bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Thousand Years
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This epilogue discusses how, some four hundred years after its fall, the world was reminded of imperial Songhay's former glory when, in early January of 2012, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawād—or the MNLA—attacked the towns of Menaka and Aguelhok, leading to the collapse of the national army in northern Mali. However, the twenty-first century was not the first instance in which the modern world reflected on West African anterior history, though prior occasions were largely artistic in nature. In any case, through both real-world events and artistic creativity, enactments of West Africa's medieval past have filtered into contemporary consciousness. Even so, in turning from the popular to the academic, histories purporting to convey a sense of global development since antiquity continue to ignore Africa's contributions, not merely as the presumed site of human origins, but as a full participant in its cultural, technological, and political innovations. The epilogue then summarizes the full trajectory of West African history examined in the previous chapters.
Introduction
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Christianity in the twentieth century. The twentieth century has suffered comparative neglect at the hands of modern Western historians of Christianity, who have, on the whole, remained more interested in the intellectual and social challenges posed to the European churches in the nineteenth century. Yet it was the twentieth century that shaped the contours of the Christian faith as it is now, a culturally plural and geographically polycentric religion clustered around a number of new metropolitan loci in the non-European world. The majority of its rapidly growing number of adherents found the post-Enlightenment questions that preoccupied the churches of the North and West to be remote from their pressing everyday concerns of life and death, sickness and healing, justice and poverty. In Islamic regions of Africa and in almost all of Asia, they were also intimately concerned with the implications of living as religious minorities in a context dominated by the majority religious tradition. Their theological priorities and ethical perspectives differed accordingly from those of Christians in the North. The twentieth century thus set the agenda for the theological and ethical issues that now constitute the fault lines dividing Christians and churches from each other. The twentieth century has thus made it necessary for students of ecumenism to redraw the map of Christian unity and disunity.
Wars and Rumors of Wars
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter suggests that the consequences of the First World War for patterns of Christian belief and the life of the churches were indeed great, but that they stimulated, not an immediate loss of faith, but rather the emergence and increasingly distinct self-definition of some of the most characteristic themes and divergent styles of Christianity in the modern world. It then identifies the main implications of the war for Christianity on a world stage. First, the war came close to destroying the spirit of Protestant internationalism that had been so powerfully symbolized and fostered by the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in June of 1910. A second consequence of the war was the gradual erosion of credibility of the European ideal of “Christian civilization,” and consequent softening of the antithesis between “Christian West” and “Non-Christian East.” Third, the war led some theological interpreters to question the more facile expressions of Christian liberalism and social optimism to which sections of the Protestant churches had succumbed since the dawn of the twentieth century. A fourth spiritual consequence of the war was the stimulus it imparted to forms of religion that emphasized the suprarational, and hence the limits of rational human capacity to change the world.
The Power of the Word and Prophecy
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter traces a number of different trajectories whereby a religion emanating from Western societies became, in the course of the twentieth century, a faith rooted in the soil of West African or Melanesian societies. Catholic missions before Vatican II were fearful of unleashing the vernacular Bible on the laity and relied instead on a tightly controlled network of schools to grow a Christian community from childhood upwards. Conversion came not through sudden movements of indigenous revival and initiative, but through the steady growth in the numbers of school rolls and hence of the baptized. Meanwhile, Protestant mission schools were even more conscious than their Catholic counterparts of the dangers of mere head knowledge or forms of adherence to the church that appeared to lack strong personal conviction. The real point of education was that it opened the door to read the Bible for oneself, in one's own language, and thus laid the individual soul open to the regenerating power of the Spirit. However, reading the scriptures in one's own language was enough to permit individual and corporate appropriations of the Christian message that radically challenged European preconceptions. As vernacular translations exposed the extent to which European Christianity had denuded the biblical text of its prophetic and miraculous elements, Africans and Melanesians who had unusual charismatic gifts or mana sometimes assumed the mantle of the prophets and challenged their missionary mentors to join their many indigenous converts in believing their mighty works.
