Mostafa Malekian: Spirituality,Siyasat‐Zadegi and (A)political Self‐Improvement

Mostafa Malekian has yet to receive much attention in Western academic literature pertaining to Iranian intellectual life, but inside Iran, he has emerged as a popular public intellectual; seen as both a culmination of and rupture with the project of “religious intellectualism.” Rather than offer a revolutionary and politically engaged vision of Islam, or a “reformist” or “democratic” interpretation of Shi?ism, his project seeks to integrate what he calls “rationality” (?aqlaniyat) and “spirituality” (ma?naviyat). As Malekian's project has developed, it has broken, in a number of important respects, with mainstream Islam as practiced in Iran, the religious reformist project, and even organized religion as a whole. This article seeks not only to offer one of the first comprehensive analysis of his existential and social thought in English, but also to analyze his project's deep affinities with a pervasive fatigue vis‐à‐vis collective projects of political emancipation and even “politics” tout court, in the latter phases of the “reformist” President Hojjat al‐Islam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami's tenure.     

The Pillars of “Mahathir's Islam”: Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim in the Modern World

Unlike his bourgeois economic nationalism or diplomatic posturing on behalf of the developing world, Mahathir Mohamad's encounter with Islam remains a largely understudied aspect of his 22-year rule of Malaysia (1981–2003). There is a marked reluctance to take seriously his pronouncements on Islam and engage with his representations of what being-Muslim should entail in the modern world. This essay takes the view that Islam, in fact, represents a significant component of the former Malaysian prime minister's political repertoire, and that an analysis of what may be described as “Mahathir's Islam” can provide a compelling alternative account of his momentous premiership. It argues that while Mahathir's engagement with Islam was fraught with contradictions and has produced a number of negative consequences that affect Malaysian society as a whole, his discourse also contained the ingredients of what Bellah and Hammond (1980) have famously described as civil religion. Mahathir's public representations of Islam – in particular, his championing of the individually responsible believer and interpretation of the message to the Prophet Muhammad as a this-worldly and pro-active “theology of progress” – can thus provide religious validation to the cosmopolitanism of the street that has helped underwrite the social peace of multi-religious Malaysia.     

KOSELLECK ON MODERNITY,HISTORIK, AND LAYERS OF TIME

In the scholarly reception of his work, Reinhart Koselleck's notion of modernity and his theory of multiple times have been cast as essentially at odds with each other. This article argues that although these positions are valid, Koselleck's writings can also accommodate an interpretation according to which the theory of multiple temporalities, or “layers of time,” provides theoretical ground for the modern understanding of time and history. Elaborating on this insight, the article shows the linkages sustaining the unity between Koselleck's formal theory of multiple times and his interpretation of modernity. To that end, I outline the main premises of the temporalization thesis that lies at the heart of Koselleck's theory of modernity, scrutinize his notion of Historik within which the framework “layers of time” belongs, and explore Niklas Olsen's and Helge Jordheim's interpretive accounts on how to conceive of the relationship between the two strands in Koselleck's thought. Ultimately, I argue that “layers of time” entails the formal conditions for historical acceleration, which is crucial for explaining the emergence of a specifically modern temporality wherein experience and expectation increasingly grow apart.     

Behçet Kemal Çağlar's Kur’ân‐ı Kerîm'den İlhamlar (Inspirations from the Holy Qur’ān): A Kemalist's Personal,Poetic Response to the Qur’ān

Behçet Kemal Ça?lar, 1908–1969, is the author of a commentary of the Qur’ān, Kur’ân‐? Kerîm'den ?lhamlar (‘Inspirations from the Holy Qur’ān’), published in 1966. This work can be described as a poetic reflection on the Qur’ān. It does not adhere to rendering every line or verse, but instead insists on maintaining a rhythmic cadence and end‐rhyme. Although it resembles a translation in some ways, Ça?lar refuses to call his work a translation. This paper begins by introducing Ça?lar and his text, a brief history of Turkish translations of the Qur’ān, then Ça?lar's approach is contrasted with the aims of translators of the Qur’ān. Ça?lar's text is studied in more detail, providing a sample of the Turkish text and a translation of it into English, focusing on Ça?lar's reflection on Sūrat ?aha. Through this study, it becomes clear that as a result of his prioritizing the literary aspects of the Qur’ān in his reflection, Ça?lar's book has an advantage over literal translations of the Qur'an and it can be useful for Qur’ān translation. At the same time, Ça?lar's book is a reflection of a desire to develop a Turkish Islam—a manifestation of Islam that came from Turkey, that reflected its language and culture and that was intelligible to its people.     

