±耳其引领阿拉伯之春

土耳其向现代民主政治过渡的经验,对处于转型初期阶段的其他国家而言,是宝贵的借鉴白2010年12月开始的阿拉伯之春,渐渐走向了一个让人始料不及的结局。伊斯兰政党成为突尼斯和摩洛哥议会的第一大党,穆斯林兄弟会首次在埃及这样的大国执政,     

伊斯兰传统文明的基本特征与中东现代化进程的历史轨迹

伊斯兰传统文明与中东现代化进程两者之间具有内在的逻辑联系和历史联系,伊斯兰传统文明的特定历史背景决定了中东现代化进程之区别于其他诸多地区现代化进程的特殊道路。土地所有制的非国有化运动、穆斯林与非穆斯林之间社会界限的淡化和法律地位的趋同、现代民族国家的兴起以及民族主义、极权主义与国家资本主义的实践,标志着中东现代化进程的长足进步。世俗化并非现代化的必要组成部分,所谓的世俗主义和伊斯兰主义在不同的历史时代具有不同的历史内涵。西方宪政制度的移植并未带来真正意义上的自由和民主,现代伊斯兰主义运动构成中东诸国下层民众的广泛政治参与和民主政治挑战极权政治的重要外在形式。     

中东民主走向何方？

中东地区的民主转型和政治现代化刚刚开始,未来还很不确定,甚至可能要花去几代人的时间和努力才能稳定下来。人们对此要有充分的心理准备。埃及军方发动政变推翻民选政府,导致非洲联盟暂停了埃及的会员资格。而从更长远的眼光看,正如穆尔西的外交顾问哈达德在被军方扣押前所说的,穆兄会政权倒台后,“民主不是穆斯林出路”的信息会在伊斯兰世界引发“响亮而清楚的共鸣”。     

近代以降埃及现代化的探索

作为中东伊斯兰世界具有重要影响力的国家之一,埃及在近代西方的冲击下成为西亚北非地区最早着手现代化的国家,亦是该地现代化程度较高的国家,埃及的现代化进程无疑是伊斯兰世界的一个缩影.本文通过梳理近代以来埃及在政治、经济和社会层面的现代化轨迹,总结其现代化进程所面临诸多挫折困难的原因、教训和启示,有利于我们认识政治民主化、法制化、经济市场化、工业化、社会多元化和公民化等现代化的本质和内涵,为中东地区国家现代化发展进程以及存在的诸多问题方面提供了经验和借鉴.     

宗教对抗国家——埃及现代化的难题

最近由于接触了埃及的现代化 ,发现在这个过程中 ,国家与宗教的冲突十分明显。冲突的最高潮表现为萨达特总统遇刺事件 ,在众目睽睽之下 ,萨达特在盛大的阅兵式上被伊斯兰激进分子刺杀。国家与宗教的冲突是埃及现代化的困境之一 ,本文即试图对这一问题做初步探讨。一、世俗主义与国家振兴埃及现代化过程中存在着两条平行的线 ,一条是显线 ,一条是隐线。显线是世俗主义——民族主义的线 ,隐线是伊斯兰现代主义——原教旨主义的线。埃及出现这种情况 ,是因为现代化从本质上说是世俗的运动 ,但埃及社会又浸透着宗教传统。在埃及现代化过程中 ,两…     

世界穆斯林人口的民族构成和分布

当今世界,穆斯林人口的问题已成为世界性的研究课题。本文从世界五大洲伊斯兰教发展状况推本溯源,发掘出该教产生的社会形态、自然条件、经济状况及复杂的民族构成,发现这样一个事实:该教的重心在亚、非两洲,而欧、美、大洋洲则增长速度快。在此基础上,对现代伊斯兰教的分布、作用也作了初步探讨。     

论20世纪上半期的埃及妇女运动（1900-1952年）

妇女问题一直是国际社会关注的焦点问题之一,阿拉伯-伊斯兰文化圈中的妇女地位问题更是为世界所瞩目。由于伊斯兰文明相对封闭和保守的特性,导致伊斯兰教妇女的社会地位同世界其他地区的妇女相比要显得低下很多,因此许多人持有这样一种观点,即伊斯兰教妇女的社会状况在几个世纪里没有多大改变,本人认为这种观点是不正确的。尽管伊斯兰妇女地位低下是一个不容辩驳的事实,但在最近几个世纪里,伊斯兰妇女的社会状况确实有了很大的改变,妇女获得了许多权益。本文以20世纪上半期的埃及妇女运动作为研究课题,对埃及妇女状况的改善进行一番探析,我们可以从中看到伊斯兰世界所发生的变化,对于正确了解伊斯兰教和伊斯兰社会有着积极的现实意义。     

中国伊斯兰文化与中华民族精神文明的历史发展

中国伊斯兰文化与中华民族精神文明的历史发展孙玉杰伊斯兰文化是产生于世界东方的独具特色的文化体系。从元代以后,中国的穆斯林在本土化的过程中,逐步形成了中国伊斯兰文化,中国的伊斯兰文化是在阿拉伯－伊斯兰文化的基础上,吸收回、维吾尔、哈萨克、柯尔克孜、乌兹...     

