From audio tapes to video blogs: the delocalisation of authority in Islam

ABSTRACT. Today, a new breed of charismatic and media‐savvy religious figures are reinvigorating internal debates on Islam by drawing large audiences across the Muslim world and the Muslim diaspora in the West. Using satellite media, websites, blogs and video blogs, these new religious celebrities are changing the nature of debate in Islam from a doctrinaire discourse to a practical discussion that focuses on individual enterprise as a spiritual quest. These leaders have become religious entrepreneurs, with sophisticated networks of message distribution and media presence. From Amr Khaled and Moez Masood, two leading figures of Arab Islamic entertainment television, to Baba Ali, a famous Muslim video blogger from California, Islam has never been more marketable. Satellite television and the internet are becoming fertile discursive spaces where not only religious meanings are reconfigured but also new Islamic experiences are mediated transnationally. This delocalisation of Islamic authority beyond the traditional sources of Egypt and Saudi Arabia is generating new producers and locales of religious meaning in Dubai, London, Paris and Los Angeles. This article examines the impact of celebrity religious figures and their new media technologies on the relativisation of authority in Islam and the emergence of a cosmopolitan transnational audience of Muslims. I ask if this transnational and seemingly apolitical effort is generating a new form of religious nationalism that devalues the importance of national loyalties.     

《清真释颖》的成书过程－－《清真释颖·书叙》解读

由清人金天柱撰的《清真释颖》一书真实地记录了乾社会伊斯兰教的发展状况,书成七年仍未刊行,又做一篇《书叙》。论述了伊斯兰教作为正教与儒家学说的同异之处,社会对伊斯兰教的误解以及造成误解的原因,叙述了来到四译馆担任教习一职的经过,四译馆的社会职能及其内部管理工作中的种种弊端,还叙述了自己撰写《清真释颖》的心理状态和社会人士对该书的积极评价。     

‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya

Bells were an inescapable part of fourteenth-century urban life. They signalled the hours of the day and times for prayers; they warned of tempests and enemy armies; they heralded masses, funerals, and deaths. The pealing of bells brought men, women, and children together, choreographing communal behaviour in time and space. Bells echoed the vox Domini, calling out the deaths of holy men and women, celebrating the working of miracles. The ubiquitous presence of bells reflected the omnipresence of God in the medieval world. Their echoes transformed private moments into collective experiences, elevating the mundane into the miraculous. Scholars have rarely examined the religious aspects of bells, looking instead at their more practical side, especially their utilisation as markers of time and the allegedly concurrent rise of mercantile culture. This article approaches bells from the viewpoints of those men and women who heard them and wanted them rung. Focusing on sources from Christian clerics, we see that medieval men rang the bells with clear, but many possible, purposes in mind. By marking time and prayers, Christian church bells helped to create and facilitate communities within dioceses, spurring and choreographing their actions. During funerals, bells broadcast private moments, giving them communal significance. The transformative, creative function of bells is clearest in their role in miracles. In Manresa, the vision experienced by a few became a community affair when the church bells gathered the people; the bells transformed an ordinary day into one where the people, as a community, received divine favour. Finally, with the deaths of holy persons, the tolling of bells transformed private, even anonymous deaths, into moments of wonder as God’s hand touched the world.The pealing of bells defined Christian communities in the Mediterranean and, at the same time as rulers and elites throughout the region were seeking to control minority groups, those same groups were seeking to exercise control over the sounds within their own communities. Through the pealing of bells, churchmen across Catalunya sought to direct the thoughts and prayers of their listeners. When the Christian clerics of Catalunya rang their churches’ bells, they had specific aims in mind, yet, as the evidence demonstrates, the pealing of the bells never meant just one thing. This article demonstrates that there is much more to understanding medieval bells than knowing ‘for whom the bell tolls’; we have to look at the listeners as much as the ringers in order to understand their cultural significance in medieval Europe. This article is a first step in how such a study could be begun.     

State restrictions on the Ahmadiyya sect in Indonesia and Pakistan: Islam or political survival?

