Religion, Revolution, and Statehood in the Islamic Ecumene: A Review Essay - Samir Amir Arjomand, Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Medieval Islam (Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 2022, 388 p.) - Revolutions of the End of Time: Apocalypse, Revolution and Reaction in the Persianate World (Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2023, 252 p.) - Kings and Dervishes: Sufi World Renunciation and the

Reviewed by: The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca ed. by Nile Green Danielle Ross The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Edited by Nile Green. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. xvi + 340 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-30092-7. $34.95 (paper). The Persianate World sets out to fill a gap in both Persian studies and linguistic history: exploring the geographic frontiers of the Persian-writing world. As Nile Green notes in the book's introduction, the concepts of the "Persianate world" or "Persian zone" as a geographical space in which Persian language, literature, and culture enjoyed hegemony was articulated over fifty years ago by Marshall G. S. Hodgson in The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in World Civilization (3 vols) (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1974). However, while the concept of a Persianate cultural-linguistic community continues to enjoy currency in Middle Eastern and Inner Asian/Eurasian history, the Persianate community has not gained the same level of prominence in the study of World History as the Latin, Greek koine, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Classical Chinese cultural-linguistic communities. Scholars and laypeople outside the field of Persian studies still tend to associate the Persian language primarily with modern Iran and, sometimes, with Islam in general. The Persianate World's fourteen contributors, an international collective of junior and senior scholars specializing in Ottoman, Russian, Central Asian, South Asia, and/or East Asian history, set out to address these issues by documenting "Persographic" culture (the production and consumption of texts in the Persian language) on the [End Page 161] outskirts of the Persianate zone. Their focus on the "frontier" serves two purposes: (1) to denationalize the history of Persianate culture by emphasizing the role of non-native speakers in Persianate literary production; (2) to challenge the image of Persian as an Islamic language by examining non-Muslim participation in Persian written culture. The Persianate World begins with an introduction in which Green describes the geographical spaces, human communities, and chronological periods that made up the Persianate world. Green's history begins in the 800s C.E. after the spread of Islam into Indo-Iranian-speaking regions and ends in the first decades of the twentieth century as new nation states and national movements promoted printing and education in vernacular languages as an alternative to transnational Persographic culture. The Persianate World focuses on the last five hundred years of this history, 1400 to 1900. The book's first section, "Pan-Eurasian Expansion," explores the spread of Persian writing into peripheral regions of the Persianate world in the 1400s–1600s. Murat Umut Inan details the embrace of Persian in the Ottoman Empire's imperial-bureaucratic and religious-mystical circles. Thibaut d'Hubert traces the use of Persian as a ritual language among villagers in Bengal. Graeme Ford draws attention to Ming bureaucrats' use of Persian as a diplomatic language for communications with Central Asia. Devin DeWeese considers the presence and limits of Persian literature in the Middle Volga region and Siberia. The second section, "The Constraints of Cosmopolitanism," teases out the limits of Persian's influence as a literary language and its decline in prestige from 1600 to 1800. Purima Dhavan uses the careers of several Punjabi authors to explore the failure of Persian to overcome factional competition and create a unified, cosmopolitan intellectual world. David Brophy argues that Turkic replaced Persian as the Qing dynasty's language of diplomatic communications with Central Asia. Alfrid Bustanov shows how students traveling to Bukhara were the main conveyors of Persianate literature to northern Eurasia; these students' choice of other educational destinations (Egypt, Istanbul, Moscow) over Bukhara led to the diminishment of Persian-language knowledge among Russia's Muslims. Alexandre Papas argues that the status of Persian in Eastern Turkistan as an erudite language limited the number of people who mastered it and, ultimately, led to Persian being perceived as a language of the occult. The third section, "New Empires, New Nations," offers four case studies of the complicated fate of Persographic culture in the 1800s–1920s. Michael Fisher argues that Persian enjoyed continued [End Page 162] and even increased prestige in India under British rule...

ABSTRACTThis article outlines the interpretive challenges of understanding the history and reception of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna by focusing on a nodal text in its transmission, Firishta’s Gulshan-i Ibrahimi. This early modern chronicle relayed famous stories about Sultan Mahmud, distorting its Persian sources at times and presenting a specific image of the Ghaznavids. Entering European literature through multiple routes, these narratives supported notions of Oriental despotism and eventually colonial discourses on Iran and India. Their trajectories reveal the canonisation of knowledge about Muslim kings and show relationships between genres and translations, exposing underlying misperceptions about the medieval Islamic and Persianate world.

