Monica Ringer | Amherst College (original) (raw)
Papers by Monica Ringer
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
Modernist histories historicized and reimagined the Prophet Mohammad the prescriptive model of a ... more Modernist histories historicized and reimagined the Prophet Mohammad the prescriptive model of a rationalized, internalized ‘modern’ Islam. The historicization of the Prophet, and the emphasis on his ability to negotiate essence in context, suggests an entirely new Islamic methodology. The essence of Islam is located uniquely in the Quran, and the Prophet becomes an example of accurate understanding of this essence – God’s intent – and its manifestation in “laws” and institutions appropriate for his specific historical time period. Prophetic Hadith, therefore, must be historicized, in order to extract their essence, or intentionality, from their specific manifestation in context. This methodology destabilized the entire premise of the Sunna, and effectively unbound ‘Islam’ from Tradition. Tradition as precedent gave way to the continual contextualization of essence – a ‘permanent becoming.’ This enabled reformers to go ‘back to the Quran’ and retrieve God’s intent. This innovative h...
Contemporary Sociology, 2002
In this thought-provoking study, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity, exposing the E... more In this thought-provoking study, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity, exposing the Eurocentric prejudices and hostility to non-Western culture that have characterized its development. Focusing on the Iranian experience of modernity, he charts its political and intellectual history and develops a new interpretation of Islamic Fundamentalism through the detailed analysis of the ideas of key Islamic intellectuals. The author argues that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity, culture and historical experience. He concludes by assessing the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East in general, and in Iran in particular. A significant contribution to the literature on modernity, social change and Islamic Studies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of social theory and change, Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies and many related areas.
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History, 2020
Historicism, as the premise of historical context, together with ideas of universalism and progre... more Historicism, as the premise of historical context, together with ideas of universalism and progress, created a new epistemological and methodological landscape that by the 19th century demanded a redefinition and reconceptualization of the nature and function of religion. Muslim intellectuals, like modernists in other religious traditions, historicized Islamic history and proposed a new approach to the Quran, Hadith and the nature of tradition itself. They rejected tradition as historically constructed and thus contingent, proposing that tradition as content, and precedent as method, be discarded in favor of the reinterpretation of the ‘essence’ of Islam according to contemporary needs. Studies of modernity should shift from an attempt to align definitions with empirical realities, and instead focus on the emergence of claims to the modern. This enables us to understand commonalities and differences among various modernities – and to avoid falling into worn paths of seeing modernity...
Iranian Studies, 2009
This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity shoul... more This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, if the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The lens of Islamic Modernism is used to uncover the underlying epistemology and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. Muslim Modernists engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and modernity; they were in conversation with European scholarship and Catholic Modernism, but more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions. This book provides a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between Western and non-Western modernities. It demonstrates that Islamic Modernists adopted intellectual frameworks that first emerged in Europe, then deployed them to ar...
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History, 2020
The taxonomy of human religions, generated and confirmed as the guiding organizational grammar of... more The taxonomy of human religions, generated and confirmed as the guiding organizational grammar of European disciplines of religious studies, philology, and anthropology, claimed to map civilizational evolution. Muslim Modernists, in addition to locating Islam in this universal taxonomy, also explored Islam in history, rewriting Islamic history as the story of transcendent Islamic essence in a sequence of particular historical contexts. They determined the historical laws of progress that dictated the path of the ‘torch of civilization’ in order to provide a historical explanation for moments of progress, and to understand the reasons for present stagnation. These new Islamic Histories chart the interaction of Islam in historical context, beginning with the revelation of the Quran, the Prophet’s application of Quranic ideals – God’s intent – and the subsequent history of Islamic institutions in historical context, from the Rashidun through the Abbasid period. Islamic History demonstr...
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
By the nineteenth-century, the idea of ‘religion’ as a universal phenomenon had become firmly ent... more By the nineteenth-century, the idea of ‘religion’ as a universal phenomenon had become firmly entrenched. Religions in the particular were therefore expressions of this universal phenomena, mapped onto human civilizational evolution. The explanation of difference moved away from a theologically-based true/false binary, and was relocated onto a universal taxonomy of mankind’s religious evolution. In this conception, ‘primitive’ religions were symptomatic of ‘primitive’ civilizations, ‘advanced’ religions likewise belonging to and reflecting ‘advanced’ civilizations. Historicism, as contextualization, enabled religions to be located in this taxonomy according to new criteria of civilizational progress. This chapter explores Islamic Modernists’ ‘location’ of Islam in this universal, phenomenological and civilizational taxonomy. The focus is on elucidating their understanding of Islam as part of, and contributing to, universal human history, and ways in which this new set of intellectua...
