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Qur'an translation was an important element of the daʿwa activities of reformist Muslims in West Java at the beginning of the twentieth century, as is reflected in the publication of the Sundanese translation of Ahmad Hassan's Tafsir Al-Foerqan, as well as other Qur'an translations penned by his friends and associates. These Sundanese translations not only promote a reformist ideology, but also demonstrate a shift in the formation of translation and literary culture in West Java: from interlinear word-for-word to verse-for-verse translation; from handwriting to printed books; and from Arabic (jawi and pegon) script to Roman script. This article explores this new tradition of Qur'an translations. Written for the modern era, they differed from the interpretive translations taught in the traditional Javanese Islamic schools (pesantren) and were influenced by a wave of reformist ideas originating from the Middle East during the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short contribution, we look at the trajectory of the largest international trade union organization, today ITUC, from the central questions in this exercise; why labor movements have achieved certain successes?, Why they sometimes failed?, And what major failures we have seen? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that conflict rather than consensus defines the history of African American political thought. Its seminal figures have pursued justice along different and diverging lines—including advocating reformist, realist, and nationalist paths. While there is agreement that white supremacy is a form of social, economic, and political domination that should be eradicated, there is disagreement regarding its nature, effects, and resilience. This variance in judgments and inferences regarding the foundations and consequences of white supremacy leads to different accounts of social change, diverging strategic advice for realizing that change, and conflicting political theories. To press this claim, I consider the conflicting political visions of Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and Marcus Garvey (1887–1940). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Kahina Bahloul's political and religious engagement and her project to create the liberal 'Fatima Mosque', founded in 2019 in Paris. Bahloul is a complex figure, and her political and religious project touches on several dimensions: she was inspired by Sufi doctrines (Ibn ʿArabi and the ʿAlāwiyya) and Islamic modernist philosophy (Mohammed Arkoun). Furthermore, she advocates for a liberal and secular Islam, proposing radical reform and implying the compliance with secular constraints, the merging of social sciences with Islamic sciences, and the polarisation between liberal Muslims and 'fundamentalist' Muslims. This article will show that 1) Sufism is mainly used to justify an individualistic approach to Islam; 2) Bahloul's epistemological hybridity, based on Islam and social sciences, implies a strong tension between her role as a scholar and as a religious authority; and 3) Bahloul's reform of Islam is not new or radical. The peculiarity of her political and religious project is her compliance with the whimsical French debate on Islam and laïcité, which implies accepting new bans, the privatisation of Islam, and the polarisation between 'good Muslims' and 'bad Muslims'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the importance of Minister Baron József Eötvös (1813–1871) in the study of Jewish history and tradition in Hungary, this article undertakes a thorough revision of his life and activities. It focuses on a critical point in his Jewish policies: the 1868–69 Jewish Congress. The first part of the article analyzes Eötvös's pre-1848 thinking and activities in the context of the social and political pressure on Jews in the interest of integration. In the second section, the article teases out various dimensions of his pro-Jewish reputation through a historical reconstruction of the myth-making. In light of this re-evaluation of Eötvös's reputation, I attempted to reconstruct the path of the 1868–69 Jewish Congress until the collapse of the minister's project. In an approach to contextually analyze the minister's conflict with the Orthodox and his alliance with Neolog Jewry, this article examines one of the reasons for the defeat of Minister Eötvös and the Neolog Congress faction by traditionalists, which involved the destruction of the myth surrounding the minister. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from a renewed scholarly interest in her figure, the essay aims to draw attention on the political engagement of Italian Republic senator Tullia Romagnoli Carettoni. The Senator’s battle for a change in the status of women, that was about a rethinking of social roles, but also a renewal of the national custom, becomes more incisive between the second half of the 1950s and the late 1970s, in the phase of democratic consolidation of the Country, but also of its modernization, which coincided with a sharp economic growth and a radical social transformation. The paper analyzes some issues, still very present, that she addressed within the institutions – but also in the magazines Mondoperaio and L’Astrolabio -, like the dialectics between female pro- ductive work and caring, with particular attention to one of the subjects to which she dedicated herself, during her intense political activity, that is the total fulfilment of women’s citizenship.