Few aspects of American history have gone through as rapid a transformation as Native American history during the past generation. In the not too distant past scholars, including many anthropologists, wrote accounts of particular Indian ‘tribes’. Many of these works, which were often quite sympathetic to their subject, concentrated on politics and wars. Beginning in the late 1960s, historians, anthropologists, and those calling themselves ‘ethnohistorians’ began to bring new perspectives to the subject. To date, many of the most important studies focus on the period before 1850. Taken together, these works testify to the fundamental importance of understanding the histories of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In recent years, scholarship about Native Americans has boomed. The cluster of six articles here suggests the range of work being done in the field. Nicholas Rosenthal provides an overview of some of the major developments and Joshua Piker offers a penetrating view of the concept of race and how it has shaped our understanding of Native peoples in early America. Ruth Spack’s short essay on American Indian schooling reveals a shift in the history of education based on the incorporation of indigenous perspectives. Tyler Boulware investigates the notion of national identity and its application for Native peoples. Dixie Ray Haggard’s perceptive piece offers nothing less than a major revision of scholars’ understanding of the Yamasee War of the 1710s, an event that played a pivotal role in the southeast during the eighteenth century. Finally, Steven Hackel and Anne Reid reveal the benefits of electronic publication. Their essay on the Early California Population Project provides insight into a major database housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a project now available to scholars that will revolutionize our understanding the period from the 1760s to the midnineteenth century. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:

Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.

1151; electronic ISSN 1533-8568. © 2011 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rac.2011.21.2.259. Review Essay: Past Practices—Ethnography and American Religion

Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. By Catherine Ceniza Choy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. By Yen Le Espiritu (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003) American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941. By Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) In 2003, America's global endeavors have demonstrated that empire in its various guises is far from a closed chapter in human history. The year 2003 also brought us three noteworthy texts in Filipino American studies by, respectively, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Yen Le Espiritu, and Dorothy Fujita-Rony. While I am not suggesting that recent American war activities explicitly relate to the publication of Filipino American texts in 2003, these books help us see why it is important to understand the relationship between the history of U.S. imperialism and Filipino American history. America's empire building in Asia and the Pacific forms a fundamental chapter in Filipino American history. As many scholars (for example, E. San Juan, Jr., Amy Kaplan, and Lisa Lowe) working in various iterations of American studies have argued, the contradiction between the promises of American democratic ideals and their practice closely relates to the invisibility of U.S. imperialism. Choy, Espiritu, and Fujita-Rony work in, and extend, this tradition. Along these lines, I use the occasion of this review essay to remind us that just as we should not [End Page 93] mistake our current historical period as an aberration from an otherwise successfully operating developmentalist narrative toward the universal global equality and security promised by Modernity, neither should we forget the relevance of America's imperialist history in the Philippines to contemporary Filipino America and America in general. Critically and insistently remembering U.S. imperialism highlights the deeply transnational, if not global, perspective that animates Filipino American studies' field imaginary. The history of U.S. imperialism and continued neocolonial relations between the Philippines and the United States form one of three critical parts of what I take to constitute that field imaginary. Nationalism and, in particular, Americanization – the wide-ranging social process that structures both the potential and actual conditions of Filipino American lives – is the second part. The third aspect is transnational capitalism and its pervasive logic of exchange, which underlies our social relations from the individual to the multinational. Together, these three aspects describe the politics of globalization that define the specificity of the situation of Filipinos in the United States. While not mutually exclusive, identifying these distinguishable aspects of Filipino American studies' field imaginary allows us to better understand Filipino American studies' underlying concerns and theoretical directions. Choy, Espiritu, and Fujita-Rony's texts demonstrate the ways that Filipino American studies' ostensible central focus – "Filipino America" and Filipino American subjectivity – relates to what I have been calling the politics of globalization. The simplicity of this claim belies the diversity of perspectives in Filipino American studies and the complexity underlying the development of Filipino American communities and Filipino American experiences. Indeed, intellectual, community and cultural workers have debated on an ongoing basis and in explicit and indirect forms, what it means to be Filipino in the United States precisely because of the inadequacy of any single study or approach to address that complexity. The texts anchoring this review essay engage this debate by presenting us with historically grounded studies that foreground U.S. imperialism, document the struggles and successes of Filipinos in the United States with Americanization, and highlight the ways that transnational capitalism both enables and limits the possibilities of Filipino American subjectivity. In other words, these texts individually and collectively provide us with focused studies on Filipino American agency in the face of systemic power. Catherine Ceniza Choy's study examines the development of nursing in the Philippines and...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Two excellent predecessors of the books reviewed in this essay are Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, eds., Defining Visual Rhetorics (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), and Carolyn Handa, ed., Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004). 2. Sol Worth, “Pictures Can't Say Ain't,” in Studying Visual Communication, ed. Larry Gross (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 162–84. 3. Andrew Malcolm, comment on “Is the New Yorker's Muslim Obama Cover Incendiary or Satire?” Los Angeles Times blog, comment posted July 31, 2008, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/07/obama-muslim.html/. 4. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1–24. 5. Stan Vernooey, “An Impressive and Moving Story,” review of The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw, Amazon.com, August 19, 2001, http://www.amazon.com/greatest-generation-tom-brokaw/dp/0812965213/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=utf8&s=books&qid=1220216702&sr=8-1/. 6. Vernooey, “Impressive and Moving Story.” 7. David Freedberg and Vittorio Galese, “Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” TRENDS in Cognitive Science 11 (2007): 197–203. 8. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapter 5. See also Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 3–27. 9. The originator of these ideas is usually considered to be Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1927/1991), 27–45. The erudition displayed in Panofsky's historical references seems to have blinded most of his readers to the shaky logic of some of his arguments, such as the idea that straight-line perspective is an arbitrary convention because it doesn't replicate the curvature of the retina. The most extreme exponent of the train of thought that Panofsky set in motion is probably Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976), 3–44. 10. The most thorough theoretical refutation of the idea that perspective and other photorealistic conventions are arbitrary constructions comes from the writings of J.J. Gibson, posthumously collected in James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986), 267–302. 11. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 12. See Richard Taylor, ed., The Eisenstein Reader (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 79. 13. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, intro. Dail Murray (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1890/2004). 14. Riis, How the Other Half, 107. 15. Riis, How the Other Half, 115. 16. Riis, How the Other Half, xxii. 17. For a comprehensive review of these issues, see Julianne H. Newton, “Influences of Digital Imaging on the Concept of Photographic Truth,” in Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication, ed. Paul Messaris and Lee Humphreys (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 3–14. 18. “Facing the Truth: The Shape of Your Face Betrays How Aggressive You Are—If You Are a Man,” The Economist, August 23, 2008, 70. 19. Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001). See also Paul Ekman and Erika L. Rosenberg, eds., What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 201–16. 20. Cara A. Finnegan, “Review Essay: Visual Studies and Visual Culture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 234–56. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul MessarisPaul Messaris is Lev Kuleshov Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania

Asia Pacific ViewpointVolume 56, Issue 2 p. 316-319 Review Advocates and ombudsmen at Papua New Guinea's Mines: A review essay. Alex Golub (2014). Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 247 pp., USD$23.95, pbk, ISBN: 978-0-8223-5508-3. Stuart Kirsch (2014) Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and their Critics. California: University of California Press, 314 pp., USD$29.95, pbk, ISBN: 978-0-520-28171-4. Shaun Gessler, Shaun Gessler shaun.gessler@anu.edu.au State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program, ANU College of Asia & the Pacific, AustraliaSearch for more papers by this author Shaun Gessler, Shaun Gessler shaun.gessler@anu.edu.au State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program, ANU College of Asia & the Pacific, AustraliaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 July 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12096Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume56, Issue2August 2015Pages 316-319 RelatedInformation

1151; electronic ISSN 1533-8568. © 2010 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rac.2010.20.2.259. Review Essay: Religion and the American Presidency

Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Medieval Islam. By Said Amir Arjomand. University of California Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 359. $95, £80 (cloth and ebook).

