Political Reforms as Religious Revival: Conceptual Foundations of Tanzimat

Parallel to Arab Nahḍah, Ottoman modernization program is associated with the Tanzimat, a period of drastic social, political and institutional transformation. The word tanẓīmāt itself, however, merely means “regulations” or “reorganization” and very little has been done in investigating the conceptual or ideational foundations of Tanzimat reforms. The question at stake here is how these series of reforms were justified and legitimized within the Ottoman political culture. Accordingly, this paper focuses on reform debates among Ottoman bureaucrats and statesmen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and proposes the concept and doctrine of taǧdīd (renewal) as a key to understanding Ottoman reform and religious transformation. Ottoman reformers at the turn of 19th century resorted to the doctrine of centennial renewal in order to both criticize the moral shortcomings of Ottoman political system and legitimize innovation. Within this logic, Ottoman reformist sultans and politicians have frequently been referred to as muǧaddids, that is restorers. This paper will present an account of the concept of taǧdīd based on Ottoman political and historical writing from the period. I argue that Ottoman reform was inseparable from the logic of religious revival and that Ottoman debates should be considered as part of and discussed in relation to the 18th-century Muslim revivalism which has attracted growing attention in the last decade.

Social Cohesion of Local Wisdom for Plural Communities

Local culture and traditions represent local wisdom. Values applied in society. These values are believed to be accurate and become references in their daily behavior. The values of local knowledge are considered influential factors in determining the status and dignity of humans in their communities. Because these values contain intelligence, creativity, and local wisdom from their ancestors, figures, and society. The value of local wisdom that remains in our community is the nyadran ritual tradition. Nyadran is considered a socio-religious and socio-cultural reflection even as a social, cultural, and religious transformation. Nyadran is an expression of social piety where cooperation, solidarity, and togetherness are the main patterns of this tradition. The tradition in Jetis hamlet is in many ways able to develop primordial bonds in a cluster with the same beliefs and views despite different religions and beliefs. This research includes qualitative-exploratory research that requires qualitative data. As a case study, this research uses an ethnographic study approach, which is a tool for analyzing local wisdom whose data sources come from informants.

Nikolai Berdyaev – from Will to Culture Towards Will to Live

Nikolai Berdyaev was a philosopher who treated the “objectivity of creative work” with disparagement. This article focuses on his attitude to culture as a “mediocre”, “intermediary” affair, and as something unworthy of particular attention respectively. Berdyaev describes the Russian people as always discontented with culture exactly because of its “mediocrity”. The author points out the duality between lived reality and culture as inalienably inherent to Russian spirituality informing great creative works, which, however, are not culture, insofar as they are aiming at the religious transformation of life.

MAGIA – RELIGIA – OSTENTACJA. KAPTORGI Z WCZESNOŚREDNIOWIECZNEGO CMENTARZYSKA W RADOMIU W UJĘCIU KOMPARATYSTYCZNYM

This article presents an analysis of two brass lockets, rectangular in shape, discovered in a richly equipped grave no. 62 in an early-medieval grave field in Radom (the 4th quarter of the 11-12th centuries). As a result of the analysis, their cognitive value can be estimated in a comprehensive way against the background of other finds of the type excavated in graves. On the other hand, it has allowed to enrich the knowledge of burying the dead with objects of magical and religious nature. The lockets discovered in Radom were made locally, most probably as imitations of more sophisticated pendants. Most probably, they were used as containers for magical or healing amulets, possibly contact relics (brandeum, eulogiae) or perfumes. They were probably buried after mid-11th century, during the religious transformation taking place in the early Piast state, bearing material testimony to the intertwining pagan rites and the ceremonies of the new faith.

Maya Blue and Franciscan Evangelism

In the first decades of the Franciscan evangelical campaign in Yucatán, Mexico (1540–90), Maya builders and artists directed the construction and pictorial decoration of hundreds of Christian edifices, ranging from small-scale chapels to larger churches and entire monastic complexes, offering a material record of the peninsula’s religious transformation. Strategic color selection and the deployment of Maya blue pigment in particular architectural, iconographic, and liturgical contexts enabled Indigenous catechumens to reconcile post-Tridentine conceptions of divinity with precontact sacred ideologies. By weaving diverse methodologies from the study of visual sources, textual documents, and material characterization techniques, we demonstrate how colonial Maya color theory actively engineered localized Catholicism.