The Concept of Reading: Kierkegaard,Irony, and Duality—A Response to Mark Cortes Favis

In a recent article in The European Legacy, Mark Cortes Favis argued that the figure of Kierkegaard expressed a tension between two aspects of writing—the Socratic and the Platonic. While Favis is correct to see a duality in Kierkegaard's writing, his article does not fully answer the problem of how we can account for our interpretation of this tension. Given that the duality within Kierkegaard's writing transgresses the boundaries of author and reader, we cannot easily circumscribe any claims on his writing without considering its effect on our reading. Rather, the characteristic duality of his authority manifests itself in a number of ways in the task of identifying the philosophical meaning of his texts. Kierkegaard's relationship to Socrates is thus symptomatic of a number of figural dualities that pervade interpretations of his work. By surveying the ways in which these interpretations draw on the axiom of duality in order to ascribe an authority to Kierkegaard's texts, I suggest Favis's argument that Kierkegaard's writing expresses both Socratic and Platonic aspects should be placed within the wider duality at work in the interpretation of Kierkegaard's work.     

Zur Auslegung von Mc. 433 καθωσ ηδ৹ναντō άō৹ειν

In his reply to O'Hara's criticism above the author maintains as his conviction that the events of 30–29 B.C. are crucial to the understanding of Jupiter's prophecy and that Caesar the Dictator has no part in it. In relation to his first article on the issue (SO 67, 1992, 103–12) he seeks here to clarify what it means that the passage functions at the same time as a prophecy within the epic context itself and as a reference to recent events from the writer's/ reader's point of view. He stresses the necessity of being aware of this double nature of the passage when discussing the linguistic and semantic issues connected with it and finds no evidence in support of O'Hara's inferences.     

Muslim Selbstverständnis: Ahmet Davutoğlu answers Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences

In formulating his understanding of Islamic history, thought and politics, the Turkish Muslim thinker Ahmet Davuto?lu approves and adopts the German philosopher Edmund Husserl's formulation of phenomenology — or, philosophy of consciousness. Both Husserl and Davuto?lu perceive a crisis in humanity and identify its causes in scientism and logical positivism, against which they develop their respective phenomenological alternatives. This article places in parallel Husserl's stylised history of Western thought and Weltanschauung method with that of Davuto?lu's Muslim worldview, in order to illuminate the latter's putatively comprehensive interpretation of Islam, diagnosis of the ills of secularism, modernisation, and crisis of values he finds in Muslim societies; and his prescribed treatment for those ills: the privileging of ontology over epistemology, and the full unfolding of core theological concepts of revelation, monotheism, and prophecy. Davuto?lu seeks to reconcile tensions and disputes within Islamic intellectual traditions concerning the nature of God and God's attributes, and the tension between mysticism and rationalism, and the historical and the atemporal. In summary, Davuto?lu's intervention in Islamic traditions is interesting in the effort it makes to appropriate elements of both Husserl and GWF Hegel for the purpose of reconciling a phenomenological reading of Islam with established Islamic authorities and commitments.     