Contrasting Patterns of Belonging and Believing
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes the strikingly divergent trajectories of Christian belief and practice in Scandinavia and the United States. All Scandinavian countries in the twentieth century experienced a decline in regular church attendance that appears to have been consistent throughout the century, and that may have begun as soon as religious compulsion was lifted in the nineteenth century. This protracted decline mirrored the slow waning of orthodox Christian belief, but this was not a decline from a previous golden age of faith; rather there seems every likelihood that the adherence of many Scandinavian people to Christian faith had been quite tenuous ever since the region was first evangelized. Yet the Scandinavian countries also illustrate in a pointed way the possibility that in certain conditions, stable patterns of religious belonging can exist almost independently of personal religious belief. Meanwhile, the United States in the twentieth century was by some criteria a more “secular” nation than Sweden or Denmark. The American state from its inception has refused to give any religious body privileged status before the law. In consequence, religion in the United States has always been divorced from the apparatus of government and public institutions to a much greater extent than in the Scandinavian nations, and in the course of the twentieth century, that divorce became more absolute in certain spheres, notably in the universities, public education, and the media.
Is Christ Divided?
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the ecumenical movement. The twentieth century has sometimes been denominated by historians of Christianity as “the ecumenical century.” Narratives of the ecumenical movement typically begin with the World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh in June of 1910, which assembled some 1,215 Protestant delegates from various parts of the globe to devise a more effective common strategy for the evangelization of the world. Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the Edinburgh conference has been widely identified as the birthplace of the formal ecumenical movement. Without it, there would be no World Council of Churches. Yet serious attempts to bridge divisions between Protestant Christians were already under way in India and China before 1910. Furthermore, the World Missionary Conference was precisely that—a gathering of mission executives and missionaries convened to consider questions of missionary policy. Delegates represented missionary agencies rather than churches, and discussion of questions of doctrine and church order was forbidden, in deference to the Church of England, whose endorsement would not have been given if the conference had been expected to discuss matters of faith and order with Nonconformists. The chapter then looks at the failure and success of the ecumenical movement.
Aliens in a Strange Land?
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter details the course of Christian–Muslim relations in the Islamic world in the twentieth century. It presents two case studies. The first focuses on Egypt, which in the first part of the twentieth century was the intellectual and publishing hub of the Muslim world, and hence was regarded by Western Christians as the key to its regeneration by the Christian gospel and “modern” ideas of reform. Egypt was also the home of Africa's oldest church, the Coptic Orthodox Church. The second case study examines a younger Christian community within a younger nation, that of the church in Indonesia. The Egyptian case study highlights the dissonance between the post-Enlightenment political philosophy of individual rights and freedom of religion that undergirds Western academic discourse on the subject of interreligious relations and the markedly different concept of religious toleration that prevails in Muslim majority states.
That the World May Believe
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores how the Catholic and Protestant churches respectively reconceived their theologies of mission in the final four decades of the twentieth century. Particular attention is devoted to the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65, the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1968, and the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization convened by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1974. It was not accidental that this process of fundamental revision was concentrated on the 1960s and 1970s—decades that witnessed the rapid dismantling of the Western colonial empires, the emergence of the “Third World” as an ideological bloc, and the highly charged political atmosphere of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant missionary movements were the offspring of colonialism, but both regularly employed the language of global Christian dominion and both tried to use colonial governments to forward their evangelistic objectives. It was thus inevitable that the anticolonial invective of these decades should not leave the churches' overseas missionary activities unscathed. These years were also an era of social and intellectual ferment in European societies. Movements of revolutionary protest against established institutions and their perceived role in the perpetuation of structural injustice and international capitalism swept through university campuses. The historic churches and their governing hierarchies were often caught in the gunfire. Their formulation of their role in the world and even of their message itself could not be unaffected.
Doing Justice in South Africa and Canada
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter highlights the impact on the churches of the human rights agenda in its application to issues of racial justice and the treatment of indigenous peoples. Most discussions of human rights discourse in the second half of the twentieth century begin with the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the consequent adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Third General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris in December of 1948. Ecumenical leaders, influenced by concerns arising from mission field experience in Asia and Latin America, were determined that the Declaration should go further still, incorporating a full statement of freedom of religion, including the increasingly contested right to convert to another religion. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, human rights discourse acquired a sharper edge. Alongside its older Cold War use as a weapon against communist totalitarianism there developed a radical human rights tradition that addressed the condition of oppressed groups and spoke the language of liberation. This alternative human rights tradition confronted the churches with a choice—either to realign themselves with the demands for liberation, or to pay the price for their apparent collusion with the status quo.
