History repeats itself, on occasion:
But we are told to have short memories.
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New research is shedding light on the depth of British involvement in the break-up of Palestine, writes Roger Owen.
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razib
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The first women’s shelter of the Ottoman Empire was established in the late 17th century and served until the mid-19th century. With a capacity of 100 people, the Hatuniye dervish convent, also known as ‘Karılar’ dervish convent, was located in the Bülbülderesi district of Eyüp, in Istanbul.
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Filippo de Vivo asks us to rethink the emergence of ‘information’ in Venice and its impact on politics.
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Corey Robin reviews the history of the conservative movement in the US.
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In December, Angry Arab reviewed Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. More recently, As’ad says he received an email from someone working for a senator regarding the book and AIPAC.
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The years 1950 to 2000 will go down in history as the Golden Age of The West.
(Of course, people in in the far future may not be as fascinated with history and historiography as we are today.)
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The post-Reformation doctrine that it was the state’s business to secure religious uniformity within its polity — or at least to exclude Dissenters from important rights — was crucial to the formation of the early modern state. By contrast, the secular Enlightenment theory that the political community consists of an abstract collection of equal citizens was propounded as a criticism of the religious inequality characterizing the absolutist state. The most famous document embodying that theory was the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” The theory was critized almost from the moment it was first stated — notably by Burke for the license it gave destructive passiosns, and by Marx for disguising bourgeois self-interest. However, the decisive moments that helped to break the alliance of church and state seem to have been religious rather than secular — Tractarianism in England and Ultramontanism in France and Europe generally. The arguments they deployed most effectively were strictly theological and were aimed at securing freedom of Christ’s church from the constraints of an earthly power. An important consequence of abandoning the total union of church and state was the eventual emergence of “minority rights” as a central theme of national politics. Members of minorities became at once equal citizens, members of the body politic (”the people as a whole”), and, as a minor body, unequal to the majority, requiring special protection.
–Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press, 2003.
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razib
ali mentions debates about whether al-biruni was shia or sunni. one thing i’ve gotten the impression from my reading is that the “sunni” party as we understand it today is a relatively late-forming identity. a sort of catchall for all the groups before the fall of the abbassids to the mongols who weren’t shia or kharijite. al-biruni lived at a time when the lines were hardening, but the boundaries might not have been totally demarcated.
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skimming Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850. mentions a self-avowed “half-muslim” urdu poet from the early 19th century who drinks wine but does not consume pork. so what’s up with muslims and alcohol? my reading of history shows that elite muslims drink alcohol quite often; to the point of making a note when a particular caliph did not drink. jehangir and a recent king of saudi arabia were alcoholics. i believe there are references to wine in babur’s poetry. has alcohol consumption actually decreased in frequency as islam has become more populist???
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razib
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Lawrence of Arabia
So I have been working on the portrayal of Islam in early Franciscan documents (especially the various lives of St.Francis), and ran across this little tidbit, in David Burr’s Spiritual Franciscans, about two of my favorite Franciscans: Peter John Olivi and Ubertino da Casale (of Name of the Rose fame). Olivi argues, for instance, in his commentary on the Apocalypse of John (1298) that
Continued decay of the Church will lead to rule by a pseudopope who, with the aid of a secular authority, will support a carnal version of Christianity, persecuting those who observe evangelical poverty. These carnal leaders and the carnal church which they represent (Babylon) will eventually be destroyed by a non-Christian (presumably Muslim) army. Thus will end the persecution of the mystical Antichrist, but that of the great Antichrist will then begin. Another king/pseudopope combination will join in a persecution aimed more explicitly at Christianity itself. Here, too, Olivi seems to anticipate an important role for Islam. Finally, with Christ’s aid, this second persecution will end and the seventh period will begin.
All this of course so that the renewal of Christian life initiated by Francis could reach its consummation.
