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Abstract
In 1796, Claude Martin (1735–1800), a wealthy French officer of the East India Company living in Lucknow, commissioned the Brahman Delārām to translate into Persian two classical texts from the Digambara Jain philosophical tradition. Using the Braj Bhāṣā commentaries composed by the seventeenth-century Jain author Hemrāj Pāṇḍe, Delārām was able to access the original Prakrit texts of the eighth- and tenth-century philosophers Kundakunda and Nemicandra via an updated vernacularized version. His translations are as an exceptional document showing the hermeneutic tools that a Persian-speaking Brahman could use to parse the doctrinal system of Jainism. Delārām’s language was markedly shaped by his familiarity with Advaita Vedānta and the “unity of being (vahdat al-vojud)” school of Sufism, focused on ontological unity. More specifically, the Sufi-Advaita idiom that developed in Persian from the early Mughal period onward functioned for Delārām as a lens through which he could engage with the doctrinal diversity of India’s religious landscape. His efforts to translate the unfamiliar and sometimes perplexing elements of Jainism reveal the complex modalities of crossing linguistic and religious boundaries through Persian in South Asia and their partial incommensurabilities.
Abstract
Alan Ward, an Irishman newly graduated from Oxford, arrived in Diyarbakir in the autumn of 1960 to teach at an elite high school. Within four months of his stay, though, he was deported from Turkey due to his interest in Kurdish. Back in Europe, he wrote a poem about the Kurds and Diyarbakir in the Occitan language, with the title La Còrda Roja (The Red Rope) in reference to Kurds hanged under the Turkish state. Discovered by Kurdish solidarity movements in the mid-1960s, he was drawn into Kurdish language and literature studies and produced several works, part of which have remained unpublished in archives. This article introduces Alan Ward as a little-known protagonist of the Kurdology of the 1960s based on both published and unpublished works authored by him as well as his correspondence with Silvio van Rooy, the founder of the International Society Kurdistan.
Abstract
Indo-Pacific, connected by water and the strait of Malacca, is home to great civilizations encompassed Africa, Asia and the Archipelagos in between. Nevertheless, Western civilization intervened and strongly influenced the societies when the era of colonialism begun. Hence, the societies are disrupted, and nation-states are created imitating what European colonial powers conveyed, especially one of the indigenous and most prominent civilizations such as Islam. Along with the rise of the Muslim population in the Indo-Pacific, Islam, as one of the remaining civilizations and Muslim society (ummah), has to strive in its native land to keep the rights upheld. This paper will examine the problematical condition that occurred after decolonization in Indo-Pacific or Global South, which ummah faced in the nation-state model and being a minority at the same time. The qualitative design will be utilized as the methodology with critical interpretative method which will be written inductively. It intends to answer the rise of ummah that contributes to globalizing International Relations (ir) by providing an alternative international system in the post-colonial era that was previously shaped by Euro-American centrism. The paper will also emphasize the history of Asia as a significant momentum in ir discipline, and as an attempt to criticize the Euro-American centric model during the colonialism era in Global South societies by exhibiting examples in ummah condition who struggle within its nation-state in post-colonial era due to the absence of mutual understanding and the perpetuation of ethnopolitical conflict as the legacy of Western colonialism and imperialism.
