Imperial Mecca

Imperial Mecca PDF Author: Michael Christopher Low
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Imperial Mecca

Imperial Mecca PDF Author: Michael Christopher Low
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 599

Get Book Here

Book Description
With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Imperial Mecca - Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj

Imperial Mecca - Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj PDF Author: Michael Christo Low
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231190763
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul's project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India's steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

Imperial Mecca - Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj

Imperial Mecca - Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj PDF Author: Michael Christo Low
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231190770
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul's project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India's steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

Rivers of the Sultan

Rivers of the Sultan PDF Author: Faisal Husain
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0197547273
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In the early sixteenth century, a series of military campaigns between the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf brought the entirety of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers under Ottoman control. This book offers a history of this rare political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia and its impact on the Ottoman state, provincial society, and the environment.

Indonesians and Their Arab World

Indonesians and Their Arab World PDF Author: Mirjam Lücking
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753142
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Indonesians and Their Arab World explores the ways contemporary Indonesians understand their relationship to the Arab world. Despite being home to the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia exists on the periphery of an Islamic world centered around the Arabian Peninsula. Mirjam Lücking approaches the problem of interpreting the current conservative turn in Indonesian Islam by considering the ways personal relationships, public discourse, and matters of religious self-understanding guide two groups of Indonesians who actually travel to the Arabian Peninsula—labor migrants and Mecca pilgrims—in becoming physically mobile and making their mobility meaningful. This concept, which Lücking calls "guided mobility," reveals that changes in Indonesian Islamic traditions are grounded in domestic social constellations and calls claims of outward Arab influence in Indonesia into question. With three levels of comparison (urban and rural areas, Madura and Central Java, and migrants and pilgrims), this ethnographic case study foregrounds how different regional and socioeconomic contexts determine Indonesians' various engagements with the Arab world.

Reinventing the Sheikhdom

Reinventing the Sheikhdom PDF Author: Matthew Hedges
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197655963
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Though the Arab Spring has reverberated through the Middle East, largely leaving a path of destruction, the relative calm in the United Arab Emirates has offered a regional roadmap for stability. Domestic changes since 2000 have significantly altered the country's dynamics, firmly cementing power within Abu Dhabi. While Khalifa bin Zayed succeeded his father as emir of Abu Dhabi and UAE president in 2004, the Emirates' evolution has largely been accredited to Abu Dhabi's crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed. His reign has been characterized by the rise of the security apparatus and a micromanaged approach to governance. Mohammed bin Zayed's strategy of fortification has focused on pre-empting threats from the UAE's native population, rather than from expatriates or foreign actors. As a result, he has consolidated power, distributing its administration among his tribal and kinship allies. In essence, Mohammed bin Zayed has driven modernization in order to strengthen his grasp on power. This book explores Mohammed bin Zayed's regime security strategy, illustrating the network of alliances that seek to support his reign and that of his family. In an ever-turbulent region, the UAE remains critical to understanding the evolution of Middle Eastern authoritarian control.

Monsoon Islam

Monsoon Islam PDF Author: Sebastian R. Prange
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108342698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, a distinct form of Islamic thought and practice developed among Muslim trading communities of the Indian Ocean. Sebastian R. Prange argues that this 'Monsoon Islam' was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies. Focusing on India's Malabar Coast, the much-fabled 'land of pepper', Prange provides a case study of how Monsoon Islam developed in response to concrete economic, socio-religious, and political challenges. Because communities of Muslim merchants across the Indian Ocean were part of shared commercial, scholarly, and political networks, developments on the Malabar Coast illustrate a broader, trans-oceanic history of the evolution of Islam across monsoon Asia. This history is told through four spaces that are examined in their physical manifestations as well as symbolic meanings: the Port, the Mosque, the Palace, and the Sea.

