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The well-developed literature on Islamist politics has tended to focus on partisan and welfare institutions within the context of existing states. Civil war raises important questions about whether and how the relevance of such institutions changes when the state itself fragments. This article seeks to understand Islamism in Yemen as a kind of post-organizational political field. At a theoretical scale, Yemen's civil war and the transformation of the country's Islamist politics offers lessons about the fixity of categorical distinctions within and across forms of Islamist activity. This article works to map dynamics of fragmentation within pre-war Islamist organizations, the disintegration of authority among Islamist leaders in the context of war, and the effect of each of these processes on the resurgence and partial transformation of particular Islamist claims. The field, as an analytic approach less firmly tied to the state itself, allows for a consideration of Islamist politics as articulated locally but shaped as well by transnational engagement with ideas and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of Sufi lexicons (iṣṭilāḥāt) through the relatively unknown Mystical Commentary of the Love Lyrics of Ḥāƒiẓ by Abū al-Ḥasan Khatamī Lāhūrī. It resituates the iṣṭilāḥāt within the context of the philosophical-Sufi tradition, engaging theories of metaphor, imagination, poetry, and imaginaries from Ricœur, Castoriadis, Lakoff and Johnson, and Caputo. Rather than employing the iṣṭilāḥāt to produce a static correspondence between poetic terms and metaphysical realities, Lāhūrī's theo-poetics transposes the metaphors and poetics of the poems into metaphors and poetics of this phenomenal world. This reading challenges previous criticisms of Sufi commentaries, particularly on the dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ. The critique that the application of iṣṭilāḥāt disembodies or allegorizes the poetic images is challenged when they are interpreted within the philosophical-Sufi tradition. Contrary to literary criticisms of iṣṭilāḥāt , the poem is not merely a formal suitcase for mystical meaning; rather, poetics, the poem's content, and theology create a nexus of interpretation for Lāhūrī. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The destruction of the Baghdadi libraries has been a powerful image connected to the Mongol conquest of 1258, often claimed to have precipitated the decline of Muslim civilization. This study, however, challenges this claim by reconstructing the state of libraries in Ilkhanid Baghdad, revealing a thriving intellectual community. Based on a close reading in Arabic biographical dictionaries and analysis of samāʿ and book lists, it elucidates the functions of libraries in Ilkhanid Baghdad, identifies channels of knowledge transmission, and offers a glimpse of the libraries' holdings. Finally, it analyzes the Mongols' role in invigorating local scholarship and the impact their rule had on Baghdad's intellectual life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This summer, American academia will celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Samuel Huntington's most controversial article, later book, on the post-Cold War era. "Clash of Civilizations?" was published for the first time in the summer issue of the semi-scholarly journal Foreign Affairs, and was considered the manifesto of US foreign policy after the fall of the Soviet Union. With his publication, Huntington established the foundation of what would become the dominant and unchallenged narrative discourse in world politics during the 1990s and 2000s, especially after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Huntington created the discourse of "Islam is the enemy" and "Islam is the new bogeyman," to use Stephen Walt's analogy. Now, twenty-five years after its publication, this article evaluates whether Huntington's assumption was correct. Does Islam really represent a global threat? And are Muslims the bogeymen of the twenty-first century? The answer, according to this article, is emphatically no! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the long and checkered relationship between Islam and the West entered a new phase. The sense of suspicion and denouncement that swept through the public sphere of many European countries and the United States was accompanied by major changes in governmental policies and a shift in the politics in each country that has witnessed or suffered from the repercussions of these attacks; this has been exasperated further by the rise of Islamic State (ISIS). This study uses different types of data sources and focuses on the previous academic work on establishing institutions of higher education within an existing unique context to examine the challenges that these institutions face on both the policy and political levels due to the prevailing current geopolitical climate vis-àvis Islam. While focusing on the present and offering some insights into the future, this paper provides a base for a more comprehensive historical overview of the main policy changes by creating a timeline of key changes in the policies and mapping the significant events that have had an impact. It is designed to investigate challenges and opportunities of Islamic higher education institutions and programs