Monday, January 9, 2017
Surah Yusuf
After 21 yrs wrongfully convicted, 13 in solitary, I asked him how he survived. "Two words," he said. "Surah Yusuf." pic.twitter.com/IDtHB6TIIQ— Rami Nashashibi (@RamiNashashibi) July 3, 2016
Prof. Mona Hassan's Book: Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History (Princeton University Press, 2017)
In the United States and Europe, the word “caliphate” has conjured historically romantic and increasingly pernicious associations. Yet the caliphate’s significance in Islamic history and Muslim culture remains poorly understood. This book explores the myriad meanings of the caliphate for Muslims around the world through the analytical lens of two key moments of loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. Through extensive primary-source research, Mona Hassan explores the rich constellation of interpretations created by religious scholars, historians, musicians, statesmen, poets, and intellectuals.
Hassan fills a scholarly gap regarding Muslim reactions to the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad in 1258 and challenges the notion that the Mongol onslaught signaled an end to the critical engagement of Muslim jurists and intellectuals with the idea of an Islamic caliphate. She also situates Muslim responses to the dramatic abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 as part of a longer trajectory of transregional cultural memory, revealing commonalities and differences in how modern Muslims have creatively interpreted and reinterpreted their heritage. Hassan examines how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have been evoked in Muslim culture, law, and politics, similar to the losses and repercussions experienced by other religious communities, including the destruction of the Second Temple for Jews and the fall of Rome for Christians.
A global history, Longing for the Lost Caliphate delves into why the caliphate has been so important to Muslims in vastly different eras and places.
Mona Hassan is an assistant professor in the departments of Religious Studies and History and the International Comparative Studies program at Duke University.
"No other book considers so deeply the afterlife of the caliphate as a literary, religious, and political theme in Islamic history. Mona Hassan provides vivid chapters on the lamentations for the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols and the murder of the last of the Baghdadi Abbasid caliphs, and gives a lucid account of the judicial theory of the caliphate in Mamluk-era Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Hassan shows that in the world of nation states, the caliphate remains an expression of the yearning for a universal religious identity."--Ira M. Lapidus, University of California, Berkeley
"How do religious communities imagine and sustain relationships with their pasts? What are the politics of cultural memory? What work do nostalgia and romance perform in the service of reimagined futures? These are the questions that the burgeoning scholarship on religion and collective memory poses. Into this field comes Mona Hassan’s Longing for the Lost Caliphate, an ambitious and sweeping exploration of the complex ways in which practices of memory and memorializing shape historical and contemporary political and communal imaginaries."--Elizabeth Castelli, Barnard College
"A significant achievement, this should be the first book given to those who ask why the caliphate is important to Muslim culture."--Francis Robinson, author of The Mughal Emperors
"A remarkable feat of interdisciplinary scholarship, this innovative book examines the persistence of the caliphate as a cultural symbol."--S. Sayyid, author of Recalling the Caliphate
Sunday, January 8, 2017
Q&A: Egypt's war on Al Jazeera journalists
Egyptian national Mahmoud Hussein – a news producer for Al Jazeera Media Network – has been held for nearly two weeks after being accused of "spreading chaos" by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Hussein is the latest Al Jazeera journalist detained by Egyptian authorities. Al Jazeera's Baher Mohamed and Abdullah Elshamy both spent hundreds of days in prison in Egypt.
On Sunday they discuss the continued crackdown on the media in the country.
From the Diwan of Ibn Ḥajar al-Asqalānī (d. 852 AH/1447 CE)
Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Hajar departed this life in 852. His funeral was attended by ‘fifty thousand people’, including the sultan and the caliph; ‘even the Christians grieved.’ He was remembered as a gentle man, short, slender, and white-bearded, a lover of chess and calligraphy, much inclined to charity; ‘good to those who wronged him, and forgiving to those he was able to punish.’ A lifetime’s proximity to the hadith had imbued him with a deep love of the Messenger (may Allah bless him and grant him peace), as is shown nowhere more clearly than in the poetry assembled in his Diwan, an original manuscript of which has been preserved at the Egyptian National Library. A few lines will suffice to show this well:
By the gate of your generosity stands a sinner, who is mad with love,-Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad, "Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani and his Commentary." http://masud.co.uk/testing/
O best of mankind in radiance of face and countenance!
Through you he seeks a means [tawassala], hoping for Allah’s forgiveness of slips;
from fear of Him, his eyelid is wet with pouring tears.
Although his genealogy attributes him to a stone [hajar],
how often tears have flowed, sweet, pure and fresh!
Praise of you does not do you justice, but perhaps,
In eternity, its verses will be transformed into mansions.
My praise of you shall continue for as long as I live,
For I see nothing that could ever deflect me from your praise.
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