Age of Coexistence

Age of Coexistence PDF Author: Ussama Makdisi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520385764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"Flawless . . . [Makdisi] reminds us of the critical declarations of secularism which existed in the history of the Middle East."—Robert Fisk, The Independent Today's headlines paint the Middle East as a collection of war-torn countries and extremist groups consumed by sectarian rage. Ussama Makdisi's Age of Coexistence reveals a hidden and hopeful story that counters this clichéd portrayal. It shows how a region rich with ethnic and religious diversity created a modern culture of coexistence amid Ottoman reformation, European colonialism, and the emergence of nationalism. Moving from the nineteenth century to the present, this groundbreaking book explores, without denial or equivocation, the politics of pluralism during the Ottoman Empire and in the post-Ottoman Arab world. Rather than judging the Arab world as a place of age-old sectarian animosities, Age of Coexistence describes the forging of a complex system of coexistence, what Makdisi calls the "ecumenical frame." He argues that new forms of antisectarian politics, and some of the most important examples of Muslim-Christian political collaboration, crystallized to make and define the modern Arab world. Despite massive challenges and setbacks, and despite the persistence of colonialism and authoritarianism, this framework for coexistence has endured for nearly a century. It is a reminder that religious diversity does not automatically lead to sectarianism. Instead, as Makdisi demonstrates, people of different faiths, but not necessarily of different political outlooks, have consistently tried to build modern societies that transcend religious and sectarian differences.

Ottoman-Southeast Asian Relations (2 vols.)

Ottoman-Southeast Asian Relations (2 vols.) PDF Author: Ismail Hakkı Kadı
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004409998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1095

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Book Description
Ottoman-Southeast Asian Relations: Sources from the Ottoman Archives, is a product of meticulous study of İsmail Hakkı Kadı, A.C.S. Peacock and other contributors on historical documents from the Ottoman archives. The work contains documents in Ottoman-Turkish, Malay, Arabic, French, English, Tausug, Burmese and Thai languages, each introduced by an expert in the language and history of the related country. The work contains documents hitherto unknown to historians as well as others that have been unearthed before but remained confined to the use of limited scholars who had access to the Ottoman archives. The resources published in this study show that the Ottoman Empire was an active actor within the context of Southeast Asian experience with Western colonialism. The fact that the extensive literature on this experience made limited use of Ottoman source materials indicates the crucial importance of this publication for future innovative research in the field. Contributors are: Giancarlo Casale, Annabel Teh Gallop, Rıfat Günalan, Patricia Herbert, Jana Igunma, Midori Kawashima, Abraham Sakili and Michael Talbot

Sunnis and Shi'a

Sunnis and Shi'a PDF Author: Laurence Louër
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
A compelling history of the ancient schism that continues to divide the Islamic world When Muhammad died in 632 without a male heir, Sunnis contended that the choice of a successor should fall to his closest companions, but Shi'a believed that God had inspired the Prophet to appoint his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, as leader. So began a schism that is nearly as old as Islam itself. Laurence Louër tells the story of this ancient rivalry, taking readers from the last days of Muhammad to the political and doctrinal clashes of Sunnis and Shi'a today. In a sweeping historical narrative spanning the Islamic world, Louër shows how the Sunni-Shi'a divide was never just a dispute over succession—at issue are questions about the very nature of Islamic political authority. She challenges the widespread perception of Sunnis and Shi'a as bitter enemies who are perpetually at war with each other, demonstrating how they have coexisted peacefully at various periods throughout the history of Islam. Louër traces how sectarian tensions have been inflamed or calmed depending on the political contingencies of the moment, whether to consolidate the rule of elites, assert clerical control over the state, or defy the powers that be. Timely and provocative, Sunnis and Shi'a provides needed perspective on the historical roots of today's conflicts and reveals how both branches of Islam have influenced and emulated each other in unexpected ways. This compelling and accessible book also examines the diverse regional contexts of the Sunni-Shi'a divide, examining how it has shaped societies and politics in countries such as Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon.