EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
A History of the World since 1300
Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E Rashid Rida and 19th Century Islamic Modernization Notes taken on November 1, 2016 by Edward Tanguay |
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end of the 19th century
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humans were becoming national subjects
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becoming Japanese
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becoming Brazilian
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becoming German
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these were all states and nations that scarcely existed a century earlier
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the national frame gave people a sense of new identity for defining their membership in political communities
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those who were bereft of a state
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didn't have a polity that they could connect their imaginations to
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the Jews
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the Gypsies
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the Comanches
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those who lived in a state where the ruling state was of a different nationality
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Arabs under Ottoman rule
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the many African-Americans who began to feel after the Civil War was perhaps the United States was unable to deliver on the promises of their declaration of their emancipation
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many began to dream and yearn for a return to Africa itself
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people for whom a state was not there to create a nation
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some political systems functioned more like networks that transcended global boundaries
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associated statehood with land which did not yet exist for them
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American identity emerges very tied up with territory
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also Argentines and Russians
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what happens to those who don't have access to a frontier the way the Americans, the Russians and the Argentines had
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the role of books and media was important
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promulgated a utopian idea of a community that didn't exist
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intellectuals played an important function
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the Ottoman Empire
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the Turks and Arabs were the inheritors of an older political structure
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an Islamic empire
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many different peoples, languages, and faiths
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nationals and Turks were in the midst of political pressures
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Russian expansion from the north
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fueled regional nationalisms
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after the opening of the Suez Canal, the Islamic states were feeling closed in
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increasingly encircled by expanding Christian empires
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increase of debate and intellectual life in Islamic worlds
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from India to West Africa
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from Delhi to Mecca
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Muslim intellectuals discussed how to cope with the shrinking world
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Rashid Rida (1865-1935)
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early Islamic reformer
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his ideas would later influence 20th-century Islamist thinkers in developing a political philosophy of an the Islamic state
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was keen to modernize law, to update it
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to make it compatible of the new global order
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criticized the old ruling caliphs
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criticized the traditional the priesthoods for holding Islam back
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represented nationalism and modernization in the Islamic world
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how to adapt Islam to this new global order
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take this sacred tradition of law making and apply it to new, secular structures
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adapted Islamic law for new nations
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if Islamic states could imagine themselves as modern states, they could incorporate science and modernization
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this was tied to land and ethnic boundaries
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wanted to treat the Islamic world as an Islamic version of Europe
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divided up into nation states
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Egyptian University created
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center for new contemplation for how to modernize Islam
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1857 Syrian Scientific Society