Literatuur Cultuur en Maatschappij in het Moderne
Midden-Oosten (werkgroep Arabisch)
Artikel/hoofdstuk Bladzijde
Menchinger, L. Ethan (2016). “Free will, predestination, and the fate of the Ottoman 3
Empire”.
Hefne, Robert W. (2014). “Islam and Plurality, Old and New”. Society (2014) 51 pp. 5
636–644
Murphy, H. Jane (2010). “Ahmad al-Damanhuri (1689-1778) and the Unity of 8
Expertise in early Modern Ottoman Egypt”. Osiris 25/1 pp. 85-103
Said, Edward (2000). “My thesis” in: Macfie ed. Orientalism. A Reader. Edinburgh. pp. 10
106-107.
Eric, Davis (2009) "10 Conceptual Sins" in Analyzing Middle East Politics. 10
Peters, Rudolph (1982). “The mysteries of the Oriental mind: some remarks on the 13
development of Western stereotypes of Arabs”.
Cleveland Chapter 11: The Arab Struggle for Independence: Egypt, Iraq and 15
Transjordan from the Interwar Era to 1945
Cleveland Chapter 15: The Middle East in the Age of Nasser: The Egyptian Base 20
Wicktorowicz “A Genealogy of Radical Islam” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 28 23
(2005) pp. 75-97
Cleveland Chapter 18: The Iranian Revolution and the Revival of Islam 26
Gunter, M (2011), The Kurds Ascending, the evolving solution to the Kurdish problem 30
in Iraq and Turkey, Palgrave Macmillan, pp 1-19.
Pennington “The Copts in Modern Egypt” Middle Eastern Studies 18, 2 (1982) pp. 33
158-179.
Demmers, Jolle (2002). “Diaspora and conflict: Locality, Long-distance nationalism, 34
and delocalisation of conflict dynamics.” The Public, Vol.9, 1, PP 85-96.
Kanie, Mariwan (2015). De Koerdische diaspora: een sterke kracht achter het 36
Koerdisch nationalisme.
Aydin, Yasar (2016). Turkish diaspora policy: transnationalism or long-distance 38
nationalism?
Seymour, Richard. “The Arab film industry” The Middle East, May 2008. 41
Armes, Roy. “Women pioneers of Arab cinema” Screen 48:4 Winter 2007 42
Tabishat, Mohammed. “Society in Cinema: anticipating the revolution in Egyptian 43
fiction and movies” Social Research vol. 79: no. 2: summer 2012
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,Menchinger: Free will, predestination, and the fate of the
Ottoman Empire
Causality and Free Will in Ottoman Thought
● Main question: how much influence, if any, do we have over our actions and the
surrounding world: are we masters of our fate or puppets moved from on high?
○ Fatalists/Predestinarians (jabriyya or mujbira) argue that humans have neither
will, choice, nor power to make decisions and that their behavior must be the
result of God’s will alone, for God can have no rivals in power.
○ Supporters of free will (qadariyya) argue that God must have granted mankind
some measure of agency, otherwise religious duty and moral right and wrong
would be meaningless.
■ This was the belief of a party of rationalists known as the Mu‘tazili
● Al-Ash‘arıˆ pointedly emphasized God’s omnipotence by adopting an occasionalist or
atomistic cosmology:
○ the universe consists of bodies made from atoms and the accidents that
inhere therein
○ God at every moment recreates these atoms according to His will and
continually joins and separates them in a process of generation and
corruption
○ humans “acquire (kasb)” actions created by God and accept responsibility for
them
● Al-Ghazaˆlı: Sunni Islam’s predominant theological orthodoxy through the idea of
“God’s custom
○ God wills and creates every event, He is the only true agent in the cosmos but
chooses to create by means of secondary causes, or, at least, through the
semblance of causes
○ while God remains able to abrogate causality at any time, His custom links
cause and effect to create a visible “natural law” upon which humans must
rely in day-to-day affairs.
● Ottomans wrote about causality: Worldly causes (esbaˆb) were understood as
“secondary” in that they were actualized by God the Primary Cause
● Kâtib Celebi takes an atomistic view of the universe in which God is the sole agent,
and terms like “God’s custom” and “Primary Cause” seem closely linked to
al-Ghazâlî’s occasionalism and the Ash‘arî school of theology.
● In the Ottoman lexicon “particular will,” (“free will”) defined human will in its
relationship to God’s will
○ Particular will” could be exercised in so-called “particular events” or worldly
events that permitted human influence, while another set of “universal events”
encompassed larger processes linked to divine preordination
● Ottomans generally accepted the idea of fate but not necessarily fatalistic attitudes
● As Kâtib Celebi stated, God commands humans to act; to ignore worldly causes is
therefore sinful, and initiative is a moral imperative.
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,The Testimony of Sources
● Contemporary European sources offer ample evidence for free will as an intellectual
problem in the empire
● Ignatius Muradcan Tosunyan stated that muslim scholars distinguish between the
worldly and spiritual well-being of humans, and the doctrine of predestination relates
only to the latter
● Ottoman scholars espoused the concept of “particular will” and asserted that
attributing human deeds to God alone was a “sin against religion.”