from a policy perspective and within the changing political governmental agenda specifically in the United States, and it offers a preliminary analysis of the dynamics of these evolving transformations. Considering the emerging need to revisit these institutions and the more recent recurring calls to reform existing Western Islamic studies programs, this paper fills another gap in the literature by providing some recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended as an epilogue and concludes the papers of this collection by analyzing their content from the specific vantage point of a comparison with parallel developments and phenomena in the Maghrib and particularly in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus). The issues studied in the collection are thus reviewed in a wider geographical and chronological context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years scholars have challenged the concept of an Islamic city by constructing a historical narrative in which it derives from the orientalist tradition. They claim that French orientalists in the early twentieth century created an ideal type of the Islamic city as contrasted with its Western counterpart in order to support the assumptions of orientalist discourse. The first part of the article challenges this assumption by showing that the French orientalists did not in fact posit an Islamic city type. The second part offers an alternative explanation for the genesis of the concept by tracing it to the work of American anthropologists in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gramsci recognised the inestimable historical contribution of Muslim and Arab civilisations, writing on these in his newspaper articles, his pre-prison letters and the Prison Notebooks. The lslamic world contemporary with him was largely rural, with the masses heavily influenced by religion, analogous in some ways to Italy whose economy was still largely oriented towards a peasantry among whom the Vatican played a leading (and highly reactionary) role. In addition to factors such as the politics-religion nexus, what Gramsci was also analysing, without saying as much explicitly, was the upheaval caused by the disintegration and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, and the inter-imperialist rivalries over the spoils and the construction of new states from its ruins. Here he draws attention to the first hesitant and contradictory anticolonial stances being adopted among the traditional leaders, as well recognising the basis for more popularly-based movements. In both Catholic countries and, as Gramsci knew especially from the experience of his Comintern work, in parts of the Muslim world, these movements could at times assume a left and politically radical orientation. What emerges is a picture of conflicting hegemonies involving principally religion, class, the political ambivalence of many religious leaders, and a burgeoning nationalism contraposed to the supra-nationalist claims of religion. But the factor underlying everything is the potential of the masses who, if awakened from torpor and detached from European colonialism, were judged capable of rupturing previous imperially-determined equilibria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Siyar or Islamic Law of Nations has gone through a period of sclerosis due to the decline of the Islamic Civilisation. This article identifies two issues that have a bearing on the modern application of siyar. First, the interaction between revelation and reason is relevant in the formulation and application of Siyar rules in the world today, which can be accomplished via siyāsah shariyyah or Sharīah-oriented policy. Second, the notion of 'State'-the main subject of international law-may point to difficulties in appreciation of the Siyar concept of territories (dār) in the modern world. These concepts are evolving, based on the need for Muslim States to protect themselves from foreign aggression. Finally, Siyar can be institutionalised through the sources of modern international law, but whether this can be achieved depends on gaining consent from the Muslim States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following pages examine the relationship between the prophet Muhammad's sacrifice of the camels and the distribution of his hair at the conclusion of his farewell pilgrimage just before his death. A study of the accounts of the Prophet's camel sacrifice shows that it prefigures the annual rites of the Hajj using the biblical model of Abraham's sacrifice to align other pre-Islamic practices, including those associated with the cult at Mecca, with the origins of a specifically Islamic civilization. The prophet Muhammad's distribution of his hair, detached from his body at the time of his desacralization from the Hajj delineates the Meccan sanctuary as the place of origination from which was spread both the physical and textual corpus of the Prophet's life. Whether by design or not, the traditional Islamic descriptions of this episode from the life of the prophet Muhammad are not unlike narratives found in Buddhist, Iranian, Christian and other traditions in which the body of a primal being is dismembered to create a new social order. Through the gift of the sacrificial camels and parts of his own body, the prophet Muhammad is portrayed, in this episode, as