This article reflects on the activities of the Indian Buddhist scholar-monk Kamalaśīla (c. 740–795) in imperial Tibet. Following accounts offered by Tibetan historians of later periods, these ...activities have so far been understood as more or less limited to Kamalaśīla’s victorious participation in the historically momentous “Great Debate” at Bsam yas monastery against the Chinese Chan master Heshang Moheyan. This article suggests that he also composed altogether seven of his works – and possibly more – while residing in Tibet, and sketches aspects of his intellectual profile on this basis. While remaining focused on Kamalaśīla, the article also raises wider-ranging questions regarding the activities of Indian Buddhist scholars in imperial Tibet against the backdrop of interconnected histories across South, Central and East Asia.
This paper engages the U.S.-focused social equity literature and its ahistorical understanding of its pre-1968 intellectual histories. We use racial contract theory to highlight the epistemological ...necessity of a disciplinary reconsideration. We suggest that intellectual histories bound to an exclusively academic voice negate a fuller understanding of lived realities. By engaging the work of a Jamaican-born activist like Marcus Garvey and his significant inroads into 1910s and 1920s America, we create an updated historical understanding of social equity that challenges the disciplinary script.
Orientalist Ambivalence Van der Deijl, Lucas
Early modern low countries,
12/2022, Letnik:
6, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article compares the first two Dutch translations of the Qur’an printed in the Dutch Republic: De Arabische Alkoran (1641) published by Barent Adriaensz Berentsma and Mahomets Alkoran (1657) ...published by Jan Rieuwertsz. It builds upon previous bibliographic research by quantifying the abbreviation of the Surahs in the two editions, identifying the sources of the paratexts, and describing the different strategies for translation. This analysis reveals how different editing choices reflect contradictory ideological attitudes among the publishers and translators involved. These producers of the first Qur’an translations echoed the widespread hostility towards Islam in Western discourses while also highlighting the peaceful nature of Muhammad and the similarities between the Bible and the Qur’an. This ‘Orientalist ambivalence’ not only resonated in local debates about freedom of conscience among Amsterdam Mennonites, but also signalled a more fundamental epistemological uncertainty following the rise of Cartesianism in the Dutch Early Enlightenment.
Darwinism and evolutionary theory have a bad track record in political theory, given their entanglements with fin-de-siècle militarist imperialisms, racialized hierarchies, and eugenic reformism. In ...colonial contexts, however, Darwinism had an entirely different afterlife as anticolonialists marshaled evolutionist frameworks to contest the parameters of colonial rule. This article exhumes just such an evolutionary anticolonialism in the political thought of Aurobindo Ghose, radical firebrand of the early Indian independence movement. I argue that Ghose drew on a nuanced reform Darwinism to criticize British imperialism and advance an alternative grounded in the Indian polity’s mutualism. Evolutionism formed a conceptual ecosystem framing his understanding of progress—national, civilizational, and spiritual—and reformulating the temporal and conceptual coordinates of the liberal empire he resisted. The article thus exposes the constructiveness of anticolonial politics, the hybridity of South Asian intellectual history, and the surprising critical potential of Darwinism in colonial settings.
This paper focuses on the intellectual output of the internees held captive as 'enemy aliens' on the Isle of Man during the Second World War. Looking at their interactions with local and national ...knowledge communities, including some Methodist priests who were responsible for introducing the internees to British political culture, it analyses how the social environment of internment created common intellectual experiences, which in turn led members of this involuntary community of displaced German-speaking scholars to form particular conceptions of Englishness in the postwar era. This case study is placed in the context of wider debates about periodisation, the relationship between land-based, oceanic and other site-specific perspectives on the British Isles, as well as the entanglements between liberty and encampment in European and global contexts.
Historians tend to take 'dynasty' for granted. It is assumed that 'we' know what 'dynasty' is; and that the concept unproblematically corresponds to the empirical reality of a historical institution ...present in all 'pre-modern' rulerships. Taking as its point of departure the peculiar history of the word itself, which acquired its current meaning only in the second half of the eighteenth century, this article sets out a research agenda for historicizing 'dynasty'. It argues that 'dynasty' is not simply a neutral historical term, but a political concept that became globally hegemonic in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the expansion of European colonialism. The article maps out three main trajectories for rethinking history beyond the totalizing concept of 'dynasty'. First, it points toward a more complex and less hierarchical vision of pre-capitalist, especially extra-European, societies. Second, it considers how capitalism produced new modes and ideologies of hereditary transmission of sovereignty and property and theorizes a link between 'primitive accumulation' and the political form of the royal/princely 'House'. Third, it centres the role of colonialism - European imperial expansion as well as anti-colonial non-European nationalisms - in globalizing 'dynasty' as a category of power.
