The 19th‐Century Akko 1 Shipwreck,Israel: hull‐construction report

The Akko 1 shipwreck was found in 4 m of water inside the ancient harbour of Akko, Israel, and was fully recorded under water. Several hull‐components were retrieved and documented on land, as well as all the finds. The results of the archaeological research and the study of the historical background suggest that the Akko 1 shipwreck is the remains of an eastern Mediterranean naval auxiliary brig, built at the end of the first quarter of the 19th century, and sailing under the Egyptian flag. The ship was apparently wrecked during the 1840 naval bombardment of Akko. © 2012 The Authors     

Iqbal’s and Hassan’s Complaints: A Study of “To the Holy Prophet” and “SMS to Sir Muhammad Iqbal”

Muhammad Iqbal and Mohd. Kamal Hassan respectively wrote “To the Holy Prophet” and “SMS to Sir Muhammad Iqbal” in the 1930s and in the 2000s – two extremely challenging times, as in the former most Muslim-majority countries were under European colonial rule and in the latter, Western global powers wove an all-pervasive web of domination and exploitation of them. They focus on the internal weaknesses of subjugated Muslims and lament that, since the attitude of many of them is characterized by inaction and reliance on others, domination by foreign powers became an inevitable corollary. A culture of self-indulgence, stagnation, and complacency precipitated their decline and facilitated their exploitation by powerful outside interests. In their pursuit to understand the reasons for Western domination over Muslim societies, they studied the “moral paralysis” of colonized Muslims in order to reform them. Accordingly, their analysis of the subordinate position of Muslim peoples and countries can clearly be viewed through the lens of Bennabi’s notion of “colonizability,” as Iqbal’s and Hassan’s complaints in the poems mostly involve exposing several of their weaknesses that prevented them from playing their actual role, and hindered them from realising their potential, in the world.     

马尔科姆·X的早期思想轨迹

马尔科姆·X的早期思想主要是指他在黑人穆斯林期间的思想,比较偏颇、极端、激进和不切实际,其早期的黑人民族主义其实就是旧式的移民主义,基本上是一种“对外移民”、“内部建国”和“心理移民”的混合体。但把它放到当时的历史时空和语境下来看,也理应得到我们的理解乃至同情。     

Secular Islam

ABSTRACT

While he appears to have been a relentless critic of secularism as a liberal ideal, the celebrated Indian poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal might also be considered among its more important non-European theorists. Globally one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century, Iqbal started publishing in its first decade, reaching the height of his power and popularity during the inter-war period until he died in Lahore in 1938. He studied philosophy as well as Arabic and Persian thought in Lahore, Cambridge, and Munich, and drew extensively upon European as much as Asian thinkers. I will argue here that Iqbal followed an important tradition of pre-modern philosophy by thinking about the relationship between politics and theology in esoteric terms.     

Zionism as told by Rashid Rida

Muhammad Rashid Rida, the editor of al-Manar and one of the preeminent Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century, published between 1898 and 1935 dozens of reports, analyses, and Quran exegesis on Jews, Zionism, and the Palestine question. His scholarship greatly influenced the Muslim Brothers and still reverberates in the Arab political discourse today. Based on the first systematic reading and contextualization of al-Manar's pertinent texts, this article examines and explains the radical shifts in Rida's views: from describing Zionism as a humanitarian enterprise of a virtuous nation to depicting it as a plan for ethnic cleansing; from expressing doubts about the ability of the Arabs to prevail against the Jews to proclaiming certainty that they would; and from condemning French anti-Semitism to embracing hateful theories about Jewish conspiracies and vices.     

The Prophetic and the Limitation of Authority in Modernist Islam

ABSTRACT

The “prophetic”, as a central concept in modernist Islamic political philosophy, has been invoked to show that Islamic political philosophy takes into account the spiritual as well as the material world. However, this expansion of the prophetic had remained relatively silent as to the authority that is granted to experiencing individuals. This essay is a story of these reinterpretations the “prophetic” by three major Muslim thinkers – Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), Ali Shari‘ati (d. 1977), and Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945). Writing in different periods and trying to respond to different questions, these authors engaged with the question of politics by reference to prophetic experience. I will explain their intellectual context, according to their cosmologies and their notions of language (participation vs. representation). Then, I will see how in different intellectual context, the force of a democratic notion of the prophetic was undermined by different reinterpretations.