The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) has been interpreted as exceptional among its European counterparts because of its internal divisions, radicalization and the impossibility of reaching cross-cutting agreements. This article demonstrates how, during the 1930s, the PSOE's evolution went hand in hand with other socialist parties in Europe, especially with the Section Française de l'International Ouvrière (SFIO). In particular, this article focuses on the views of the Spanish socialist factions – prietismo and caballerismo – on the formation and development of the Popular Front in Spain and France. The press of these factions – El Socialista, Claridad and Leviatán – had a similar role in the evolution of both parties. Furthermore, this study points out how the different factions of Spanish socialism used the French experience to legitimize their positions during the first part of 1936. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major Shīʿī political system in the contemporary world is based on the theory of the 'Guardianship of the Jurist' (velāyat-e faqīh). The theory maintains that the most senior Shīʿī cleric, who is the deputy of the Hidden Imam, is not only the religious, legal, and judicial authority but should also be the head of an Islamic state. This article explores contemporary Shīʿī Iranian cleric Ayatollah Yusuf Sanei's approach to this theory. The article demonstrates that Sanei was a pro-velāyat-e faqīh theorist following the birth of Islamic Republic, but came to criticise it after the rise of the Reformist Movement in Iran and the ascension of Mohammad Khatami to presidency until his death in 2020. The article argues that, as a reformist Shīʿī scholar, Sanei challenged various aspects of the theory in the last two decades of his life. It concludes that, rather than being an anti-velāyat-e faqīh theorist, Sanei argues for a 'conditional' guardianship theory since he considered the legitimacy of a system based on the velāyat-e faqīh to be heavily dependent on public consent rather than God's will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Egypt, the secularization of discourses and practices raises a fundamental challenge to sīra writing concerning its vocation to make the founding narrative and the religious ideals of Islam comprehensible and meaningful to contemporary Muslims. Arguing that the Muslim community's image of the Prophet does indeed both affect and reflect its religious and spiritual condition, the known Egyptian intellectual and former rector of al-Azhar, ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd (1910-1978) holds the appearance of de-theologized forms of sīra writing as a symptom of a profound crisis of Islamic intellectuality. Against this background, his prophetological considerations seek to show that this challenge can only be overcome by a sīra writing that engages the audience in a personal and spiritual relationship with the Prophet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1934, Alfonso López Pumarejo, the recently elected president of Colombia, announced that expanding government programs in public health and education would be a priority for his administration. This article analyzes this period's cultural transformation programs, examining the establishment and operation of sanitary units, mixed healthcare centers, and itinerant rural health commissions in the 1930s and the 1940s. It proposes a two-part argument. First, it demonstrates how reformers, intellectuals, and doctors associated with Latin America's first wave of social medicine transformed existing institutional spaces to serve the aims of the government's new public health model, designing and implementing programs to extend healthcare into the countryside. They proposed shifting from campaigns focused on eradicating a single disease to campaigns that tackled multiple diseases and also advocated for an increase in national, departmental, and municipal fiscal contributions to public health programs. Second, it touches upon the fiscal and resource-related challenges that limited these programs' reach. These challenges illustrate the fractured and fragmented nature of the Colombian state and its lack of capacity to effectively integrate the countryside by reaching often neglected remote rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the formation, organisation and political role of the Muslim Brotherhood student movement in the Egyptian contentious political scene of the 1930s and 1940s up to the 1952 military coup, by combining the rich secondary literature of the period with the Brotherhood's internal sources. The reconstruction focuses on the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood – as any mass organisation – was far less homogeneous than what is normally claimed by both internal and external sources, both sharing a general overstating of internal discipline and absolute obedience, especially