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
Modernists saw in Islamic history the solution to the pressing question of why the Islamic world ... more Modernists saw in Islamic history the solution to the pressing question of why the Islamic world was ‘backward’ compared to the dynamic and powerful European great powers. The Abbasid “Golden Age” was touted by Muslim Modernists as empirical proof that Islamic essence, properly manifest in historical context, was a powerful motor of progress and civilization. Modernists claimed not only that Islam had produced superior civilizational levels compared to contemporary Europe, but that it could do so again. The prevalent European narrative of the ossification of Islamic institutions, and the concomitant rise of dogmatism that prevented intellectual inquiry, creativity, and ultimately, further progress, was by and large accepted by Muslim Modernists. However, they insisted that the ossification of tradition was not essential to Islam but rather, historically contingent. Modernists deployed the “Golden Age” argument to insist on the de-contextualization of Islamic essence and its re-conte...
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
The ‘modern’ understanding of the nature of religion transformed the relationship between God and... more The ‘modern’ understanding of the nature of religion transformed the relationship between God and mankind, from one characterized by external recognition of the immanence and ‘supernatural’ power of God, to one characterized by the internalization of the Divine in man, and the centrality of individual consciousness. Modern religion folded humanism into an enduring eschatological framework, whereby God’s intent was consistent with civilizational progress of humankind. Religious Modernism’s fundamental project was the unification of religion and modernity. Historicism problematized and revealed Tradition to be constructed, yet in its deconstruction lay the possibilities of reconstruction. Freedom from Tradition and dogma enabled freedom to rediscover essence, to re-contextualize essence in contemporary context – to reinterpret, and reconstruct religion. Modern Islam was cast as a return to truth, the rectification of the distortions of Tradition and the reignition of Islam’s essential...
Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s famous 1875 novel Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi takes place in late nineteen... more Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s famous 1875 novel Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi takes place in late nineteenth-century Istanbul and follows the lives of two young men who come from radically different backgrounds. Râkim Efendi is an erudite, self-made man, one who is ambitious and cultivated enough to mingle with a European crowd. In contrast, Felâtun Bey is a spendthrift who lacks intellectual curiosity and a strong work ethic. Squandering his wealth and education, he leads a life of decadence. The novel traces Râkim and Felâtun’s relationships with multiple characters, charting their romances and passions, as well as their foibles and amusing mishaps as they struggle to find and follow their own path through the many temptations and traps of European culture. The author creates a rich portrait of stratified Ottoman life through a diverse and colorful cast of characters―from a French piano teacher and an Arab nanny, to a Circassian slave girl―each deftly navigating the shifting mores of their social class. Written during the Ottoman Empire’s uneasy transition to modernity, the novel’s protagonists embody both the best and worst elements of two worlds, European and Ottoman. The novel provides readers with an elegant yet powerful appeal for progressive reforms and individual freedoms. Levi and Ringer’s fluid translation of this Ottoman classic stands as a landmark in the history of Turkish literature in translation.
Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity
International Journal of Middle East Studies
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016]). Here and elsewhere in his study, Muhanna offers ne... more [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016]). Here and elsewhere in his study, Muhanna offers new interpretations that incorporate and exist alongside conventional interpretations. This practice of incorporating multiple valid readings resonates with al-Nuwayri’s tendency toward ecumenism, as Muhanna describes it. But more importantly, it energizes an expanding understanding of encyclopedism and the Mamluk textual legacy, an understanding which can embrace the multiplicity of factors determining the text’s construction. That Muhanna’s ecumenism limits itself to these more minor interpretative questions does not, certainly, diminish the significance of this contribution. Chapter 5 offers a fascinating account of the strategies implemented in producing large compilations in theMamluk period. Muhanna makes great use of the preserved autograph volumes of the Ultimate Ambition as well as other extant manuscripts copied by al-Nuwayri, which he considers alongside al-Nuwayri’s own detailed account of the education and practice of the copyist. Muhanna points toward a more literary reading of compilation in which we might consider the archival practices that copyists such as al-Nuwayri brought to the art of adab (pp. 111–12). Yet he stops short of a real consideration of the implications of such a reading. Similarly, while the discussion of the history of the reception of the Ultimate Ambition in Chapter 6 is entertaining and instructive, it offers less compelling insights and arguments than those that characterize the other chapters of Muhanna’s study. The World in a Book is a valuable and original contribution to the study of premodern Islamic literature and history that calls attention to the texts, until recently largely neglected, of the Mamluk period. Muhanna’s study delivers “meaningful questions and meaningful answers” in refreshingly readable prose and is strongly recommended by this reviewer (p. 82).