A Noise of War in the Camp
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the ramifications for Christian belief and practice of the application of human rights ideology to questions of gender and sexuality. It was only in the course of the twentieth century that rights ideology crossed the gender divide, giving rise to the women's suffrage movement and the substantial erosion of previously unquestioned assumptions about the God-given roles and hierarchical relationship of the sexes. From the second decade of the century in North America and Europe, inherited Christian convictions about the theological and ethical legitimacy of restricting ordained leadership in the churches to men began to be questioned. In Protestant and Anglican churches, these convictions were slowly and unevenly abandoned as the century proceeded. The chapter then considers the shifts in popular attitudes to sexual ethics. By the final decade of the century, some of the global denominational forums had become the arena for heated debate between conservatives and liberals. Churches or individuals could be “liberal” on an issue such as the ordination of women and “conservative” on homosexuality.
The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Modern World
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter details how, in the course of the twentieth century, the position of the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches weakened markedly—and apparently irreversibly—in some of their historic strongholds, such as Egypt and Palestine, while in most of eastern Europe, Orthodoxy came under severe ideological pressure from communist regimes between 1917 and 1989, only to emerge into the post-Soviet era remarkably intact. Perhaps the most striking feature of Orthodox history during the century is the extent of the global diffusion—yet at the same time tendency to ethnic fragmentation—of Orthodox Christianity. By the close of the century, there were more than 3 million Orthodox Christians in North America, who were subject to at least fifteen different ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The primary reason for such geographical and institutional diffusion was the intercontinental migration of diverse Orthodox populations from various parts of eastern and central Europe, but an important secondary reason was the growing appeal that Orthodoxy exerted on Christians who for one reason or another had become dissatisfied with their former Protestant or Catholic allegiance. By the 1990s, the Orthodox Church was one of the very few churches in western Europe or North America that was displaying steady growth, as a result of both immigration and conversion.
Conclusion
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter argues that the twentieth century was indeed a period of extraordinary and sustained Christian growth in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. Yet it also witnessed a serious recession from Christian faith in most of Europe, Australasia, and parts of North America; the continuance and even intensification of serious obstacles to the progress of Christianity in the Islamic world and in most of India; and an accelerating and tragic exodus of Christians from those parts of West Asia and the Middle East that had once constituted the heartlands of Christianity. In some of its manifestations that have become increasingly prominent since the 1980s, the fabric of Christian doctrine and spirituality has been so fundamentally redesigned in the interests of the pursuit of individual material prosperity that the question becomes whether Christianity has converted indigenous religionists or whether indigenous religious and cultural perspectives have succeeded in converting Christianity. The Christian history of the twenty-first century may provide an answer. If the gravest challenge faced by Christianity in the twentieth century was the repeated subversion of Christian ethics by a series of tragic compromises between Christianity and ideologies of racial supremacy, the most serious challenge confronting the religion in the twenty-first century looks likely to be the preparedness of some sections of the church in both northern and southern hemispheres to accommodate the faith to ideologies of individual enrichment.
Absence
Authors: Cameron Averil
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines Byzantium's absence from the wider historical discourse. Part of the reason for this absence is that it has been relegated to the sphere of negativity. The very name that people use today—“Byzantium”—was a derogatory coinage of the early modern period, and Byzantium has traditionally been the subject of adverse comparisons with Rome and with everything classical. Autocracy, bureaucracy, deviousness, and a stultifying lack of originality—all still seem to go together with the word “Byzantium,” underpinned by the ever-present awareness that in the end Byzantium “fell.” In general historiography, Byzantium is either nonexistent or in between. In many Anglo-Saxon history departments, Byzantium is regarded as a niche specialization, while among books intended for the general reader, many of the most successful continue to emphasize court intrigue or a romanticized view of Orthodoxy. The chapter then looks at the role played by Orthodoxy in Byzantium. It also studies Byzantine literature.