during Ḥasan al-Bannā's charismatic leadership (1928–1949). The students of the Muslim Brotherhood were clearly channelling bottom-up pressures for more radical political action, sometimes ignoring directives from above and influencing the trajectory of the larger movement. In the warming political context of the late 1940s, Islamist students were acting independently, for instance taking the initiative to build tactical alliances with other student organisations even those belonging to the antagonist leftist/progressive camp, thus actively contributing to creating the momentum that led to the 1952 Revolution. However, and despite the clear message from its base, the Brotherhood leadership ended up by always opting for a moderate and cautious course, avoiding head-on confrontation with the government even at the cost of multiple crises and defections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sufism has been subjected to reformist ideas, whether by the colonial Orientalists or the post-colonial Islamic Republic of Pakistan. This research investigates the process of colonial and post-colonial reformism through the hagiographical transmutation of a malāmatī Qādirī Sufi, Shāh Ḥusayn. It observes that the idea of colonial reformism cannot be thoroughly applied in this case—the post-colonial Pakistani state rigorously implemented its reformist policies and transmuted the saint's image, while Western academia depicts him as queer. Therefore, the paper argues that Sufis have been used as sacred props by colonial and post-colonial reformists and scholars, resulting in multiple and contradictory Shāh Ḥusayns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewal and Reform have been the most discussed and dominant themes of Muslim intelligentsia, as they lived through the subjection of the greater part of the Muslim world by the Western colonial powers during the 18th and 19th centuries. The intellectual discourse on reform by the early Muslim reformers pivoted to the adoption of Western science and values and to the struggle of developing a new ilm al kalām (theology) complementary to modern science and western ideologies. The subsequent reformers, however, were more critical of Western ideas of civilization. Fazlur Rahman and Mohammed Arkoun belonged to the later wave of Muslim reformist movement of the 20th century and are the most well-known trail blazers of this reformist discourse, which centered on the Qur'ān. This article provides insight into the reform strategies of Dr. Fazlur Rahman and Mohammed Arkoun by mapping out key concepts in their discourses and their influence on later generations of reformers. Fazlur Rahman identified the stagnant intellectual legacy as the sole cause of the downfall of Muslim Civilization, caused by the absence of Ijtihād (independent legal reasoning). In his opinion, blind imitation based on precedence and consensus has only created a new hierarchy of traditional ulama (religious scholar) whose retrogressive mindset monopolized the interpretation of the Qur'ān. Making the Qur'ān as the center point for reform, he advocated its rereading based on the comprehension of the élan (spirit) of the Qur'ān. Similarly, Mohammed Arkoun, being trained in postmodern literary theory, adopted post structural methods for re-reading the Qur'ānic text. Arkoun's critique and approach is interwoven with complex terminologies. He advocated desacralizing the text and the radical rethinking of Islam as a cultural and religious system. This appraisal promotes a philosophical perspective in combination with an anthropological and historical approach. Both these reformers have their own set of advocates and detractors. Undeniably, however, as this paper argues, Arkoun's approach of understanding the Qur'ān can disturb the conventional prevalent belief system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of July 1905, the Belgian anarchist Edward Joris and members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation attempted to assassinate the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in Istanbul. The Sultan survived, but the lives of numerous civilians were lost. The first part of this paper reviews the assassination attempt, its participants, and its political background, whereas the second part analyzes how this event was presented to Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the political press at the time, with a special review of the echoes it had among the Muslim intelligentsia gathered around the Bošnjak gazette. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late nineteenth-century Tunisian history has primarily been studied from a European perspective, in the colonial context of the French Protectorate. Yet, the North-African beylik was still inscribed within the realm of the Ottoman Empire long after 1881. The strength of the Mediterranean network was epitomized by Ḫayr al-Dīn's political figure and by his going back and forth between Tunis and Istanbul. Later on, the princess Nazlı Fazıl Hanım (d. 1913) created another layer of relationships, extending the zone of contacts to Paris and Cairo, putting Tunisia at the heart of Mediterranean intellectual exchanges. In her tow, the famous Egyptian scholar Muḥammad ʿ⁠Abduh had a notable influence over Tunisian ʿulamāʾ , and Bachir Sfar (al-Bašīr Ṣfar), forerunner of the Young Tunisians, paralleling the Young Turks, created his own path through a complex geo-political space. This article documents these personal links and the circulation of ideas within this cultural space: Maghreb in Mediterranean context, at the meeting point of provincial and imperial logics, and at the crossroads of traditionalist and reformist agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the creation of the 1857 Security Pact (ʿAhd al-amān) in the Regency of Tunis. This law is commonly viewed as having been drafted and imposed by the European powers as a replication of the Ottoman Tanẓīmāt and as having inaugurated an era of modernizing reforms that led to a secularized nation-state, notably due to the notions of equality it introduced. I show instead that this new law aimed to solve concrete problems in a context of severe fiscal crisis and that its creation was more a story of hard-fought diplomatic negotiations than of modernization and secularization. While the Security Pact was imposed by European pressures, and while the Ottoman Tanẓīmāt were invoked during the negotiations, Tunisian political elites shaped its content from the start, in an effort to defend the beylical state's legal sovereignty and affirm its Muslim character. It was these elites who introduced, against the wishes of the French government, equality for all inhabitants of the Regency (including foreigners) and the principle of a common jurisdiction for the bey's subjects and for foreigners. These legal changes must not be analyzed as an exceptional rupture (a claim made by those who view the nineteenth century reforms as having initiated a "modern" Tunisia) but as part of a long series of transformations. Although not everyone agreed about their legitimacy, these transformations were understood by reformers within the framework of a long-standing Islamic theory of the practice of change that was based, not on ijtihād , but on the widening of custom (ʿurf) and of the discretionary power of the ruler (siyāsa). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of citizenship studies and changes in citizenship is examined between 1945 and 2022 with special reference to Britain. Although the idea of citizenship was established as early as Greek political thought, the development of citizenship based on a welfare state starts in Britain with post-war legislation on education, health, and welfare. The early sociology of citizenship was the work of T. H. Marshall in Britain and Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf in Germany. These two sociologists established a vocabulary and research agenda that has remained influential including basic concepts such as social citizenship, civility, life chances, and public cultures. The post-war settlement in Britain that involved a strategy for the reform of capitalism began to come apart during the Thatcher Years (1979–1990) in which neo-liberalism became the dominant political-economic paradigm. This period saw the creation of 'casino capitalism', the erosion of the welfare state or in Thatcher's words 'the Nanny State'. Whereas citizenship in the twentieth century was based on notions of sameness and solidarity, citizenship studies have to address increasing social and cultural diversity, a global refugee crisis, the relationship between social and human rights, a demographic crisis, and above all the erosion of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Charter of Workers’ Rights was a major achievement of the Italian Socialist Party and of the center-left governments. This article explores some of the factors in the international context that allowed for a period of reforms in Italy. Changes in the policies of the US administration; a difficult leadership succession in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; the renewal of the Catholic Church thanks to the Vatican Council; and the enlargement of the Italian working class plus the role of the Socialist Minister of Labor must all be given credit for a truly significant piece of legislation. The Charter also contained a vision of the future, of a new society, still to come. JEL codes: J5, K31, Z13

