Monica M. Ringer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781474478731
- eISBN:
- 9781474491211
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474478731.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
Modernists saw in Islamic history the solution to the pressing question of why the Islamic world was ‘backward’ compared to the dynamic and powerful European great powers. The Abbasid “Golden Age” ...
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Modernists saw in Islamic history the solution to the pressing question of why the Islamic world was ‘backward’ compared to the dynamic and powerful European great powers. The Abbasid “Golden Age” was touted by Muslim Modernists as empirical proof that Islamic essence, properly manifest in historical context, was a powerful motor of progress and civilization. Modernists claimed not only that Islam had produced superior civilizational levels compared to contemporary Europe, but that it could do so again. The prevalent European narrative of the ossification of Islamic institutions, and the concomitant rise of dogmatism that prevented intellectual inquiry, creativity, and ultimately, further progress, was by and large accepted by Muslim Modernists. However, they insisted that the ossification of tradition was not essential to Islam but rather, historically contingent. Modernists deployed the “Golden Age” argument to insist on the de-contextualization of Islamic essence and its re-contextualization in the present – the rescue of essence from history. Muslim Modernists, by comparing Islam in history to Christianity in European history, asserted the Islamic Origins of Modernity, thus enabling an indigenous future modern – the reclaiming of the ‘torch of civilization’.Less
Modernists saw in Islamic history the solution to the pressing question of why the Islamic world was ‘backward’ compared to the dynamic and powerful European great powers. The Abbasid “Golden Age” was touted by Muslim Modernists as empirical proof that Islamic essence, properly manifest in historical context, was a powerful motor of progress and civilization. Modernists claimed not only that Islam had produced superior civilizational levels compared to contemporary Europe, but that it could do so again. The prevalent European narrative of the ossification of Islamic institutions, and the concomitant rise of dogmatism that prevented intellectual inquiry, creativity, and ultimately, further progress, was by and large accepted by Muslim Modernists. However, they insisted that the ossification of tradition was not essential to Islam but rather, historically contingent. Modernists deployed the “Golden Age” argument to insist on the de-contextualization of Islamic essence and its re-contextualization in the present – the rescue of essence from history. Muslim Modernists, by comparing Islam in history to Christianity in European history, asserted the Islamic Origins of Modernity, thus enabling an indigenous future modern – the reclaiming of the ‘torch of civilization’.
Andrew Ginger and Geraldine Lawless (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526124746
- eISBN:
- 9781526138866
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526124753
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Over the past quarter of a century, the study of nineteenth-century Hispanic culture and society has undergone two major shifts. The first was a rejection of ‘the myth of backwardness’ a notion that ...
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Over the past quarter of a century, the study of nineteenth-century Hispanic culture and society has undergone two major shifts. The first was a rejection of ‘the myth of backwardness’ a notion that these cultures and societies were exceptions that trailed behind the wider West. The second trend was a critical focus on a core triad of nation, gender and representation. This volume of essays provides a strong focus for the exploration and stimulation of substantial new areas of inquiry. The shared concern is with how members of the cultural and intellectual elite in the nineteenth century conceived or undertook major activities that shaped their lives. The volume looks at how people did things without necessarily framing questions of motive or incentive in terms that would bring the debate back to a master system of gender, racial, ethnographic, or national proportions. It reviews some key temporal dilemmas faced by a range of nineteenth-century Spanish writers. The volume explores how they employed a series of narrative and rhetorical techniques to articulate the consequent complexities. It also looks at how a number of religious figures negotiated the relationship between politics and religion in nineteenth-century Spain. The volume concentrates on a spectrum of writings and practices within popular literature that reflect on good and bad conduct in Spain through the nineteenth century. Among other topics, it provides information on how to be a man, be a writer for the press, a cultural entrepreneur, an intellectual, and a colonial soldier.Less
Over the past quarter of a century, the study of nineteenth-century Hispanic culture and society has undergone two major shifts. The first was a rejection of ‘the myth of backwardness’ a notion that these cultures and societies were exceptions that trailed behind the wider West. The second trend was a critical focus on a core triad of nation, gender and representation. This volume of essays provides a strong focus for the exploration and stimulation of substantial new areas of inquiry. The shared concern is with how members of the cultural and intellectual elite in the nineteenth century conceived or undertook major activities that shaped their lives. The volume looks at how people did things without necessarily framing questions of motive or incentive in terms that would bring the debate back to a master system of gender, racial, ethnographic, or national proportions. It reviews some key temporal dilemmas faced by a range of nineteenth-century Spanish writers. The volume explores how they employed a series of narrative and rhetorical techniques to articulate the consequent complexities. It also looks at how a number of religious figures negotiated the relationship between politics and religion in nineteenth-century Spain. The volume concentrates on a spectrum of writings and practices within popular literature that reflect on good and bad conduct in Spain through the nineteenth century. Among other topics, it provides information on how to be a man, be a writer for the press, a cultural entrepreneur, an intellectual, and a colonial soldier.
Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- April 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780199466290
- eISBN:
- 9780199095865
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199466290.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Indian Politics
The authors analyse the reasons underlying the resurgence of communalism in the 2000s in Uttar Pradesh (UP) leading to riots in Mau in 2005, Gorakhpur in 2007, and Muzaffarnagar in 2013, but more ...
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The authors analyse the reasons underlying the resurgence of communalism in the 2000s in Uttar Pradesh (UP) leading to riots in Mau in 2005, Gorakhpur in 2007, and Muzaffarnagar in 2013, but more importantly move beyond riots to analyse the new ways and means whereby communalism in the present phase is being manufactured by the Hindu right. They argue that UP is experiencing a post-Ayodhya phase of communalism markedly different from the late 1980s/early 1990s. The book employs a model of institutionalized everyday communalism whose defining feature is that rather than initiating major, state-wide riots, the strategy of the BJP–RSS currently is to create and sustain constant, low-key communal tension together with frequent, small, low-intensity incidents out of petty everyday issues that institutionalize communalism at the grassroots. The use of this strategy is examined based on extensive fieldwork in the districts of eastern and western UP that experienced major riots. A fusion of rising cultural aspirations and deep economic anxieties in UP, which remains an economically backward state, and where a deepening agrarian crisis, unemployment, poverty, and inequalities are widespread, has created fertile ground for the new kind of communal mobilization. The agenda of the BJP–RSS is political to establish majoritarian rule, but equally important cultural, because India is viewed as fundamentally ‘Hindu’ in a civilizational sense in which Muslims will remain alien. It is through this lens of the new ‘avatar’ of the BJP, its ideology and strategies, and its impact on society and polity that an attempt is made to understand the current round of communalism in UP.Less
The authors analyse the reasons underlying the resurgence of communalism in the 2000s in Uttar Pradesh (UP) leading to riots in Mau in 2005, Gorakhpur in 2007, and Muzaffarnagar in 2013, but more importantly move beyond riots to analyse the new ways and means whereby communalism in the present phase is being manufactured by the Hindu right. They argue that UP is experiencing a post-Ayodhya phase of communalism markedly different from the late 1980s/early 1990s. The book employs a model of institutionalized everyday communalism whose defining feature is that rather than initiating major, state-wide riots, the strategy of the BJP–RSS currently is to create and sustain constant, low-key communal tension together with frequent, small, low-intensity incidents out of petty everyday issues that institutionalize communalism at the grassroots. The use of this strategy is examined based on extensive fieldwork in the districts of eastern and western UP that experienced major riots. A fusion of rising cultural aspirations and deep economic anxieties in UP, which remains an economically backward state, and where a deepening agrarian crisis, unemployment, poverty, and inequalities are widespread, has created fertile ground for the new kind of communal mobilization. The agenda of the BJP–RSS is political to establish majoritarian rule, but equally important cultural, because India is viewed as fundamentally ‘Hindu’ in a civilizational sense in which Muslims will remain alien. It is through this lens of the new ‘avatar’ of the BJP, its ideology and strategies, and its impact on society and polity that an attempt is made to understand the current round of communalism in UP.
Jelle J.P. Wouters
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780199485703
- eISBN:
- 9780199097760
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199485703.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity, Politics, Social Movements and Social Change
The politics of statehood and related demands pervade all nooks and corners of India. This chapter discusses the Frontier Nagaland statehood demand that has emerged within (or against?) the Naga ...
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The politics of statehood and related demands pervade all nooks and corners of India. This chapter discusses the Frontier Nagaland statehood demand that has emerged within (or against?) the Naga Movement for Independence. Through a set of socio-historical and ethnographic explorations, the author shows how the demand for Frontier Nagaland, while tracing back to divergent colonial trajectories between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Nagaland, implies that the creation of Nagaland state produced new constellations of power, new fault-lines, and new axes of differentiation. Seeing the state first and foremost as a ‘resource’, six eastern Naga tribes today lament, what they experience as, the dominating and exploitative influences of western Naga tribes, whom they see as ‘advanced’ and accuse of preventing eastern Nagas from receiving their development dues.Less
The politics of statehood and related demands pervade all nooks and corners of India. This chapter discusses the Frontier Nagaland statehood demand that has emerged within (or against?) the Naga Movement for Independence. Through a set of socio-historical and ethnographic explorations, the author shows how the demand for Frontier Nagaland, while tracing back to divergent colonial trajectories between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Nagaland, implies that the creation of Nagaland state produced new constellations of power, new fault-lines, and new axes of differentiation. Seeing the state first and foremost as a ‘resource’, six eastern Naga tribes today lament, what they experience as, the dominating and exploitative influences of western Naga tribes, whom they see as ‘advanced’ and accuse of preventing eastern Nagas from receiving their development dues.