Epilogue
Authors: Cameron Averil
Published: May 2020

This epilogue addresses the question of periodization in relation to Byzantium. Several recent writers prefer to see “Byzantium” proper as beginning from ca. 600 or later, and there are good reasons why. Constantinople was formally inaugurated in AD 330, but there was not yet such an entity as “Byzantium,” distinct from the eastern Roman Empire, and it remains the case that the Byzantines thought of themselves as Romans. Nevertheless, adopting a later periodization risks obscuring the fact that what people call Byzantium had a long earlier history; it was not a new state formed only in the medieval period. The chapter then argues that Byzantium belongs to mainstream history. Moreover, Byzantine studies must be rescued from its continuing association with the competing claims of negativity and exoticism. Recent publications have set an encouraging pattern, but now the subject needs to be opened up further, and Byzantium seen against more “normal” and wider perspectives.
Introduction
Authors: Russell David
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter outlines some basic claims about tact, the subjects it touches upon, and the way this book is framed. In broadest terms: tact privileges encounters over knowledge, and an aesthetic of handling over more abstract conceptualization or observation—whether of people or objects. Tact can be described as a close and haptic attention to the moment, preferring a present ambivalence to a future perfection. Tact lends itself to political uses just where—in its refusal of assertion—it seems most impertinent to practical ends. It is a literary art that draws upon the particular resources of the essay as form; and it provides the grounds for a claim about the relationship between art and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy. Tact has its origins in a particular time and place, the British nineteenth century, but it is also a more generalizable and available style.
Aesthetic Liberalism
Authors: Russell David
Published: May 2020

This chapter aims to resituate John Stuart Mill's early essays on aesthetics and poetry within the tradition of the tactful essayists studied in the other chapters of this book. As much as those of Charles Lamb, Mill's early essays are experiments, at once in both aesthetic and social form. Moreover, one can propose that the young Mill's aesthetic liberalism did survive: only not so much in the development of the discipline of political theory as in the nineteenth-century literary essay. The chapter looks closely at the tension between Mill's aesthetic and his argumentative liberalisms. It considers how and why the latter won out over the former during the course of his career.
The Grounds of Tact
Authors: Russell David
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that tactless essays open the way to tactful novels. Here, the resources of the essay form in George Eliot's work are marshaled, not to make use of more hospitable modes of mediation, wider repertoires of relation, but rather to protest precisely the lack of any desire for, or attention to them in the culture in which Eliot lived. Essays, for Eliot, are still the form in which our choices of relation are brought to the fore; it is just that, from this point of view, the world's inadequacies are glaring. Her novels will share her essays' commitment to an immense aesthetic project: seeking to redescribe the world in such ways as new relationships to it, and states of mind about it, become possible. The task of Eliot's essays was to find through critique a way in to alternative mediations of the world.
Tact in Psychoanalysis
Authors: Russell David
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the writings of Marion Milner. Like Eliot in her essays, Milner laments the inadequacy of cultural resource available to support a creative life; but unlike Eliot in her essays, Milner is on the lookout for new uses for vulnerability. If the resources of the strong only serve to suppress the capacities and perceptions of those who are marginalized, then what use can they be to the weak? Though the chapter considers her diary books in some detail, its focus is on how their concerns with a freedom to see and feel for oneself, and the uses of vulnerability, shape her analytic work. In particular, how this work calls for a clinical sensibility with striking affinities to the tact of the nineteenth-century essayists described in this book.
Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance
Authors: Hack Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter illustrates how the African Americanization of Charles Dickens' Bleak House makes newly visible and meaningful certain aspects of the novel even as it calls into question the power of such features to determine the cultural work the novel—and, by extension, any text—performs. This doubly estranging dynamic will be particularly clear with regard to a cultural task that has come to be seen as one of the novel-form's most important: the cultivation of national identity. As the chapter shows, Bleak House does not merely fail to imagine a community that includes Africans, African Americans, slaves, and people of color in general. Rather, it consolidates the national community it does imagine by means of their exclusion. Paradoxically, however, this strategy becomes most conspicuous when it is least efficacious: engaging in their own forms of close reading at a distance, members of these groups and their advocates find in Dickens's novel a material and imaginative resource for their own efforts to tell the stories they want to tell and build the communities they seek to build.
(Re-)Racializing “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
Authors: Hack Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the African Americanization of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It argues that what makes “The Light Brigade” an inspired choice for this kind of task is its history and historicity. There exists a history of placing Tennyson's poem in relation to African American culture, and this history is one in which this relationship has been variously construed and vigorously contested. As the chapter shows, from the moment it was published, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was mobilized, especially though not exclusively by African Americans, as a site or tool to address certain issues. These include: the relationship of African Americans to the dominant cultural tradition; the nature and politics of interracial cultural rivalry, mimicry, and appropriation; and the role of poetry and the arts—and violence—in the fight for racial empowerment and equality.