The Middle East Journal, Oct 1, 2001
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
Modernist histories historicized and reimagined the Prophet Mohammad the prescriptive model of a ... more Modernist histories historicized and reimagined the Prophet Mohammad the prescriptive model of a rationalized, internalized ‘modern’ Islam. The historicization of the Prophet, and the emphasis on his ability to negotiate essence in context, suggests an entirely new Islamic methodology. The essence of Islam is located uniquely in the Quran, and the Prophet becomes an example of accurate understanding of this essence – God’s intent – and its manifestation in “laws” and institutions appropriate for his specific historical time period. Prophetic Hadith, therefore, must be historicized, in order to extract their essence, or intentionality, from their specific manifestation in context. This methodology destabilized the entire premise of the Sunna, and effectively unbound ‘Islam’ from Tradition. Tradition as precedent gave way to the continual contextualization of essence – a ‘permanent becoming.’ This enabled reformers to go ‘back to the Quran’ and retrieve God’s intent. This innovative h...
Contemporary Sociology, 2002
In this thought-provoking study, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity, exposing the E... more In this thought-provoking study, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity, exposing the Eurocentric prejudices and hostility to non-Western culture that have characterized its development. Focusing on the Iranian experience of modernity, he charts its political and intellectual history and develops a new interpretation of Islamic Fundamentalism through the detailed analysis of the ideas of key Islamic intellectuals. The author argues that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity, culture and historical experience. He concludes by assessing the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East in general, and in Iran in particular. A significant contribution to the literature on modernity, social change and Islamic Studies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of social theory and change, Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies and many related areas.
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History, 2020
Historicism, as the premise of historical context, together with ideas of universalism and progre... more Historicism, as the premise of historical context, together with ideas of universalism and progress, created a new epistemological and methodological landscape that by the 19th century demanded a redefinition and reconceptualization of the nature and function of religion. Muslim intellectuals, like modernists in other religious traditions, historicized Islamic history and proposed a new approach to the Quran, Hadith and the nature of tradition itself. They rejected tradition as historically constructed and thus contingent, proposing that tradition as content, and precedent as method, be discarded in favor of the reinterpretation of the ‘essence’ of Islam according to contemporary needs. Studies of modernity should shift from an attempt to align definitions with empirical realities, and instead focus on the emergence of claims to the modern. This enables us to understand commonalities and differences among various modernities – and to avoid falling into worn paths of seeing modernity...
Iranian Studies, 2009
This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity shoul... more This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, if the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The lens of Islamic Modernism is used to uncover the underlying epistemology and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. Muslim Modernists engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and modernity; they were in conversation with European scholarship and Catholic Modernism, but more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions. This book provides a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between Western and non-Western modernities. It demonstrates that Islamic Modernists adopted intellectual frameworks that first emerged in Europe, then deployed them to ar...
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History, 2020
The taxonomy of human religions, generated and confirmed as the guiding organizational grammar of... more The taxonomy of human religions, generated and confirmed as the guiding organizational grammar of European disciplines of religious studies, philology, and anthropology, claimed to map civilizational evolution. Muslim Modernists, in addition to locating Islam in this universal taxonomy, also explored Islam in history, rewriting Islamic history as the story of transcendent Islamic essence in a sequence of particular historical contexts. They determined the historical laws of progress that dictated the path of the ‘torch of civilization’ in order to provide a historical explanation for moments of progress, and to understand the reasons for present stagnation. These new Islamic Histories chart the interaction of Islam in historical context, beginning with the revelation of the Quran, the Prophet’s application of Quranic ideals – God’s intent – and the subsequent history of Islamic institutions in historical context, from the Rashidun through the Abbasid period. Islamic History demonstr...
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
By the nineteenth-century, the idea of ‘religion’ as a universal phenomenon had become firmly ent... more By the nineteenth-century, the idea of ‘religion’ as a universal phenomenon had become firmly entrenched. Religions in the particular were therefore expressions of this universal phenomena, mapped onto human civilizational evolution. The explanation of difference moved away from a theologically-based true/false binary, and was relocated onto a universal taxonomy of mankind’s religious evolution. In this conception, ‘primitive’ religions were symptomatic of ‘primitive’ civilizations, ‘advanced’ religions likewise belonging to and reflecting ‘advanced’ civilizations. Historicism, as contextualization, enabled religions to be located in this taxonomy according to new criteria of civilizational progress. This chapter explores Islamic Modernists’ ‘location’ of Islam in this universal, phenomenological and civilizational taxonomy. The focus is on elucidating their understanding of Islam as part of, and contributing to, universal human history, and ways in which this new set of intellectua...
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
Modernists saw in Islamic history the solution to the pressing question of why the Islamic world ... more Modernists saw in Islamic history the solution to the pressing question of why the Islamic world was ‘backward’ compared to the dynamic and powerful European great powers. The Abbasid “Golden Age” was touted by Muslim Modernists as empirical proof that Islamic essence, properly manifest in historical context, was a powerful motor of progress and civilization. Modernists claimed not only that Islam had produced superior civilizational levels compared to contemporary Europe, but that it could do so again. The prevalent European narrative of the ossification of Islamic institutions, and the concomitant rise of dogmatism that prevented intellectual inquiry, creativity, and ultimately, further progress, was by and large accepted by Muslim Modernists. However, they insisted that the ossification of tradition was not essential to Islam but rather, historically contingent. Modernists deployed the “Golden Age” argument to insist on the de-contextualization of Islamic essence and its re-conte...
Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
The ‘modern’ understanding of the nature of religion transformed the relationship between God and... more The ‘modern’ understanding of the nature of religion transformed the relationship between God and mankind, from one characterized by external recognition of the immanence and ‘supernatural’ power of God, to one characterized by the internalization of the Divine in man, and the centrality of individual consciousness. Modern religion folded humanism into an enduring eschatological framework, whereby God’s intent was consistent with civilizational progress of humankind. Religious Modernism’s fundamental project was the unification of religion and modernity. Historicism problematized and revealed Tradition to be constructed, yet in its deconstruction lay the possibilities of reconstruction. Freedom from Tradition and dogma enabled freedom to rediscover essence, to re-contextualize essence in contemporary context – to reinterpret, and reconstruct religion. Modern Islam was cast as a return to truth, the rectification of the distortions of Tradition and the reignition of Islam’s essential...
Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s famous 1875 novel Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi takes place in late nineteen... more Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s famous 1875 novel Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi takes place in late nineteenth-century Istanbul and follows the lives of two young men who come from radically different backgrounds. Râkim Efendi is an erudite, self-made man, one who is ambitious and cultivated enough to mingle with a European crowd. In contrast, Felâtun Bey is a spendthrift who lacks intellectual curiosity and a strong work ethic. Squandering his wealth and education, he leads a life of decadence. The novel traces Râkim and Felâtun’s relationships with multiple characters, charting their romances and passions, as well as their foibles and amusing mishaps as they struggle to find and follow their own path through the many temptations and traps of European culture. The author creates a rich portrait of stratified Ottoman life through a diverse and colorful cast of characters―from a French piano teacher and an Arab nanny, to a Circassian slave girl―each deftly navigating the shifting mores of their social class. Written during the Ottoman Empire’s uneasy transition to modernity, the novel’s protagonists embody both the best and worst elements of two worlds, European and Ottoman. The novel provides readers with an elegant yet powerful appeal for progressive reforms and individual freedoms. Levi and Ringer’s fluid translation of this Ottoman classic stands as a landmark in the history of Turkish literature in translation.
Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity
International Journal of Middle East Studies
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016]). Here and elsewhere in his study, Muhanna offers ne... more [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016]). Here and elsewhere in his study, Muhanna offers new interpretations that incorporate and exist alongside conventional interpretations. This practice of incorporating multiple valid readings resonates with al-Nuwayri’s tendency toward ecumenism, as Muhanna describes it. But more importantly, it energizes an expanding understanding of encyclopedism and the Mamluk textual legacy, an understanding which can embrace the multiplicity of factors determining the text’s construction. That Muhanna’s ecumenism limits itself to these more minor interpretative questions does not, certainly, diminish the significance of this contribution. Chapter 5 offers a fascinating account of the strategies implemented in producing large compilations in theMamluk period. Muhanna makes great use of the preserved autograph volumes of the Ultimate Ambition as well as other extant manuscripts copied by al-Nuwayri, which he considers alongside al-Nuwayri’s own detailed account of the education and practice of the copyist. Muhanna points toward a more literary reading of compilation in which we might consider the archival practices that copyists such as al-Nuwayri brought to the art of adab (pp. 111–12). Yet he stops short of a real consideration of the implications of such a reading. Similarly, while the discussion of the history of the reception of the Ultimate Ambition in Chapter 6 is entertaining and instructive, it offers less compelling insights and arguments than those that characterize the other chapters of Muhanna’s study. The World in a Book is a valuable and original contribution to the study of premodern Islamic literature and history that calls attention to the texts, until recently largely neglected, of the Mamluk period. Muhanna’s study delivers “meaningful questions and meaningful answers” in refreshingly readable prose and is strongly recommended by this reviewer (p. 82).
The Middle East Journal, Oct 1, 2001
Islamic Modernism and the Reenchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History
Islamic Modernism and the Re-enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History, Edinburgh University Press, 2020
This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity shoul... more This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, of the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The lens of Islamic Modernism is used to uncover the underlying epistemology and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. We see that Muslim Modernists engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and modernity; they were in conversation with European scholarship and Catholic Modernism but, more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions.