The Sovereign and the Sage

2020 ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
James Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Military Elite

This chapter assesses the ulama's relationship with state power. By the long nineteenth century, the ulama stood as a pillar of the state, limited though that state was. Islamic scholars systematically deployed their diverse Persianate skill set and leveraged Islamic knowledge on behalf of the Turkic nobility. Nevertheless, the ulama still envisioned the state as an Islamic state, and they carefully guarded their moral prerogative to speak for the religion both groups agreed had a total monopoly on politics and social life. Although in certain instances evidence exists of this most important of prerogatives — the authority to legitimately speak for religion — shifting in favor of the Turkic military elite, the ulama cultivated a spirit of moral independence and superiority to the state.

scholarly journals Post-Islamism Redefined: Towards a politics of post-Islamism

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-54
Author(s):  
Milad Dokhanchi
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Alternative Definition ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Current Conception ◽  
Sharia Law ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Modern Condition ◽  
Islamist Movements

Problematizing Asef Bayat’s notion of “post-Islamism,” this article proposes an alternative definition for the concept, having in mind the case of Iran. The current conception of the term “post-Islamism” may be challenged via a survey of post-revolutionary Islamist movements that resisted the state and as well as Ayatollah’s Khomeini’s concession to the concept maslahat (expediency), through which state expressed preference for modern reason over sharia law. The case of Islamists contesting state power questions the monolithic image of Islamism drawn by Bayat as movements longing to create a state based on the doctrine of velāyat-e faqih. Also Khomeini’s concession to maslahat indicates that the Islamic state must be seen as one of the participants in “post”-Islamist secularizing trends in Iran. Hence, Bayat’s post-Islamism was more of an inevitable political phenomenon adopted by the state itself than a conscious project adopted by Muslim secularist intellectual figures seeking to put an end to Islamism. Unlike Bayat’s post-Islamism, which celebrates the end or a “break” from an Islamist paradigm, this article then invites readers to expose Islamism to post-modern critique, the result of which would not be a negation but rather a revival of Islamism that takes into account the contingencies of the post-modern condition. Similar to post-Marxism and post-anarchism, post-Islamism maintains the ethos of the traditional canon, Islamism in this case, while rejecting its authoritarian and universalist tendencies. A post-Islamist politics has yet to emerge, yet its introductory philosophical foundations have been already developed in the 1990s by figures such as Abdolkarism Soroush and Morteza Avini. Soroush’s post-Islamism, however, ultimately landed in a modernist liberal episteme, hence remained Islamist, while Avini, despite his support for the state, offered a much more radical critique of Islamism while remaining faithful to its ethos.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
James Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Social Group ◽  
The State ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Independent Source ◽  
Military Elite ◽  
Influential Individuals ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Islamic scholars of Bukhara during the long nineteenth century. Islamic scholars were among the most influential individuals in their society, and that power rested on their mastery of diverse forms of knowledge rather than birthright. Instead of imagining those varied competencies and practices as embodied by separate professions, this book conceptualizes them as distinct practices and disciplines mastered by a single milieu. Instead of imagining stratified castes of “ulama” as against “sufis” as against “poets,” there is a unified social group of multitalented polymaths selectively performing sharia, asceticism, and poetry as circumstances dictated. These polymaths of Islam were the custodians of the only form of institutionalized high culture on offer in Central Asia. Their authoritative command over many different forms of knowledge — from medicine to law to epistolography and beyond — allowed them to accumulate substantial power and to establish enduring family dynasties. The Turkic military elite relied on these scholars to administer the state, but the ulama possessed an independent source of authority rooted in learning, which created tension between these two elite groups with profound ramifications for the region's history.

scholarly journals Learning to Labour: “Native” Orphans in Colonial India, 1840s–1920s

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-42
Author(s):  
Soni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Poor Children

AbstractTo this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.

The Atomic Theory of Society

1930 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-637
Author(s):  
William Orton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The State ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Atomic Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
House Of Lords

In few affairs is political wisdom so put to the test as in the treatment of institutions that are growing old. Age in these cases has little to do with mere antiquity: the forms of social life are subject to no set term of years. It is a matter of continuing adaptability. Some institutions, like the British monarchy, possess this attribute in an astounding degree. Others, like the House of Lords, betray a hardening of the arteries that bodes ill for their survival in times of rapid change. For the speed of social change affects not only their physical and conceptual environment; it acts also upon, and through, the temper of the politicians and the public. In such periods society will sometimes administer a sudden coup de grâce to its more recalcitrant institutions, abolishing at one stroke both the abuses they have inflicted and the garnered wisdom they enshrine. The loss involved in these moments is seldom evident until long after, when it has to be made good ab ovo.To such moods the Gallic genius is peculiarly liable; and it was in one of them that the French crashed open the gates of the nineteenth century and nailed the atomic theory of society to the lintel. “There are no longer any guilds in the state, but only the private interest of each individual and the general interest. No one may arouse in the citizens any intermediate interest, or separate them from the public weal by corporate sentiment.”