The Culturally Contested Lives of Muslim Youth and American Teenagers
Authors: O'Brien John
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides the background of a group of young men, referred to as the “Legendz,” who were urban American teenagers and second-generation immigrants. These young men were also self-identified and practicing Muslims embedded in a tightknit religious community. As some of the central cultural expectations associated with urban American teenage life were understood to be in tension with or even direct opposition to those locally associated with being a “good Muslim,” these young men led what can be called culturally contested lives. As such, the everyday lives of the Legendz were characterized in part by the presence of two competing sets of cultural expectations, or what can be called cultural rubrics: urban American teen culture, as manifested in their schools, peer groups, and the media they consumed; and religious Islam, as locally practiced in their mosque and by their families. Precisely how these young Muslim American men innovated and applied creative social solutions to their immediate cultural dilemmas, and how these efforts marked them as fundamentally similar to a broad range of other American teenagers, is the focus of this book.
“Cool Piety”
Authors: O'Brien John
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses how participation in hip hop culture could lead to recognition from non-Muslim peers. “Hip hopper” was for the Legendz a widely recognized and desirable identity that could momentarily precede and eclipse that of “religious Muslim” in an interaction with non-Muslim peers. In making meaningful social connections with other urban youth based on a shared engagement with hip hop culture, the Legendz were following a pattern observed by sociologists among other second-generation immigrants whose participation in hip hop music and style allowed them to gain acceptance and make social inroads among young people from outside their immediate ethnic community. In addition to employing hip hop as a way to gain acceptance and make connections with a broader urban American community of non-Muslims, the Legendz also actively adapted the genre's music and culture in creative ways to develop their own in-group Muslim American identity and style. The resulting identity performance—referred to as cool piety—tapped into broader African American urban cool while still exhibiting a close association with local standards of Islamic behavior to produce a nuanced and multifaceted presentation of Muslim American self.
“Keeping It Halal” and Dating While Muslim
Authors: O'Brien John
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines two distinct models through which members of the Legendz attempted to reconcile the contradictions between Islamic expectations of premarital gender relations and their participation in American-style teenage romantic relationships. Yusuf and Salman sought to manage this dilemma by articulating and pursuing an overtly Islamic approach to dating which they called “keeping it halal.” “Keeping it halal” entailed an explicit labeling of their romantic activity as Islamically appropriate (halal) as well as a stated commitment to setting specific limits on physical intimacy. This approach was initially attractive to these young men because it promised a level of cultural clarity and emphasized an attractive similarity between states of romantic love and Islamic piety. While “keeping it halal” worked well as an articulated aspiration and an initial guide for young Muslim Americans' behavior while dating in America, its effectiveness as a lasting strategy for reconciling teenage dating and Islamic morality eventually fell short for those who attempted it. Exemplifying an alternative approach to managing the dilemma of dating as a young Muslim, Abdul, Muhammad, and Fuad avoided articulating their dating relationships within an explicitly Islamic moral framework or by setting clear boundaries on physical intimacy. Instead, they emphasized the aspects of their relationships that aligned with a culture of romantic love while trying to keep Islamic understandings present but marginal and the possibility of physical intimacy alive but obscure by discussing such subjects in strategically ambiguous ways.
Growing Up Muslim and American
Authors: O'Brien John
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter argues that the story of the Legendz suggests key conditions important to the cultivation of healthy Muslim American identities. The Legendz's deep and pervasive sense of themselves as Muslims and Americans, as well as their cultivated ability to skillfully navigate the cultural rubrics of American youth culture and Islamic religiosity, are attributable to three key conditions present within their social environment. First, the adults in the Legendz's community maintained an openness and understanding that allowed the boys room to engage in some measure of American youth culture without fear of harsh punishment or communal ostracism. A second important condition seems to have been the presence of a familiar and consistent group of friends located within the same culturally complex situation. The Legendz developed a sense of their ability to manage competing sets of cultural expectations as young Muslims together. A third condition that seems to have contributed to the Legendz's ability to effectively manage their culturally contested lives was a social and physical space in which these processes could unfold and take place. An underlying theme cutting across all three of these conditions is the need for a productive overall understanding of Muslim American teenagers as being in the midst of a process of identity development, cultural negotiation, and growing up.
