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In This Issue
| This issue contains three articles and dual review essays. The articles examine Islamic legal communities, nineteenth-century
French historical thought, and the cultural context of state formation in South Africa. The review essays assess recent historiographical trends in the history of the European Enlightenment. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. |
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Articles | |
| Nimrod Hurvitz takes as his point of departure the fact that Islamic jurists led huge movements named madhahib, which played central roles in Islamic societies, politics, and intellectual discourse for over a millennium. These movements pose an obvious yet unexplored question: How were small groups of jurists transformed into mass movements? Hurvitz's answer focuses on the early Islamic era and on the Hanbali madhhab in what is now Iraq. He argues that if we want to grapple with the formation of such a unique and pivotal institution as the madhhab, we need to look at the intellectual and attitudinal complex that was shared by the Hanbali intellectual elite and their numerous lay followers. In the Hanbali case, this shared worldview was the esteem given to personal piety and a propensity to impose such ideals on all Muslims. As a consequence, Hanbalism adopted a posture of militant social activism that has accompanied it since its inception and up to its twenty-first-century offshoot—Wahhabism. The analytical approach advanced by Hurvitz highlights the interplay between social history and the history of ideas, and thus it encourages us to open new angles from which to study Islamic or other socio-religious movements. |
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| Jonathan Dewald sets the development of French thinking about social history within a seldom-examined intellectual context: the historical writings of a group of prominent mid-nineteenth-century men of letters, including Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Hippolyte Taine, and Ernest Renan. Little read today, these writers exercised an immense influence on their contemporaries across Europe and North America. Dewald contends that these men envisioned history as the study of society and social psychologies, and not merely—or even primarily—the study of political leaders. Consequently, they explored the differing sensibilities that characterized different historical eras, the forms of popular violence, the history of women, and a variety of related topics. Although they stressed the scientific character of their analyses, these writers also sharply distinguished their efforts from the scholarship of the emerging research universities. Instead, these historians emphasized linkages between historical research and other forms of intellectual life, and all of them wrote fiction and literary criticism as well as history. Dewald contends that his analysis of their scholarship suggests the need for a revised genealogy for our own historical practice, one that attends to intellectual currents outside the universities as well as to those within them. He insists that a new appreciation of their writing should also spur us to rethink the political sources of social history's emergence. In this case, the writers that Dewald examines were all conservatives, who responded in ambivalent ways to the historical changes around them. Their pessimism, he maintains, helps explain their interest in the irrational in history and their emphasis on profound differences between historical eras. Dewald's article thus suggests how attention to our own discipline's past can help us understand its present in new and compelling ways. |
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| Clifton Crais explores the cultural history of state formation and African resistance in the Transkei, South Africa. As a case study, he uses the ritualized murder of a European official to analyze the relationship between chiefs and magistrates and the ways in which Africans understood the emerging colonial order. Crais argues for a political history that uses the insights of recent cultural anthropology to understand state formation, political practice, and African culture, agency, and consciousness. He emphasizes the importance of exploring conquest as a cross-cultural encounter, instead of seeing conquest as the story of European imposition and African reaction. He emphasizes the daily activities of early colonial officials, the technologies they deployed, and the way they made claims to rule over others. Africans understood European technology and the work of bureaucrats using a political grammar that connected political authority with magic. In Africanizing the state, he concludes, they substantially blurred both the theory and practice of early colonialism in South Africa. Crais thus has crafted a compelling case for putting the state back into colonial history. |
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Review Essays | |
| The two review essays examine the recent literature on the Enlightenment from very different perspectives. |
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| Jonathan Sheehan asserts that until recently scholars have assumed that the Enlightenment was a fundamentally secularizing force, one that sought nothing less than the speedy extinction of religion. But in the past ten years, he argues, religion has returned to the Enlightenment. While modern scholars have long listened carefully to the complaints of the devout, they have just rediscovered that religion in the eighteenth century was not only alive and well but indeed at the very heart of its intellectual life. This resurrection of religion has happened along a broad resurgence of historical interest in religious topics since 1989. But, Sheehan insists, the debut of religion on the stage of the Enlightenment has been one of the most dramatic moments in this shift. After all, he reminds us, the Enlightenment has traditionally been read as the very cradle of the secular world. Making religion into a cornerstone of the Enlightenment thus raises troubling questions about the precise nature of this secularizing vision. Sheehan maps this new enthusiasm for matters of the spirit onto what he sees as a communal discomfort with the history of the Enlightenment and modernity. The injection of religion into the Enlightenment, he maintains, is part of a revision of the history of secular society that has sent the very category of "the Enlightenment"—long defined as an anti-religious philosophical program—into great turmoil. In the end, though, Sheehan concludes, these difficulties are productive because they help historians develop more expansive and rigorous approaches to the Enlightenment, religion, and secular modernity. And his essay suggests how this literature can also be used to address similar issues in other times and places. |
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| Dale K. Van Kley focuses his essay on two recent, distinguished, and lifework-like summations on the subject of Christianity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: John McManners' two volumes on eighteenth-century France for the Oxford series and Bernard Plongeron's global survey for the Deslée series. He situates the two works in the wider historiographical trend that emphasizes Christianity's complicity in the making of secular "modernity" and that correspondingly deemphasizes the degree to which the varieties of eighteenth-century Christianity were incompatible with a similarly diverse Enlightenment. Although he argues that the two works of synthesis exemplify this trend, Van Kley explains that they also make it more difficult than ever to explain why the century should have had to end with the dechristianizing phase of the French Revolution as well as the Terror from which this phase is inseparable. Comparing the authors' implicit or explicit attempts to explain the discontinuity of dechristianization, he argues for the radical exceptionality of France as evidenced in part by the anticlerical cast of the French Enlightenment. He also contends that this exceptionality cannot be explained without reference to the Reformation-vintage religious controversies that lasted longer and raged more intensely in France than anywhere else in eighteenth-century Christendom. In this way, his essay addresses at once the state of the literature on eighteenth-century Christianity, the European Enlightenment, and the problem of explaining the Terror in the French Revolution. By doing so, it addresses larger concerns in the history of religion generally and Christianity more particularly. |
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