Interaction between Law and Morality: The Philosophical Construct

This paper discusses the jurisprudential analysis of law and legislation in a modern state. The main objective of this analysis is to ascertain the role and status of morality in the modern constitutional setup. Various views of legal positivism will be probed in light of the role of morality in codification. The study will comprise upon doctrinal analysis of various positivist writers of the 20th century. Contemporary elements of law in the modern nation-state system are more pro-positivist in approach rather than moral. In the light of these elements, the reader will understand the scope of morality especially religious morality in the contemporary legal framework. A comparative analysis will explain the standards of both theories of legal positivism and naturalist interpretation of laws.

Rescuing the Muslim collective self: the Nur case in light of the Modern Muslim Subjectivities Project

There is a tendency in the literature to emphasise how contemporary Islamic movements promote ways of living a pious Muslim life alternative to those proposed by secular liberal modernity. For this reason, the domains of religious and civic engagement have often been thought of as opposed to each other. In counterpoint to this tendency, the paper explores the intertwining of national views about mass education and modern citizenship with a renewed Islamic emphasis on the need for moral and ethical reform of society within the Nur movement in modern Turkey. Methodologically, the paper draws upon ethnographic material from research conducted in 2010 on the Suffa community in Istanbul, as well as on an account of the life and projects of the leader of the movement, Said Nursi, mainly drawn from secondary sources. This case is explored in light of the theories of successive modernities that inspired the analytical framework for the Modern Muslim Subjectivities Project applied in this special issue. In so doing, it illustrates the complex nexus that Nursi established between long-standing views of Islamic ethics and modern perspectives on education and civic engagement in response to the emergence of the modern nation-state in the first half of the 20th century.

Subversive Archaism

In Subversive Archaism, Michael Herzfeld explores how individuals and communities living at the margins of the modern nation-state use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state authority under both democratic and authoritarian governments. Through close attention to the claims and experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum dwellers in Thailand, Herzfeld shows how these subversive archaists draw on national histories and past polities to claim legitimacy for their defiance of bureaucratic authority. Although vilified by government authorities as remote, primitive, or dangerous—often as preemptive justification for violent repression—these groups are not revolutionaries and do not reject national identity, but they do question the equation of state and nation. Herzfeld explores the political strengths and vulnerabilities of their deployment of heritage and the weaknesses they expose in the bureaucratic and ethnonational state in an era of accelerated globalization.

Smile of the Crescent: Constructing a Future Identity Out of Historical Ambiguity in İstiklal Marşi (with Translation)

This article analyses identity construction in İstiklal Marşi (“Independence March”), the national anthem of the Republic of Turkey, within the theoretical framework of Eurocentric nation-state rhetoric. It argues that the continuing success of the text, written by Mehmet Akif [Ersoy] in 1921, is independent of the ideological stand of its author, and lies instead in its conveyance of a modern nation-state identity. In order to demonstrate this, the article first depicts the circumstances of the adoption of the national anthem and its immediate reception in Turkey. Afterwards, it examines identity construction in the anthem and reveals that the war against European forces determined the self-perception of the nation by both the negation and mirroring of the other. It concludes that, by foregrounding certain elements such as l’esprit frondeur and faith, and by interpreting the convention of Ottoman Divan poetry, the poet infused the cultural and aesthetic legacy of the past into the future needs of a nation-state.

Stampa e nazionalismo in Egitto a cavallo tra Ottocento e Novecento

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Egypt saw new concepts of community emerge to replace the extant, traditional forms of identity based on local loyalties. This paper will explore the role played by language and journalism in this re-imagining of identity, and its use by the elite in shaping perceptions of the Egyptian people, nation and language. A fundamental element of this process was the development in the use of the term ummah in the discourse of many thinkers of the Nahḍah, from its meaning signifying the global community of Muslim believers, into a symbol of the modern nation-state, a re-interpretation which I discuss drawing, notably, on the unpublished writings of the journalist Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid. This perspective enables an exploration both of the competition between traditionalist values and the secular, multicultural model of early Egyptian nationalism, and of the multifarious colonial influences on the pro-Europe anelite in this struggle for a vision of Egypt’s future.