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aprosos of the apostasy post below, God’s Rule - Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought :
The Prophet was remembered as havinggiven them the choice between conversion and death. But it was only Arab pagans that he had eradicated: did non-Arab peers have to be similarly treated? After some debate, the jurists decided that the Zoroastrians…were an exception, they had once possessed a book…and/or that the Prophet had accepted jizya from Zoroastrians (in eastern Arabia)…But the jurists could not agree on other pagans. Some took the Prophet’s eradication of Arab idolaters to mean that all pagans had to be given the choice between Islam or death, whatever their ethnicity. This was the position of the Shafi’ites…Others argued that the Arabs were a special case and that it was the Prophet’s treatment of Zoroastrians which had universal significance: all non-Arab pagans should be treated as Zoroastrains. That was the position of the Malikis and Hanafis…aruging that all unbelievers were eligible for dhimmi status, full stop.the hanafi position is one reason adduced as to why this school is popular in the turkic and south asian world; it was more practical since non-muslims were thick on the ground. but it is interesting to note that shafis are dominant in southeast asia, where there are large non-muslim pagan minorities (buddhists and hindus).
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From a H-Net review of Claudia Koonz’s The Nazi Conscience:
One of the biggest obstacles to the creation of an antisemitic consensus among both bureaucrats and academics, [Claudia] Koonz found, was that it proved almost impossible in the natural sciences to pin down any verifiable biological differences, to document the racial taxonomy that Nazi ideology insisted must exist. Instead, racial revisionism really took root in the humanities and social sciences. Along with anthropology and ethnology, Koonz notes that “history came into its own as the queen of the racial sciences” (p. 203), generating a flood of bibliographies, archival reports, monographs, and articles to underwrite both ethnic fundamentalism and antisemitism.
Of ethnic fundamentalism, Koonz says:
I use the term “ethnic fundamentalism” to describe deeply anti-liberal collectivism that was the hallmark of public culture in the Third Reich. The term bears an affinity with both religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism. Like the former, ethnic fundamenalism claims to defend an ancient spiritual heritage against the corrosive values of industrialized, urban society. Like the latter, ethnic fundamentalism summons its followers to seek vengence for past wrongs and to forge a glorious future cleansed of ethnic aliens. Its leaders, often endowed with charistamtic aura, mobilize followers to participate in a moral universe that is accessible only to those who share a language, religion, culture or homeland.
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“Western civ”: an American war baby
In both its remote and immediate origins, “Western civ” was a war baby. The first such course was instituted at Columbia immediately after World War I, as a continuation of the “war issues” course offered during hostilities. It defined the traditions of the West as those for which the Allies had fought against the Hun. The course had few imitators between the wars, but after World War II it became the most widely taught history course on American campuses. Courses of this type were strongly urged by the influential report of Havard’s General Education Committee in 1945, whose principal concerns, according to a sympathetic commentator, were “‘why we fight’, the principles of a free society, the need to provide a consistent image of the American experience, the definition of democracy in a world of totalitarianism, the efforts to fortify the heritage of Western civilization, and the need to provide a ‘common learning’ for all Americans as a foundation of national unity.
- Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
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Muslims in Europe: the Jewish pre-WWII analogy is flawed. If you really want to scour history, see the Catholic experience in Britain (e.g. Test Act) and Germany (e.g. Kulturkampf). Catholics were accused of pretty much the same as Muslims: loyalty to a necessarily hostile and foreign religion, adhering to a backward religion, living in squalor and acts of terrorism. While Jews were also accused of this (e.g. Eastern European Jews living in east London which now dominated by Bangladeshi Muslims), they were also accused of being internationalist, rootless etc. (right-wing critics of what is labelled “left-multiculturalism” are following in this tradition…).
I am sure if someone wanted to, they could draw parallels between Locke’s ‘concern’ over atheists and Catholics to present day ‘concerns’ about Muslims.
Further reading: Razib’s citation below and “Varieties of anti-religious imagination” at the Immanent Frame, Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners.
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from earthly powers, page 324-325:
“Prejudice was accompanied by the customary demographic paranoia. The Catholic population was believed to be increasing at an alarming rate, allegedly through conversions and mixed marriages, althought many Protestants credulously assumed that the peasants of Prussia Poland bred like rabbits. In fact, the only area to register a striking increase in the Catholic population was Upper Silesia, where this was attributable to migration into its industrial hellholes, rather than to religiously inspired lack of sexual continence, while conversions to Rome were outnumbered by those of Catholics to Prtestantism. More than half of the children of mixed marriages were brought up as Protestants rather than Catholics….”(regarding the kulturkampf)
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