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Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Politics
... Pers ve Yunan antik düşüncesinden esinlenen Emevi ve Abbasi dönemleri siyasetname ve nasihatname yazını, öncüllerinde olduğu gibi kralın/padişahın erdemlerinin tebaanın ahlakının ve toplumsal düzenin korunmasındaki rolü vurgulamıştır (Kallek, 2003). Nitekim yukarıda bahsi geçen, Abbasi dönemi elitizminin bir parçası olan el-Mâverdî de toplum temsilcileri konumundaki yönetici sınıfın toplumun yararını gözetecek erdem sahibi halifeyi seçmesi suretiyle bir sosyopolitik sözleşme sağlandığını varsayar (al-Azmeh, 2001;Darling, 2013b Raiyyeti kul ider padişah-ı aleme adl (Okumuş, 2005) Adaletle başlayıp biten bu çemberde dünyada nizamın ancak adaletle sağlanabileceği, bu adaleti ve nizamı sağlayanın devlet olduğu, devletin nizamının şeriatla mümkün kılındığı, şeriatı ancak mülkün (saltanat, hükümet) koruyabileceği, mülkün de askerle korunduğu, askeri sağlayan şeyin mal (refah) olduğu, malın raiyyetten (tebaa/halk) geldiği ve raiyyetin de ancak adaletle tâbi kılınabileceği döngüsünü görürüz. Başka bir deyişle adalet dairesi devletle tebaa arasında adalet temelli bir sözleşme tanımlar. ...
Bu makale, Osmanlı tarihinde hukuki çerçevede ırz kavramının kullanımının izlerini sürmeye çalışmaktadır. Irz ve namusun, adalet ile yakın ilişkisi 18. yüzyıl hukuk kültüründe, özellikle arzuhâl etme pratiğinde kendisini göstermektedir. Osmanlı tebaasının İstanbul’a yazdığı arzuhâllerde ve Divan-ı Hümâyûn’dan bu arzuhâllere cevap olarak verilmiş hükümlerde, ırza saldırı (hetk-i ırz) ve tebaanın ırzının saldırganlardan korunması önemli bir yer kaplar. Bu makale, ırz, namus ve adalet arasındaki ilişkinin İslam hukuku ve Osmanlı siyasi düşüncesindeki kökenlerine değindikten sonra, 18. yüzyıl ortasında arzuhâllerde hetk-i ırz kavramı çerçevesinde şekillenen namus söyleminin cinsel şiddetin gayr-i meşru kullanımının engellenmesi üzerinden devlet ve tebaa arasında bir meşruiyet krizine ve adalet sözleşmesine işaret ettiğini göstermektedir. Fakat arzuhâllerdeki namusun korunmasına dair talep ve karşılığında devletin verdiği teminat, devlet baba ile aile reisi arasında kadının cinselliği üzerinden kurulmuş eril bir sözleşmedir.
... 141 Although Alexander the Great may have thought that Zeus was in fact his father: , p. 872. He could also claim descent from Poseidon on his mother's side: Al-Azmeh (1997), p. 23. 142 Hornblower (1994, p. 222, comments that "it is hard to know what to make of this". ...
Hereditary monarchy was the dominant form of government until the modern era. In view of its obvious disadvantages, its success needs explaining. The primary explanation has four components. (1) In the pre-modern era, collective action problems made oligarchy and democracy difficult except in small states, and (2) small states have a competitive disadvantage in war against large states, so small republics tended to be eliminated by larger monarchies. (3) Oligarchies and democracies face a permanent risk of being captured by individuals who turn them into monarchies or dictatorships, and (4) dictatorships in any case tend to turn into monarchies. There are also secondary factors that help to explain monarchy's success. In the pre-modern era it was often supported by powerful groups, notably by the aristocracy and the priesthood, for reasons of self-interest. It also had ideological support from prevailing beliefs regarding inheritance, hierarchy, and religion, and from demonstration effects. The proposed explanation of monarchy's success in the pre-modern era is consistent with republicanism's success in modern times and with the survival of a significant number of overt and covert monarchies in the 21 st century.