清代伊斯兰宗教教育的发展

清朝前期,清廷在处理诸多民族宗教问题时,就确立了齐其政而不易其俗"的伊斯兰教政策。随着经济的发展和穆斯林的阶级分化,伊斯兰教形成中国所特有的门宦制度,清后期的伊斯兰教内部又有新教派的出现。有清一代,以经堂教育为主要形式的中国穆斯林宗教教育制度日趋完善,以汉文著译伊斯兰教典籍并阐扬教义的活动出现高潮。     

当代埃及的城市边缘区问题

本文是对第三世界城市化进程负面影响的个案研究。当代埃及的过度城市化造成了城市边缘区的出现和膨胀,加剧了城市贫困,形成城市二元结构。城市边缘区的政治参与表现为政治冷淡和人民议会选举中畸形的高投票率。城市边缘区卷入了自发性暴力和伊斯兰极端组织发动的政治暴力,直接威胁埃及的政治稳定。因此,从1993年开始,穆巴拉克政权启动“棚户区改造计划”,以从根本上遏制城市边缘区的政治暴力,维护政治稳定。     

Christian–Muslim Relations in Egypt in the Wake of the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring protests that brought massive and largely unforeseen political change to Egypt included all sectors of society, including the Egyptian Christian population, known as Copts. Copts participated in large numbers in the protests that brought about regime change in February 2011, but the broader implications of the revolution to Copts are unclear. In this essay, I address the changes in Christian–Muslim relations that attended the development of a new republican regime in Egypt as a result of the Arab Spring. While the former regime of President Hosni Mubarak had formed a stable elite partnership with the hierarchy of the Coptic Orthodox Church (a “neo‐millet” system), the 2011 revolution contributed to the erosion of this partnership in favor of a republican and pluralist model of citizenship in which individual Copts represent their own interests. The increasingly assertive public role of lay movements among Copts, coupled with the death of the Coptic Patriarch (pope) and his replacement by a younger successor, points to the continued erosion of the elite partnership in favor of the new model. Time will tell whether or not pluralist representation or a retrenched corporatism that favors the church will dominate Christian–Muslim relations in Egypt into the future.     

John Lieder and his Mission in Egypt: The Evangelical Ethos at Work Among Nineteenth-Century Copts

The English Church Missionary Society (CMS) dispatched a contingent of missionaries to Egypt in 1825. This article analyses the methods and impact of that contingent. The schools that the CMS missionaries introduced are cast not as vehicles of enlightenment — as is frequently the case in mission historiography — but as technologies of power. Specifically, the article recounts how the head of the mission, the Reverend John Lieder, deployed Lancaster schools among the Coptic Christians of Cairo to effect not merely a spiritual, but further, a cultural conversion of this Orthodox community. Lieder, his predecessors, and his contemporaries in the Mediterranean field sought to instil in the Copts the "evangelical ethos" of industry, discipline, and order. The article links this CMS project of cultural conversion to the process of state-building in Egypt. Indeed, Lieder was a pioneer purveyor of technologies of power that would prove indispensable to late-nineteenth-century elites in their efforts to produce, in the subaltern strata of Egyptian society, industrious and disciplined political subjects resigned to their lowly positions in the Egyptian social order.     

Israel and Post‐Mubarak Egypt: Perils of Historical Analogy

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has perceived the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 as a replica of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Drawing on the apparent similarities between the two revolutions—both made against dictators who reigned over secular, Western‐oriented regimes advocating coexistence with Israel, and both having Islamists as the best‐organized opposition force—Netanyahu appears to have concluded that the outcome for Israel would be the same: the advent of an aggressive Islamist regime in Cairo that would initiate a larger conflict. Based on this historical analogy, the Netanyahu government has adopted policies that are meant to help Israel defend against the potential deterioration in relations with Egypt. However, looking at Iran 1979 to draw on lessons about Egypt 2011 is misleading and does not take into account the significant differences that would rather lead Egypt to preserve the peace. This article analyzes Netanyahu's employment of this historical analogy and examines other appropriate lessons that Israel could draw from Iran's Islamic revolution, and proposes that Israel should instead engage the Egyptian revolution and reach a peace deal with the Palestinians so that it avoids misperception and maintains the Egyptian–Israeli peace.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
De Medieval Islamic Controversy Between Philosophy and Orthodoxy: Ijmā and Ta'wīl in The Conflict Between Al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd in Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Texts and Studies, Volume 3: Iysa A. Bello
Beauty in Arabic Culture by Doris Behrens-Abouseif
The Making of an Egyptian Arab Nationalist: The Early Years of Azzam Pasha, 1893–1936 by Ralph Coury
Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia by Robert W. Hefner     