Indonesia and Pakistan have both adopted state policy that restricts the religious freedom of a minority heterodox sect, the Ahmadiyya, which is viewed by mainstream Muslims as a non-Muslim minority. This outcome is somewhat puzzling as there is a great discrepancy between the institutionalisation and formal privileging of the dominant religion – Islam – in the two Muslim majority states. I find that the similar outcome is attributable not to the institutionalisation of Islam in the state, but rather to the political survival needs of the regime, motivating it to adopt the policy demands of Islamist actors to repress the Ahmadiyya sect.

印度尼西亚和巴基斯坦都施行了限制少数异端艾哈马蒂亚教派宗教自由的国家政策。艾哈马蒂亚被主流穆斯林视为非穆斯林少数派。这个结果有些令人费解,因为在两个穆斯林占多数的国家,在主导性宗教即伊斯兰教的体制化与特权化之间存在差异。笔者发现,类似的的结果根源不在伊斯兰的体制化,倒是在于政权的政治生存需要,即响应伊斯兰主义主体压制艾哈马蒂亚教派的政策需要。     

关于元杂剧《灰阑记》的来源问题

《灰阑记》引起了世界的关注,国内有学论及了它的来源和世界性影响问题,这有意义。但学关于《灰阑记》题材来源的说法是不正确的。《灰阑记》虽在内容上与佛教、基督教、伊斯兰教所记的故事有相似之处,但李行道却不是从这三个宗教故事中取材。一,三个宗教虽在唐代以前就传入中国,但其时除了佛教有关故事已翻译过来以外,其他两个同类故事是不是已经翻译过来,难以确定;二．李行道是中国的隐士,不是宗教信徒,他受中国传统化的影响,《风俗通义》是宋元习见之书,他见到的可能性更大;三,元杂剧创作中普遍存在着吸取历史故事、小说等材料进行创作的倾向．李行道所在的平阳是当时杂剧创作的中心之一,他当然会受到这个倾向的影响。因此,我们认为,他是从中国本土的故事受到启发,创作了《灰阑记》。中国本土故事就是见载于《风俗通义》中的黄霸断两妇人争子的故事。《灰阑记》的故事情节、宗旨．与之极为一致。世界几种化中都存在着《灰阑记》式的故事,这一情形值得深入研究。用比较的方法研究中外化及学的相互影响及异同,是有意义的,但应注重事实,不应轻言袭用而贬低一个民族创造化的努力和对世界化的贡献。     

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.     

Islam,Territory, and Contested Space in Post-Soviet Russia

A noted American specialist on nationalism and identity politics in the former USSR reviews the political, institutional, and territorial complexities identified with the Muslim minority in the Russian Federation. Coverage includes the size and distribution of Muslim communities, the government's approach to the diverse adherents of Islam (including Wahhabis), fragmentation of Islamic institutions, and federal policies before and after the October 2004 terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, North Ossetia. Considerable attention is devoted to differences between Islamo-internationalism and Islamo-nationalism in Chechnya, as well as similarities and differences among approaches to Muslim affairs in Russia and other parts of Europe. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O15, O18, Z13. 1 table, 53 references.     

Identities and agency in religious spheres: a study of British Muslim women's experience

This article examines the ways in which British born South Asian Muslim women engage with Islam through study circles, using data drawn from participant observation of, and interviews with, 25 women in two major cities in northern England. I argue that the religious spaces within which the women participate allow them to assert various identities, as well as agency, as they collectively search to comprehend Islam. In particular, I demonstrate that in traversing these religious spheres, women transform them from male dominated sites to spaces wherein feminine, political and cosmopolitan identities are expressed. Scholarship on Islamic feminism in western contexts has focused on visible symbols such as the veil and little attention has been given to the social processes that Muslim women may engage in order to better understand and practise Islam. For the women who formed part of this study, the veil was only one aspect of their religious identity. In examining religious spheres such as the mosque, I argue these are not disembodied sites where only religious rituals are performed, but are created, discursive spaces and social networks that allow women to feel empowered within British society.     

Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewaltigung: Contextualizing Austria's Gedenkjahr 2005

This essay explores the politics of memory in post-1945 Austrianpolitical culture, focusing on the shift between the fiftiethanniversary of the Anschluss and the sixtieth anniversary ofthe end of the Second World War. Postwar Austrian society experienceda particular tension associated with the Nazi past, manifestedin communicative and cultural forms of memory. On the one hand,the support of many for the Third Reich—expressed throughactive or passive complicity—threatened to link Austriawith the perpetrator status reserved for German society. Onthe other, the Allies' Moscow Declaration (1943) created a mythof victimization by Germany that allowed Austrians to avoidconfronting difficult questions concerning the Nazi era. Consequently,discussion of Austrian involvement in National Socialism becamea taboo subject during the initial decades of the Second Republic.The 2005 commemoration is notable insofar as it marked a significantbreak with this taboo. New forms of cultural memory expressedin 2005 are examined here as the culmination of two things:first, criticism from the centre and left of the Austrian politicalspectrum that began during the Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980sand the 1988 commemoration; second, efforts by successive SocialDemocratic chancellors and certain federal party leaders, beginningin the early 1990s, to break the pervasive silence that madeVergangenheitsbewältigung difficult, and to challenge theAustrian right wing's glorification of elements of the Nazipast. This process included the novel step of acknowledgingthe Nazi skeletons in the Social Democratic Party's own cupboard.     

中国文化自然遗产管理评价的指标体系初探

化和自然遗产管理的研究引起学术界重视。目前献集中于研究转型期遗产管理的组织结构的调整,但缺少在管理机制的设计和操作层面上开展研究。本试图从遗产管理绩效评估入手开始对遗产管理激励机制的探索。初步构建了以遗产保护为基本目标和以社区发展、游客管理和经营开发为贡献目标的遗产管理评价指标体系,并对评价的原则和关键指标确定等进行思考。     

Institutionalizing the democratic party-state: political parties as ‘public utilities’ in Italy and West Germany, 1945–75

This article argues that the rise of parties as ‘public utilities’, that is, semi-state organs crucial in the functioning of democracy, which is currently observed by political scientists, has long historical roots. It looks from an institutionalist perspective to the development of party–state relations in Germany and Italy since the Second World War, paying specific attention to how institutional reform corresponded to changing normative assumptions about the position of political parties in twentieth-century democracy. The first notions on the ‘statist’ dimension of parties were put forward as an answer to the challenges of mass politics in the interwar era. After 1945, politicians and constitutional judges drew upon this tradition in their efforts to stabilize mass democracy. They deliberately constructed ‘party-state democracies’, in which parties influenced the state and the state managed individual parties and the party system. This became visible in the constitutionalization of political parties, as well as in the enactment and normative justification of party (finance) laws in the 1960s and 1970s. The advent of parties as public utilities, even though fiercely criticized today, was therefore embedded in an ideological tradition that sanctioned the ‘party-state’ as crucial for the stability of modern democracy.     

Structural ways to embed a research laboratory into the company: A comparison between Philips and General Electric 1900-1940

This paper compares the Philips Research Department and the Research Laboratory of the American company General Electric (GE). 1 It argues that it is, above all, the issue of the organization of industrial research, appropriate leadership and the embeddedness of a research department in the company as a whole that is important for an historical analysis of an industrial research department. The complex structures that Gilles Holst (the first Philips research director) and Willis Whitney (the GE research director during the first decades of the twentieth century) set up in their organizations enabled scientists to keep in touch with the resources provided by the universities, and made it possible for them to come up with articles, patents and devices for their respective companies. It enabled them also to strengthen their contacts inside and outside the laboratory's walls. However, more than his colleague Whitney at GE, Holst at Philips intended to integrate the research laboratory into the company as a whole. Holst's policy as a research director will be illustrated using the case of Philips' radio research. A comparative discussion of industrial research in the 1930s within both companies shows that the "successful" integration of research activities is context-dependent.