Sufism, Old and New

2018 ◽  
pp. 94-139
Author(s):  
Ahmad S. Dallal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
Main Ideas

One of the main ideas advocated by revisionist historians is that of Neo-Sufism, which argues that eighteenth century Islamic thought was characterized by a new brand of reform Sufism which was devoid of spirituality and at the service of Orthodox, legalistic Islam. This common notion was first introduced by Fazlur Rahman. In contrast, the chapter argues that eighteenth century Sufism was not devoid of spirituality, and it supports the argument that the concept of neo-Sufism is not useful for understanding eighteenth century reform or Sufism. Beyond this valid critique, however, the chapter draws the outlines of an eighteenth-century tradition of non-Wahhabi critiques of Sufism.

West, Copley, and Eighteenth-Century American Provincialism

1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-416
Author(s):  
Joseph Allard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Art ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Study Tour ◽  
Good Fortune ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
American Painting ◽  
John Singleton ◽  
John Singleton Copley

It is a common notion that American painting in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was derivative and provincial. It was an artistic period marked by failure and frustration during which the promising artist, usually after a study tour in Europe, was met with indifference or misunderstanding. He either just managed to scrape a living, often by having to compromise his talents in search of an audience, or was forced to abandon painting altogether and turn to other pursuits. The only successful American painters, in this view, were those who became established in Europe; and they somehow no longer seem to be American. The best of the group were Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, whose European careers have been consistently misunderstood, until very recently, through geographical and historical myopia. European art historians have given them short shrift because they were, after all, provincial painters with the good fortune to practise in a European capital. American art historians have neglected their European work because (from the American point of view) it was English art they practised.

Islam without Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad S. Dallal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Ganges

Replete with a cast of giants in Islamic thought and philosophy, Ahmad S. Dallal’s pathbreaking intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Muslim world challenges stale views of this period as one of decline, stagnation, and the engendering of a widespread fundamentalism. Far from being moribund, Dallal argues, the eighteenth century--prior to systematic European encounters--was one of the most fertile eras in Islamic thought. Across vast Islamic territories, Dallal charts in rich detail not only how intellectuals rethought and reorganized religious knowledge but also the reception and impact of their ideas. From the banks of the Ganges to the shores of the Atlantic, commoners and elites alike embraced the appeals of Muslim thinkers who, while preserving classical styles of learning, advocated for general participation by Muslims in the definition of Islam. Dallal also uncovers the regional origins of most reform projects, showing how ideologies were forged in particular sociopolitical contexts. Reformists’ ventures were in large part successful--up until the beginnings of European colonization of the Muslim world. By the nineteenth century, the encounter with Europe changed Islamic discursive culture in significant ways into one that was largely articulated in reaction to the radical challenges of colonialism.

Provocative Wealth: Non-Muslim Elites in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
Maurits van den Boogert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Legal System ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Status ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
The Common ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractIn the Western sources, the Ottoman legal system is often portrayed as unreliable and incidents of Europeans or Ottoman protégés of Western embassies and consulates who claimed to have been maltreated abound. These reports strengthened the common notion in Europe that Ottoman government officials were rapacious and corrupt. The article challenges these views by analyzing two incidents from 18th-century Aleppo, which shed light not only on the dynamics of Ottoman-European relations on the ground, but also on the status of non-Muslim elites in the Ottoman Empire.

scholarly journals Reform Within Islam

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-144
Author(s):  
Bedri Gencer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Islamic Modernism

When the western influence or civilization came to impinge upon the Muslimworld in the late eighteenth century, a profound process of transformation beganin Muslim thought. There had been so many encounters between the West andthe East, or in other words, between Islam and Christianity over centuries in variousways and on different levels. However, this was a novel phenomenon, withoutantecedents, resulting from "the technical age" and accordingly from a stateof comparative superiority among nations placing them inexorably in an objectivehierarchy in terms of their use of the possibilities of this age. (The term"technical age" is used here as defined by Marshall G.S. Hodgson in TheVenture of Islam as a universal human development, contrary to the term "modemage," which implies western superiority.) Having lost the sense of absolutesuperiority provided by their faith, Muslims had come to feel themselves morevulnerable to the Western challenge than ever. Quite naturally this led Muslimthinkers to question their thought, religion, and civilization in comparison withthose of the West Few if any thinkers, like the architect of the Majalla, AhmedCevdet Pa????a. the foremost intellectual figure in modem times, in whom theauthentic 'alim tradition was embodied, remained bound to the idio-sources andpossibilities of Islamic thought in coping with the Western challenge to the bitterend. The bulk of the Muslim intelligentsia and 'ulama, far from possessing astaunch, implicit faith in the self-sufficiency of Islamic legacy, as AhmedCevdet Pa§a has, felt themselves as bound to compromise with western thoughtin some way or other. Then a new way of thinking on the part of Muslimthinkers "Islamic modernism" came into being.Seen in this light, Islamic modernism marks a decisive rupture in the historyof Islamic thought in that it represents an attempt at renewal from outside, asopposed to the ihya or tajdid tradition codified by the Prophet himself, which ...