... The research would revisit the conventional claim that the world of Islam, until its colonization by European powers, contained no strongly developed endogenous politico-legal traditions of citizenship. A careful eye would need to be trained upon the mounting counter-evidence, provided by recent scholarship, of well-developed practices of open-ended political communities structured by clusters of religiously sanctioned urban institutions : the umma (the community of believers); an autonomous civic system of shari`a laws; the cultivation of social solidarity and social pluralism through the waqf foundations and Sufi brotherhoods (turuq); and the cultivation of public spheres for the purpose of monitoring and checking the exercise of political power [Arjomand, 1998;Al-Azmeh, 1997;Hodgson, 1974;Hoexter et. al. 2002;Lapidus, 1988]. ...
... Jahrhunderts -der sogenannten "Chinesischen Erweckung"sowie die anhaltenden wellenartigen Nachwirkungen dieser Revolution in das 21. Jahrhundert [Fitzgerald, 1996;Madsen 2002;Metzger 1995, volume [Arjomand, 1998;Al-Azmeh, 1997;Hodgson, 1974;Hoexter et. al. 2002;Lapidus, 1988 (1790). ...
... pushed much wider apart by two developments in the West: the absolutist state and of capitalism, which brought a new notion of rational government-based 'statistics' and 'policy' (police, Polizei) (Foucault, 1991), and the democratic revolutions, which vastly expanded the scope of the Aristotelian notions of common good and equality before the law.-Azmeh (1997) emphasizes similarities in the conception and enunciations of power across different civilizations. My focus is, by contrast, on the axiological differences which can account for divers arrangements of the same or similar traits in fundamentally different configurations. 2. As the two approaches to politics developed separately and did ...
The conditions of civilizational borrowing, the principles of selectivity and the emergent qualities of civilizational synthesis are examined with reference to medieval Muslim conceptions of state and society. The article highlights the features of pristine Islam which invited the political thought of other civilizations, or more precisely, the Indian science of government and Greek political science. With the cultural integration of Iran into the Muslim caliphate, especially after the ’Abbasid revolution in the mideighth century, the Indian borrowing via the Middle Persian translation emerged as an integral part of the Arabic and Persian literature on statecraft. The reception of Greek political science was a part of the translation of Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic a century later, and was developed into the discipline of practical philosophy or political science. Through the mutual accommodation of the shari`a and a political culture derived from Greek and Perso-Indian sources, the civilizational encounters under consideration introduced an unmistakable element of pluralism – or at any rate, dualism – in the normative order of medieval Islam.
This study focuses on the examination of manuscript copies of Ibn Battuta's work “The Journey” (“Rihla”). This work is an important historical source documenting the cultural, political, and geographical diversity of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. The analysis of various manuscripts – their origins, differences, and historical context – reveals the processes of knowledge transmission and preservation within the Islamic world. Additionally, the study addresses issues of textual discrepancies and their impact on historical interpretation. As a result, the research aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the historical significance of these manuscripts and their contribution to international historical studies.
The Mamluk Sultanate ruled Egypt, Syria and the Arabian hinterland along the Red Sea. Lasting from the deposition of the Ayyubid dynasty (c. 1250) to the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, this regime of slave-soldiers incorporated many of the political structures and cultural traditions of its Fatimid and Ayyubid predecessors. Yet its system of governance and centralisation of authority represented radical departures from the hierarchies of power that predated it. Providing a rich and comprehensive survey of events from the Sultanate's founding to the Ottoman occupation, this interdisciplinary book explores the Sultanate's identity and heritage after the Mongol conquests, the expedience of conspiratorial politics, and the close symbiosis of the military elite and civil bureaucracy. Carl F. Petry also considers the statecraft, foreign policy, economy and cultural legacy of the Sultanate, and its interaction with polities throughout the central Islamic world and beyond. In doing so, Petry reveals how the Mamluk Sultanate can be regarded as a significant experiment in the history of state-building within the pre-modern Islamic world.
Following the great fragmentation in the Arab world today, as well as the problematic de-colonization phase, it would be relevant to investigate whether Arab-Islamic Egyptian revivalism has been truly capable of shaping a counter-hegemonic narrative against Western colonialism and post-colonialism in the twentieth century. Can we consider Sayyid Qutb's political and religious analysis, as well as his formative background, a concrete counter-hegemonic narrative? Was the narrative of Rashid Rida and Hasan al-Banna solidly based on religious Islamic concepts and meanings? The main aim of this article is to reconsider the contemporary understanding of Islamic Egyptian thought in relation to Buruma and Margalit's proposed Occidentalism methodology, on the one hand, and the hegemonic–counter-hegemonic debate, on the other.
