Browse results
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.
Abstract
Genesis and development of ethnic and national identities have been topics of continual interest and importance for historical research but, as taken for granted, may obscure the similarities between populations now recognized as separate groups and blur social and cultural boundaries between distinct sub-groups within a community. This article explores how the scope and application of identities as determined by “place” and by “people” as well as a combined emphasis on both place and people have evolved in the modern history of Northeast China, with broader implications for the study of Asia through comparison with other regions of the world.
Abstract
While Shāh Walī Allāh’s political letters have been the subject of much scholarly discussion, they are still deeply misunderstood. These misunderstandings are due, primarily, to erroneous attributions of recipients, misidentified individuals in the letters, and the failure to read these “political letters” alongside Walī Allāh’s broader epistolographic corpus, contemporary biographical texts and political chronicles of the period. This article argues that far from being a critic of the Mughal Empire per se, Walī Allāh was closely associated with leading members of ʿĀlamgīr II’s court. Moreover, his famous “invitation” to the Afghan ruler Aḥmad Shāh Abdālī, ostensibly asking him to invade Hindustan, should properly be understood as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to attract the favorable attention of a military leader in order to mitigate the danger posed by his troops.
Abstract
This research investigates the impact of “not burdening the state” as a practice of national identity on vaccine implementation in China’s response to COVID-19. The study shows how vaccination provides a pathway for some Chinese citizens to practice “immunity national identity,” creating solidarity by invoking individual obligation toward the collective and the state. In this process, the science of vaccines is politicized, contributing to the building of a sense of belonging to and identification with the state. By showing how the immunized and vaccinated body works as a site generating the community of the nation-state, this research argues that immunity, residing beyond the healthy body and entangled with national identity, becomes a means of strengthening and imagining “us.” This paper shows how the sense of belonging to the nation interacts with vaccine-related information, influencing individuals’ willingness to accept vaccines, and how the act of vaccination and public knowledge about vaccines further shape national identity.
Abstract
With the advent of biomedicine in India, vaccination has been studied in tandem with the colonial commitment to exercise control over imperial subjects. The history of smallpox vaccination in India is entangled with the Goddess Śītalā – “controller” of epidemics. Despite the eradication of the epidemic, faith in the goddess reigns among her devotees. This ethnographic study suggests that Śītalā devotees are informed by a plurality of understandings of body, disease, and prophylaxis in the Covidian age; I argue that Śītalā practices and the irreducible faith in the goddess aid in sustaining trust in biomedical interventions like vaccines among her devotees. Based on fieldwork conducted in West Bengal, I further argue that Śītalā’s place as a “lesser” or “lower-caste” deity worshipped mostly by marginalized sections of society makes their active demand for vaccination an act of assertion.