Scientists have warned decision‐makers about the severe consequences of the global environmental crisis since the 1970s. Yet ecological degradation continues and little has been done to address climate change. We investigated early‐career conservation researchers' (ECR) perspectives on, and prioritization of, actions furthering sustainability. We conducted a survey (n = 67) and an interactive workshop (n = 35) for ECR attendees of the 5th European Congress of Conservation Biology (2018). Building on these data and discussions, we identified ongoing and forthcoming advances in conservation science. These include increased transdisciplinarity, science communication, advocacy in conservation, and adoption of a transformation‐oriented social–ecological systems approach to research. The respondents and participants had diverse perspectives on how to achieve sustainability. Reformist actions were emphasized as paving the way for more radical changes in the economic system and societal values linked to the environment and inequality. Our findings suggest that achieving sustainability requires a strategy that (1) incorporates the multiplicity of people's views, (2) places a greater value on nature, and (3) encourages systemic transformation across political, social, educational, and economic realms on multiple levels. We introduce a framework for ECRs to inspire their research and practice within conservation science to achieve real change in protecting biological diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the recent currents of thought in the contemporary Islamic world, which is becoming increasingly dominant, is developing on the margins of social and cognitive credibility of modern rationality. The basic methodological orientation that characterizes this cognitive current could reaffirm the historical memory of mu'tazilism, a classical theological school in Islam known for the fact that its representatives strongly promoted the primary importance of rational thinking. It does not matter whether we will accept to call these new Muslim thinkers NEO-mu'tazilites because of that - what will be much more important is to clearly determine their cognitive position in the overall classification of cognitive currents in the contemporary Islamic world. In fact, today we recognize four general currents of Muslim thought: (1) continuity of historical intellectual heritage, (2) mechanical promotion of modern knowledge, (3) critique of modernism from the perspective of Islamic intellectual tradition, (4) reconstruction of Islamic historical heritage from the perspective of exclusive credibility of modern knowledge. In this general cognitive classification in the contemporary conditions of the Islamic world, it will be crucial to distinguish two groups within the last current of thought, namely: (1) early Muslim reformers who were not experts in internal structures and hidden philosophical principles of modern science, (2) newer thinkers who are in no way connected with the historical heritage of Islamic classical knowledge, but under the cloak of popular religious terms reduce the key elements of the Islamic doctrinal and ontological stage in favour of the exclusive authority of the logical structures of modern rationality. These latter thinkers, who usually declare themselves as NEO-mu'tazilites, by essential reconstruction of the cultural and civilizational being of Islam, in fact discredit the social position of contemporary representatives of the classical Islamic intellectual heritage, who in the last few decades have renewed the internal sources of Islamic civilizational power in conditions of general reaffirmation of religious values. In this context, we will understand better the recent changes in the balance of global power and the models by which the modern West is reorganizing comprehensive capacities of its political, media and even academic authorities in order to consolidate in the long run new intellectual and educational structures in the contemporary Islamic world on the margins of modern rationality.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the transition from the Ancient Order to the New as liberal-bourgeois one in Spain first began to be carried out in the Cadiz Cortes by two political forces: revolutionary-minded liberals and moderate liberals (future “moderados”). The end of the War of Independence in 1814 and the return of the traditionalist-minded king Fernando VII created a “bifurcation point” from the resolution of which depended the further development of Spain for the medium term: either continuation of reforms or restoration of the Ancient Order. At the same time, the reformist impulse of Cadiz Cortes was so strong that even representatives of the initially traditionalist “servile party” formulated the so-called “Manifesto of the Persians”, which along with loyal feelings for the king offer a number of moderate political and institutional reforms. Despite the crushing failure of this project, Spanish historiography assessed the Manifesto as epochal and generally constructive: while left-wing historians always saw in it only a manifestation of an anti-revolutionary reaction, traditionalist historians, on the contrary, starting from the middle of the 19th century emphasized its pro-reformist intentions.