Introduction
Authors: Yılmaz Hüseyin
Published: May 2020

This chapter details the post-Abbasid trajectory of the caliphate and its Sufistic reconstruction. With the fall of Baghdad in 1258, the historical caliphate, embodied by the Abbasid Empire, formally ended with traumatic consequences that, in response, facilitated the rise of a new wave of self-reflection, exploration, and experimentation in all segments of Islamicate societies. In the absence of the imperial caliphate, along with the rise of independent regional Muslim dynasties from the fourteenth century onwards, the idea of the caliphate, reinterpreted in response to profound changes taking place in the broader Muslim community, regained its prominence in Islamic political discourse, and, with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, became the linchpin of imperial ideology in the sixteenth century. Modern studies on the question of Muslim rulership repeatedly assume that the historical caliphate, as conceived by Muslim jurists during the Abbasid period continued to define both the concept and the institution in subsequent political thought and praxis. This assumption confines the theoretical construction of the caliphate to jurisprudence, overlooks the impact of later historical experiences, and disregards the formative influence of broader intellectual traditions in framing the caliphate as both an institution and an ideal.
The Caliphate Mystified
Authors: Yılmaz Hüseyin
Published: May 2020

This chapter deals with the formative period of Ottoman political thought from the formal end of the Seljuk state at the turn of the fourteenth century to the Egyptian campaign of 1517. It argues that political ideals and imageries inculcated from the Ottomans' own historical experience, appropriation of Arabic, and the Persian corpora on Islamic political theory; and its exposure to indigenous practices of authority constituted an integral part of state formation and ruling ideology that redefined rulership in general, and the caliphate in particular. Having been founded at the western fringes of the Islamicate society in the midst of nominally converted Turkish-speaking nomadic populations, the Ottomans at large were only gradually exposed to learned traditions of High Islam. Two foundational epics of the Ottoman Empire, Halīlnāme and İskendernāme, were composed in this period. Translation of political texts and composition of frontier epics gradually transformed Turkish, which was continuously despised by the learned as a profane language of illiterate nomads with no alphabet, into one of the three principal languages of Islamic learning and culture.
The Sultan and the Sultanate
Authors: Yılmaz Hüseyin
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the innovative panoply of views on the nature of political authority, and visions of the sultanate as its form of embodiment. Virtually every author writing on rulership felt it necessary first to address the question of what political authority really was, its raison d'etre and status among humanity, how it was acquired or lost, the nature of the ruler and his morality, and historical models of rulership. No author doubted the consensus-confirmed view that the sultanate was the highest rank a human being could attain, but they took divergent paths in defining its nature, scope, and entangled boundaries. A common attitude was to reconcile between various historical and theoretical models of political authority including philosopher-kingship, prophethood, and imamate by defining them in ways compatible with their own visions of rulership. Elaborating on a particular vision of rulership almost always involved an explanation of human nature, human beings' existential status, and the purpose of life. There is a strong correlation between one's perception of human nature and vision of ideal rulership.
Conclusion
Authors: Yılmaz Hüseyin
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about the Sufi-minded Ottoman historians that reconstructed Islamic history in which both the Ottomans and the Safavids were identified as the parties of the same perennial conflict since the creation of Adam. The Ottomans and the Safavids—both ethnically Turkic dynasties—were identified as the Romans and the Persians in allusion to the well-known Qur'anic prophecy that the former would defeat the latter. Perception of the Safavids as the perfect other for Islam was not mere war propaganda. The conquest of Constantinople, reportedly prophesized by Prophet Muhammed, and the approach of the end of the first millennium of the Islamic calendar had already sparked apocalyptic anxieties. Through the endeavors of high-profile jurists and mainstream Sufis, this esoteric epistemology was fully reconciled with the formal teachings of Islam and became an important component of political imagery and imperial ideology.