‘Eastern History with Western Eyes’: E.A. Freeman,Islam and Orientalism

E.A. Freeman is remembered today as a confident proponent of English superiority, whose historical writings were distorted by mid-Victorian prejudices in favour of the Aryan race. This perspective privileges some of Freeman's ideas and works above others, and obscures the complexities of his view of the past which only fully emerge through an examination of his two neglected works on the East: The History and Conquests of the Saracens (1856) and The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877). In analysing Freeman's obscure Oriental volumes this article uses the insights of Edward Said who argued that the West exploits the East according to contemporary exigency and consistently represents the Orient as ‘other’. It demonstrates that Freeman composed the Saracens and Ottoman Power in direct response to Britain's support of the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War and Eastern Crisis, and re-arranged the past to represent the Turk as distinct from, and inferior to, the West. Freeman's account of the distinctiveness of the Orient, however, suggests the need to revise literature on Western approaches to the East which has assumed that antagonism towards Islam declined in the modern period, or was masked behind narratives that purported to be secular and objective but which continued to empower Europe and subjugate the Orient. Juxtaposing Freeman's narratives on Western and Eastern history, I argue that his association of Christianity with European progress and Islam with Eastern barbarism is key to understanding his deep fear of cultural contact with the Orient. Far from bolstering the strength and power of the West vis-à-vis the East, Freeman's account of the fearful barbarity of the Islamic Orient is underpinned by his belief in an anti-Christian, Judeo-Islamic, conspiracy that threatened the West with degeneration and recapitulation.     

Uncomfortable proximity. Literary technique,authorial provocations and dog whistles in Michel Houellebecq’s fiction

ABSTRACT

In 2002, following an interview with the magazine Lire where he described Islam as ‘la religion la plus con’, Michel Houellebecq was prosecuted, and eventually acquitted, for ‘injure raciale et incitation à la haine religieuse’. In discussions of Houellebecq’s case, supporters were quick to invoke the ‘special value’ of the literary space for the free discussion of ideas, however provocative or unpalatable. Houellebecq’s acquittal, and support from figures such as Salman Rushdie, have afforded the writer an unprecedented degree of literary freedom. Subsequent novels such as La Possibilité d’une île (2005) and Soumission (2015) show the author fully inhabiting this freedom in order to undertake a provocative critique of Islam. This article explores how both literary technique and authorial presence endorses the controversial ideas of his texts within Houellebecq’s writing and demonstrates how a movement from ambiguously undermining towards reinforcing those ideas can be observed. In particular, the framing of provocative ideas and assertions expounded in his fiction has become less robust throughout his career. This leads to, I suggest, a greater porosity between Houellebecq’s fiction and that of contemporary right-wing essayists such as Alain Finkielkraut and Renaud Camus.     

Erdoğan’s pragmatism and the ascension of AKP in Turkey: Islam and neo‐Ottomanism

This article aimed to analyze the ascension of Justice and Development Party—Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (AKP)—in Turkey and its political measures regarding both Islam and the country's Ottoman past, in order to comprehend the party's role in a potential shift of Turkish national identity and in Turkey's relationship with the Middle East. The article does this through a content analysis of decrees, laws, and other measures taken by the AKP that emphasizes its cultural and religious policies, as well as revisiting literature produced about the subject. Analyzing Recep Tayyip Erdo?an's government during his time as Prime Minister (2003–2014), two noteworthy features come to light: its Islamic influence and its so‐called neo‐Ottomanist outlook. However, this article argues that besides an identity‐ and ideology‐based motivation, the AKP had pragmatic intentions in adopting such approaches, aiming to gather support both domestically and regionally.     

IN THE FOLDS OF TIME: RASHĪD AL‐DĪN ON THEORIES OF HISTORICITY

By focusing on Rashīd al‐Dīn's (d. 718/1318) historiographical oeuvre and here in particular his “History of the World,” this article challenges the usual approach to his Jāmi? al‐tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles) and argues that his was a deeply pluralistic enterprise in a world with many centers, tremendous demographic change, high social mobility, and constantly shifting truth‐claims in an ever expanding cosmos, to which Rashīd al‐Dīn's method, language, and the shape of his history were perfectly adaptable. This article introduces the notion of “parallel pasts” to account for Rashīd al‐Dīn's method. By placing the Jāmi? al‐tawārīkh and its author in their historical and intellectual context, this article also argues that this method is not restricted to Rashīd al‐Dīn's historiography: His historiographical work ought to be seen as part of his larger theological and philosophical oeuvre into which the author placed it consciously and explicitly, an oeuvre that is, like Rashīd al‐Dīn's historiography, pluralist at heart, and that could be as easily classified as “theology” or “philosophy” as “historiography.”     