This article identifies two comparable teaching and learning lines of the reformist Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya Sufi order in the Indo-Afghan borderlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the strategies of social engagement of the mobile mullās of the Akhund Ghaffūr-Haddā Mullā line and those of the pīrs of the khānqah (Sufi lodge)-centered line of Khwājāh Usmān Dāmanī. The concurrent establishment of these two Sufi lines in the northwestern borderlands of colonial India was an important historical phenomenon inspired by a 'reformed' Mujaddidī practice and the two Sufi lines were comparable because of their roots in Mujaddidī reformism. I argue, however, that the two Sufi lines must also be differentiated because of the loci of their participation in and mediation of the day-to-day affairs of practising communities. Members of the Haddā Mullā's line dispersed among the Pashtun borderland communities to enforce religious priorities from day to day, while members of Usmān Dāmanī's line consciously confined their activities to the khānqah. The patterns of activity of the members of the two Mujaddidī lines suggest a new framework for understanding the relationship between Islam and politics in the Indo-Afghan borderlands: it was not the ideological approach to Islam, but the spatial imaginaries employed by the frontier Sufis which produced their respective political agendas and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Moneta e Credito is the property of Associazione Economia Civile and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article considers the various perceptions and interpretations of the 1918 University Reform made by José Carlos Portantiero (1934-2007) and José María Aricó (1931-1991), two recognized figures of the so-called Argentina “new intellectual left” (Terán, 1991). Both intellectuals shared – in a relationship marked by friendship – numerous projects and situations that delimited their respective intellectual trajectories from early activism in the Communist Party in the 1950s to support for Alfonsinism in the 1980s. This paper suggest is that this prolonged proximity did not imply that Aricó and Portantiero shared a common perception of the University Reform, its importance and its legacy. On the contrary, their opinions and interpretations on the University Reform changed along the time and had a different weight in their own intellectual work. These perceptions may indicate, on the ideological and political level, an ambiguous and variable relationship between reformism and the new left, but also that the University Reform became an object of reflection that fits to the various projects and intellectual concerns of Aricó and Portantiero.

Reformist Muslim ideology has been perceived to liberate Muslim women from the shackles of patriarchal religious and cultural norms. This article analyzes the extent to which contemporary reformist Islamic theology influences Muslim women’s movement in the light of Muslim debates on women and gender issues. In doing so, it focuses on the case of Islamic reform by Indonesian liberal-progressive Muslims since the late New Order and its influence on the Muslim women’s movement in the country. This article argues that Islamic reform promoted by contemporary liberal-progressive Muslims has given a significant contribution to the development of Muslim women’s movement. It has laid the ground for an Islamic paradigm shift on the discourse on Islam and gender. The opening of the gate of ijtihad and respect for modernity espoused by reformist Muslims have provided tools for radical change in Islamic discourse on gender while still ground such change on an Islamic basis. It has empowered Muslim women to claim for the rights in religious knowledge production and build a critical mass of Muslim women who take an active part in the struggle for gender and social justice. However, the development of Muslim women’s movement has been far more vibrant through its engagement with the dynamic of its surrounding socio-political circumstances and though critical dialogue with broader currents of feminist thoughts. Such complex genealogies have enabled Muslim women’s movement to claim its own identity as indigenous Islamic feminism that poses multiple critiques to any unjust systems that deprive Muslim women of their rights.

