Evangelical Awakening: Becoming Protestant in the Arab Renaissance

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-84
Author(s):  
Deanna Ferree Womack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Shared Values ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Evangelical Identity ◽  
Printed Word ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Bible Reading ◽  
Literary Renaissance

Chapter 1 considers what it meant to become Protestant in the sectarian landscape of nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria in a period of widespread socio-cultural and political transformation. It compares and contrasts American missionary and Syrian Protestant views of evangelical identity and religious conversion as it examines Protestant conversion accounts written after 1860, including an account by the renowned scholar Butrus al-Bustani. Drawing upon shared values of literacy, Bible reading, and evangelistic printing, these narratives demonstrate how Syrian and American Protestants upheld the printed word as a cultural force, a concept that fit with the intellectual currents of the Nahda in the late Ottoman period. Whereas traditional studies of this literary renaissance characterize it as a secular movement, Syrian Protestants tell a story of nahdawi identity entwined with evangelical commitments.

“Publishing” the Gospel, Reading the Nahda: Protestant Print Culture in Late Ottoman Syria

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-142
Author(s):  
Deanna Ferree Womack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Greek Orthodox ◽  
Arabic Poetry ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
American Mission ◽  
A Site ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Literary Renaissance

Chapter 2 turns to the American Mission Press in Beirut, which was a site of American-Syrian collaboration and a resource for Syrian Protestants to participate in the Arab cultural and literary renaissance. Locating the Nahda in Beirut within the context of broader nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movements, the chapter explores the socio-cultural contributions of Protestant men who wrote for the American Mission Press beginning in the 1870s. It demonstrates that these authors - including the nahdawi scholar Ibrahim al-Hurani - engaged in Nahda production not only through Arabic poetry, scientific studies, and other “secular” publications, but also in their writings on Islam and through press debates with Jesuit missionaries, Syrian Catholics, and Greek Orthodox leaders.

The Challenge of Mass Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The State ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Mass Democracy

Chapter 1 analyzes Schmitt’s assessment of democratic movements in Weimar and the gravity of their effects on the state and constitution. It emphasizes that the focus of Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar was mass democracy rather than liberalism. Schmitt warned that the combination of mass democracy, the interpenetration of state and society, and the emergence of total movements opposed to liberal democracy, namely the Nazis and the Communists, were destabilizing the Weimar state and constitution. Weimar, Schmitt argued, had been designed according to nineteenth century principles of legitimacy and understandings of the people. Under the pressure of mass democracy, the state was buckling and cannibalizing itself and its constitution. Despite this, Schmitt argued, Weimar jurists’ theoretical commitments left them largely unable to recognize the scope of what was occurring. Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar democracy was intended to raise awareness of how parliamentary democracy could be turned against the state and constitution.

The Modernity of Kinship

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Building Block ◽  
Darwinian Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Development ◽  
European Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
Elemental Form

Chapter 1 explores the modern values that have animated kinship studies since their emergence in the nineteenth century. It examines the sudden invention of kinship by Johann Bachofen, Henry Maine, John Ferguson McLennan, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and Lewis Henry Morgan in the 1860s, and the internal and external developments in the West that prompted their discoveries: revolutionary agitation, the engagement with “primitives” around the globe, industrialization and the disintegration of old solidarities, and intellectual revolutions in the study of prehistory, especially Indo-European studies and Darwinian evolution. Social theorists transformed kinship into an elemental form of human sociality and evolutionary development, and a building block of the emerging liberal order as the West coped with the ontological sea change wrought by the desacralization and industrialization of society.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

A Perverted Balance: Modern Salafism between Reform and Jihād*

2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Itzchak Weismann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
World War ◽  
Religious Intellectuals ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Muslim Brothers

This article argues that there are structural affinities and continuities between the late nineteenth-century modernist reformers and today’s quietist, political, and jihādī Salafī factions. Salafism refers to the basic theological-ideological formation that postulates a return to pristine Islam to overcome tradition and bring regeneration. The Salafī balance between authenticity and modernization promoted by enlightened religious intellectuals in the late Ottoman period was shattered by the events of World War I and its aftermath. This resulted in its bifurcation between conservatives, who adopted literalist and xenophobic Wahhābī positions, and modernists, primarily the Muslim Brothers, who employed innovative means in their religio-political struggle to re-Islamize society and oust colonialism. The Salafī balance was reconstructed after independence on new, unenlightened lines in the Saudi Islamic Awakening (al-Ṣaḥwa al-Islāmiyya), which combined the erstwhile rigorous Wahhābī teachings with radicalized Islamism. Global jihādī-Salafism completed the perversion of the modernist Salafī balance by reducing the authentic way of the salaf to excommunication and violence and by using the most modern means in its war against both Westerners and indigenous Muslim governments.


Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Darin Stephanov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Mass Scale ◽  
Comprehensive Approach ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Promising Area ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

The introduction provides a brief overview of the book’s main questions and goals against the backdrop of recent scholarship on group identities and communal boundaries. This book proposes a more systematic and comprehensive approach to the topic in the context of the late Ottoman Empire, based on terminological innovation and a three-tiered theorization of average personal attachments. By adopting the meta concept of ruler (in)visibility, it connects the ruler to the ruled and suggests that the former had no viable competitor for popular loyalties over most of the nineteenth century. It then identifies the annual all-imperial ruler celebrations, a global mass-scale nineteenth-century phenomenon, as an under-researched and extremely promising area of focus in the study of the moorings of contemporary popular belonging. Finally, the introduction discusses methods and sources, and provides a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the book.

Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Thain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Edith Cooper ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Katharine Bradley

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.

The Bible and Popular Christianity in Modern China

2021 ◽  
pp. 574-590
Author(s):  
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee ◽  
Christie Chui-Shan Chow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Bible Reading

This essay investigates the influential role that the Bible played in the sphere of Chinese popular Christianity. It explores the widespread use of the Bible among the lay populace who were traditionally excluded from the concerns and pursuits of Chinese Christian elites in cosmopolitan cities. Beginning with an overview of the cultural influence of the Bible in the mid-nineteenth century, this study argues that the liberating power of the Word was leveraged by peasant converts looking for new cosmologies and norms to change society. The twentieth century witnessed multiple levels of direct engagement with biblical texts, unmediated by foreign missionaries, among Chinese evangelists and congregants. Some drew on new biblical inspirations to found independent churches and sectarian groups, and some relied on the practice of bibliomancy to seek guidance in times of chaos. These examples offer complex view of the symbiosis between Bible reading and conversion in Chinese popular Christianity.

Inside Views

2018 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Andrew Warnes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Self Image ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Self Service ◽  
Sister Carrie ◽  
Individual Self

Chapter 1 offers a brief history of the demise of the shop counter and of the rise of self-service over the late nineteenth century. It offers a brief reading of Sister Carrie, showing how self-service engendered a new relationship to the commodity object, which, in turn, reflected on individual self-image.

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