The Regional Context of Islam in Russia: Diversities along the Volga

A noted investigator of Russia's ethnic and geopolitical affairs presents case studies of six regions (in aggregate home to ca. 5.8 million Muslims, or over one-third of Russia's total) within the Volga and North Caucasus districts in an effort to demonstrate the importance of the regional context in which Russia's Muslims reside. Drawing upon field interviews (through March 2006) and information from local media, the author shows how the milieu in which Islam is practiced diverges markedly across regional boundaries. The diversities are traced to location, history, ethnocultural affiliation, number of adherents, educational resources, and relations between Islamic leaders and government officials. Also analyzed is the role of the two major competing spiritual centers of Islam in Russia, and the sense of regional self-identity. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H70, Z10, Z12. 1figure, 28 references.     

HUME,HISTORY, AND THE USES OF SYMPATHY

This article focuses on the role of sympathy and antipathy in David Hume's History of England (1754–1762) in relation to the broader place of sympathy in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume, in his earlier philosophical work, argues that sympathy is a naturally occurring responsiveness to others’ feelings, similar to the resonance between musical strings. In his History, however, he carefully curates his readers’ emotional responses, inviting sympathy with figures of suffering—such as King Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots—while also, often almost simultaneously, stirring intense antipathy for those whose religious extremism he regards as socially dangerous and beyond comprehension. After first situating the emergence of Hume's theory of sympathy in its early eighteenth-century context, this article explores in detail the techniques of sentimental management that appear across the six volumes of the History of England. The elaborate deployment of emotions in Hume's historiography is shown to be in tension both with some aspects of his philosophy of natural human sympathy and with his brief reflections on the writing of history. Hume channeled his readers’ sympathies toward particular targets and against others. A careful analysis of this usefully sheds light on the management of sympathy in modern historiography, on which Hume has had an enduring influence.     

LIVING IN A TIME OF MADNESS: LAST DAYS OF JAVA'S LAST PROPHETIC POET

Shortly before his death in December 1873, the renowned Javanese court poet R. Ng. Ronggawarsita composed a short work of social criticism and Islamic ethics that is among the most celebrated of Javanese literary texts. Serat Kalatidha (The Time of Darkness) reflects upon the avenues that remain open to the ethical subject in what Ronggawarsita calls the “time of madness,” the time of darkness and error that marked his dismal present in high colonial Java. Most celebrated as a prophecy, the poem is, in part, a critical reworking of an early nineteenth‐century prophetic reflection on the Javanese past. My article explores the troubled context in which the author wrote this twelve‐stanza (108‐line) poem and how its text forms both a critical commentary on the state of the poet's current‐day society and a pensive reflection on the ethical imperatives of Islam. In the course of this exploration, I reveal how Ronggawarsita's poem forms a prophecy, not as a foretelling of an already determined future, but rather as a work that moves along prophetic time to provoke in his readers a productive intimacy with both pasts and futures.     

1. INDIA IN A WORLD: DILEMMAS OF SOVEREIGNTY

Azfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam prompts a consideration not only of the histories of Islam and early modern connected histories of Central and South Asia, but also of current debates about local and global history‐writing. Moin's work intersects with a strand of comparative world history—following Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels—but also engages strands of historical anthropology, bringing to light a range of compelling stakes for global historians, historians of South Asia, and scholars of nationalism alike. Though Moin's work pushes the boundaries of connected histories centered on South Asia, his focus on a trans‐regional millennial science avoids questions of the local within new global histories.     