Abstract
This article revisits the political thought of Filipino statesman Claro M. Recto (1890–1960), with a focus on the idea of nationalism. Upon his return to Congress in 1952, Recto advocated for Filipino nationalism in response to the so-called “special relationship” between the Philippines and the United States in the post-independence period. He claimed that the Philippines, though granted independence in 1946, remained under the disparaging political and economic influence of the United States because of one-sided treaties. In Recto’s mind, this “special relationship” was the main reason for the country’s retrogression in attaining political and economic growth and development. Throughout his post-independence career in Congress, Recto was consistent in his posture of advocating Filipino nationalism. This article uncovers that Recto’s nationalist crusade was anti-imperialist in principle against American neocolonialism thus only protective of the welfare of the Filipinos. This rereading of Recto’s political thought hopes to add more nuance understanding about him, but it also deepens our understanding of the essence of nationalism in the postcolonial period in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
Abstract
The present study is an analysis of a treatise (risāla) by the 18th-century Mālikī al-Tāwudī in which he discusses a doctrinal detail regarding bayʿ al-thunyā, a common stratagem to circumvent the prohibition of interest. I use al-Tāwudī’s text as a lens to reconstruct the hermeneutical perspective of a Muslim jurist of the late premodern era. In the first section, I show that al-Tāwudī’s legal reasoning is strongly informed by the legacy of Mālikī discourse on bayʿ al-thunya, which is one of constant disagreement over the acceptability of the institution. In the course of this conflict, various doctrinal compromises were negotiated, only to be challenged again by the invention of new stratagems or by rigorist backlashes. Al-Tāwudī’s treatise must be understood as part of this doctrinal tug of war.
In the second section, I analyze al-Tāwudī’s epistemological premises. I show that his legal reasoning is strictly exegetical, except that the object of this exegesis is not Qurʾān and Sunna, as proposed in classical uṣūl al-fiqh, but the school’s literary corpus. This corpus, in turn, is hierarchically structured. It consists of many layers of texts, accumulated over centuries and tightly interwoven by intertextual references, with certain texts enjoying a particularly authoritative status. Against this background, reasoning becomes a game of artful referencing. Successful argumentation requires claiming a maximum of authority within the school tradition in support of one’s position.
Abstract
This article offers new evidence on commercial financing in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It examines the little-known role of cash waqfs (nukud-ı mevkufe), Islamic trusts, in supporting Ottoman trade with Europe in the sixteenth century. Most of scholarship on cash waqfs considers this institution exclusively as a provider of micro-credit to consumers because the Islamic legal framework allegedly hindered capital accumulation from this institution. By focusing on the cash waqfs of Sarajevo in Ottoman-Venetian trade in the Adriatic Sea in the 1580s, I demonstrate that this institution could also operate as a source of commercial capital supporting large-scale business ventures. I argue that this was the case in Sarajevo because of the absence of other major capital providers in that city and of the specific role played by local artisanal associations (esnaf) in the foundation and administration of these endowments as well as in the conduct of international trade. These findings for Sarajevo are another demonstration of the operational diversity and flexibility of Islamic credit institutions in the pre-modern period.
Abstract
This article presents an overview of Chinese-language historiography concerning ancient maritime trade between the Mediterranean and East Asia. It examines the impact of institutional structures, political context and wider questions within the Chinese research environment, revealing inter-disciplinary intersections and recent trends, including towards the intensive study of numismatic evidence and the centring of the (maritime) Silk Road as the focal point of a growing research community. This article aims to enable future research collaboration, in a contemporary context in which scholars working in China are often more aware of key debates in western scholarship than vice versa.
Abstract
Current and past historical research on Russia and China’s borderlands heavily relies on the concept of ethnicity. Both the Russian and Qing empires ascribed to an “ethnic mode of ruling” in their borderlands, reflected in the estate inorodtsy and the Eight Banner system. In view of how strongly state-determined categories of ethnic identification can influence historical analysis, this paper observes that the focus of research is shifting from “ethnicity” to “regionality”. The paper also explores how the communist regimes in Russia and China of the 20th century handled the legacy of the multiethnic empire with the politicization of ethnic groups.
Abstract
This article examines the shifting lines between ethics and law in the policing and punishment of prostitution in nineteenth-century Tehran. It begins by exploring Tehran’s urban policing and legal institutions before examining how illicit sexual acts were defined alternatively as sins or crimes, depending on the relative publicness of the act, in prescriptive and legal texts. It then turns to how this played out in practice by analyzing a first-hand account of a private party and a rare testimonial document signed by neighborhood residents complaining about a pimping and procurement ring in their midst. Prostitutes and pimps regularly evaded penal sanction through close contacts with the police, which prompted an array of government strategies to address prostitution. Finally, the article ends by discussing known cases of punishment for prostitution and pimping in Tehran, including two Tehrani prostitutes whose crimes drew the attention of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh.