Author: Marc van Grondelle Publisher: Hurst Publishers ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 166
Book Description
Examines the processes and interactions which led to the modernisation and successful co-optation by the British government of this comparatively small branch of Shi'a Islam. The author poses several key questions regarding the wider developing relationship between movements in contemporary Islam and "The West".
Author: Teena Purohit Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674071581 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.
Author: Marc van Grondelle Publisher: ISBN: 9780231154406 Category : Great Britain Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Nizari Ismailis, once a small, legendary sect within Islam, grew to become a highly organized temporal and religious movement exerting far-ranging political and economic influence. A significant part of this shift was due to an increase in diplomatic relations between the British Empire, and later the British Commonwealth, and the Nizari Ismaili movement. Yet these interactions have never been seriously studied, subjecting a crucial component of Islamic history to conjecture and misinformation. Based on extensive archival research, Marc van Grondelle examines the events that led to the modernization and successful cooptation of this comparatively minor branch of Shi'a Islam. He raises several key questions regarding the interaction between movements in contomporary Islam and the West. Particularly significant is his discussion of how the British government effectively coopted a Muslim group for the group's own benefit, as well as the benefit of British foreign and colonial policy. Van Grondelle investigates the actions that shaped the Ismailis' relationship with London and the social and political conditions that determined their later contact. He also examines how this strange coexistence fully matured, considering some of the personal, institutional, and cultural complications that upset a delicately evolving relationship.
Author: Reuben A. Loffman Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3030173801 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
This book examines the relationship between Catholic missionaries and the colonial administration in southeastern Belgian Congo. It challenges the perception that the Church and the state worked seamlessly together. Instead, using the territory of Kongolo as a case study, the book reconfigures their relationship as one of competitive co-dependency. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, the book argues that both institutions retained distinct agendas that, while coinciding during certain periods, clashed on many occasions. The study begins by outlining the pre-colonial history of southeastern Congo. The second chapter examines how the Church began its encounters with the peoples in Kongolo and the Tanganyika province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Subsequent chapters highlight how missionaries exerted significant influence over the colonial construction of chieftainship and the politics of Congolese decolonization. The book ends in 1962, with the massacre of a number of Holy Ghost Fathers in an event that signaled the beginning of a more Africanized Church in Kongolo. ‘The author gratefully acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Research Council in the completion of this project.’
Author: Ahmet T. Kuru Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108419097 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 323
Book Description
Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.
Author: Daryoush Mohammad Poor Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1838600396 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies Muhammad Hasan al-Husayni, also known as Hasan 'Ali Shah and, more generally, as the Aga Khan (1804-1881), was the 46th Imam of the Nizari Ismailis and the first Ismaili Imam to bear the title of Aga Khan, bestowed on him by the contemporary Qajar monarch of Persia. This book is the first English translation of his memoirs, the 'Ibrat-afza, `A Book of Exhortation, or Example', and includes a new edition of the Persian text and a detailed introduction to the work and its context. The 'Ibrat-afza was composed in the year 1851, following the Ismaili Imam's departure from Persia and his permanent settlement in India. The text recounts the Aga Khan's early life and political career as the governor of the province of Kirman in Persia, and narrates the dramatic events of his conflict with the Qajar establishment followed by his subsequent travels and exploits in Afghanistan and British India. The 'Ibrat-afza provides a rare example of an autobiographical account from an Ismaili Imam and a first-hand perspective on the regional politics of the age. It offers a window into the history of the Ismailis of Persia, India and Central Asia at the dawn of the modern era of their history. Consequently, the book will be of great interest to both researchers and general readers interested in Ismaili history and in the history of the Islamic world in the nineteenth century.
Author: Nathalie Clayer Publisher: Hurst & Company ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 432
Book Description
In the enormous literature on the Muslim world, one of the few gaps in our knowledge is the status of Islam in inter-war Europe, an imbalance this book aims to address. The Muslim population of Europe in the period from 1918-1939 was not one of isolated islands of belief and practice. Rather, there was far more interaction between Muslim communities than had hitherto been imagined. For example, there was much correspondence and exchange of ideas between the Ahmadi-Lahori missions of Berlin and Woking, near London, and Albanian religious leaders. Other topics discussed in this book include the earlier than imagined emergence of notions of a distinctly 'European' Islam, the fraught interplay of politics and Islam, especially the development by some governments of Muslim 'agendas', the richness and importance of debates within Europe's Muslim community, the attempts by the Nazis to foment 'jihad' and the modus operandi of trans-national networks.
Author: E. Morier-Genoud Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137265000 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 358
Book Description
This volume investigates what role colonial communities and diaspora have had in shaping the Portuguese empire and its heritage, exploring topics such as Portuguese migration to Africa, the Ismaili and the Swiss presence in Mozambique, the Goanese in East Africa, the Chinese in Brazil, and the history of the African presence in Portugal.
Author: Marc van Grondelle
Author: Teena Purohit
Author: Marc van Grondelle
Author: Reuben A. Loffman
Author: John Iliffe
Author: Ahmet T. Kuru
Author: Daryoush Mohammad Poor
Author: Nathalie Clayer
Author: Soumen Mukherjee
Author: E. Morier-Genoud