History on the Move: Reimagining Historical Change and the (Im)possibility of Utopia in the 21st Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhan Hellerma
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Current Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Main Ideas

Abstract In his meticulously researched and conceptually innovative book, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon aims to capture the historical sensibility emergent during the postwar period broadly conceived, spanning from the 1940s to our present moment. Attending particularly to the debates concerning ecological and technological outlooks, Simon theorizes that our historical horizon is increasingly shaped by the expectations of an unprecedented event that challenges the sustainability of the human subject as known today. Arguing that the concept of unprecedented change can best be explained against the backdrop of a modern processual temporal configuration originating in the eighteenth century, Simon likewise probes the same concept to illuminate a distinct relationship with the past. Elaborating on the main ideas of the book, the paper will interrogate critically Simon’s assertion whereby the novel postwar temporality is inherently dystopian, and will negotiate Simon’s engagement with presentism, which he questions as an inaccurate representation of our current regime of historicity.

AHMAD S. DALLAL, ISLAM WITHOUT EUROPE : TRADITIONS OF REFORM IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ISLAMIC THOUGHT

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-278
Author(s):  
Anne-Laure Dupont
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Xixe Siecle ◽  
Xixe Siècle

L'idée de réforme en islam – ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler en français, depuis les années 1930, le « réformisme musulman » – reste couramment associée aux discours, systèmes de pensée et idéologies qui se développèrent dans les pays musulmans, en gros du milieu du xixe siècle au milieu du xxe siècle, à la fois en réaction à la domination économique, culturelle, militaire et coloniale européenne et grâce au développement des échanges et à la circulation plus rapide des personnes et de l'information. Ce réformisme était constitutif de ce qui était alors perçu comme une renaissance de la pensée et de la production écrite, en arabe nahḍa. Combiné au nationalisme, l'idéal de renaissance plongeait les siècles antérieurs à la rencontre avec l'Europe dans l'obscurité et faisait de l’époque ottomane un temps de déclin. Ceci se traduisit longtemps, sur le plan scientifique, par une grande méconnaissance des xve, xvie, xviie et xviiie siècles. Au prétendu retard pris par le monde musulman à l’époque moderne répondit ainsi un retard historiographique, fort heureusement en voie de comblement depuis près de cinquante ans.

scholarly journals Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 110-112
Author(s):  
Bruce B. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
American University ◽  
American University Of Beirut ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Georgetown University ◽  
Muslim Scholars

It is hard to exaggerate the scope or scale of this major monograph from one of the foremost Arab Muslim scholars of his generation, Ahmad Dallal, formerly Provost at the American University of Beirut, and now Dean of Georgetown University Qatar.In carefully orchestrated arguments, with massive documentary evidence, Dallal addresses eighteenth century theological/juridical issues across the span of the Muslim world. He touches on intellectual giants and reform movements from Senegal to Syria, from Yemen to India, delving deeply into complex debates that continue to resonate. Islam without Europe catapults Dallal into the company of revisionists who are also global historians, those looking for a way to redefine Islam outside the parameters of European historical conventions. To download full review, click on PDF.

Political Power, Religious Authority, and the Caliphate in Eighteenth-Century Indian Islamic Thought

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-340
Author(s):  
MUHAMMAD QASIM ZAMAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Moral Force ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Robust Recognition ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractThis article examines how Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762), one of the most prominent scholars of eighteenth-century India whose thought has continued to be influential in many Muslim circles to the present day, conceptualized the interplay of political power and religious authority. Though several of Wali Allah's numerous writings have received considerable scholarly attention, this aspect of his political and religious thought has, oddly, been much neglected. A close reading of Wali Allah's writings reveals him to be keenly interested not just in the immediately relevant issues of the chronic political instability afflicting his age but also in the broader, theoretical, questions of how political power undergirds the moral force of religious norms and institutions. It is his unusually blunt but robust recognition that power is part of what enables a religious tradition to evolve and change that this article explores. That recognition—buried in writings that purport to be about the merits of Islam's first caliphs—has other important implications, too, notably for an understanding of the broad political context in which the sacred law itself undergoes change.

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