Muslim Political Theology Before and After Empire: Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s Station of Leadership (Manṣab-i Imāmat)*

ABSTRACT

This essay examines an important yet hitherto unexplored early-nineteenth century Indo-Persian work of Muslim political theology Station of Leadership (Man?ab-i Imāmat; also known as Darājāt-i Imāmat), written by the towering and contentious Sunnī thinker and political theorist from Delhi Shāh Mu?ammad Ismā?īl (d. 1831). In this hugely critical though lesser known of Ismā?īl’s texts, he sought to detail a theory and framework of ideal forms of Muslim political orders and leaders. Man?ab-i Imāmat presents a fascinating example of a text of Muslim political theology composed during a moment marked by a crisis of sovereignty as South Asia gradually yet decisively transitioned from Mughal to British rule. In this essay, through a close reading of Man?ab-i Imāmat, I aim to bring into view a vision of Muslim political thought and understanding of sovereignty that exceed and subvert the modern privileging of a territorial conception of the nation-state as the centerpiece of politics. I show that while tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology that assumed Islam’s superiority over and subsumption of other religious identities and traditions, sovereign power for Ismā?īl indexed not territorial sovereignty but the maintenance of Muslim markers of distinction in the public performance of everyday religious life.     

Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity

"Cultural imperialism" has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay surveys the ways in which the term "cultural imperialism" has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. The second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term "colonization of consciousness" used by Jean and John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China, showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non–Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of modern cultural globalization.     

TWO BIOGRAPHIES OF NAPOLEON

The central argument of this review essay is that the British and French traditions of biography, and specifically Napoleonic biography, are quite different. The two works under consideration are outstanding examples of the differences. Boswell's Life of Johnson is the cornerstone of modern British biography, and Andrew Roberts follows this example. Although Johnson was not a political or military figure but a man of letters, Roberts's biography of Napoleon adheres to the close focus on a single man, with only limited excursions beyond his hero's life and deeds. In addition, Roberts's work is essentially a military biography, and his considerable strengths lie here. The French, without a Boswell, have relegated biography to a lesser role, until recently. Patrice Gueniffey, in what will be a multi‐volume work—this first volume goes only to 1802—is more interested in Napoleon's place in the history of Europe, and especially Revolutionary France. Napoleon is often confined to the wings while Gueniffey sets the stage. Roberts's judgments and assessments, while shrewd and informed, are often more conventional than those of Gueniffey, who sees the Egyptian campaign as one of the important keys to understanding the young Bonaparte and his subsequent career. He is also deeply interested in fixing Bonaparte's place in the French Revolution. Because Gueniffey ends his first volume with the Consulate, a more detailed comparison of the two works is not possible.     

Past Contradictions,Contemporary Dilemmas: Egypt's 2013 Coup and Early Islamic History

To what extent is the present of Muslim societies influenced by their past? How do politics and historiography relate to each other in medieval and contemporary Islam? More specifically, can events from early Islamic history help us understand current events in Muslim countries? By discussing how some of these remote events have contributed to the emergence of certain political views, this article argues that they are still relevant to the present in Muslim countries (in our case here, Egypt) and can indeed help us understand an important part of the picture of a recent event that may have a long lasting influence on the present and future of both the country and the region where it occurred. This event was the removal of Egypt's first ever democratically elected president by a military coup on July 3, 2013, one year after he assumed office. By examining the various religious and political hermeneutic strategies used by some medieval and modern Sunni scholars to support or condemn certain acts of rebellion while opposing others, the article seeks to demonstrate — through the comparison of some of these strategies — the contradictory positions of medieval Sunni scholars regarding events from early Islam, and thus the dilemmas that their modern counterparts face when dealing with contemporary events.     

The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim City in Asia’s Future

This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia’s cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of ‘de-cosmopolitanization’. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city.     

When Subjects Talk Back: Writing Anne Braden's Life-In-Progress

Subversive Southerner is an oral history-based biography thatleans toward being a full critical biography of Anne Braden,a southern white woman (Kentucky-born, Alabama-reared) whoseracial justice activism spans nearly six decades. The book representsan enterprise of shared authority between Braden and authorCatherine Fosl, and this essay explores the evolution of thatenterprise and reflects on the relationship between oral historybiographer and living subject. During the thirteen years thatit took to complete the book, Fosl's relationship with Bradenwent through transitions that altered the structure of the book,and raised fundamental questions—such as who but the personliving it can or should have authority over a life? One of thecentral issues in writing the book was how to address a questionthat many historians of the 1950s South have pondered: was AnneBraden ever a member of the Communist Party? Braden chose notto answer that question, and Fosl respected her decision.     

A century of Grace; restorative spatial justice,pedagogy, and beloved community in twenty-first century Detroit

This article poses feminist biographical investigation as a dialectical approach to situated knowledge, and as a potential avenue for a feminist theorization of space and place. By exploring biography as a departure from canonical epistemological structures, the attempt here is to credit, contextualize and identify key places and people of origin in the evolution and production of theory and knowledge without such heavy dependency on the usual resources that legitimize theoretical and pedagogical contributions; such as academic publications, teaching contributions and references. The biographical focus of this article is the life and work of Grace Lee Boggs, an important contributor to urban studies whose theoretical and pedagogical contributions have gone largely unacknowledged by geographers and spatial thinkers. What can a biographical investigation teach us about feminist knowledge production relating to the production of space? What does feminist biography offer epistemologically to our understandings of space? These questions are examined here through the theoretical contributions of Grace Lee Boggs, a long-time resident of Detroit, second generation Chinese American, civil rights and feminist activist and working class philosopher, as a means of exploring biography as a feminist research methodology.     

The transatlantic Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the nineteenth century

Since the 16th century, African Muslims figured prominently among the slave population of the Americas. While the number of Muslims pulled into the trade has always been a matter of speculation, lists of Africans rescued from slave ships provide us with some clues about the size and direction of the Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the 19th century. Based on an analysis of tens of thousands of names recorded in these lists, this essay argues that the majority of Muslim captives leaving Africa departed from Upper Guinea and suggests that Cuba was the center of the forced Muslim diaspora in the Americas. It traces the transatlantic links that connected particular regions of embarkation in Africa to their counterparts in Latin America and considers the implications of those connections for religious and cultural change within 19th-century slave populations. The essay challenges in important ways the colonial/postcolonial divide in Latin American history and uses Islam to pose important questions about the dynamics of social change across slave societies.     

Russia,China, and the universalism of modernity: the “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a short essay by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) – one of the intellectual and political protagonists of late imperial and early Republican China. In it, he interpreted the historical experience of Russian modernization under Peter the Great (1672–1725) and used it as a “success story” for the renewal of Chinese monarchical institutions. It was written in 1898 and presented to the Manchu throne under the title “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great”, and for our purposes will be the departing point for a “global intellectual circuit” through which the following questions will be addressed: Why was seventeenth and eighteenth century Russia considered as a model for China by the author? How did he manage to adapt the historical experience of Russia into a social and political conceptual framework for China? What was Kang’s historiographical method, and what kind of philosophy of history framed his reflections? What does this short essay tell us about Kang’s view on “Westernization”, on the concept of “modernity” itself, and on its use for historiographical purposes?     

Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Gender History: Or,Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?

This essay is a methodological evaluation of the procedures and presuppositions informing the social and cultural history of gender, as exemplified in recent scholarship about the transformations of sex and gender in Britain from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. It suggests answers to two questions: how can we write the cultural history of gender while maintaining both rigour in the enterprise and an awareness of its limits? And where might we go when these limits suddenly appear to undermine the very foundational presuppositions on which the whole cultural‐historical project is built?     

Number‐One Enemy: Police,Violence and the Location of Adversaries in a Papua New Guinean Prison.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I aim to explore how prisoners at Bomana in PNG, in the period I was there between 1994–1995, figured the violence of police. This includes an examination of what they understand to be state power and what they take to be their response to it, including the possibility of critique. Do inmates at Bomana recognize a scale shift between state and citizen, between law and violence? If so, when? How do they relate the actions of the Constabulary to their own violent behaviour and to the forceful or violent behaviour of others? These questions will be approached through the notion of enmity. In particular, by a discussion of what inmates mean when they label the police their ‘number‐one enemy’.     

New Perspectives on the "Dao" of "Huidaomen": Redemptive Societies and Religion in Modern and Contemporary China

This essay uses research in Chinese religion,and specifically Chinese "redemptive societies," to challenge and enrich the received history of "sects and secret societies" in modern and contemporary Chinese history,and suggests that a future "history of cultivation movements" might be a helpful means to steer between competing narratives of state-building and personal religious experience.The discussion is illustrated with a brief biography of Li Yujie (1901-94),founder of the redemptive society Tiandijiao who devoted his life to cultivation and religion,but also to independent journalism and the Guomindang.     

3. INDIGENOUS EMPIRES AND NATIVE NATIONS: BEYOND HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN'S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

How should historians write Native history? To what extent should one privilege Native terms, sources, chronologies, and epistemologies? And to what extent should historians align Native history with concepts developed for other peoples and places? These crucial questions about emic (insider) and etic (outsider) approaches to the past are cast into sharp relief in Pekka Hämäläinen's award‐winning The Comanche Empire. This essay charts the perils and possibilities of each position. It then explores possible ways to move beyond the emic/etic division that has dominated many of the recent debates about Native history through a rereading of an episode in which Comanche history collides with US and Mexican history.     

