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"This is the first comprehensive social, intellectual and religious history of the wide-spread Sabbatean movement from its birth in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to the Republic of Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century, claiming that they owed their survival to the internalization of the Kabbalistic "burden of silence"--
Immanuel Wallerstein is one of the most important and yet controversial thinkers and activists of our time, writing on a wide range of topics from global economics and international politics. To Wallerstein, capitalist world-system, which was created over the last five hundred years, and whose main ideology was liberalism, has been going through a deep structural crisis since the 1970s. He maintains that this system will be replaced by other and perhaps better systems in the mid or long run. In his works in last few decades, Wallerstein has devoted almost all of his energy and time analyzing and explaining how the capitalist system could be replaced by a better system. In that regards, he considers Islamism as one of the most important dissenting movements in the World-System, but necessarily as a powerful force to replace it. This volume contains his articles and commentaries on Islam, the Middle East and the World-System, all of which were published since the Arab Spring.
“Superb... A tour de force.” —Ebrahim Moosa “Provocative... Aydin ranges over the centuries to show the relative novelty of the idea of a Muslim world and the relentless efforts to exploit that idea for political ends.” —Washington Post When President Obama visited Cairo to address Muslims worldwide, he followed in the footsteps of countless politicians who have taken the existence of a unified global Muslim community for granted. But as Cemil Aydin explains in this provocative history, it is a misconception to think that the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single entity. How did this belief arise, and why is it so widespread? The Idea of the Muslim World considers its...
In the early centuries of Islam, Muslim scholars developed countless scientific disciplines in attempting to classify, investigate, and utilise the hadiths and the sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. As none of these sciences evolved into a fully-fledged hadith science, scholars began to implement the methodology of fiqh in examining the hadiths. After Imam al Shafii in the ninth century, hadiths were almost exclusively confined to the realm of legal studies. This new legalistic and literalist approach to the hadith created serious problems, primarily for two reasons, the Prophet did not intend that each of his words and utterances should form the basis of a legal system, and unlike the Quran, the Prophets statements were transmitted over generations and not always verbatim and therefore recorded hadiths could not be treated as immutable legal documents. The aim of this book is to demonstrate the necessity of creating a new hadith science.
The dawn of the Cold War marked a new stage of complex U.S. foreign policy involvement in the Middle East. More recently, globalization and the region’s ongoing conflicts and political violence have led to the U.S. being more politically, economically, and militarily enmeshed – for better or worse—throughout the region. This book examines the emergence and development of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East from the early 1900s to the present. With contributions from some of the world’s leading scholars, it takes a fresh, interdisciplinary, and insightful look into the many antecedents that led to current U.S. foreign policy. Exploring the historical challenges, regional allian...
This book examines the place Antisemitism occupies within Turkish history and society, especially since the rise of the AKP. It also elucidates and analyses the various actors, factors, and changes that the term and the phenomena "Antisemitism" have gone through. Additionally the book presents the Turkish regime's relations, attitude, and approach toward the Turkish-Jewish community in Turkey.
Daddy, why do they call us Dönmeh? is a collection of interviews through which the author was able to shine a light on the famous messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi from the 17th century and which continues to survive in its multiple identities. Even if today most of the old community has disappeared, the remaining few members of this society keep fighting to preserve their traditions by telling stories about their families as well as by laying bare both their fears and hopes for the future of the Salonican. Suzan Nana Tarablus was born in Istanbul. She graduated from the Arnavutköy American College for Girls and studied American Language and Literature at Istanbul University. During the ...
The Heresy of Jacob Frank is the first monograph length study on the religious philosophy of Jacob Frank (1726-1791), who, in the wake of false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. Based on close readings of Frank's late teachings, recorded in 1784 and 1790, this book challenges scholarly presentations of Frank that depict him as a sex-crazed "degenerate," and presents Frank as an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic, Kabbalah and Western Esotericism.Frank's worldview combines a skeptical rejection of religious law as ineffectual and repressive with a supernatural, esoteric myth of immortal beings, mat...
The Business of Transition examines how the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigated the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In this social and cultural history, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst revolution and war, rising ethnic tensions, and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourg...
Markus Dressler tells the story of how a number of marginalized socioreligious communities, traditionally and derogatorily referred to as Kizilbas (''Redhead''), captured the attention of the late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish nationalists and were gradually integrated into the newly formulated identity of secular Turkish nationalists.