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.     

Ramadan Blues: Debates in Popular Islam during Ramadan in Amman,Jordan

Within the context of the contemporary Middle East and the post‐Islamic Resurgence, avoiding music has become associated with a rise in religiosity and normative Islam. As a result, residents of Amman, Jordan actively avoid consuming music during Ramadan. A large‐scale survey and ethnographic data, including participant observation with employees in an Islamic bank, confirm that avoiding music is a public ethic of Ramadan that is temporally specific and in wide use during the month. In this article, I argue that the tensions surrounding the debates of music's compatibility with normative Islam are enacted in terms of a conflict between cultural and Islamic authenticities. These tensions are resolved temporarily during Ramadan through altered consumption in which one ethical, “Islamic” framework that regards music as haram, or “forbidden,” eclipses another, more diverse “cultural” framework, and does so largely without inducing crisis or controversy. This is because the two realms are not articulating with each other; rather, claims of a normative Islamic authenticity overwhelm the possibilities for a more diverse cultural authenticity. Outside of Ramadan, however, these two competing authenticities often spark tensions and conflicts between family members, neighbors, and coworkers. This article concludes by exploring the implications of ordering morality for religious life in this assertive, even illiberal fashion for diversity in belief and practice.     

Muhammad Abd al‐Rahman (Phillip) Barker: Bridging Cultural Divides through Fantasy/Science‐Fiction Role‐Playing Games and Fictional Religion

“Muslims” and “Dungeons & Dragons” are rarely discussed in the same sentence. However, one of the earliest fantasy role‐playing games, which left a lasting impact on the industry, was the brainchild of Muhammad Abd al‐Rahman (Phillip) Barker (1929‐2012), a professor of South Asian Studies, an expert in Native American languages, and an American convert to Islam. Like Tolkien, Barker created an enormous fantasy world; however, unlike Tolkien, his world was redolent with Native American and South Asian cultural and religious influences. Through this world, he shared with his fans a nuanced understanding of non‐Western societies, cultures, and beliefs – the facets of the human experience that truly constitute multiculturalism. While fictional religion in role‐playing games has been feared and condemned, fictional religion (and occultism) plays a pivotal role in Barker's work; an exploration of his approach towards fictional religion also sheds more light on the question of why fantasy role‐playing games came across as competitors towards religion. Barker's fantasy world brought people of diverse backgrounds together in a beautiful demonstration of how fantasy and science fiction can bring about intercultural and interreligious tolerance in an otherwise intolerant world. Given the centrality of games such as Dungeons & Dragons to American popular culture, an exploration of Barker's legacy can also be seen in the light of the study of the history and contributions of Muslims in America.     

The Latest Instalment in the Whig Interpretation of Australian Education History: Catherine Byrne's JORH Article “Free,Compulsory and (not) Secular”

The original meaning of the term “secular” in the “free compulsory and secular” nineteenth‐century Australian public education acts is often contested, and has recently become part of a contemporary debate about the presence of confessional religion in state schools. I outline four different interpretations expressed in Australian education history writing, then review the recent Journal of Religious History article “Free, Compulsory and (not) Secular” by Catherine Byrne, arguing that it belongs to the secular liberal or “Whig” interpretation of the meaning of “secular” in the acts. The article is critiqued for forcing sources to conform to an overly rhetorical narrative device: a polarised structure valorising Victorian legislator George Higinbotham, and demonising New South Wales legislator Sir Henry Parkes. The article is also criticised for sub‐optimal source‐work, lack of awareness of the corpus of Australian education history, and overt contemporary policy agendas. I also suggest that the larger “Whig” interpretation of “secular” as part of a liberal progress narrative, underemphasises a religious hermeneutic and a critical theory hermeneutic: that a Protestant consensus about state schooling and “secular” in the Public Education Acts was also a deeply sectarian device for excluding Catholics from a dominant social settlement, just one part of a systemically divided and prejudicial culture.     

The Immemorial Iranian Nation? School Textbooks and Historical Memory in Post‐Revolutionary Iran

Abstract. This paper is concerned with the fortunes of the pre‐revolutionary, Pahlavi nationalist narrative in post‐revolutionary Iran. The study analyses and compares pre‐ and post‐revolutionary school textbooks with the aim of demonstrating that, for all its revolutionary and Islamic‐universalist hyperbole, the Islamic Republic of Iran remained committed to the Pahlavi dynasty's conception of the ‘immemorial Iranian nation’ (or the ‘Aryan hypothesis’) as it was first articulated by European scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Post‐revolutionary Iran clung to the European/Pahlavi master narrative of Iranian history, its very basic ‘story line’. It was, therefore, subject to the same evolution, the same dialectic of remembering and forgetting, the same successive deformations, and the vulnerability to the very same manipulation and appropriation. This study, then, attempts to establish that the Islamic Republic's apparent shift from ‘Iran Time’ to ‘Islam Time’, though it reaches far beyond Iranian borders, nevertheless remains wedded to, and embedded in, the dominant European, secular traditions of the Pahlavi era. Islamic consciousness in Iran does not in any way constitute the basis for an alternative myth to the national myth. Rather, it adds Islamic terminology to the very same myth. Political Islam thus remains within the confines of Iranian nationalism. It is articulated in the framework of the symbols of Iranian nationalism, endowing them with a meaning that is supposedly religious.     

Babi–Baha'i Expansion and “Geo‐Cultural Breakthroughs”

Utilising the concept of “geo‐cultural breakthroughs,” the article briefly describes the process of Babi‐Baha'i expansion, tracing the way in which the early Babi movement was later transformed into the Baha'i Faith, and the Baha'i movement itself underwent a succession of massive transformations in the range and diversity of its following. Three main stages and three “worlds” of expansion are identified: (i) an initial “Islamic” stage (1844–c. 1892), in which Babism and the early Baha'i movement were largely confined to the environing culture and society of the Islamic Middle East and its cultural extensions; (ii) an “international” stage (c. 1892–c. 1953), during which Baha'i missionary expansion succeeded in transcending the religion's Islamic roots, in particular by gaining a small but intensely active Western following; and (iii) the present “global” stage from about 1953 onwards, in which the Baha'i Faith has begun to assume the characteristics of a small‐scale world religion, with larger numbers of adherents having been gained, particularly in some parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, regions outside of both the religion's original Islamic heartland and the West.     

Sri Lankan Muslims: between ethno‐nationalism and the global ummah

ABSTRACT. Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or “Moors”, who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy‐four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long‐standing external threats of ethno‐linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro‐Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of “external” ethno‐nationalist rivalries and “internal” Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth‐century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti‐Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today.     

Neocolonial Urbanism? La Rénovation Urbaine in Paris

This paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to “valorize”, “secure” and socially “mix” estates. The paper highlights the political and neo‐colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land‐rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo‐colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the “urban revolution” of 1968 (Garnier) and to the “anti‐colonial revolution” of independence and anti‐racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti‐colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo‐colonial aspects of the French state.     

Performing the nation in anti‐colonial protest in interwar Morocco

This article applies a process approach to the study of nationalism, analysing anti‐colonial protest in interwar Morocco to address how and why elite‐constructed national identity resonates for larger audiences. Using Alexander's social performance model to study nationalist contention, it examines how a Muslim prayer ritual was re‐purposed by Moroccan nationalists to galvanise mass protest against a French divide‐and‐rule colonial policy towards Moroccan Berbers that they believed threatened Morocco's ethno‐religious national unity. By looking at how national identity was forged in the context of contentious performances and why certain religious (Islam) and ethnic (Arab) components were drawn on to define the Moroccan nation, this study offers a model for answering why national identity gets defined in specific ways and how the nation gains salience for broader publics as a category of collective identity.     

Return of the Whig: Reviewing Historiographies of the Meaning of “Secular” in the Australian Colonial Public Instruction Acts

The term “secular” in the Colonial Australian public instruction acts was always controversial. Recent policy debates seek to draw a connection between its original intent and removing religion from schools, notably Marion Maddox's Taking God to School (2014), and Catherine Byrne's “Free, Compulsory and (Not) Secular” (2013). The issue resurfaced recently in a NSW Teachers' Federation Research Paper (Waight, 2022), and in Gross and Rutland's Special Religious Education in Australia and Its Value to Contemporary Society (2021). I propose that while this is a valid public policy issue, any originalist argument actually relies upon a singular historiographical argument, namely a “Whig” historiography. However, across historians the meaning of “secular” has actually been evaluated through four different historiographies: a “Whig” progress narrative; economic materialism; critical theory; and a religious/nationalist approach. Maddox, Byrne and Waight's approaches can be characterised within a “Whig” approach to Australian education history, originally found in “The Melbourne School” of Austin and Gregory, and the textbooks of Barcan. Its revival presents a good opportunity to survey the topic of education historiography, assess the “Whig” argument, and to propose that religious/nationalist historiography provides a more accurate interpretation of the original intent of the term “secular.”     

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.     

Islamists’ Conceptualization of Belonging and Otherness: The Case of Atawhid w'Al‐Islah in Morocco

As one of the various Islamic groups in Morocco, each of which defends its case and concretizes Islamic activism in its way and according to its own philosophies, beliefs, goals and political agendas, the movement of Atawhid w'Al‐Islah presents itself through its discursive formations as the most open, flexible, and tolerant group in the Moroccan religious scene, and affirms values of dialogue, cooperation, tolerance, moderation, and embracement of otherness to be its founding beliefs and ideologies, while, in empirical reality, it fails to keep the same positive image and prove a real belief in the claimed principles and values. The two concepts of “group” and “belonging” stand as the shaping motives of the movement's actions and reactions, suggesting the notion of “distance” which controls interaction within and outside the group according to calculations of proximity, formed and framed by the belonging factor itself which dictates taxonomies and polarizations, defining people in terms of “X” and “Y.” This invigorates an intricate othering system that vacillates between the two extremes of simulation and stigmatization, and binary oppositions forged within a sphere of dissociativeness and inequality formulations. In this respect, this article aims to study the movement of Atawhid w'Al‐Islah's introversion and extroversion legacies, portraying the main features of its members and activities and scrutinizing its perception of “belonging” and “otherness” as two main concepts around which revolve its in‐group/out‐group taxonomies.     

Quaker Dreaming: The “Lost” Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land

This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post‐colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen's Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi‐layered nature of colonial action and post‐colonial historicism, and also points to a self‐referential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.     

A Zoroastrian Dispute in the Caliph’s Court: The Gizistag Abāliš in its Early Islamic Context

The Gizistag Abāli? is a ninth- or tenth-century Pahlavi text, recording a debate which took place at the court of al-Ma?mūn between a Zoroastrian priest and a heretical dualist. This article, the first in-depth study of this important work, examines the text in its broader Islamicate environment. It argues that the narrative itself is probably fictional, but reflects a real historical phenomenon, namely the interreligious debates which took place among Zoroastrians, Muslims, Christians, and Jews during the ?Abbasid period. It argues that the text is a unique Zoroastrian example of a literary genre that was common among Christians at the time, namely, “the monk in the emir’s majlis.” By comparing the Gizistag Abāli? to these Christian texts, it explores why Zoroastrians generally did not launch explicit polemics against Islam, comparable to those of other non-Muslim communities. It seems that Zoroastrian authors were more concerned with explaining their own doctrines than critiquing the beliefs of others. This is curious considering the large numbers of Zoroastrians who were converting to Islam at the time. Finally, the article proposes new ways of refining the way we read Pahlavi texts, by analyzing them alongside the literatures of other religious communities in the early Islamic empire.     

Misconceptions About the Caliphate in Islam

Three common misconceptions about the caliphate in Islam are explored alleging: 1) that there has been only one caliph at a given time governing all Muslims, uninterrupted until the caliphate system was abolished in 1924, 2) that caliphs governed vast territories, 3) that God in Islam mandates a blueprint for governance called the caliphate. This essay begins with the role the caliphate played in agendas of Islamic movements over the last 100 years. Then the historic development of the caliphate is discussed providing the background to explore the first two misconceptions. The third misconception is consequently addressed through a linguistic, Qur'anic, and historical analysis of the word “caliphate.” The fact that neither the Qur'an, nor the Prophet saw himself as a head of state is explored, and the misappropriation of the word “constitution” to replace the word “pact” in “the pact of Medina” is pointed out. A simple classification of three types of “caliphates” is suggested, emphasizing the wide range of connotations it conveys. Finally, counterarguments using the Qur'an and Hadith are addressed. The essay concludes with the idea that what makes a state Islamic are not name nor its structure, but rather its orientation towards Qur'anic ethical values.     

The Roots and Achievements of the Early Proto‐Sunni Movement: A Profile and Interpretation

In recent years, the term “proto‐Sunni” has become common in scholarship on the early centuries of Islam. Drawing on categories developed by Peter Berger, this study seeks to move toward a more inclusive portrait of the early proto‐Sunni movement and a more organic understanding of the movement's success. It argues that owing to the erosion of several of the “plausibility structures” of earliest Islam, three tendencies emerged among the proto‐Sunnis between the early 8^th and mid‐9^th centuries C.E.: proto‐Sunnis as traditionist ?ulamā?, proto‐Sunnis as pious ascetics, and proto‐Sunnis as volunteer holy warriors. The prestige acquired through their activities in these areas enabled the early proto‐Sunnis to “objectify” and “legitimize” new plausibility structures which would prove decisive to an eventual Sunni consensus.     

The rise of Islamic finance: post‐colonial market‐building in central Asia and Russia

Islamic finance signifies more than a projection of religious affiliation. The importance of Islamic finance is increasing in central Asia, both as a source of capital and as a form of post‐colonial market‐building. In central Asia, it is an important facet of the new phenomena of ‘nation‐branding’ and a means of reinvigorating the economy. In identity politics, Islamic finance projects an attitude of religious tolerance allowing states in the region to reposition their geopolitical identity relative to the Islamic community. This creates a ‘performance’ of Islamic finance that facilitates the creation of legitimacy for the state. Adopting Islamic finance projects images of the state's religious tolerance and diversity without changing the underlying structures; it suggests an ‘Islamicness’ that is useful to the development and post‐colonial goals of the state. As such, it creates opportunities for geopolitical alliances with Muslim countries. Economically, it appeals to rising financial‐industrial elites seeking new investment‐opportunities, which reduces pressure on the state to democratize. Meanwhile, in Russia, Islamic finance is an alternative source of capital for the sanctions‐hit state and a useful identity marker with which to connect to the increasingly wary Caucuses and Commonwealth of Independent States countries, lending it a wider significance across Eurasia.