Revolution as a Cultural Institute

The author of this article analyzes the concept of “revolution” and “revolutionism” in the contemporary culture. He defines the latter as one of the most important cultural institutions of modernity and regards it as a continuous and constitutive process in the New Age society, though acting most of the time in a latent form. Although the boundaries of the concept of revolution are extremely broad today, any study inevitably raises the question of the typology of revolutionary processes, to which the orthodox thought could provide an independent answer. Revolutions can be divided into two types. The first type is political revolutions, a change of political regimes. The second includes systemic revolutions, which lead to a change in the global cultural model. The revolution as a historical phenomenon, along with the subject of colonization, emerges from the Enlightenment and Reformation discourses, which replaced the Christian idea of the catechization of peoples. This led to the revolution becoming a reference point for a society that gravitated toward a radical reconstruction of institutions and identities and which was willing to pay a high moral price for it. Attention is paid to the quasi-religious foundations of revolutionary thought and revolutionary action. The results show that a modern society is a society with horizontal dynamics of development, and its social upheavals, often taking a radical revolutionary format, can only use Christian symbolism to disguise non-Christian content. The Soviet culture reproduced elements of religious practice because the new government clearly wanted to create its own rituals, as the deep religiousness of the people called for it. The main objective of this article is to structure and briefly describe the semantics of revolutionism, in which the eschatological, mystery and psychological aspects are highlighted, and the revolutionary ritual of sacrifice is examined. The author concludes that the authentic and truly spiritual alternative to the revolutionary constructivism of modern society includes the religious transformation of a man, as well as theosis and cosmotheosis, which can also change the existing social model.

I’m Somali and I’m Christian: A dilemma for religion and identity in the context of migration in Southern Africa

This contribution is one of a series that aimed at publishing significant findings from the research conducted for a PhD study where emerging themes were isolated and discussed. During one of the focus group conversations, Abdul (not his real name) explained how his Somali-Christian identity presented a dilemma whilst he lived with fellow Muslim Somali nationals when he was displaced during the 2015 xenophobic violence in Johannesburg. Firstly, this contribution discusses a general overview of the situation of migration and then his situation is explored from the themes, which emerged from this study from the lens of bicultural and acculturation processes of identity formation. Although this was not a representative sample of male foreign migrant experiences, analysing Abdul’s situation within a post-colonial and bicultural acculturation paradigm revealed the ‘embedded’ trajectories at the interface between religion, identity and migration in social and economic processes of transformation. Sketching Abdul’s experiences through these lenses also generated contested processes on the interface of religion and identity that reflect the significance of the role played by religion in identity constructions which are open to change (and sometimes present a dilemma), as life circumstances fluctuate with complex interactions in search of survival strategies to ward off any potential threats to a flourishing life. Such survival strategies highlight how these encounters generate hybrid identities and discourses with new boundaries, which, although fluid, volatile and situational, are reminiscent with historical and odious notions of colonialism that present African migrants as undesired foreigners whilst portraying other western and Asian migrants in cosy terms such as expatriates and tourists.Contribution: Exploring the relevance of migrant expressions within the context of identity constructions and socio-economic framework demonstrates how contested processes of socio-economic and religious transformation reflect the significance of the role played by religion on identity constructions. These constructions are articulated through fluid and complex encounters, which fluctuate to generate hybrid identities and migrant survival discourses.

After Darkness, Light

About 1560, the Little Ice Age entered a new and brutally cold era, when social strains threatened the survival of social and political orders. The resulting unrest and disaffection took multiple forms, but they especially manifested in one notorious form of social paranoia—namely, the witch-hunts, which now reached their peak in Europe. At the same time, the 1560s witnessed a dramatic religious transformation within Christianity, affecting both its Catholic and Protestant dimensions. The fast-growing Calvinist movement represented a revolutionary current that threatened the near-overnight razing of ancient religious ways. On the other side, reformed and restructured Catholicism became quite as hard-edged and confrontational, equally as much a faith of crisis. The Christian world entered a new and much harsher period of polarization, as revolutionary religious change detonated savage wars.

Introduction: ‘Religious Transformation in the Middle East: Spirituality, Religious Doubt, and Non-Religion in the Middle East’

The political impact—or rather the lack thereof—following the revolutionary uprisings in the Middle East has been well documented [...]

When Abangan Embraces Sufism: Religious Phenomenology to Counter Radicalism in Contemporary Java

Abangan is one of the socio-religious groups regarded as a marginal community among the trichotomy of santri and priayi. It has been known that abangan were not religious Muslim, and they are poor farmers as well as workers, backward and less educated people. Meanwhile, santri are more religious and priayi among Javanese society are middle-class people practising syncretic Islam. The thesis on “The Religion of Java,” by Clifford Geertz, was more than a half-century indicated religious and social classification in Javanese society. In the midst of political polarization of Indonesian reformation, transnational Islamic groups began to establish their movement widely. Transnational Islamic groups that promote radicalism and violent extremism clearly avoid local wisdom and mysticism. As a result, abangan has experienced dramatic religious and social change. This study aims to see how to face radicalism after reformation in the social and religious transformation of abangan in Java. Previous studies have shown that the phenomenon of radicalism affects religious intolerance addressed to minority groups like abangan. This research paper aims to examine how abangan reacts to radicalism and engages with Sufism and their devotion to tarekat. Abangan recently appears to convert and join the tarekat movement as an alternative discourse to encounter modernism and religious radicalism.