This extremely timely book deals with the development of Bulghar regional identity among Tatars and Bashkirs, i.e. Volga-Ural Muslims.
Based on locally-produced Islamic manuscrips, the book examines how these Muslims manipulated local legends, conversion narratives, and sacred geography to create a body of sacred historiography that expressed a meaningful regional identity, and one which responds to the changing relationship between these Muslims and the Russian state over the nineteenth century.
The book also traces the debate between traditionalist supporters and reformist detractors...

Following the war of 1948 Palestine's Druzes became part of the state of Israel. Overwhelmingly rural, they sought to safeguard their community's age-old ethnic independence by holding on to their traditional ethno-religious particularism. Ethnicity and ethnic issues, however, were ready tools for the Zionists in the pursuit of their policy aims vis-a-vis the state's Arab population. Central among these was the cooptation of part of the Druze elite in an obvious effort to alienate the Druzes from the other Arabs - creating "good" Arabs and "bad" Arabs served the Jewish state as a foil for its...

This anthropological monograph, dealing with a persistent form of social inequality in the Maghreb, examines the affinities between ancient hierarchical categorization and the emergence of new forms to impress and contest social ranking in the modern nation-state. Point of departure is a detailed account of the ambivalent relations between descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and a social group of humble descent called Haratin in a sanctuary located on the northern fringe of the Sahara. In sections on the division of labour, fictive kinship and supernatural mediation, the book shows how...

This volume deals with issues and problems of national and gender identity in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey. Articles discuss experiences and position of women vis-a-vis state intervention, economic, political and cultural change, in both public and private spheres of life. In the book the real life conditions and experiences of women are analyzed on three complementary levels. The first of these is the economic and institutional circumstances shaped by structural adjustment policies, globalization and transnational policies. The second is realities of everyday life, particularly...

Relationships between colonialists and the colonised peoples are often ambivalent - but always fascinating. This edited volume explores the issues of cultural reciprocity between Europeans and South Asians during the crucial period from 1760 to 1860. In doing so, prevailing assumptions about these complex relationships are examined. Part I examines a variety of themes in reciprocal encounter, such as class structures, urban landscape, Anglo-Muslim cooperation and debates on indigenous values. Part II deals with the persons important to the process of reciprocity and discursive...

While presenting an historical account of the internal dynamics of Islam in Wallo, Ethiopia, with particular emphasis on the modes of its introduction and dissemination, and on its relationship with the Ethiopian state and regional power structure, this book describes the background to, and manifestations of, the revival and consolidation of Islam in the region in the nineteenth century by assessing the role of Muslim scholars, traders and chiefs in that process. It also traces the origin of the tradition of Islamic renewal and reform, and analyzes the response of Wallo Muslim religious...

This first history of the Rashīdi Aḥmadiyya argues for a new explanation of the great Sufi revival of the eighteenth century, and also defines a new paradigm of development and change in Sufi orders. In his study of one widespread Sufi order over two centuries and three continents, the author identifies a repeating cycle in which a section of an order rises under a great shaykh, splits, and stabilizes. Though each great shaykh seems to remake the order with little reference to what has gone before, there are in fact two constants through all cycles: the written literature of the...

Exploring the origins and development of the Syrian identity, during the 18th and 19th centuries, through the role of Christian Arab intellectuals and merchants, Ottomans and American missionaries, this volume examines its background, stages of evolution, and components. It shows that the contribution of these Christian Arabs, despite their relatively small number, lies in the processes they set in motion, being the first to promote territorial concepts along with a secular interpretation of Arab culture. This Syrian identity constitutes an innovative case study in the broader discipline of...

Who speaks for Islam? To whom do Muslims turn when they look for guidance? To what extent do individual scholars and preachers exert religious authority, and how can it be assessed? The upsurge of Islamism has lent new urgency to these questions, but they have deeper roots and a much longer history, and they certainly should not be considered in the light of present concerns only. The present volume - grown out of an international symposium at the Free University, Berlin in 2002 - is not so much concerned with religious authority, but with religious authorities, men and women...

In seeking to understand village evacuation in the Kurdistan region of Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, this book focuses on the spatial aspects of the armed conflict. It tries to explain how settlement and resettlement policies and practices in Turkey have been part of a larger project of political and cultural engineering, based on a revision of a classical understanding of modernity as reflected in the work of Durkheim, Mauss, and Tonnies. This interdisciplinary perspective has allowed contributions from sociology to the political sciences and from history to social geography.