The Islamic State

1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-234
Author(s):  
Louay M. Safi
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Usual Practice ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Political Body

IntroductionThe purpose of this paper is to delineate the basic elements involvedin the concept of the Islamic state and to clarify the basis and scope of politicalpower. More specifically, discussions will focus on the purpose of the Islamicstate, the source of political legitimacy, and the scope of state power. I willcontend that a clear distinction should be made between the role and purposeof the state and those of the ummah, for only through the separation of theresponsibilities and objectives of the two can the injunctions of the Shari‘ahand the principles of revelation be properly observed.Historical BackgroundAlthough the word “state” (dawlah) was first used in the Qur’an, almostsix centuries had to elapse before the word was given its first technical definitionby Muslim scholars. The word dawlah was mentioned once in the Qur’an(in 59:7) in connection with the distribution of the fay’ (the property Muslimsappropriated from the Banu al Nadr upon the latter‘s expulsion from Madinah).The Qur’an justified this departure from the usual practice of dividing thespoils among the fighters by referring to the divine intention of preventingthe circulation of wealth among a small group within the society?Up until the late fifth century, one could hardly find any reference tothe state in Muslim literature, or in Western literature for that matter. Otherterms such as al amsar or dar al Islam were employed whenever a referencewas made to the territories under Muslim control. Alternatively, the stateas a political body was identified by its political organs, i.e., al khilafah, ...

scholarly journals Comments on Wojciech Dzieduszycki’s Reflections on the State and Law

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 325
Author(s):  
Łukasz Szymański
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
State Power ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The State ◽  
Evolutionary Conservatism ◽  
The Law ◽  
Concept Of Law

<p>Conservatives in Galicia during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy exerted an overwhelming influence on political and social life. Among the conservative groups and parties, there were the so-called Podolaks, to which Wojciech Dzieduszycki belonged, writer, politician and philosopher. He wrote about the genesis and concept of law, the functions of the state and the scope of state power. He spoke against the law that regulates all manifestations of human life, because social relations are also regulated by moral and religious norms. Dzieduszycki was critical of socialism and all excessive forms of state intervention because he was against excessive state power. Based on Dzieduszycki’s reflections on the state and law, it can be concluded that he was an advocate of evolutionary conservatism.</p>

scholarly journals Living on Edge: New Perspectives on Anxiety, Refuge and Colonialism in Southern Africa

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Archaeology ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
African Archaeology ◽  
Social Distress ◽  
Making Sense

Archaeologies of colonialism have have called for exploring the culturally dynamic entanglements of people and objects while acknowledging the violence that accompanied these entanglements. Heeding these calls requires attention to how the state and state power were materialized, particularly in settler colonies where state apparatuses advanced unevenly, insidiously and clumsily. Here, I explore how the (mis)understandings and (mis)apprehensions of people and places that accompanied the halting expansion of colonial frontiers were materialized. Focusing on southern Africa's Highveld and Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, I offer anxiety as a framework for conceiving of colonialisms as epistemic encounters: processes of ‘making sense’ of new people, things and places based on material practices, empirical experience and desire. Through a narrative of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg told with archival, archaeological and ethnographic materials, I revisit a longstanding trope of southern African archaeology and historiography: refugia from social distress. I argue that refuge can be taken as a sense-making practice rather than as reaction to stress. I close with thoughts on what an anxiety framework can offer the still-developing field of African historical archaeology.

scholarly journals معاصر مسلم ریاستی قوانین کی تشکیل میں مقاصد شریعت اور تلفیق کا کردار: ایک تجزیاتی مطالعہ

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ishfaq Ahmad
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Period ◽  
The State ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Impact

In Islamic polity, the Qur’ān and Sunnah work as primary sources of guidance for the state and government. It is perhaps due to this reason that in the early period of the Islamic state no need was felt for any kind of legislation or codification to run the affairs of the state. Later on, the prevalent schools of legal thought gradually became the source of law in different areas of the empire. In the eastern parts, Ḥanafī School was recognized as a source of law, while in the western parts Mālikī School held this position. In the sixteenth century, King Saleem I officially declared Ḥanafī fiqh as the state law of the Ottoman Empire. However, in the nineteenth century, when most of the parts of the Muslim world came under the control of colonial powers, Muslim legal thought many problems. These problems, it was believed, could not be addressed properly while remaining within the boundaries of a particular school of thought. When the process of decolonization started and several Muslim states gained independence, they relied heavily on Maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah and talfīq while introducing legislation in their domains. This paper attempts to analyze the impact of these two factors in the processes of legislation in contemporary Muslim states.

Some aspects of the idea of unity V. Solovyov and the present

2000 ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
O. O. Romanovsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Policy ◽  
The State ◽  
Place Of Residence ◽  
The Government ◽  
The University ◽  
Temporary Closure

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the nature of the national policy of Russia is significantly changing. After the events of 1863 in Poland (the Second Polish uprising), the government of Alexander II gradually abandoned the dominant idea of ​​anathematizing, whose essence is expressed in the domination of the principle of serving the state, the greatness of the empire. The tsar-reformer deliberately changes the policy of etatamism into the policy of state ethnocentrism. The manifestation of such a change is a ban on teaching in Polish (1869) and the temporary closure of the University of Warsaw. At the end of the 60s, the state's policy towards a five million Russian Jewry was radically revised. The process of abolition of restrictions on travel, education, place of residence initiated by Nicholas I, was provided reverse.

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