La noción de comunicación-mundo condensa el proyecto intelectual que Armand Mattelart forjó en Francia hacia fines de los años ochenta del siglo XX y desarrolló con creatividad y constancia en la ...década del noventa. Este proyecto se presenta y despliega en su trilogía de la comunicación-mundo: La Communication-monde (1992); L’Invention de la communication (1994); Histoire de l’utopie planétarie (1999). Desde mediados de los años ochenta se extendía en Francia un discurso que hacía de la comunicación un valor explicativo de lo social. Situar la posición teórica de Mattelart en este contexto nos permitirá dar cuenta de las condiciones de emergencia de su reflexión, pero también de la singularidad y productividad de su perspectiva para entender la organización social contemporánea a través de la crítica de la cultura y la comunicación.
What Is Islam? Ahmed, Shahab
2015, 2015., 20151117, 2016., 2016-01-01
eBook
What is Islam? How do we grasp a human and historical phenomenon characterized by such variety and contradiction? What is "Islamic" about Islamic philosophy or Islamic art? Should we speak of Islam ...or of islams? Should we distinguish the Islamic (the religious) from the Islamicate (the cultural)? Or should we abandon "Islamic" altogether as an analytical term?
InWhat Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed presents a bold new conceptualization of Islam that challenges dominant understandings grounded in the categories of "religion" and "culture" or those that privilege law and scripture. He argues that these modes of thinking obstruct us from understanding Islam, distorting it, diminishing it, and rendering it incoherent.
What Is Islam?formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation-one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic. It also puts forward a new understanding of the historical constitution of Islamic law and its relationship to philosophical ethics and political theory.
A book that is certain to provoke debate and significantly alter our understanding of Islam,What Is Islam?reveals how Muslims have historically conceived of and lived with Islam as norms and truths that are at once contradictory yet coherent.
The Persian world history “Ḥabīb al-siyar” is one of the most copied historiographical works in Islamic intellectual history. Written by the Iranian historian Khvāndamīr in Herat during the rule of ...the Shiʿi Safavids in the 1520s, the book was subsequently adapted to the religious and political expectations of his later patrons, the Sunni Mughals in India, and circulated through hundreds of copies spread across the entire eastern Islamic world. In „Ein Bestseller der islamischen Vormoderne“ (“An Early Modern Bestseller”), Philip Bockholt analyses copies of the work and offers new insights into their readership at various locations in the premodern Islamic world. Taking cues from reception, provenance, and historical readership studies, he examines ownership and readership notes, endowment seals and illustrations in order to shed light on the owners and readers of the work between the 16th and early 20th centuries. By giving an in-depth analysis of marginal notes found in the extant copies, he situates the “Ḥabīb al-siyar” within the broader framework of Islamic book culture and shows that the chronicle was part of a larger canon of texts. This canon was read within a greater Persianate world including not only the Safavid court in Iran and the Mughal court in India, but also places on the Deccan as well as in Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire. This study thus offers comprehensive insights into the transregional transmission of Persian historiography as well as regionally specific readership practices.
Die persische Weltchronik „Ḥabīb as-siyar“ ist eines der am häufigsten kopierten Geschichtswerke der islamischen Geistesgeschichte. Das vom iranischen Historiker Ḫvāndamīr im safavidischen Herat der 1520er-Jahre verfasste Werk wurde für verschiedene Herrscher nach ihrer jeweiligen konfessionellen Präferenz mit einem schiitischen bzw. sunnitischen Schwerpunkt ausgerichtet und zirkulierte in den Jahrhunderten nach seiner Entstehung in Hunderten von Abschriften in der gesamten östlichen islamischen Welt. Philip Bockholt untersucht in seinem Buch „Ein Bestseller der islamischen Vormoderne“ die Wege dieser Abschriften durch die Hände unterschiedlicher Besitzer und Bibliotheken und analysiert anhand von Besitz- und Stiftungsstempeln, Lesevermerken und Illustrationen die Leserschaft des Werkes vom 16. bis ins beginnende 20. Jahrhundert. Hierbei werden Fragen der Rezeptions-, Provenienz- und historischen Leserforschung aufgegriffen und das „Ḥabīb as-siyar“ als persisches Geschichtswerk im Kontext der islamischen Buchkultur verortet. Wie die Analyse der ausgewerteten paratextuellen Elemente der Handschriftentradition zeigt, war das „Ḥabīb as-siyar“ Teil eines weitreichenden Kanons von Texten an Herrscher- bzw. Fürstenhöfen einer persophonen Großregion, die nicht nur den Safavidenhof in Iran und den Mogulhof in Indien, sondern auch Knotenpunkte auf dem Dekkan und in Zentralasien sowie die Hauptstadt des Osmanischen Reiches umfasste. Die Studie bietet daher Einblicke in die transregionale Rezeptionsgeschichte persischsprachiger Geschichtsschreibung und Dynamiken regionaler Lesepraxis.
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