Islamic Modernism And The Re Enchantment Of The Sacred In The Age Of History

This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity and argues that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, of the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. Shows how the adoption of historicism in the 19th century engendered Islamic modernism as a theological reform movement.

This book is principally a study of the complex relationship of religion to modernity. Monica M. Ringer argues that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, of the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. Using the lens of Islamic modernism she uncovers the underlying epistemology and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, both forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. She shows that Muslim Modernists, like their counterparts in other religious traditions, engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and to modernity. They were in conversation not only with European scholarship and Catholic modernism, but more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions.

How to approach the complex intellectual legacy of a modern Muslim thinker like Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905)? This book offers an answer to this question by providing a new complete intellectual biography of him. It delineates 'Abduh's formation as a reformer and activist and embeds his varied intellectual contributions in a culture of ambiguity which has marked the intellectual life of Muslim societies throughout their history. By using new sources – in particular his early mystical, philosophical and political writings – and including recent academic contributions on him, the book explores 'Abduh's complex intellectual formation, the various religious, philosophical and cultural influences that shaped him, and his changing attitudes towards “Western modernity” and its colonial manifestation in the 19th century. Oliver Scharbrodt challenges the perception in academic scholarship - and among Muslim reformers of the 20th century - that searched for intellectual coherence and biographical consistency in 'Abduh's life. Instead, this book offers a new more comprehensive reading of his intellectual legacy and highlights the variety of approaches and ideas manifest in his contributions.

The Idea of Semitic Monotheism examines some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion in the long nineteenth century—from the Enlightenment to the First World War. It aims to understand the new status of Judaism and Islam in the formative period of the new discipline. Guy G. Stroumsa focuses on the concept of Semitic monotheism, a concept developed by Ernest Renan around the mid-nineteenth century on the basis of the postulated and highly problematic contradistinction between Aryan and Semitic families of peoples, cultures, and religions. This contradistinction grew from the Western discovery of Sanskrit and its relationship with European languages, at the time of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Together with the rise of scholarly Orientalism, this discovery offered new perspectives on the East, as a consequence of which the Near East was demoted from its traditional status as the locus of the Biblical revelations. This innovative work studies a central issue in the modern study of religion. Doing so, however, it emphasizes the new dualistic taxonomy of religions had major consequences and sheds new light on the roots of European attitudes to Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century, up to the present day.

The volume provides the first (internationally and even in Turkey’s own case) elaboration of Global Intellectual History debates with regard to late Ottoman and Turkish Republican periods. It covers both individuals and groups as carriers of ideas (what we call in the volume ideational entrepreneurs) and simultaneously concepts and ideologies that emerge(d) in the interaction of Turkey’s intellectuals and scholars with their, mostly Western, counterparts. Additionally, it includes examples of its non-Western engagements, broadening the usual focus on Turkish-Western relationships. The contributions are of relevance both for specific studies on Turkish intellectual history and for broader audiences looking for new material in the novel Global Intellectual History framework. Also, the readings serve as helpful sources for courses on Intellectual History, European and Middle Eastern Studies, Turkish History, Global History, and related Area Studies courses. Specific chapters pertain further to broader study areas.

This volume draws attention to and moves beyond the traditional methodological frames that have governed knowledge production in the academic study of Islam. Departing from Orientalist and largely textual studies, the chapters collected herein revolve around three main themes: gender, the political, and what has come to be known as "lived Islam." The first involves ascertaining how to read gender and gender issues into traditional sources. The second encourages an attunement to the often delicate intersection between the spheres of religion and politics. The final provides a corrective to our traditional over-emphasis on the interpretation of texts and a preoccupation with studying (mainly male) elites. Taken as a whole, this volume encourages a multi-methodological approach to the study of Islam. Contributors include Abbas Aghdassi, Aaron W. Hughes, Eva Kepplinger, Taira Amin, Betül Avcı, Ali Abedi Renani and Seyyed Ebrahim Sarparast Sadat, Meral Durmuş and Bahattin Akşit, Walid Ghali, Isabella Crespi and Martina Crescenti, Brian Arly Jacobsen, Pernille Friis Jensen, Kirstine Sinclair, and Niels Valdemar Vinding, Magdalena Pycińska, Zahraa McDonald, Emin Poljarevic, Abdessamad Belhaj.

Zaynab Fawwaz (d. 1914) emerged from an obscure childhood in the Shi'I community of Jabal 'Amil (now Lebanon) to become a recognized writer on women's and girls' aspirations and rights in 1890s Egypt. This book insists on the centrality of gender as a marker of social difference to the Arabic knowledge movement then, or Nahda. Fawwaz published essays and engaged in debates in the Egyptian and Ottoman-Arabic press, published two novels, and the first play known to have been composed in Arabic by a female writer. This book assesses her unusual life history and political engagements—including her work late in life as an informant for the Egyptian khedive. A series of thematically focused chapters takes up her views on social justice, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the 'gender-nature' debate in the context of local understandings of Darwinism, education, and imperialism and Islamophobia, attending also to works by those to whom Fawwaz was responding. Her role in the first Arabic women's magazine, and her contributions to later women's magazines, are part of the story, too. Further chapters consider her uses of history in fiction to criticize patriarchal control of young women's lives, and her play as an intervention into reformist theatre, and the question of women's access to public culture in 1890s Egypt. Questions of desirable masculinities are central to all of these. Fawwaz was also known for her massive biographical dictionary of world women. In that work as in her essays, Fawwaz articulated an ethics of social belonging and sociality predicated on Islamic precepts of gender justice, and critical of the ways male intellectuals had used 'tradition' to silence women and deny their aspirations.

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.