Islam and State: A Study on Al-Mawardi and An-Nabhani’s thought and its Compatibility in Indonesian Context

Even though study concerning Islam and politics has been conducted by many researchers, few of them investigating about compatibility of Islamic political thoughts, which originated from the classical and medieval periods that have been influencing Islamic political movements and thoughts in Indonesia, with Indonesian context. Thoughts of Imam al-Mawardi (lived in the 12th Century) and Taqiyuddin al-Nabhani (lived in the 20th Century) are some of them that should be mentioned in this regard. Islamic political thoughts of al-Mawardi become the main reference for Sunni Muslims who are majority in Indonesia, while Islamic political thought of al-Nabhani become the main guidance of HTI (Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia) movement of which its members and followers are many in Indonesia. This article investigates about the political thoughts of al-Mawardi and al-Nabhani concerning the relationship between Islam and state as well as their compatibility with Indonesian context. This study uses the library research in which its primary resources are books written by al-Mawardi entitled Al-Ahkam al-Sulthaniyah and al-Nabhani entitled Ad-Daulah al-Islamiyah. By utilizing qualitative content analysis, data were collected and analyzed. This article argues that the Islamic political thought of al-Mawardi has been adopted by majority of Indonesian Sunni Muslims with some adjustments with Indonesian context, so that his thoughts become compatible with the concept of modern nation-state of Indonesia. On the other side, Islamic political thought of al-Nabhani which developed within a spirit of resistance to Western (European) colonialism has been adopted and campaigned by HTI without adjustment with Indonesian context. This causes al-Nabhani’s thought clashes with the concept of modern nation-state of Indonesia.

Citizenship and Religious Freedoms in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

The majority of the social and political forces that spearheaded and actively participated in the 2011 and 2013 waves of uprisings catapulted the demands to reestablish ‘citizenship’ as one of the main foundations of a new social contract aiming at redefining state–society relations in a new Egypt. Meanwhile, the concept of citizenship has been increasingly featured in the discourse and practice of a wide variety of state actors and institutions. In fact, Egypt’s experiences with the modern nation-state project concerning the conceptualization of citizenship, and the subsequent implications on religious freedoms and the role of religion in the polity at large, has gone through various ebbs and flows since the beginning of the 20th century. The concept of citizenship as such has faced a plethora of challenges and has been affected by the socioeconomic and political trajectories of state–society relations during the Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, and, most recently, Sissi regimes. Dilemmas of geographical disparities and uneven access to resources and services, in addition to issues of discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities such as Coptic Christians, Shiites, Nubians, Bedouins, or on the basis of gender, are among the main accompanying features of the neoliberal order that was introduced and then consolidated first by Sadat’s Open Door and then Mubarak’s state-withdrawal policies, respectively. To what extent did the conception and practice of citizenship rights and religious freedoms—as defined by state and non-state actors—change after the demise of the Mubarak regime? In addition, what is the role of the Egyptian civil society vis-a-vis the state in this process of conceptualizing and/or practicing citizenship rights and religious freedoms in the new Egypt? Focusing on the aforementioned questions, this paper aims at shedding some light on the changing role of religion in the Egyptian polity post 2011, while also highlighting the impact of the sociopolitical and economic ramifications witnessed within the society on the scope of religious liberties and citizenship rights as a whole.

Status in Early Modern and Modern World Politics: Competition or Conflict? A Comparative Analysis of Early Modern Ceremonial Rankings and Modern Nation-State Rankings

Based on Simmel's sociology of competition, the article compares historically varying structures and semantics of world political status competition. Early modern and modern rankings that represent the world political status of royal titles, or modern states, respectively, serve as empirical material. It is shown that status competition in the early modern period can neither semantically nor structurally be distinguished from conflicts, whereas in modern world politics competition is framed as a distinct social relationship and as an alternative to conflicts. Methodological and epistemological conclusions are drawn from the findings, suggesting that more caution should be taken when applying modern terms to historical contexts.

Religion and Social Change

This chapter discusses the peculiarly modern way of relying on the idea of social equality to study the past, which has led to a widespread narrative that religious traditions routinely failed to bring about social equality. It focuses on social historians, whose interest in non-elite people grew out of Marxist sensitivities that predisposed them to view religion as a symptom of distress or instrument of social control but not as a force for social change. It traces the emergence of “equality” as an important term in western political and social writing and how modern nation-state rhetoric from the late 18th century onward made it normative. It becomes clear that modern democracies too have often failed to bring about social equality, even when they explicitly promote it. This develops a penetrating view of scholarship about equality in historical religions, thereby framing the historiographical issues that occupy the rest of the book.

Community Agency and Islamic Education in Contemporary Zanzibar

Western liberal political philosophy, which undergirds the conception of the modern nation-state as theorized by European philosophers of liberalism from centuries past, is primarily concerned with the dynamics of rights and responsibilities between the individual and state institutions. In defining these dynamics, some philosophers held an assumption of human nature as inherently inclined toward selfish ends...