The Kurds, a tribe that follows the Shafi’i madhhab (one of the four schools of Islamic law), obey and adhere to the Islamic Sharia. This tribe, however, has changed the course since secularism occurred in Turkey. The Kurds lost their way because the leader in charge was the Sultan of Turkey as the representative of Muslims. In the past, the principles of Islam were still carried out by the Kurds, say they believed that all people were born equal in the sight of Allah and the only characteristic that made someone superior to another is righteousness (al-taqwa). Nowadays, this belief is no longer embraced. This study aims to capture Kurdistan figures from various dimensions such as history, social and politic. Due to the political ruins of World War I and II, the Kurdish has had a big ambition for independence. They have suffered from agitation, intimidation, and massacres given by neighboring countries. Consequently, this leads the Kurds to become weak and unsteady among anti-Islam ideologies such as marxism, leninism, and radical secularism.
This chapter surveys the period between 661 and 950 during which the two great caliphal dynasties of the Umayyads and the ‘Abbasids ruled over much of the Islamic ecumene. It looks at the formation of an Islamic empire and its key institutional features, which were rooted in the encounter between the Arabs and earlier Byzantine and Sasanian civilizations of the Near East. The encounter shaped religion, culture, and society for several hundred years. Although Muslims lived in areas outside Umayyad and ‘Abbasid control, most notably North Africa, the institutions and high culture forged by these dynasties and their subjects permeated the Islamic ecumene as a whole. The chapter also considers how and why the actual power of the ‘Abbasids decreased by looking at the spread of the religion of Islam within society and outwards to the geographical periphery of the caliphal empires. This encouraged an ever‐increasing number of groups to assert their sociopolitical autonomy. It ultimately facilitated the Buyid bid to take power from the ‘Abbasids in Baghdad in the years immediately before 950 (dealt with in Chapter 9).
The imperial ideologies developed in the post‐Mongol Persianate world represent both a break with Islamic precedent and a realization of the millenarian universalism inherent in Islam itself. Early modern Muslim dynasts—styling themselves saint‐philosopher‐kings, millennial sovereigns, and divine cosmocrators—combined Chingizid, Persian, and Islamic symbols of religiopolitical legitimacy in their quest for world domination, emblematized by Alexander the Great, Chingiz Khan, and Amir Timur. During this profoundly messianic era, sultans and saints competed for sacral power (walaya); securing access to this power became a driving concern of ruling and scholarly elites, whether by way of Sufism, occultism, or ‘Alidism, and often eclectic combinations of all three. The present chapter surveys these new strategies of religiopolitical legitimation pursued between the 15th and 17th centuries by the Timurid, Aq Quyunlu, Safavid, Uzbek, Mughal, and Ottoman empires, constituent members of the vast Persian cosmopolis stretching from the Balkans and Anatolia in the west to China and India in the east.
This article outlines that Islām and Islamic law lost their original importance, but they still represent a corner stone in the civil and political society being exploited by the regimes in order to survive to the waves of popular unrest.
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Offering key insights into critical debates on the construction, management and destruction of heritage in Muslim contexts, this volume considers how Islamic heritages are constructed through texts and practices which award heritage value. It examines how the monolithic representation of Islamic heritage (as a singular construct) can be enriched by the true diversity of Islamic heritages and how endangerment and vulnerability in this type of heritage construct can be re-conceptualized. Assessing these questions through an interdisciplinary lens including heritage studies, anthropology, history, conservation, religious studies and archaeology, this pivot covers global and local examples including heritage case studies from Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, and Pakistan.
This chapter focuses on the work of conservation at the site of Qusayr ‘Amra, a bathhouse located 80 km east of Amman, in Jordan. The site was built by the Umayyad prince Walid b. Yazid during the caliphate of his uncle Hisham, probably between 730 and 743 AD (111–125 H.), and its interior walls are covered by mural paintings. I explore how archaeology and conservation have contributed or interfered with the understanding of the monument, and how authenticity can be defined in a site that has seen at least three major conservation interventions. It will also discuss whether the paintings can really be defined as “Islamic Art,” fitting a narrative of royal power that uses symbols and iconographies that are borrowed from the cultures that preceded the arrival of Islam in the region.