● Habesci affirmed deism
● Sir James Porter: many Ottomans were philosophical and conversant with what he
called the “Aristotelian” and “Epicurean” systems
● One indication that Ottomans were concerned with free will and predestination is the
large literature on the “particular will” that flourished from the seventeenth to the
nineteenth centuries
Concluding Observation on the Fate of the Ottoman Empire
● Free will and predestination became increasingly important in warfare and reform in
the wake of Ottoman military defeats, particularly in the eighteenth century
● Removing divine intervention from their calculus and extending the boundaries of
human will allowed such figures to argue for a wide application of reason to the
empire’s political problems and to see the world in a more secularized or deistic
way—that is to say, one in which human rather than divine action produces outcomes
○ Free will went hand in hand with early modern Ottoman reform
○ So it makes sense that groups who were threatened by reform (ulama and
military) were fatalistic
● The problem of fate and free will also had an existential side.
○ The very real threat to the empire from domestic and external forces posed a
psychological threat to their deeply ingrained feelings of uniqueness and
divine favor
○ The perception that the empire was in decline demanded answer
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,Hefne: Islam and Plurality, Old and New
● Because of the fact that religions emerge in a context of religious plurality, the
question of how to co-exist with religious and ethical differences is a foundational
concern
○ In our late-modern age, with its global circulation of people, capital, and
lifestyle models, the challenge of plurality for believers and everyone else has
become all the more pervasive
● There is a series of revelations that provides evidence of the varied and evolving
relationship of the nascent Muslim community with its non-Muslim neighbors
● Three themes:
○ 1. whether in scripture, jurisprudence, or political treatise, there is no single
message in Islamic tradition with regard to the question of plurality
○ 2. the historical practice of Muslim rulers has often shown greater variation
with regard to questions of plurality than has scripture, jurisprudence, or
political treatise
○ 3. Muslims in modern times have had to revisit and rethink their traditions with
regards to plurality
Plurality and Revelation
● At the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s reception of Qur’anic revelation (610–632
CE), Arabia was a land of considerable religious diversity
○ people were polytheists or idol–worshippers
○ Mecca’s polytheist elite was involved in the maintenance of a sanctuary in
that caravan city
● There were also monotheists → “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab)
● Arabian Christians do not appear to have comprised a well-organized sociopolitical
community, while Arabia’s Jews were clearly well-organized and influential.
● The Constitution of Medina (after hidjra) stated that religions other than Islam were to
be tolerated, and that Jews in particular should enjoy significant autonomy and civic
rights
● After the death of the Prophet in 632 CE, Arab-Muslim armies were drawn into
campaigns to rid the Arabian peninsula of all religions but Islam
From Revelation to State-Power
● By the 8th century the Muslim empire extended from Spain to northern India
● It is estimated that less than 10% of the non-Arab population had converted to Islam
by this time
● A portion of the jurisprudence composed during this period came to deal with the
question of how to treat non-Muslim subjects in a Muslim-ruled land
● Ahl al-dhimma refers to the non-Muslims covered under the terms of the dhimma
agreement ( → contract that establishes the terms of the relationship between a
Muslim-led ruler and non-Muslim subjects)
○ this contract differs from the rights and obligations in the Medina Constitution
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, ● Non-Muslims resident in a Muslim-ruled society were to be accorded the status of
“protected people” on the grounds that they comply with three conditions:
○ 1. recognize Muslim suzerainty (suzereiniteit= de macht die een gebied
domineert)
○ 2. abide by those portions of shari’a law that apply to non-Muslims
○ 3. pay a poll tax for non-Muslims known as the jizya
● Dhimmis had a second-class legal status
○ But many Muslim rulers set aside the legal restrictions on polytheists and
people of the book, adopting a far less discriminatory approach to their
non-Muslim subjects
■ India’s Mughal rulers and Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Millet and State Toleration
● Millet= the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman empire who had been accorded a
significant measure of legal and confessional autonomy
● The millet system was arguably the most successful and enduring formula for
multi-religious peace seen in any faith tradition in the late medieval and early modern
periods
● The Ottomans developed a system of “religious and ethnic cohabitation without
serious violence over four centuries of rule.”
● After 1453, three non-Muslim millets came to be recognized: Greek Orthodox,
Armenian and Jewish
● The millet system’s unusual stability also had to do with legacies peculiar to Ottoman
governance and religion
○ this region was one of enormous ethnoreligious diversity, with significant
intermarriage and religious borrowings, and a general tendency toward “fluid
boundaries in multicultural settings."
● Circumstances that reinforced Ottoman tendency toward pluralist flexibility:
○ The earliest conquests were in the Balkans, where the great majority of their
subjects were Christians
○ Long history of Turkic interaction along the eastern frontiers of the Byzantine
Empire → cooperation
○ The Ottoman state was a strong state (state capacity). Ottoman authorities
took care to prevent the emergence of religious currents that might challenge
dynastic power and the complex alliances on which it depended
From Dhimmihood to Pluralist Citizenship?
● In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Western colonial powers occupied
most Muslim lands and the dhimmi and millet systems came to an end
○ but the influence of dhimmi ideals continued
● In most lands, shari‘a courts were stripped of their authority in commercial and
criminal affairs
○ in most courts’ jurisdiction was restricted to matters of family law, as well as
religious activities
● In political life, the concept of dhimmihood gave way to nationhood and
multiconfessional citizenship
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