Constantin Frantz and the intellectual history of Bonapartism and Caesarism: a reassessment

The conservative German publicist and political theorist, Constantin Frantz (1817–1891), occupies an ambiguous place in German intellectual history. Some, such as Friedrich Meinecke, located him within the rich intellectual tradition of German federalism, highlighting his hostility to the idea of the “nation-state” and the traditions of nationalism, Realpolitik and militarism. Others, by contrast, have situated him within a long genealogy of German fascism, identifying his remarkable 1852 work, Louis Napoleon, as a kind of precursor or antecedent of twentieth-century fascist ideology. This interpretation raises broader questions about the historiography on Bonapartism and Caesarism, which has often been motivated by an interest in the intellectual origins of modern fascism. The present article supplies a reinterpretation of Frantz’s thinking about Bonapartism (Napoleonismus) and Caesarism by focusing on a much broader range of his intellectual output and by tracking the development of his view of Bonapartism’s significance between 1851 and the early 1870s. The main outcome is not just to question Frantz’s place in the “prehistory” of fascism, but also to show how deeply nineteenth-century debates about Bonapartism were connected to concerns about liberalism, democracy, nationalism and imperialism.     

Making Original Men: Elijah Muhammad,The Nation of Islam,and The Fruit of Islam

Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam converted thousands of African American men to Islam during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. Muhammad's men neither protested for Civil Rights nor subscribed to the militancy of the Black Power Movement. Indeed, they construed both to be fundamentally flawed routes to justice, freedom, and equality. Nation men, or Fruit of Islam (FOI) as they are more commonly known, believed that through Islam, racial separation, and community building initiatives they could ultimately reclaim their freedom, self-respect, and manhood. The NOI provided men with a newfound sense of self and purpose and in doing so imbued them with a deep-rooted appreciation for Islam, as taught by Elijah Muhammad. Rank-and-file male members of the faith community remain largely overlooked in the extant scholarship on the NOI. This article seeks to recover the stories of rank-and-file FOI. It assesses the organisation's appeal to men, the varied means by which it challenged them and the burdens the community placed on FOI.     

A RETRIEVAL OF HISTORICISM: FRANK ANKERSMIT'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

Frank Ankersmit is often perceived as a postmodern thinker, as a European Hayden White, or as an author whose work in political philosophy can safely be ignored by those interested only in his philosophy of history. Although none of these perceptions is entirely wrong, they are of little help in understanding the nature of Ankersmit's work and the sources on which it draws. Specifically, they do not elucidate the extent to which Ankersmit raises questions different from White's, finds himself inspired by continental European traditions, responds to specifically Dutch concerns, and is as active as a public intellectual as he has been prolific in philosophy of history. In order to propose a more comprehensive and balanced interpretation of Ankersmit's work, this article offers a contextual reading based largely on Dutch‐language sources, some of which are unknown even in the Netherlands. The thesis advanced is that Ankersmit draws consistently on nineteenth‐century German historicism as interpreted by Friedrich Meinecke and advocated by his Groningen teacher, Ernst Kossmann. Without forcing each and every element of Ankersmit's oeuvre into a historicist mold, the article demonstrates that some of its most salient aspects can profitably be read as attempts at translating and modifying historicist key notions into late twentieth‐century categories. Also, without creating a father myth of the sort that White helped create around his teacher William Bossenbrook, the article argues that Ankersmit at crucial moments in his intellectual trajectory draws on texts and authors central to Kossmann's research interests.     

From Babylon to Christianity: William Foxwell Albright on Myth,Folklore, and Christian Origins

The American Orientalist William F. Albright (1891–1971) is remembered as a leading voice of twentieth‐century “biblical archaeology,” a field that aimed to demonstrate empirically the Hebrew Bible's substantial historicity. Less well known is Albright's research on Christian backgrounds, which by contrast reflected modernist theology's scepticism about the gospel narratives' literal truth. Drawing ideas from the “Pan‐Babylonian” school of biblical criticism, Albright invoked the influence of ancient Near Eastern myth and folklore on the Christ story, this being the culminating theme of his magnum opus From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940). Originally Albright believed that this mythological interpretation would reestablish Christianity's intellectual credibility in the twentieth century and thus help revive New Testament theology. Yet in the latter part of his career he omitted the mythological thesis from his writings, apparently having concluded that it was harmful to orthodox Christian faith.