Celebrations of the two main festivals of the Iranian calendar, Nawrūz and Mihraǧān, are part of the general phenomenon of presence of Iranian strands in social and political culture of the Abbasid centuries. Through a critical approach to the sources, the author verifies the assumption that Iranian festivals were a politically relevant element of Abbasid culture and customs. The political relevance of Nawrūz and Mihraǧān is then discussed with regard to its relations with contemporary Islamic political discourse as a whole, in order to verify two recent interpretations of Islamic political theory and practice in the formative centuries. Sources hereby considered lead to the conclusion that Nawrūz and Mihraǧān are clearly embedded into Abbasid political discourse. Those festivals, in fact, concurred to the construction of a hierarchic legitimacy. At the same time, incompatibility or competition between them and Islamic political theory remained merely exceptional.
In this chapter I shall first of all argue that there is much to be learnt from the thesis of neo-Marxists concerning the always partially economic character of international relations. However, I shall contend in the second place that this needs to be qualified by an equal insistence on the religious character of these relations. In the third place I shall attempt to build a “geopolitical theology” on the basis of these reflections.
This article is both and attempt to define our emerging field and discussion of current research in the area of royal studies. This editorial feature argues that we should define the 'boundaries' of the field as broadly as possible in order to make the most of the rich interdisciplinary aspects of this area of study.
The complex relationship between society and business is vividly captured by ethical standards and obligations. This is especially pertinent in the Islamic world, where religion plays a key role in both social and commercial interactions. Many people see the presence or absence of ethical commitments as an indicator of whether business actors uphold their social responsibilities, and there is an increasing recognition of the significance of ethical value for business. This Handbook explores the interweaving relationship between Islamic business ethics and the market, and examines the critical role that ethics can play in ensuring that business thrives. By offering theoretical perspectives on research it goes beyond the conventional treatment of Islamic ethics, and asks what is important for the various market and social actors in the business world to behave in a morally responsible manner.
Near the beginning of the period covered by this volume, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, the celebrated ‘father of church history’, composed two addresses in which he praised the accomplishments of Constantine’s reign. Toward its end, another Christian clergyman, the deacon Agapetus, addressed a series of aphorisms on kingship to the emperor Justinian. The two works serve as a convenient means to bracket the monumental changes that the church underwent during these centuries as it moved from the periphery to the centre of Roman social and political, as well as religious, thought. This is a story traditionally told in terms of Christianity’s ‘innate intolerance’ and imperial ‘Caesaropapism’, explaining at once the ruthless suppression of traditional religions that accompanied this movement and the intrusion of the state into the domain of the church. But these are concepts that (to borrow words coined for a vastly different situation) have by now outlived their uselessness. The writings of Eusebius and Agapetus open the way to a more complex, but also far more interesting, story, one that involves questions of imperial ideology, Christian identity, and demographic disruptions whose impact we have only recently come to appreciate.The heavenly iconThe first of Eusebius’ two writings was a speech, ‘On the Holy Sepulchre’, composed for the eight-day Encaenia ceremony celebrating the dedication of Constantine’s magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in September 335. Ostensibly a reply to critics who thought the structure a waste of imperial resources and ‘frankly demeaning’, the speech is primarily a lengthy justification of the incarnation. In ch. 11, Eusebius sets out to demonstrate the many benefits that Christianity had produced.
