosity. The economic market model cannot be confirmed for Eastern Europe. There is in Eastern and Central Europe a demonstrable link between economic prosperity and the loosening of religious and church ties. What can act as a bulwark against the eroding effects of modernization is church activity on the one hand, and the everyday proximity, visibility, and concreteness of religious practices and rituals, symbols, images, and objects on the other.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Studying Political Leadership: The Case of François Mitterrand

1994 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Cole
Keyword(s):  
General Framework ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Environmental Constraints ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The One

The study of political leadership, in France and elsewhere, must be appreciated in terms of the interaction between leadership resources (personal and positional) on the one hand, and environmental constraints and opportunities on the other. This article proposes a general framework for appraising comparative liberal democratic political leaderships. It illustrates the possibilities of the framework by evaluating the political leadership of the French President François Mitterrand.

Scatter 2

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Other ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Jean Bodin ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
The One ◽  
Nuremberg Trials

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

ON A FIFTEENTH CENTURY TEST FOR STERILITY

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-343
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The One

Barren marriages until the present century were usually considered a sign of Divine displeasure. But as knowledge of the phsyiology of reproduction was a closed book until recently, many preternatural methods for determining whether sterility was the fault of either husband or wife may be found in the medical literature of the Renaissance. None is more fanciful than the following from an English leechbook of the fifteenth century: Knowing the default of conception, whether it belong to the man or the woman. Take two new earthen pots, each by itself; and let the woman make water in the one, and the man in the other; and put in each of them a quantity of wheatbran, and not too much, that it be not thick, but be liquid or running; and mark well the pots for identification, and let them stand ten days and ten nights, and thou shalt see in the water that is in default small live worms; and if there appear no worms in either water, then they be likely to have children in process of time when God will.1 Dawson2 writes that this and similar experiments are ancient ones and are described in Egyptian papyri.

Indian and Russian Tolstoy: one among strangers and a stranger among one’s

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
Svetlana M. Klimova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Indian Thought ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Lev Tolstoy ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Church ◽  
Peculiar Phenomenon

The article examines the phenomenon of the late Lev Tolstoy in the context of his religious position. The author analyzes the reactions to his teaching in Russian state and official Orthodox circles, on the one hand, and Indian thought, on the other. Two sociocultural images of L.N. Tolstoy: us and them that arose in the context of understanding the position of the Russian Church and the authorities and Indian public and religious figures (including Mahatma Gandhi, who was under his influence). A peculiar phenomenon of intellectually usL.N. Tolstoy among culturally them (Indian) correspondents and intellectually them Tolstoy among culturally us (representatives of the official government and the Church of Russia) transpires. The originality of this situation is that these im­ages of Lev Tolstoy arise practically at the same period. The author compares these images, based on the method of defamiliarisation (V. Shklovsky), which allows to visually demonstrate the religious component of Tolstoy’s criticism of the political sphere of life and, at the same time, to understand the psychological reasons for its rejection in Russian official circles. With the methodological help of defamiliarisation the author tries to show that the opinion of Tolstoy (as the writer) becomes at the same time the voice of conscience for many of his con­temporaries. The method of defamiliarisation allowed the author to show how Leo Tolstoy’s inner law of nonviolence influenced the concept of non­violent resistance in the teachings of Gandhi.

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