Daniel Foliard
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226451336
- eISBN:
- 9780226451473
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226451473.001.0001
- Subject:
- Earth Sciences and Geography, Cartography
While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With ...
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While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era. Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.Less
While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era. Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.
Peter Webb
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474408264
- eISBN:
- 9781474421867
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474408264.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Middle Eastern Cultural Anthropology
Who are the Arabs? When did people begin calling themselves Arabs? And what was the Arabs’ role in the rise of Islam? Investigating these core questions about Arab identity and history by marshalling ...
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Who are the Arabs? When did people begin calling themselves Arabs? And what was the Arabs’ role in the rise of Islam? Investigating these core questions about Arab identity and history by marshalling the widest array of Arabic sources employed hitherto, and by interpreting the evidence with the aid of theories of identity and ethnicity, Imagining the Arabs proposes new answers to the riddle of Arab origins and fundamental reinterpretations of early Islamic history. It is revealed that the time-honoured stereotypes which depict Arabs as ancient Arabian Bedouin are entirely misleading because the essence of Arab identity was in fact devised by Muslims during the first centuries of Islam. Arab identity emerged and evolved as groups imagined new notions of community to suit the radically changing circumstances of life in the early Caliphate. The idea of ‘the Arab’ was a device which Muslims utilised to articulate their communal identity, to negotiate post-Conquest power relations, and to explain the rise of Islam. Over Islam’s first four centuries, political elites, genealogists, poetry collectors, historians and grammarians all participated in a vibrant process of imagining and re-imagining Arab identity and history, and the sum of their works established a powerful tradition that influences Middle Eastern communities to the present day.Less
Who are the Arabs? When did people begin calling themselves Arabs? And what was the Arabs’ role in the rise of Islam? Investigating these core questions about Arab identity and history by marshalling the widest array of Arabic sources employed hitherto, and by interpreting the evidence with the aid of theories of identity and ethnicity, Imagining the Arabs proposes new answers to the riddle of Arab origins and fundamental reinterpretations of early Islamic history. It is revealed that the time-honoured stereotypes which depict Arabs as ancient Arabian Bedouin are entirely misleading because the essence of Arab identity was in fact devised by Muslims during the first centuries of Islam. Arab identity emerged and evolved as groups imagined new notions of community to suit the radically changing circumstances of life in the early Caliphate. The idea of ‘the Arab’ was a device which Muslims utilised to articulate their communal identity, to negotiate post-Conquest power relations, and to explain the rise of Islam. Over Islam’s first four centuries, political elites, genealogists, poetry collectors, historians and grammarians all participated in a vibrant process of imagining and re-imagining Arab identity and history, and the sum of their works established a powerful tradition that influences Middle Eastern communities to the present day.
Jessica M. Marglin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780300218466
- eISBN:
- 9780300225082
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300218466.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
This introductory chapter presents the Assarraf family as the focal point of study, before providing an overview on the Jewish, Islamic, and international legal background of this family and that of ...
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This introductory chapter presents the Assarraf family as the focal point of study, before providing an overview on the Jewish, Islamic, and international legal background of this family and that of many other such families in Morocco. It brings up the intersections inherent in the legal system that Jews in Morocco have enjoyed, highlighting the potential for this subject for further academic study. In particular, the Assarrafs' movement between Jewish and shariʻa courts is relevant to Jewish, Middle Eastern, and legal historians, for somewhat different reasons—and as the chapter shows, contrary to prevailing opinion, the Jews were not isolated within their own legal system.Less
This introductory chapter presents the Assarraf family as the focal point of study, before providing an overview on the Jewish, Islamic, and international legal background of this family and that of many other such families in Morocco. It brings up the intersections inherent in the legal system that Jews in Morocco have enjoyed, highlighting the potential for this subject for further academic study. In particular, the Assarrafs' movement between Jewish and shariʻa courts is relevant to Jewish, Middle Eastern, and legal historians, for somewhat different reasons—and as the chapter shows, contrary to prevailing opinion, the Jews were not isolated within their own legal system.
Peter Webb
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474408264
- eISBN:
- 9781474421867
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474408264.003.0008
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Middle Eastern Cultural Anthropology
By unfastening Arab identity from conventional cultural stereotypes, Bedouinism and ancient pre-Islamic Arabian bloodlines, this book sought to reveal the complexities and changing nature of historic ...
