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Notwithstanding the many precedents for economic boycott before the crusader period, the first evidence of a Christian offensive other than on the battlefield appears only in the second half of the twelfth century, almost seventy years after the Council of Clermont. This paper aims to complement Moore's theory about the emergence of the Christian persecuting society with an additional case that, from a medieval Christian point of view, associates two of the Devil's main partners: first and foremost Muslims but also Christian merchants who profited from trading with them. It is the premise of this study that the many bans on trade with the Muslims in the crusader period – both in their essence and timing – and the reactions that they aroused reveal conflicting attitudes toward Muslims and Islam, thus contributing new perspectives for the study of the crusades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been some controversy recently over the identity of the first mayor of Nicosia during British rule. This paper seeks to clarify the issue by putting it into context. What was Nicosia like between 1878 and 1882? What exactly do we mean by the words 'mayor' and 'municipal council'? How was the town administered then and how and to what extent did municipal procedures change in the subsequent years? The material researched suggests that the unusual circumstances of the occupation created a prolonged period of transition during which basic municipal functions were essentially directed by British officials. It was not until 1882 that a substantial shift from an Ottoman to a more British colonial form of administration took place. The resulting reforms provided the islanders with a judiciary independent of the executive, and a partially elected legislature. Nicosia was, on the whole, slower than the coastal towns to make the most of the opportunity for municipal self-government that the new legislation also offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the fashioning of a new discursive realm of Islamic kingship in thirteenth–fourteenth-century Mongol-ruled Iran (the Ilkhanate). It examines how literati, historians, and theologians ingeniously experimented at the Ilkhanid court with Persian and Islamic concepts and titles to translate and elaborate their Mongol patrons' claims to govern through a unique affinity with heaven. The fusion of Mongol and Islamic elements formulated a new political vocabulary of auspicious, sacred, cosmic, and messianic rulership that Turco-Mongol Muslim courts, starting in the fifteenth century, extensively appropriated and expanded to construct new models of imperial authority. A comparison with Buddhist and Confucian assimilative approaches to the Mongol heaven-derived kingship points to a reciprocal process. Mongol rulers were not simply poured into preset Muslim and Persian molds; symbols and titles were selectively appropriated and refashioned into potent vessels that could convey a vision of Islamic kingship that addressed Chinggisid expectations. From their desire to collect and assume local religious and political traditions that could support and enhance their own legitimizing claims, the Mongols set in motion a process that led to their own integration into the Perso-Islamic world, and also facilitated the emergence of new political theologies that enabled models of divine kingship to inhabit the Islamic monotheistic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the theme of inter-religious translation in the context of early modern India. More specifically, it considers the prominent 18th century Sufi master and scholar Mirzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān's (d.1781) translation of Hindu thought and practice as reflected in his Persian letters on this subject. Through a close reading of the content and context of his translation project, I show that while according the Hindu 'other' remarkable doctrinal hospitality, Jān-i Jānān's view of translation was firmly tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology committed to upholding the exceptionality of Muslim normative authority. Interrogating his negotiation of hospitality and exceptionality and the notions of time that undergirded that negotiation occupies much of this essay. I also explore ways in which Jān-i Jānān's translation of Hinduism might engage ongoing scholarly conversations regarding the rupture of colonial modernity in the discursive career of religion in South Asia. In the Euro-American study of religion, many scholars have shown the intimacy of modern secular power and the reconfiguration of religion as a universally translatable category. But what conceptual and historiographical gains might one derive by shifting the camera of analysis from the colonial reification of religion to the inter-religious translation efforts of a late 18th century thinker like Jān-i Jānān who wrote at the cusp of colonial modernity? This question hovers over the problem-space of this essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a spatial approach to the recent history of conflict and confrontation between the Ethiopian Government and Ethiopian Muslim Communities in Addis Ababa. Based on original ethnographic data and inspired by existing academic studies on political-religious relationships in Addis Ababa, this study takes a closer look at the significance of the urban public landscape in power-struggles between the EPRDF and the Muslim communities. The article argues that political-religious struggle in Addis Ababa shapes the current urban landscape, as use of and control over urban public space and place forms a crucial element in the strategies of public authority of all involved actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines some aspects of the reception of French Spiritism and psychical research in twentieth century Iran: its promotion by Iranian modernist intellectuals before the Second World War, and its appropriation by Shi‘i Muslim ‘ulama in the 1940s and 1960s. Spiritism appealed to those intellectuals and scholars who sought to reconcile their commitments to science with their religious longings and dedication to moral reform. In comparing these encounters with spirit communication, I show that the adoption of putatively scientific claims in contexts that professional scientists usually disavow can be about much more than strategic appropriation and attempts to justify preexisting doctrines. They also allow us to understand science's power to mold the moral subjectivities of reformers through selective absorption into long-continuous traditions of virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shi‘i communities of South Asia, roughly 60 million people, represent, after those of Iran, the second largest grouping of Shi‘as in the Muslim world. Until recently our knowledge of them has not matched their numbers. Indeed, they, and here I refer to the Twelver Shi‘as rather than the Isma‘ilis, have suffered from the paradox of being both highly visible but in scholarly terms largely invisible. Where the Shi‘a live in South Asian towns and cities, arguably, no community has been more visible or more audible: visible because of their great processions at Muharram; and audible, certainly at Muharram, but also throughout the year in their majalis, as they recount the events of Karbala, often transmitting them by loudspeaker to the muhalla. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the intellectual life and organizational work of an Indian Muslim activist and journalist, M. O. Abbasi, a largely forgotten figure who nonetheless stood at the center of colonial-era debates over the public role of Islam in mainland Tanzania. His greatest impact was made through the Anjuman Islamiyya, the territory's leading pan-Islamic organization that he co-founded and modeled on Indian modernist institutions. The successes and failures of Abbasi and the Anjuman Islamiyya demonstrate the vital role played by Western Indian Ocean intellectual networks, the adaptability of transoceanic, pan-Islamic organizational structures, and, ultimately, the limits imposed on pan-Islamic activism by racial politics in colonial Tanzania. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The history of Islamic law in Russian Central Asia defies many of the categorizations offered by both global and Russian imperial history. Recent studies of law in the age of colonialism have concluded that the attainment of legal hegemony in the colonies was consequent upon the initiative of indigenes that strategically manipulated jurisdictions; as colonial subjects increasingly involved the state in their private conflicts, they effectively pushed their masters to consolidate the institutional arrangements through which the state dispensed justice. Historians of the Russian Empire have reached a diametrically different conclusion: under tsarist rule, they argue, Muslims continued to access the services of the “native courts,” which remained mostly untouched following Russia's southeastward expansion. As the empire promoted a policy of differentiated jurisprudence, Russians effectively safeguarded the integrity of Islamic law. I argue that both of the aforementioned approaches are confined to the level of institutional history, and thus fail to consider that the creation of colonial hegemony rested on ways in which colonial subjects understood law and viewed themselves as legal subjects. I show that Russians, from the outset of their rule in Central Asia, initiated Muslims into colonial forms of legality by overcoming the jurisdictional separation they had themselves put in place. In allowing the local population to file their grievances with the military bureaucracy, the Russians effectively pushed Central Asians to reify colonial notions of justice, and thereby distance themselves from the tradition of Islamic legal practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the transformation of the sacred landscape in the cities of Syria and Palestine from late antiquity to early Islam. This phase of urban and architectural history, often obscured by the changes brought in during the medieval period, is investigated through a close comparison of textual and material evidence related to the main urban religious complexes. It is suggested that the new Friday mosques were frequently built contiguous to Christian great churches, creating a sort of shared sacred area within the cities. Legal issues related to the Islamic conquest and the status of minorities are considered in order to explain the rationale behind such a choice by Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies on leadership in Southeast Asia's early modern era have tended to centre necessarily on men, and in particular, on O.W. Wolters' concept of ‘men of prowess’. The concept of female leadership is still little researched. This case study of Sultanah Safiatuddin Syah of Aceh (1641–75) provides some insights into female leadership in the Malay-Muslim island world of Southeast Asia. Contrary to the received view that successful leadership tended to be male (men of prowess), this article demonstrates that female leadership and the justification for the position of the ruler relied less on notions of sacral and charismatic power based on male prowess, but instead shifted to Muslim notions of piety and the just ruler. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study seeks to illuminate patterns of refugee settlement in the Bengali Muslim diaspora since 1947, which replicate global trends identified by Aristide Zolberg in new nation-states. Based on historical research and oral testimony gathered from over two hundred migrants in different settings in India, Bangladesh, and Britain, it suggests why some Muslims crossed borders after India's partition and others did not; why most moved only short distances within the delta; and why so many huddled in the shadow of the new national borders and so few traveled to the West. I uncover the subtle interplay between migrants' agency and structures of coercion, and between histories of mobility and of affect, in the shaping of migration choices, and explain how the recurrent patterns identified by Zolberg were produced in a regional context of critical but unexplored significance. The essay explores the impact of nation-state formation on older forms of mobility in the region, and the continuing interconnections between local micro-mobilities and regional, national, international, and trans-oceanic migrations. I suggest that the concept of "mobility capital" can help to explain not only patterns of migration, but also patterns of staying on. I conclude by questioning "cumulative causation theory," which has inadvertently lent credence to fears that the developed countries of the West will be "swamped" by immigrants drawn from ever-expanding migratory networks based in the "third world." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing its information from different documents in Portuguese and French archives, this article examines the evolution of Portuguese colonial policies towards Islam, focusing on the special case of Mozambique. Such policies evolved from an attitude of neglect and open repression, prevalent in the early years of the colonial war that broke out in 1965, when Muslims were perceived as the main supporters of the anti-colonial guerrilla in northern Mozambique, to an approach that tried to isolate ‘African Muslims’ from foreign influences in order to align them with the Portuguese. The article analyses the latter strategy, assessing its successes and failures, and the contributions made by several of those who were involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on social conditions of Muslims living in Western countries. Topics mentioned include the increase in the anti-Muslim sentiment after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the reports of a growing number of violations of civil rights in a context of securitization, and the work of researchers regarding discrimination against Western Muslims and their reaction.

What is Islamic about reform among Muslims and what is not? How can we differentiate reform within an Islamic paradigm and a paradigmatic shift from the Islamic tradition to something else in a Muslim community? How do we establish the connection between reform as an intellectual or scholarly project and the translation of that project into social reality (or, in some cases, the absence of such a translation)? This article addresses these questions in the context of the Volga-Ural region in the late Russian Empire, where reformist Muslims attempted to reform existing Islamic educational institutions, particularly the religious seminaries called “madrasas,” as a means to modernize the region's Muslim communities. Educational reform initiatives among Volga-Ural Muslims originated within the framework of Muslim networks and institutions. Yet, especially after Russia's Revolution of 1905, reform in a number of prominent madrasas came to be characterized by various non-religious and at times even anti-religious influences emerging from the globalization of Western European modernity. Consequently, in these madrasas, education and the overall student experience turned into a secularizing process, and Islam as a religious system lost its weight and appeal for many students, who then engaged in a reform movement that evolved beyond an Islamic paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]