THE BEGINNINGS OF ISLAMIC STONEPASTE TECHNOLOGY*

A multidisciplinary programme of research on Islamic pottery has been focused on questions of the dating, provenance and technology of Islamic pottery. One particular question has been the development of stonepaste, a material made primarily of crushed quartz with added frit-glass and clay. The combination of the different approaches of this study has revealed early foundations for the technology in ninth-century AD Iraq, apparently originating in the clay ceramic rather than the ‘Egyptian faience’ tradition. Subsequent and final practice developed in tenth- and eleventh-century AD Egypt. This technology becomes the primary body for all fine Islamic ceramics.     

Hiding in plain sight: the Coptic Museum in the Egyptian cultural landscape

Abstract

Museums have long been important tools of nation building and of helping nations deal with their increasing diversity. The Arab Spring of 2011 brought massive social upheaval and change to the Middle East. Egypt experienced particularly dramatic changes. Long-standing fissures around who qualifies as an Egyptian, which groups dominate in this secular or religious nation, and what it means to be an Egyptian today came to the fore. How did different groups fare within this negotiation and what role did cultural institutions play? We explore these struggles through the lens of the Coptic Museum and the experiences of the Coptic community. We argue that the Museum historici s es Copticism, or depicts it as an historical, bounded period in Egyptian history. It also embraces a historical narrative that sees Copts as the direct descendants of the Pharaohs, and therefore the original Egyptians, although some later converted to Islam. By so doing, the Museum positions the community centrally but unchallengingly within the ever-changing ‘master’ national narrative, whether in its more religious or secular form. By telling this particular story, the community saves itself and its materials, but it also constructs and perpetuates its paradoxically central, but marginal position in the nation.     

Structural stability of hair over three thousand years

Ten hair samples of Copts from the 8th–10th century AD obtained during the 1963–1964 excavation campaign in the district of Sayala, and 11 hair samples of Egyptian mummies dated to the 18th–25th dynasty were examined for their structural properties compared with recent hair samples. Structural comparison was performed using X-ray diffraction and infra-red spectroscopy. Using the attenuated total reflection technique, which allows multiple reflection infra-red spectroscopy on native hair, we were able to reveal the structural integrity of the ancient hair samples. X-ray diffraction studies using Cr-alpha radiation confirmed the infra-red results. Signs of dehydration could be observed but no conformational changes, indicating the structural stability of hair protein over thousands of years.     

American Presbyterians,Freedmen's Missions,and the Nile Valley: Missionary History,Racial Orders,and Church Politics on the World Stage

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American Presbyterian “home” and “foreign” missions developed parallel and mutually reinforcing policies towards freed slaves in Egypt, Sudan, and the U.S.A. as well as towards Egypt's indigenous Christians, the Copts. Yet the racial ideologies and social hierarchies of these three countries reflected distinct historical trajectories of migration and conquest. In the Nile Valley, American missionaries struggled to understand, address, and sometimes revise Egyptian and Sudanese social hierarchies, which they found alternately idiosyncratic or unjust. This essay conjectures that these interactions, in the long run, induced the Nile Valley missionaries to confront the lingering injustices and incongruities in American social hierarchies, particularly in the mid‐ to late twentieth century. In this way, the “foreign” mission experience had a backflow for missionaries and their church by raising questions about American racial orders and by strengthening a commitment to civil rights and social justice agendas.     

The Scientisation of Culture: Colonial Medicine's Construction of Egyptian Womanhood, 1893–1929

From Great Britain's colonial takeover of Egypt's School of Medicine and adjoining hospital in 1893 until its return to Egyptian control in 1929, this study argues that colonial medical discourse constructed a trope of the ‘modern Egyptian woman’ as a byproduct of the discursive exchange between Victorian and Egyptian medicine. As evidence, this study identifies the colonial reforms of Egyptian medical institutions. Through analysis of governmental documents, medical treatises, curriculum, periodicals, travel literature and memoirs, this foray argues that Egyptian medical institutions were Anglicised, creating for the ‘modern Egyptian doctor’ an unprecedented level of socio‐political authority. Paradoxically, this same process of medical professionalisation disempowered the Egyptian midwife. Furthermore, through the modern authority of the doctor, Egyptian discourse constructed medico‐nationalist rationalisations of female domesticity, or ‘republican motherhood’.