The Discourse of Secularism
Authors: Scott Joan Wallach
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter treats the discourse of secularism as a discursive operation of power whose generative effects need to be examined critically in their historical contexts. Following Michel Foucault, this chapter's approach is “genealogical,” as it analyzes the ways in which the term has been variously deployed, and with what effects. This approach does not deny the reality of the institutions and practices said to embody secularism, however. But instead of assuming that we know in advance what secularism means, or that it has a fixed and unchanging definition, this chapter interrogates its meaning as it was articulated and implemented differently in different contexts at different times. After all, the word “secularism” is not new, but compared to the much older secular, it is surprisingly modern.
Women and Religion
Authors: Scott Joan Wallach
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the ways by which women in Western Europe, Britain, and the United States were associated with religion. It addresses the fact that the discourse of secularism, despite its promise of universal equality, made women's difference the ground for their exclusion from citizenship and public life more generally. However, the chapter suggests that it was not because religious ideas about women were left in place. Instead, the apostles of secularism, in France and elsewhere, offered what they took to be entirely new explanations for women's difference from men, rooting them in human nature and biology rather than divine law. Gender difference was inscribed in a schematic description of the world as divided into separate spheres, public and private, male and female. In fact, in this context the association of women with religion was not a relic of past practice but an invention of the discourse of secularism itself.
Political Emancipation
Authors: Scott Joan Wallach
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers the contradictions of women's emancipation in light of the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions. It shows how the resistance to women's citizenship had less to do with the necessarily slow but inevitable progress of liberal democratic ideas than it did with a contradiction at the very heart of the political thinking that articulated them—a political thinking integral to the discourse of secularism. Liberal political theory postulated the sameness of all individuals as the key to their formal equality—abstracted from their circumstances there was no discernable difference among them, they stood as equals before the law. At the same time there were differences that were thought to refuse abstraction. These were people in a state of dependency, such as propertyless peasants, wage laborers, women, children, slaves. Therefore, they could not be counted as autonomous individuals—autonomy, after all, was at the heart of the very definition of individuality.
From the Cold War to the Clash of Civilizations
Authors: Scott Joan Wallach
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that, in the second half of the twentieth century, the old public/private distinction was dissolved in the realms of both religion and sexuality. This put into place concepts that prepared a new discourse of secularism in Western Europe and the Anglo-American world—one in which Islam took the place of Soviet communism as a threat to social order. Secularism as a political discourse was eclipsed by the Cold War, although its traces and effects were not. The relationship of the state to religion was reformulated as the Soviet Union came to represent, not the embodiment of secularism as it had been defined in the nineteenth-century anticlerical campaigns but the home of what was derided as godless atheism. In this new discourse, the secular and the Christian were increasingly considered synonymous, and women's sexual emancipation became the primary indicator of gender equality.
The Art of Being Governed
Authors: Szonyi Michael
Published: May 2020

How did ordinary people in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) deal with the demands of the state? This book explores the myriad ways that families fulfilled their obligations to provide a soldier to the army. The complex strategies they developed to manage their responsibilities suggest a new interpretation of an important period in China's history as well as a broader theory of politics. The book examines how soldiers and their families living on China's southeast coast minimized the costs and maximized the benefits of meeting government demands for manpower. Families that had to provide a soldier for the army set up elaborate rules to ensure their obligation was fulfilled, and to provide incentives for the soldier not to desert his post. People in the system found ways to gain advantages for themselves and their families. For example, naval officers used the military's protection to engage in the very piracy and smuggling they were supposed to suppress. The book demonstrates how subjects of the Ming state operated in a space between defiance and compliance, and how paying attention to this middle ground can help us better understand not only Ming China but also other periods and places. The book illustrates the ways that arrangements between communities and the state hundreds of years ago have consequences and relevance for how we look at diverse cultures and societies, even today.
A Younger Brother Inherits a Windfall
Authors: Szonyi Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter opens with the story of the Zheng family, whose creative solutions to the challenge of choosing a family member to serve in the army introduces sophisticated strategies through which families in the military system addressed their obligations to provide labor to the army. Their regulatory position was straightforward—the Zheng family had to provide one soldier for military duties—but their actual situation could be complex. The Zheng family developed elaborate strategies to make their obligations more predictable, to reduce their risks, and to distribute the benefits of their registration as widely as possible while minimizing the costs. The chapter explores how families responded to various implications of registration, and how the social implications of the various meanings of registration changed over time. It focuses on the strategies registered households came up with using the organizational and cultural resources they had at their disposal, and how their actions in turn affected that repertoire of resources.
