Publications of Al-Azmeh, A.

Pasts incorporated : CEU studies in the humanities

The book includes the following articles:1. Tropes and temporalities of historiographic romanticism, modern and Islamic -- 2. Islam and the history of civilizations -- 3. Chronophagous discourse: a study of the clerico-legal appropriation of the world in an Islamic tradition -- 4. The muslim canon from late antiquity to the era of modernism -- 5. God's chronography and dissipative time -- 6. Rhetoric for the senses: a consideration of Muslim paradise narratives -- 7. Islamic political thought: current historiography and the frame of history -- 8. Monotheistic monarchy.

Human Rights and the Contemporaneity of Islam : A Matter of Dialogue?

This article was presented at the XVth Conference of the Academy of Latinity, 14 – 17 April 2007, Amman, Jordan.

Monotheistic kingship

Discusses both Christian and Muslim political thought.

Book review : The Armies of the Caliphs : Military and Society in the Early Islamic State

This article reviews the book "The Armies of the Caliphs : Military and Society in the Early Islamic State" by Hugh Kennedy.

Abu Bakr al-Razi

Abu Bakr al-Razi : An Anthology

Civilization, Concept and History of

The concept of civilization as it is recognizable today, emerged with the rise of historical consciousness in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and achieved global spread in the twentieth century. Civilization came to constitute a primary unit of historical discourse, in association with cognate terms such as culture, quite apart from its indication of certain morphological features of human society, such as urbanism. Broadly conceived, the notion of civilization has served two schemas of world history, the one universalist and evolutionist, and the other particularistic and vitalist. Both notions have ideological implications, and were often deployed in conflicts between universalist-progressivist and conservative-nationalist political creeds, the former laying emphasis on the normative and morphological continuities in human societies, while the latter stressed openness to historical becoming as well as societal and historical transformism. Quite apart from the normative implications of both notions, the one valorizing abiding resources of particularist national and civilizational character and the other speaking for an open notion of progress, recent historical research has rendered possible the concrete and properly historical consideration of the notion of historical continuity beyond the boundaries of the ideological commitment of the two notions of civilization that have profoundly marked the categorization of historical material and historical periodization in general.

Civilization, Culture and the New Barbarians

There has been a revival in Western thought of romantic ideas of society & history that, before WWII, had been associated with conservative & right-wing political movements & ideologies. The emphasis on an unreflected notion of culture, postmodernist relativism, scenarios of the wars of civilizations, fundamentalist reclamations of authenticity, & multiculturalist celebrations of difference constitute a revival of irrationalist social theories, where culture replaces race as the organizing principle of a theory of predispositions inherent in ethnic, religious, & national groups. This repetition of late-19th-century polemics against degeneration & against the Enlightenment gathered force in a context marked by the fall of the socialist bloc, deregulation, structural marginality, & the waning of humanism in favor of an anthropological pessimism emphasizing singularity. 49 References. Adapted from the source document.

Al-Mawardi

Al-Mawardi : An Anthology

Ibn Khaldun (In Arabic)

Ibn Khaldun's History : An Anthology

Religious and cultural reactions to colonialism in the Muslim world

The reformist Ottoman state in the second half of the nineteenth century & its successor states in the Arab world.

Muslim History : Reflections on Periodisation and Categorisation

This article seeks to review the common assumption of a clear, largely endogenous, continuous and singular medieval period in Muslim history. The assumption implicates a romantic vision of history as one of continuity, and the possibility of writing the history of large-scale masses as one of singularity, and that the historical masses can quite satisfactorily be identified by transhistorical nominatives such as Islam, Hellenism, or the West. Correlatively, the histories of such masses are encoded according to the literary topos of rise and decline, à la Herder, Hegel, Renan, Becker, Toynbee and others. The author proposes that the conceptualisation of historical objects as Muslim or otherwise, and the consequent periodisation is possible only when shorn of romantic historism, and if the titles under which historical material is organised were to be subverted to preserve a definite distance between self-representation and subsequent construal on the one hand, and the actual workings of History on the other. It thus suggests that 'Late Antiquity' be taken to encompass the conditions that gave rise to Islam, which wouldpresent the Arab empires as points of arrival and the crystallisation of cultural, economic, demographic, religious, statist and other universalist trends that constitute Late Antiquity.

Book review : A History of Islamic Legal Theories : An Introduction to Sunni Usul al-fiqh

This article reviews the book "A History of Islamic Legal Theories : An Introduction to Sunni Usul al-fiqh" by Wael Hallaq.

Phronesis

The book includes the following articles:Muslim 'Culture' and the European Tribe -- Islamism and the Arabs -- The Discourse of Cultural Authenticity -- Arab Nationalism and Islamism -- Islamist Revivalism and Western Ideologies -- Utopia in Islamic Political Thought -- Wahhabite Polity -- Islamic Studies and the European Imagination -- The Religious and the Secular in Contemporary Arab Life -- Culturalism, Grand Narrative of Capitalism Exultant -- Muslim Modernism and the Canonical Text.