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By unfastening Arab identity from conventional cultural stereotypes, Bedouinism and ancient pre-Islamic Arabian bloodlines, this book sought to reveal the complexities and changing nature of historic Arab identity. The book was intended as an invitation to begin rethinking Arabness afresh, and by highlighting the shortcomings inherent in the static, monolithic manner in which historical Arab communities have often been discussed, our analysis sought to reappraise historic Arabness as an ethnicity, tracking its evolution and contextualising its development with close attention to the sociopolitical and ‘cultural stuff’ factors that sustain ethnogenesis....Less
By unfastening Arab identity from conventional cultural stereotypes, Bedouinism and ancient pre-Islamic Arabian bloodlines, this book sought to reveal the complexities and changing nature of historic Arab identity. The book was intended as an invitation to begin rethinking Arabness afresh, and by highlighting the shortcomings inherent in the static, monolithic manner in which historical Arab communities have often been discussed, our analysis sought to reappraise historic Arabness as an ethnicity, tracking its evolution and contextualising its development with close attention to the sociopolitical and ‘cultural stuff’ factors that sustain ethnogenesis....
Mustapha Sheikh
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198790761
- eISBN:
- 9780191833250
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790761.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
This chapter is an historical survey of the Qāḍīzādeli movement focusing on its first phase, followed by a critical assessment of the existing literature in the field.
This chapter is an historical survey of the Qāḍīzādeli movement focusing on its first phase, followed by a critical assessment of the existing literature in the field.
Mustapha Sheikh
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198790761
- eISBN:
- 9780191833250
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790761.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
This book is about the emergence of a new activist Sufism in the Muslim world from the sixteenth century onwards, which emphasised personal responsibility for putting God’s guidance into practice. It ...
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This book is about the emergence of a new activist Sufism in the Muslim world from the sixteenth century onwards, which emphasised personal responsibility for putting God’s guidance into practice. It focuses specifically on developments at the centre of the Ottoman Empire, but also considers both how they might have been influenced by the wider connections and engagements of learned and holy men and how their influence might have been spread from the Ottoman Empire to South Asia in particular. The immediate focus is on the Qāḍīzādeli movement which flourished in Istanbul from the 1620s to the 1680s and which inveighed against corrupt scholars and heterodox Sufis. The book aims by studying the relationship between Aḥmad al-Rūmī al-Āqḥiṣārī’s magisterial Majālis al-abrār and Qāḍīzādeli beliefs to place both author and the movement in an Ottoman, Ḥanafī, and Sufi milieu. In so doing, it breaks new ground, both in bringing to light al-Āqḥiṣārī’s writings, and methodologically, in Ottoman studies at least, in employing line-by-line textual comparisons to ascertain the borrowings and influences linking al-Āqḥiṣārī to medieval Islamic thinkers such as Aḥmad b. Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, as well as to several near-contemporaries. Most significantly, the book finally puts to rest the strict dichotomy between Qāḍīzādeli reformism and Sufism, a dichotomy that with too few exceptions continues to be the mainstay of the existing literature.Less
This book is about the emergence of a new activist Sufism in the Muslim world from the sixteenth century onwards, which emphasised personal responsibility for putting God’s guidance into practice. It focuses specifically on developments at the centre of the Ottoman Empire, but also considers both how they might have been influenced by the wider connections and engagements of learned and holy men and how their influence might have been spread from the Ottoman Empire to South Asia in particular. The immediate focus is on the Qāḍīzādeli movement which flourished in Istanbul from the 1620s to the 1680s and which inveighed against corrupt scholars and heterodox Sufis. The book aims by studying the relationship between Aḥmad al-Rūmī al-Āqḥiṣārī’s magisterial Majālis al-abrār and Qāḍīzādeli beliefs to place both author and the movement in an Ottoman, Ḥanafī, and Sufi milieu. In so doing, it breaks new ground, both in bringing to light al-Āqḥiṣārī’s writings, and methodologically, in Ottoman studies at least, in employing line-by-line textual comparisons to ascertain the borrowings and influences linking al-Āqḥiṣārī to medieval Islamic thinkers such as Aḥmad b. Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, as well as to several near-contemporaries. Most significantly, the book finally puts to rest the strict dichotomy between Qāḍīzādeli reformism and Sufism, a dichotomy that with too few exceptions continues to be the mainstay of the existing literature.
