Suchergebnisse

"Examines how loneliness-in an age of social networks, biopolitical capital, the rankings knowledge economy, and rising inequality-necessitates, and gives rise to, cloneliness (the reproduction of loneliness) in different societies through diverse cultural and institutional practices."--

"Patrick Leigh Fermor: Noble Encounters Between Budapest and Transylvania is the extraordinary story of how one unknown young man charmed his way into the castles, manor houses, beds and lives of some of the most influential people in a part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire which was then on the cusp of tremendous change. This book records the history of a class, as witnessed by an exceptional young outsider in 1934 and also records what happened to many of them once the grim reality of Communism took hold in this part of East-Central Europe. It is also a portrait of Budapest in 1934, a grand city about to change forever."--

Abstract
Turkstroi was a Soviet trust that, in partnership with Turkey's state-owned Sümerbank, constructed several industrial enterprises in the Turkish Republic in the 1930s. By situating the trust in the context of Soviet, Turkish, and multilateral economic development, this article argues that the trust was an expression of patterns of both convergence and divergence in Soviet and Turkish interwar statism. As one of the few transnational industrial enterprises to materialize during the first two Soviet Five-Year Plans, Turkstroi was an impressive feat. But the volume of industrial plant and expertise that the trust was able to send to Turkey was largely predetermined by the dynamics of Soviet hard-currency restraints, and the trust's managerial staff was later annihilated during the Stalinist Purges. Still, Turkstroi necessitated the formulation of a transnational wing to the Soviet planned economy and showcased Soviet technical expertise outside the union. In comparison with their respective trading links with Western industrial powers, Soviet-Turkish industrial collaboration was of limited in scope. Nonetheless, to a degree disproportionate with its actual economic contribution, Turkstroi generated intellectual debate within Turkey about the character of Turkish development, Soviet boasts about the international dimensions of its industrial prowess, and a host of new Turkish state-owned and bilateral (Ankara-Moscow) institutions to ensure the running of the trust's subsidiary operations.

Claude Markovits, India and the World: A History of Connections, c. 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 304 pp.

In 1917, an Arabic treatise was published by the recently inaugurated Daudi Bohradāʿī al-muṭlaq(chief cleric), Tahir Sayf al-Din (r. 1915–65). In the work, entitledDawʾ Nur al-Haqq al-Mubin(The Brilliance of the Light of Transparent Truth), thedāʿīnot only underscored his monopoly of religious interpretation in the Daudi Bohra community, but also engaged in a series of jibes against Sunnis and Shiʿis.1As the book gained a wider readership beyond the confines of the Daudi Bohra community, several cities in Gujarat were beset by public campaigns against thedāʿīand his followers. Handbills in Gujarati and Urdu were disseminated challenging thedāʿīto a disputation and calling for his censure. Arabic, Persian, and Urdu fatwas were also penned castigating thedāʿīfor engaging in what his detractors regarded astakfīr(excommunication).

AbstractFew works in recent years have enriched the study of Islamic law quite like Faiz Ahmed's Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires. The book presents an opportunity to interrogate prevailing historiographical debates about the "codification" of Islamic law (as opposed to its "compilation"), and to account for processes of divergence in Islamic legal culture across Eurasia. This response explores some of the prevailing tensions among Ottoman, Afghan, and Indian experts in early twentieth-century Afghanistan. These stemmed from the dissimilar legal training acquired by the actors and the varying character of Islamic modernism in each geographical context. A focus on diverse intellectual trajectories and competing visions of Islamic law furnishes a useful means for accounting for the aporia endemic to Aman Allah's modernizing project.

AbstractThis article examines the creation of the first privately-owned Muslim banks in the first half of the twentieth century and the legal debates they instigated among Muslim communities. Whether in Bosnia or India, these banks appeared suddenly in the years immediately before the First World War. They were envisioned as a way to free up Muslim capital for productive ends, and as the means to jumpstart a Muslim economic renaissance. Far from masking their interest transactions, the banks' founders and customers pointed to a range of Islamic legal rulings that justified interest levied on deposits and loans. These rulings varied from one geographic locale to the next, and were expressive of diverse Muslim institutional and legal histories. Yet in an age when the formerly diffuse discursive terrain around interest, usury, and the Islamic foundational sources was shifting towards a consensus that rejected any interest/usury distinction, some of these banks faced acute challenges, particularly in India. There, novel notions of interest-free Islamic economics were articulated from the interwar period, which rejected any form of Muslim interest-banking. In time, the earlier iteration of Muslim interest banking became overshadowed by the new paradigm of "Islamic banks" which purportedly eschewed all financial interest.

Abstract
This article examines the Saudi government's refusal to introduce paper currency until 1956 against the backdrop of two developments: First, the composition of a number of treatises written by Muslim scholars in the late Ottoman and early Saudi Hijaz and Najd permitting use of the medium; second, the unsuccessful effort by several Muslim entrepreneurs to create formal banking facilities in the Hijaz between the 1920s and 1950s. Throughout these decades, as the Saudi regime repeatedly claimed that paper currency violated Islamic orthodoxy because it was a bearer of interest, these scholars argued forcefully for the medium's legitimacy by mobilizing the legal sources of their particular school of law (madhhab). This contrast reflects how the religious politics of the kingdom departed from both Ottoman precedents and other contemporary Islamic contexts in which paper currency was widely assimilated via the assent of Muslim legal scholars. The regime's tepid support for, or outright obstruction of, the creation of formal banking facilities that issued paper currency further exacerbated this divergence. In the end, because of such inconsistency it required technocratic institutions like the IMF and ARAMCO to introduce paper currency and a formal banking system into the kingdom from the mid-1950s.

Spanning the period from 1850 to 1950, this dissertation is a study of three processes: 1) the religious and commercial institutions created by Indian Muslims to participate in circuits of regional and global capitalism; 2) intra-Muslim debates concerning Islamic law, customary practice, and the norms and institutions of modern capitalism; 3) the rise of an anti-capitalist discourse of 'Islamic economics' which provided the framework for the postcolonial birth of the Islamic finance industry. By situating Indian Muslim economic life in a geographic frame stretching from the Balkans to Burma, and using sources in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu, this dissertation represents a significant empirical intervention. At the same time, rather than resorting to the normative, ahistorical categories of Islam typical in studies of 'Islam and capitalism,' this dissertation utilizes the dual frameworks of political and religious economy to zoom in on the panoply of Muslim commercial and religious 'firms' that operated in this space. The study of these firms highlights the very real tensions - between law and custom, colonial capital and local enterprise, religious competition and appeals to Muslim unity - that modulated Indian Muslim commercial life. Four arguments are deduced from the study of these firms. Firstly, there was substantial intra-Muslim economic disparities throughout the colonial period, which call into question the typical argument of a 'Hindu-Muslim wealth gap,' a formulation that ignores the economic links between Muslim and non-Muslims. Secondly, the success of select Indian Muslim firms was contingent upon the initial mobilization of local religious institutions needed to enter the market as a competitive player, followed by the creation of lasting relationships of trust with non-Muslims. Thirdly, there was immense internal disagreement among firms over whether the Islamic legal tradition must supply a benchmark for commerce, which spawned competing behavioral norms and institutional trajectories. Lastly, the rise of an all-India Muslim politics showcased the dissonance between different forms of Muslim capitalism. This precipitated a highly charged struggle over what an 'authentic' Muslim economic life entailed. Ultimately, these rival visions and the firms that espoused them were central to the so-called 'Great Convergence,' the process whereby the economic disparities perpetuated by nineteenth-century colonialism and globalization were negotiated and mitigated.

This article analyses the Ottoman government's attempt to encourage Indian Muslims to purchase its treasury bonds during the Balkan Wars in 1912–13. It contrasts this largely unsuccessful scheme with the enormous contributions of Indian Muslims to the parallel campaign to raise relief funds for Ottoman soldiers and refugees. While this latter movement involved the intermittent dispatch of remittances to the Ottoman Ministry of Finance and Red Crescent, the bond drive demanded a multi-year commitment and conjured up a variety of financial and religious dilemmas for Indian Muslim constituencies. To better contextualise these divergent outcomes, this article first examines the infrastructures of Indian Muslim religious and financial exchange with the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century. It then charts the charitable campaigns organised by Indian Muslims between 1877 and 1912, before turning to the Balkan Wars. The foundering of the bond drive stemmed from problems on both the supply and demand side, namely, International Financial Control (IFC) in the Ottoman context, informational asymmetries, fears of Ottoman insolvency and an aversion by some to accepting interest. Nevertheless, Indian Muslim capital enjoyed a freer degree of circulation than in the post-Ottoman environment, where new powers sought to curtail or control it in an age of financial de-globalisation.