5. Governing Islam by tribes and constitutions: British mandate rule in Iraq (original) (raw)

İlmiyye ve Siyaset, Challenges between Islam and Politics in the Discourse of the Ottoman Ulema

2020

Structural Changes in the Modern Middle East: Revolution, Constitution, Parliament or negative efforts of minor structural ones. In addition, a series of such changes, as a whole, can be believed to have originated with European penetration or rule, followed by progressive and reactionary moves in the nineteenth century. I believe that the contents of the presentations by Dr. Dundar and Mr. Tokunaga are evidently different but both are closely related with such changing processes in the Middle East. Their presentations were very helpful for us to reconsider the differences between and similarities in structural changes in the cases of the Ottoman Empire and Iran. In connection with the above, it appears that the millet system was one of the residues in the great structural change of the Ottoman Empire, which converted from an Islamic state into a multi-ethnic state, and finally the Turkish nation-state. Being different from the Ottoman Empire, which had already accomplished a pseudo-centralized or centralized system, Iran needed a state-building exercise based on centralization. I wonder whether the issue of electoral law highlighted by Mr. Tokunaga might have represented the evidence in the significant structural change from decentralized Qajar rule to the centralization of the Pahlavi dictatorship. Moreover, during Reza Shah's period, the task of centralization was certainly accomplished to some extent by means of modernization as well as policies against armed tribes and the Shi'ite religious forces. However, both the Turkish and Iranian cases seem to have scarcely realized structural change in relation to "Islam and Search for Democratization," which is this session's main theme.

Islamicate Secularities in Past and Present

Historical Social Research, 2019

Quote as: Dressler, Markus, Armando Salvatore and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (eds). 2029. Islamicate Secularities: Past and Present, in Historical Social Research 44(3). All papers are accessible through https://www.gesis.org/en/hsr/full-text-archive/2019/443-islamicate-secularities-in-past-and-present Partly as a product of encounters with Europe, accelerated in the last 150 years, Islamicate societies developed new epistemic distinctions and structural differentiations between religious and non-religious spheres and practices. This special issue conceptualizes these distinctions and differentiations as “Islamicate secularities”, thereby connecting Marshall Hodgson’s notion of the “Islamicate” with the concept of “Multiple Secularities”. The individual contributions address the question of secularity in relation to Islam with a variety of spatial and temporal foci that range from Turkey to China and Indonesia, from the present to the colonial era and even precolonial contexts. The issue thus provides an array of perspectives on how Muslims have engaged with religion in relation to social and political conflicts and how this has led to contested reifications of ‘Islam’ and its boundaries, especially in relation to politics. As preliminary result, a tendency towards ‘soft distinctions’, kept under the umbrella of ‘Islam,’ emerges. Quote the Introduction as: Dressler, Markus, Armando Salvatore, A., and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. 2019. Islamicate Secularities: New Perspectives on a Contested Concept. Historical Social Research, 44(3), 7-34. In the colonial era, new distinctions and differentiations between religious and non-religious spheres took shape within inner-Islamic discourses, partly as a product of encounters with Western knowledge. This introduction conceptualizes these distinctions and differentiations in relation to Islam, drawing on Marshall Hodgson’s concept of the Islamicate, which we employ for our heuristic notion of Islamicate secularities. It charts the paradigmatic conflicts that shape the contested fields of Islamic and secularity/secularism studies. The introduction discusses the epistemological and political context of these debates, and argues that theoretical and normative conflicts should not hinder further empirical inquiries into forms of secularity in Islamicate contexts. It also explores promising theoretical and methodological approaches for further explorations. Particular emphasis is laid on the historical trajectories and conditions, close in time or distant, that have played a role in the formation of contemporary Islamicate secularities. Keywords: Secularity, multiple secularities, Islamicate secularities, Islam and politics, Marshall Hodgson.

Politics of Religion and Secularism in the Ottoman Empire: 14th to 20th Century

2013

The subject of this article is the movements and processes of secularism in the Ottoman Empire. The main argument of the article is that while the Ottoman Empire was a substantially religious state in legal and political terms in its establishment, beginning with the late 17th century it is introduced to a gradually strengthening process of secularization reaching to a peak during the collapse of the Empire. The major reason for this development was the weakening of the Ottoman state power relative to its European counterparts and the necessity envisaged by the statesmen and the intellectuals to change the traditional domestic institutions with more effective and productive western institutions. Being initiated in the military domain first, the process was gradually to spread over other domains of the Ottoman state and society too.