Network Management and Information Systems in Promotion of Urban Economic Development: Some Reflections from CityWeb of Tampere

Partnership relations have become more important in promotion of urban economic development. Efforts have been made to create such networks by which to strive for new markets or political arenas and so to extend the resource base of the urban region. The objective in the creation of networks is the most efficient mobilization possible of the know-how and resources in the urban region and external to it. These observations inevitably prompt the following questions: How can the quality of cooperative processes be improved and how can networks and various development projects be managed? It seems evident that information and its conscious management play a crucial role in seeking answers to these questions. Simultaneously such questions emerge as to how network management can respond to the increasing amount of information and the demands for rapid learning. How can the vast flood of information and knowledge in the networks be managed, how can essential features be extracted, i.e. how can a sustainable basis for perceptions be created? One possible answer, among others, to these questions is information systems utilizing modern information technology. This paper focuses on urban development networks and especially at how their efficiency can be promoted by network management and by modern information systems. The case described and tentatively analysed is the information system CityWeb of Tampere urban region, Finland.     

Networked Spirits and Smart Séances: Aura and the Anthropological Gaze in the Era of the Internet of Things

2015 has been declared the year of the “Internet of Things”, the promised (or threatened) era when our commodities communicate among themselves. But even the most optimistic prognostications cannot conceal deep ambivalences about objects and agency. How do we think about our things when they communicate and act independently of us? How do we frame our relationships with them? How do we articulate distributed intelligence? And how are others imbricated in those relationships? Yet, anthropologists have been asking these questions for some time, and, in this essay, I revisit some ghosts of anthropology's past in order to prompt spectral evocation of these anthropological futures. Through revisiting anthropological fascinations with the nineteenth-century séances, phantasmagoria, commodities and auras, this essay looks to nineteenth-century confusions not only to reflect on the confusions of the present, but also to gesture to possible futures where our lively things might help us challenge suspect dichotomies of human and non-human.     

Der Naturwissenschaftler und sein Körper. Naturwissenschaftsgeschichte aus anthropologischer Perspektive

Since it's early days modern science is confronted with the following dilemma: Scientific investigation of nature requires the availability of the scientist's body in nearly all of its activities, though on the other hand science feels obliged to minimalize any influence of this body for methodological reasons. How has science dealt with this dilemma? How has it managed to keep the balance between using the body in favour of knowledge and keeping the required distance to it? In answering these questions the paper tries to reconstruct the history of early modern science from an anthropological perspective.     

Corporal Punishment Verses in the Qur'an are to be Reinterpreted to Counter Violent Extremist Practices from Within the Islamic Juristic Tradition

Corporal punishments in the Qur'an, also grouped under the Arabic term Ḥudūd, have been understood as a set of preordained harsh punishments due whenever their conditions are met. They not only served mainly as a deterrent, but also as a penal code in traditional religious Islamic law books. This essay argues that those Ḥudūd‐Qur'anic corporal punishments can be reinterpreted to only represent an upper limit never to be exceeded, favoring more lenient noncorporal punishments, or even no punishment at all by the state. For the Qur'an recommends forgiveness for murder, theft, brigandage, slander, and adultery. If this powerful Qur'anic paradigm is to be well understood and popularized, it would contribute to eroding the ideological basis of the extremists’ propaganda machine. It would also help Muslims connect to their Islamic tradition in a modern pluralistic society without undue tension. An historic overview of the penal culture at the time of the Qur'anic revelation, and then through its modern evolution in various geographic locations, including Muslim majority societies is used to contextualize the discussion. Two possible counter arguments based on Muslim tradition are addressed, namely the concept of abrogation in the Qur'an, and the Hadith (Prophetic traditions) undermining this reading of the Qur'an.     

Commissioned Citizenship: The Evolution of Pedagogical Citizen Construction in Canada, 1947–1994

One of the most influential tools that the state wields in developing citizenship is public education. The 19 royal commissions and major reports on education completed in provinces across Canada between 1947 and 1994 offer valuable insight into what the Canadian state conceives as ideal citizenship. The following work attempts to answer two research questions: (1) When do provincial governments desire to change the direction of education (and construction of citizens)?; and (2) How do provincial governments define the ideal citizen once reform is initiated? This essay finds that through three eras of reform, the pedagogical focus on citizenship moved from the individual to the community to a diluted form with no unifying vision. The sum of these attempts at change and conceptions of ideal citizenry leads one further from an accepted meaning of the continually elusive notion of Canadian citizenship.