Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Medieval Islam

Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Medieval Islam PDF Author: Said Amir Arjomand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520387589
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
This study of messianism and revolution examines an extremely rich though unexplored historical record on the rise of Islam and its sociopolitical revolutions from Muhammad’s constitutive revolution in Arabia to the Abbasid revolution in the East and the Fatimid and Almohad revolutions in North Africa and the Maghreb. Bringing the revolutions together in a comprehensive framework, Saïd Amir Arjomand uses sociological theory as well as the critical tools of modern historiography to argue that a volatile but recurring combination of apocalyptic motivation and revolutionary action was a driving force of historical change time and again. In addition to tracing these threads throughout 500 years of history, Arjomand also establishes how messianic beliefs were rooted in the earlier Judaic and Manichaean notions of apocalyptic transformation of the world. By bringing to light these linkages and factors not found in the dominant sources, this text offers a sweeping account of the long arc of Islamic history.

Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Medieval Islam

Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Medieval Islam PDF Author: Said Amir Arjomand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520387589
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
This study of messianism and revolution examines an extremely rich though unexplored historical record on the rise of Islam and its sociopolitical revolutions from Muhammad’s constitutive revolution in Arabia to the Abbasid revolution in the East and the Fatimid and Almohad revolutions in North Africa and the Maghreb. Bringing the revolutions together in a comprehensive framework, Saïd Amir Arjomand uses sociological theory as well as the critical tools of modern historiography to argue that a volatile but recurring combination of apocalyptic motivation and revolutionary action was a driving force of historical change time and again. In addition to tracing these threads throughout 500 years of history, Arjomand also establishes how messianic beliefs were rooted in the earlier Judaic and Manichaean notions of apocalyptic transformation of the world. By bringing to light these linkages and factors not found in the dominant sources, this text offers a sweeping account of the long arc of Islamic history.

Revolutions of the End of Time: Apocalypse, Revolution and Reaction in the Persianate World

Revolutions of the End of Time: Apocalypse, Revolution and Reaction in the Persianate World PDF Author: Saïd Amir Arjomand
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004517154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
A study of Mahdist movements focusing on abrupt discontinuities, revolutions as apocalyptic breaks, and on the reaction of the ruling authorities as counter-revolution, as reversion to continuity within a single civilizational zone defined by its cultural unity as the Persianate world.

Of Piety and Heresy

Of Piety and Heresy PDF Author: Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111448053
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This book examines and contextualizes Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad Ghazzālī’s (d. 505/1111) fierce response to antinomian and freethinking currents in twelfth-century Persia. Seyed-Gohrab offers a translation of Ghazzālī’s treatise on antinomians, and one of his religious rulings (fatwa) on the topic. Both were written after Ghazzālī’s intellectual crisis in 488/1095, when he voluntarily withdrew from his position as a Professor at the prestigious Niẓāmiyya College in Baghdad. He determined to live an ascetic life, devoting all his attention to God. In this period, Ghazzālī wrote his masterpieces in Arabic and Persian. Seyed-Gohrab shows that these two less-known works shed new light on the motivation for Ghazzālī's major works. The book depicts Ghazzālī’s Persian intellectual context, and the tumultuous political period in which a strong literary and Sufi antinomian trend emerged from the social periphery to become central to literary activities at the Saljuq court. The book also treats Ghazzālī’s Persian poetry, offering original insights into Ghazzālī’s contemporary, the celebrated polymath ʿUmar Khayyām (d. about 525/1131), whose transgressive quatrains are interpreted as a response to a suffocating religious context.

