History

Nearly one-third of Turkey’s official preaching workforce are women. Their numbers have risen considerably over the past two decades, fueled by an unforeseen feminization of higher religious education as well as the Directorate of Religious Affairs’ attempts to redress its historical gender imbalances. Created in the early Turkish Republic, the Directorate is also historically embedded in (re)defining the appropriate domains and formations of religion, and the female preachers it now employs navigate people’s potent fears rooted in memories of this fraught past. In the various neighborhoods of Istanbul, these preachers attempt to overcome conservative Muslims’ cautious ambivalence toward the interpretative and disciplinary powers of a secular state as well as assertive secularists’ discomfort and suspicion over increasingly visible manifestations of religiosity. Thus, the activities of state-sponsored female preachers are inescapably intertwined with the contestation of religious domains and authority in the secular Republic of Turkey and demonstrate an intricate interplay between the politics of religion, gender, and secularism in contemporary Turkish society.

Through an extensive analysis of early biographical dictionaries and histories, hadith collections and commentaries, as well as legal texts, I reconstruct the life of a female jurist from the third generation of Muslims. It was through informal networks of kinship and scholarship that ʿAmrah bint ʿAbd al-Rahman (d. 106/724) contributed to the core of Islamic knowledge in ways similar to her male contemporaries, while she also served as a resource within the community for the gender-specific concerns of women. The depth of her knowledge established ʿAmrah’s narrations as reliable evidence of the Prophet Muhammad’s conduct and endowed her own opinions and deeds with an authoritative weight respected by contemporaries and subsequent generations of Muslim scholars.

In the United States and Europe, the word “caliphate” has conjured historically romantic and increasingly pernicious associations. Yet the caliphate’s significance in Islamic history and Muslim culture remains poorly understood. This book explores the myriad meanings of the caliphate for Muslims around the world through the analytical lens of two key moments of loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. Through extensive primary-source research, Mona Hassan explores the rich constellation of interpretations created by religious scholars, historians, musicians, statesmen, poets, and intellectuals.

Hassan fills a scholarly gap regarding Muslim reactions to the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad in 1258 and challenges the notion that the Mongol onslaught signaled an end to the critical engagement of Muslim jurists and intellectuals with the idea of an Islamic caliphate. She also situates Muslim responses to the dramatic abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 as part of a longer trajectory of transregional cultural memory, revealing commonalities and differences in how modern Muslims have creatively interpreted and reinterpreted their heritage. Hassan examines how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have been evoked in Muslim culture, law, and politics, similar to the losses and repercussions experienced by other religious communities, including the destruction of the Second Temple for Jews and the fall of Rome for Christians.

A global history, Longing for the Lost Caliphate delves into why the caliphate has been so important to Muslims in vastly different eras and places.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10894.html

"No other book considers so deeply the afterlife of the caliphate as a literary, religious, and political theme in Islamic history. Mona Hassan provides vivid chapters on the lamentations for the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols and the murder of the last of the Baghdadi Abbasid caliphs, and gives a lucid account of the judicial theory of the caliphate in Mamluk-era Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Hassan shows that in the world of nation states, the caliphate remains an expression of the yearning for a universal religious identity."--Ira M. Lapidus, University of California, Berkeley

"How do religious communities imagine and sustain relationships with their pasts? What are the politics of cultural memory? What work do nostalgia and romance perform in the service of reimagined futures? These are the questions that the burgeoning scholarship on religion and collective memory poses. Into this field comes Mona Hassan’s Longing for the Lost Caliphate, an ambitious and sweeping exploration of the complex ways in which practices of memory and memorializing shape historical and contemporary political and communal imaginaries."--Elizabeth Castelli, Barnard College

"A significant achievement, this should be the first book given to those who ask why the caliphate is important to Muslim culture."--Francis Robinson, author of The Mughal Emperors

"A remarkable feat of interdisciplinary scholarship, this innovative book examines the persistence of the caliphate as a cultural symbol."--S. Sayyid, author of Recalling the Caliphate

Although Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī is primarily known for his seminal scholarship in the field of prophetic traditions or ḥadīth studies, he was also an accomplished poet.  In fact, as this article reveals, one of the poems that Ibn Ḥajar included in his carefully crafted collection from the ninth/fifteenth century struck a deep chord of Muslim memories surrounding a restored Islamic caliphate.  Far from the image of complete apathy to the Cairene Abbasids that has long been conventional wisdom, Ibn Ḥajar’s panegyric for al-Mustaʿīn (r. 808–16/1406–14) lauded the Abbasid caliph’s assumption of the Mamluk sultanate as a restoration of legitimate rule to the blessed family of the Prophet (Ahl al-Bayt).  In crafting his poem, Ibn Ḥajar draws upon a deep reservoir of devotional love for the Prophet’s family in the late Mamluk era, embodied by al-Mustaʿīn as the descendent of the Prophet’s uncle al-ʿAbbās, and upon a dynamic and evolving Islamic legal tradition on matters of governance.  Even though al-Mustaʿīn’s combined reign as sultan and caliph lasted only a matter of months, Ibn Ḥajar’s commemoration of it became a famous piece of cultural lore down through the last years of the Mamluk Sultanate and past the Ottoman conquest of Egypt.  Through exploring the intertwined histories of Ibn Ḥajar, al-Mustaʿīn, and their contemporaries, as well as analyzing published and manuscript recensions of Ibn Hajar’s poetry, topographies of Cairo, Mamluk chancery documents, and treatises on Islamic law and ḥadīth literature, this interdisciplinary article elucidates the religious and socio-political complexity of veneration for the Abbasid caliphate in the late Mamluk era.

NOTE Enhancing the Proliferation Security Initiative: The Case for a Decentralized Nonproliferation Architecture By Thomas D. Lehrman* Table of Contents I. Introduction 224 II. The Policy Goals 226 III. Mediating Conflicting Claims 228 A. Freedom of the Seas 228 B. Sovereignty and ...

This Article proposes a two-pronged legislative response to the current debate over medical malpractice insurance. The author does not advocate mandatory caps on malpractice damages, nor the imposition of a uniform regime on the field of medicine. Rather, he articulates some of the important legal, medical, and societal benefits that would come from embracing arbitration in the non-emergent medical malpractice context. The author also calls for the reformulation of the National Practitioner Data Bank to achieve greater transparentcy and to leverage advances in information technology and data-mining software to measure the risk levels of individual practitioners. This reform, in turn, would open up the possibility of greater subcategorization of premiums and more effective deterrence in medical malpractice insurance.