An Officer in Cahoots with Pirates
Authors: Szonyi Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter introduces the Jiang family, hereditary commanders of the garrison at Fuquan. At least one of their members was both an officer and also a smuggler and pirate. This story shows how families took advantage of their special position in the military system to gain advantage in illicit commerce. Their proximity to the state and their ability to negotiate the differences between the military and commercial realms using their special position gave them a competitive advantage in overseas trade. Families strategizing about how to work within military institutions, working the system to their advantage, making decisions about the degree to which they would or would not be incorporated by the Chinese state, played an important role in the development of China's diaspora and its global trade linkages. The chapter also talks about soldiers stationed in the garrison that had to adapt to the new contexts in which they found themselves and build new communities.
An Officer Founds a School
Authors: Szonyi Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the soldiers' marriage practices, the temples at which they worshipped, and the Confucian schools at which some of them studied to show how soldiers and their families became integrated into the societies where they were garrisoned. When sons and daughters of the guard married, both to fellow military households and to other local families, they created new social networks that territorialized military household families in the locale. The chapter also talks about military households and their building of schools and temples for the community. Just as in other towns and villages in late imperial China, temples often served as the main venue for local management, the site where conflicts and tensions were worked out. In general, official military cults tended to be gradually displaced by popular gods, both those that soldiers brought with them from their own native places and those that were already worshipped in the area.
A Temple with Two Gods
Authors: Szonyi Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how military households strategized within the Ming state's registration system and how their assignment to the region generated new kinds of social relations. It explains how Ming military institutions have shaped local social life over the centuries and how their legacies shape social relations even up to the present day. The chapter also discusses the variety of approaches and methods members of military households used to integrate into the existing communities around them, sometimes infiltrating and taking over existing community organizations such as temples and thereby developing and maintaining a separate communal identity within the larger society, sometimes integrating as individuals and families with that society and blending into it. It explores the families' process in moving between different regulatory systems and tried to even take over existing social organizations. A small temple in the village of Hutou provides an illustration of how these new social relations could endure.
A God Becomes an Ancestor
Authors: Szonyi Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about the garrisons after the fall of the Ming. Even after the Ming military institution no longer existed, it continued to matter to the people who had lived in it. Some refused to let the institution die, seeking to maintain the prerogatives they had enjoyed under it. Others found they had inherited obligations that survived the change in dynasty and had to find ways to manage those obligations. Still others tried to adapt elements of the Ming institution to suit the new context. They found ways to make themselves legible to the Qing state, and they did so using language that Qing officials could accept, even though the language described social institutions that were actually very different from what they seemed.
Tanzania in the 2000s
Authors: Chorev Nitsan
Published: May 2020

This chapter traces the trajectory of Tanzanian drug companies in the decade following donors’ increased funding of drugs in Tanzania, which started in 2005. It studies the transition of the pharmaceutical sector in Tanzania from a small, vulnerable sector to a still small but more sophisticated one. As in Kenya, upgrading was thanks to developmental foreign aid that offered markets, monitoring, and mentoring. Fewer pharmaceutical companies in Tanzania were able to respond to the incentives created by the Global Fund market, but they responded positively to tailored offers made by development agencies, which involved help with creating domestic demand. Another difference between Tanzania and Kenya was the complementary regulatory roles played in Tanzania by the state and, potentially, foreign investors.
Foreign Aid and the State
Authors: Chorev Nitsan
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main arguments regarding developmental foreign aid in the pharmaceutical field and suggests that similar conclusions apply to other industrial sectors, as well as to other (nonindustrial) sectors of interest to foreign aid, including the provision of services and the distribution of essential commodities. It also identifies a number of contradictions and tensions inherent to developmental foreign aid, including in regard to its effects on the state. First, given that the cases examined in the book confirm the importance of state capacity for foreign aid effectiveness, the chapter takes on the highly contested question of whether foreign aid could contribute to state capacity-building. Second, given the difficulties in increasing state capacity, maybe aid programs could simply bypass the state? The chapter then explains why even developmental foreign aid should not—but also cannot—replace the state. The type of foreign aid that is likely to be effective is not parachuting aid that evades local institutions and actors but, rather, foreign aid that relies on the institutions and actors in place. Finally, the chapter considers the recent wave of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the pharmaceutical sector in East Africa.