making a figurative and literal offering of himself at the origins of Islamic civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the organizing ideological and infrastructural principles of the Safavid state structure and questions whether the Safavid state had the capacity and universality to qualify as an empire. Until now, the Safavid state has only been given equal status to the Ottoman and Mughal state as a "gunpowder empire". But with this approach some other aspects tip the balance towards the cohesion and coherence that enabled the Safavid Empire to function as an empire in spite of exiguous economic resources and the limitations of ideological underpinnings. When some of these aspects lost their force, this contributed to the dissolution of the glue that kept Iranian society together and to the demise of the Safavid state in the early eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between empires and commercial institutions is a well-known feature of pre-industrial Muslim empires, such as the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires. Rulers constructed religious monuments and civic institutions that simultaneously functioned as commercial centers. The key to this symbiotic relationship is the institution of waqf, the so-called "charitable endowments" that supplied funds to support mosques, schools, baths and other religious institutions. The endowments largely drew their funds from shops, bazars or caravanserais usually built nearby. Therefore a great mosque or madrasa often became a commercial center. This situation was the conscious result of imperial commitment to stimulating the commercial exchange, which would supply and enrich these states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western scholars generally agree that early hadīth critics limited their authentication of hadīths to examining isnāds. The argument that these critics took the matn into account has relied on material of dubious reliability or on works produced after the formative period of the Sunni hadīth tradition. By providing examples of matn criticism from the 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries, I prove that Sunni hadīth critics did in fact engage in matn criticism; and I argue that these critics consciously manufactured the image of exclusive focus on the isnād in an effort to ward off attacks by rationalist opponents. By demonstrating a high correlation between the hadīths found in early books of transmitter criticism and those found in later books of forged hadīth with explicit matn criticism, I show that early critics engaged in matn criticism far more often than appears to have been the case, disguising this activity in the language of isnād criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which examined concepts related to Islamic civilization. Characteristics of Islamic cultures as compared with other religions; Dimensions of culture and cultural values; Relevance of religion to economic growth.

The article analyses the influence of the ulama (Islamic religious scholars), on the Acehnese society in Indonesia. Islam is the religion of the large majority of Indonesians. As reformers the ulama seemed to perform the role of intellectuals who brought new ideas into society. With Islam they created a common bond among all the Acehnese based on the concept of equality of men under religion despite the differences in social identifications which separated them. The most important change experienced by the ulama has been in the field of their religious education. This was largely due to the ideas of Islamic modernism that first came to Aceh through many ways and from different places during the Dutch colonial rule. The hardest one to evaluate is the development of their intellectual quality vis-a-vis the other important group, the new intellectuals. It is true that their modernized religious schools have adopted a substantial number of secular subjects, but they seem to have not succeeded very far in widening the intellectual horizon of their graduates.

The Islamic city stands out clearly in the landscape, un-blurred till yesterday by blighted suburbia, unburdened by the weight of centuries. Wherefrom Islam is a most interesting field for the urban sociologist and its urban history, so different from the European, provides an intelligible lesson in the dynamics of city building and urbanization. The European and Islamic cities differ in their formative process. The Islamic city was often a passing affair, the brief adventure of a rising dynasty which ambitioned a seat for its power and a worthy memorial of its passage. The earth in Islam is pockmarked with the skeletons of dead cities and those, which passed the test of time, have inherited, for a relatively limited tradition, large domains and undisputed gravitational fields. Given the choice, to create new cities rather than to add to an existing fund of urban life, one learn more about the dynamics of urbanization from this culture than by exploring the obscure origins of the polis or the European mediaeval city. Urbanization in the West has been a one-shot process, and one is still riding the wave, which began as a ripple at the end of the Neolithic revolution. In Islam, urbanization is Penelope's handiwork, which the suitors alone, blinded by the promise of a complete tapestry, could not understand.