A Theory of Catastrophe

A Theory of Catastrophe PDF Author: Bryan S. Turner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110772442
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Sociology has developed theories of social change in the fields of evolution, conflict and modernization, viewing modern society as essentially unstable and conflict driven. However, it has not seriously studied catastrophe. A Theory of Catastrophe develops a sociology of catastrophes, comparing natural, social and political causes and consequences, and the social theories that might offer explanations. A catastrophe is a general and systematic breakdown of social and political institutions resulting, among other things, in what we could call a catastrophe consciousness. The Greek ‘cata-strophe’ formed the conclusion to a dramatic sequence of strophes. The cata-strophe was the final act of a drama, namely its denouement. Catastrophic denouements are without hope: genocides, military occupations, plagues, famines and earthquakes. A Theory of Catastrophe analyzes Pompeii, the Black Death, colonial genocide in North America, WWI and the Spanish Flu, and Nazi Germany and finally this century: terrorism, new wars, climate change and pandemics. As a study of sociological theory, Bryan Turner discusses Spengler’s Decline of the West, Marxism as a theory of catastrophic capitalism, messianic movements, Weber on modernity, and risk society. He concludes by comparing optimism and pessimism, and the idea of inter-generational justice.

Sociology of Shiʿite Islam

Sociology of Shiʿite Islam PDF Author: Saïd Amir Arjomand
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004326278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
Sociology of Shiʿite Islam is a comprehensive study of the development of Shiʿism. Its bearers first emerged as a sectarian elite, then a hierocracy and finally a theocracy. Imamate, Occultation and the theodicy of martyrdom are identified as the main components of the Shiʻism as a world religion. In these collected essays Arjomand has persistenly developed a Weberian theoretical framework for the analysis of Shiʿism, from its sectarian formation in the eighth century through the establishment of the Safavid empire in the sixteenth century, to the Islamic revolution in Iran in the twentieth century. These studies highlight revolutionary impulses embedded in the belief in the advent of the hidden Imam, and the impact of Shiʻite political ethics on the authority structure of pre-modern Iran and the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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.

A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 2

A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 2 PDF Author: Patrick D. Bowen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004354379
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 732

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Book Description
In A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 2: The African American Islamic Renaissance, 1920-1975 Patrick D. Bowen offers an in-depth account of African American Islam as it developed in the United States during the fifty-five years that followed World War I. Having been shaped by a wide variety of intellectual and social influences, the ‘African American Islamic Renaissance’ appears here as a movement that was characterized by both great complexity and diversity. Drawing from a wide variety of sources—including dozens of FBI files, rare books and periodicals, little-known archives and interviews, and even folktale collections—Patrick D. Bowen disentangles the myriad social and religious factors that produced this unprecedented period of religious transformation.

The Excellence of the Arabs

The Excellence of the Arabs PDF Author: Ibn Qutaybah
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479859761
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
A spirited defense of Arab identity from a time of political unrest In ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad, the social prestige attached to claims of Arab identity had begun to decline. In The Excellence of the Arabs, the celebrated litterateur Ibn Qutaybah locks horns with those members of his society who belittled Arabness and vaunted the glories of Persian heritage and culture. Instead, he upholds the status of Arabs and their heritage in the face of criticism and uncertainty. The Excellence of the Arabs is in two parts. In the first, Arab Preeminence, which takes the form of an extended argument for Arab privilege, Ibn Qutaybah accuses his opponents of blasphemous envy. In the second, The Excellence of Arab Learning, he describes the fields of knowledge in which he believed pre-Islamic Arabians excelled, including knowledge of the stars, divination, horse husbandry, and poetry. By incorporating extensive excerpts from the poetic heritage—“the archive of the Arabs”—Ibn Qutaybah aims to demonstrate that poetry is itself sufficient evidence of Arab superiority. Eloquent and forceful, The Excellence of the Arabs addresses a central question at a time of great social flux, at the dawn of classical Muslim civilization: What does it mean to be Arab?

Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment

Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment PDF Author: Ahmet T. Kuru
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108419097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.

كتاب جهات الأئمة الخلفاء من الحرائر والإماء المسمى نساء الخلفاء

كتاب جهات الأئمة الخلفاء من الحرائر والإماء المسمى نساء الخلفاء PDF Author: ابن الساعي، علي بن انجب،
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479866792
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Saʿi (d. 674 H/1276 AD). Ibn al-Saʿi was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656 H/1258 AD.