<JATS1:p>These three volumes represent some of the most important historical sources for medieval Islamic scholarship. Yet the Persian of the original texts is often extremely difficult, even for accomplished scholars. Distinguished linguist and orientalist Wheeler Thackston, here provides lucid, annotated translations that make this key material accessible to a wide range of scholars. Mirzar Haydar’s ‘Tarikh-i-Rashidi’ provides a history of the Khans of Moghulistan, the vast stretch of territory between the ancient cities of Central Asia and Mongolia. Khwandamir’s ‘The Reign of the Mongol and the Turk’, covers the major empires and dynasties of the Persianate world from the 13th to the 16th century, including the conquests of the Mongols, Tamerlane, and the rise of the Safavids. The final volume, written by the grand vizier of the Mongol rulers of Iran, includes a valuable survey of the Turkic and Mongolian peoples, a history of Genghis Khan’s ancestors, and a detailed account of his conquests.</JATS1:p>

Historians and analysts of current affairs alike are interested in the role that women have played in Islam, including the extent to which women were the agents and creators of Islamic mysticism. We still know surprisingly little about premodern learned women, particularly from the eastern Iranian world. This article describes one female mystic, Umm ʿAlī, who flourished in ninth-century Balkh and has so far eluded modern scholarship. A historiographical study of her provides insight into how the representations of mystical women changed over time. From the earlier sources, we learn that Umm ʿAlī applied creative and interesting strategies that provided her access to the highest sources of learning. Umm ʿAlī’s case also allows for some tentative conclusions on the importance of pedigree, and the practice of strategic marriages that connect local power-holders with the ʿulamāʾ.

This issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society (Volume 41 Nos. 3-4) comprises three main research articles, which respectively engage with the themes of political loyalty, justice and the just ruler, and popular preaching. We begin with Abdessamad Belhaj’s study, “Political Loyalty in Reformist Islamic Ethics: Resources and Limits.” We then turn to Fadi Zatari and Omar Fili’s contribution, “Justice and the Just Ruler in the Islamic Mirror of Princes.” For our third research article for this issue, we have Hatim Mahamid and Younis Abu Alhaija’s work, “Popular Religious Preaching as Informal Education and its Impact on Medieval Islamic Culture.” This issue of the AJIS also includes several book reviews, including Iymon Majid’s review essay “Integrating Kashmir.” Majid’s essay considers two recently published and important works, Shahla Hussain’s Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition and Hafsa Kanjwal’s Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building under Indian Occupation. AJIS Volume 41 Nos. 3-4 ends with two insightful forum pieces. The first is Mohamed Alio’s contribution, “The Mazrui Dynasty: Serving Islam in East Africa” and the second is Shahzar Raza Khan’s piece on the famous Urdu poet Akbar Allahabadi.

Over the course of the past several decades, Francis Robinson has done much to illuminate facets of the history and culture of the traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, of South Asia. “For far too long,” he writes, “[the] ulama have been treated as cardboard figures, caricatures of Muslim men of God…. [C]olonial administrators, and subsequently scholars, have rarely known enough to treat them as more than such; Western-educated Muslims, who have discovered new forms of authority, have often been concerned both to mock and to distance themselves from the mediators of religious authority; and the followers of ulama have been concerned to impose upon them an image of an ideal teacher and scholar at the cost of concealing aspects of their character, personality, and behaviour” (TheUlama of Farangi Mahall [hereafter FM], p. 148). The cost of letting the caricatures persist is high. In many instances, an understanding of the Muslim public sphere and of religious thought in modern Islam remains at best incomplete without serious attention to the ulama. And important facets of religious change likewise remain elusive unless the evolving discourses and the institutions of the ulama are brought within our purview. When more observers of Muslim societies come to recognise the ways in which the ulama are integral to the history of modern and not just of medieval Islam, it would be in some measure due to the influence of Robinson's writings. Among other things, Robinson's work is significant for its insistence that we consider how religious ideas, norms, and traditions shape politics instead of treating them as little more than symbols employed by the political elite for purposes of mass political mobilisation. At the same time, he has explored how religious identities and institutions have themselves evolved in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. And with the history and culture of the ulama as his primary point of reference, he has brought to light new perspectives on Islam in South Asia, as well as on the historical interaction between South Asia and the Muslim world at large.

Essay Review: Islamic Science at its Best: In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, <i>i</i>: The Call of the Muezzin, in Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, <i>ii</i>: Instruments of Mass Calculation