Among the growing number of literary works that have (re)-imagined the character of late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, several Egyptian novels and autobiographies have represented him through the eyes of children, who, in one way or another, directly were affected by his personality, decisions, speeches, or ideas. The perspective of children offers these works a rare opportunity to approach Nasser in ways that the world of adults may not. It can indicate the incomprehensibility of the situation in which children find themselves vis-à-vis Nasser. Children's incomplete knowledge of the political context of their lives, these works suggest, may drive them to adopt different responses toward Nasser than those advanced by their families. More importantly, I argue that these works capture the children's developing awareness of the significance of Nasser at moments of severe familial crises, during which their fathers emerge as the most negatively affected ones. In so doing, these works place children in an uncomfortable, unsettling position where the father's place loses its unassailable authority. The tension is all the more aggravated when the attack on the father at the hand of Nasser's regime is accompanied by the child's growing respect and love for Nasser. As this article will demonstrate, these works pit biological fathers against Nasser—the figurative father of the nation, children included—and, at times, demand a certain belonging from children. They, in other words, corner children between filiation and affiliation, in Edward Said's articulation of the terms, where the forced absence of the father is juxtaposed with a sudden presence of Nasser in the child's world.
This article examines the impact of nationalism theory, and specifically the theory of national awakening, on Kurdish historiography. Kurdish experts cite several famous nationalism theorists, but seem most impressed by Anthony Smith's model of a singular transformation in which a not-yet-national community becomes a proper nation. Kurdish experts do not always use Smith's terminology, however, and often invoke other scholars in support of the singular transformation model. Kurdish historiography disagrees what the singular transformation entails, and different thresholds of nationalism imply wildly different dates for the birth of Kurdish nationalism. Stage theories of national awakening have had little impact, and ought to be reconsidered.
In engaging with heterogeneous societies, states have oscillated between three modes of dealing with social diversity: accommodation, segregation and eradication. Accordingly, this article cross-examines three typologies of secularism: Consociational secularism (Lebanon), communal partition (India and Pakistan) and coercive secularization (China and Turkey). The article argues that while each state shared the challenge of establishing state sovereignty in pluralistic societies, the central authorities’ attempt to impose homogenization varied according to the strength of state institutions, the hold of communal ideologies and the degree of disparate socio-economic interests. The legitimacy of regimes hinged on the perceived impartiality of the state in meeting the demands of diverse socio-economic and ethno-religious constituencies. The article argues that the potential for fragmentation was particularly high when socio-economic fault-lines overlapped with, and reinforced ethno-religious fissures. When sectarian solidarity trumped loyalty to the state, partition along communal lines unfolded within the caldron of civil war, as was the case in Lebanon in 1975 and the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 and 1971. By contrast, the authoritarian states of Maoist China and Kemalist Turkey could enforce, albeit violently and at great human cost, a rigidly secular, cultural homogenization in part because they were perceived to be lessening socio-economic inequalities despite their assault on traditional identities. In all cases, and regardless of whether or not a dominant majority existed or not, sovereignty and state legitimacy was ultimately predicated not so much on the absence or presence of democracy or diversity, but on the provision of a critical measure of justice for all citizens irrespective of origin or identity.
This article examines the intertwined literary and political processes that moulded the texts of Mughal sovereignty and shaped the lives of Mughal sovereigns. In historical terms it considers the lives of Babur (d. 1530) and his grandson Akbar (d. 1605) and the ‘books’ associated with them, the Baburnama and Akbarnama. However, in order to connect the two pairs, this article follows an unconventional and less trodden path through Safavid political history, Iranian Sufism and the Persian epic and storytelling tradition. By doing so, it reveals new, less intuitive perspectives on the cultures that produced these texts and their protagonists. Specifically, it shows how Babur’s work and others like it were not only products of new literary tastes and reading practices but also participated in the making of new institutions of kingship and sainthood that evolved together in Mughal India and Safavid Iran over the sixteenth century.
The study of the medieval Arabic and Persian ‘mirror for princes’ literatures in many respects resembles that of the similarly abundant literatures produced in Byzantium and the Latin West. In earlier scholarship, the predominant approach was that of the history of ideas, and scholars tended to focus on depictions of the ideal ruler and other aspects of the ‘political thought’ expressed in the mirror literatures. A secondary area of interest concerned textual transmission within and across these literatures. More recent scholarship has continued to develop and refine these established approaches, and has also developed new directions of research. Notably, several scholars have explored the Sitz im Leben of individual mirrors, and have studied their meaning and significance in the historical settings in and for which they were composed. Certain recent publications have highlighted the flexibility of mirrors, the multiple purposes they often served, the range of perspectives represented by their authors, and the importance of authors’ choices of language and genre in shaping the composition and reception of their works.
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