In this article I seek to make sense of the apparent contradiction of a call for jihad made under the auspices of the Japanese empire during its occupation of Java from March 1942 to September 1945. Why was Mas Mansur (1896–1946), the Indonesian religious figure and national hero who made the call, so supportive of the Japanese military administration? And why is this act so seldom remembered? As I hope to explain, Japan had already figured in the reformist Muslim imagination as a patriotic anti-western model for decades, creating a constituency that was initially open to Japanese overtures framed around mobilising national sentiment. Equally some Japanese advocates of southern expansion had thought about such framings while downplaying their preferred vision for a Greater East Asia that would not include an independent Indonesia. How this collaboration played out, with the Japanese eventually conceding ground on Islamic terms to gain national bodies, is a story worth retelling. In so doing I stress that Indonesia – lying at the intersection of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian imaginaries – should figure more prominently in global studies of Japanese policies regarding Islam in Asia or yet anti-Westernism in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this retrospective piece, the Guest Editor of the first number of CounterText (a special issue titled Postcolonial Springs) looks back at the past five years from various scholarly and personal perspectives. He places particular focus on an event that took place mid-way between the 2011 uprisings across a number of Arab countries and the moment of writing: the March 2015 terror attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, which killed twenty-two people and had a profound effect on Tunisian popular consciousness and that of the post-2011 Arab nations. In this context, the author argues for a renewed perspective on memoir as at once a memorial practice and a political gesture in writing, one that exceeds concerns of genre and form to encompass an ongoing project of political re-cognition following events that continue to remap the agenda for the region. The piece makes a brief final pitch for Europe's need to re-cognise, within those modes of 'articulacy-in-difficulty' active on its southern borders, specific answers to its own present quandaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anjuman Khuddam-i-Kaaba (Society of the Servants of Kaaba) was established in May, 1913, with the objective of protecting holy places of Islam located, then, in the domain (modern day Saudi Arabia) of Turkish Empire. The establishment of such an organization was necessitated by the rising tide of pan-Islamism. The rising trend of pan-Islamism in India was due, mainly, to the particular conditions of Muslim elite (ashrafiah) who felt disempowered and rendered irrelevant under the colonial administrative structure. This loss of temporal Muslim authority in India made Muslim elite take refuge in asserting their identity as deeming themselves part of larger community of Muslim world (ummah). Moreover, the reformed and willed individual self who believed in struggle within inner-self and outer mundane life, started asserting his/her identity as a Muslim who was poised to do his/her best for the community of Muslims. The contemporary declining conditions of Muslims and their subjugation by colonial powers encouraged their solidarity on the basis of ummah as increasingly relevant to take refuge in. The establishment of Anjuman Khuddam-i-Kaaba was but one such expression of assertion of Muslim identity by bringing sanctity of the sacred places of Islam in political arena. It envisioned massive projects for the welfare of Muslim community of India including making its own ship making company to facilitate pilgrims of Hajj (sing. Haji, plu. hujjaj) besides its main function i.e. the protection of holy places of Islam in Makkah and Madina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A year after Atatürk abolished the institution of the caliphate, Ali Abdel Razek, an Islamic scholar from the traditional al-Azhar University, published a not-too-thick volume entitled Islam and the Foundations of Political Power and initiated a new and dynamic discussion of completely unexpected proportions about the relationship between Islam and politics. Distinguished professors of al-Azhar had an urgent meeting and made a decision that Abdel Razek should be stripped of his title of an Islamic cleric because of the views he had expounded in his book. However, despite this, in the following decades his book became one of the most popular texts among the contemporary Muslim thinkers in the Egyptian scientific and political circles and beyond. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the contents of this book we notice that Abdel Razek persistently attempts to show that the caliphate did not have any benefit for the Muslims, and that it even was a source of permanent injustice and evil. He concludes that the political power, the state and even the judiciary should not be connected with religion, because they are exclusively political phenomena. He also insists that the Prophet Muhammad was a purely spiritual leader and that he had never contemplated the concepts of political authority or the state. For this reason he explicitly claims that politics and religion are mutually incompatible and warns Muslims that they must follow the latest results of human reason in the field of political science if they wish to consolidate the foundations and structure of the political power in their societies. However, we notice that, due to his frequent and generally objective criticism of the Caliphs and their policies in various historical periods, Abdel Razek ignores the fact that in the Quran and the Islamic tradition there are frequent references to the political power, the judiciary, defense issues, economic control, and the organization of internal and international politics, that is, that both the Quran and the Islamic tradition contain teachings about a different policy that leads one toward eternal bliss. Such policy, the ultimate purpose of which is the enlightenment of man and society, was written about extensively by the representatives of a brilliant political philosophy and political jurisprudence in Islam, who relied on the cognitive credibility of the religious texts and the various categories of theoretical and practical reason.

Upon an analysis on thesis of Rosa Luxemburg and V. I. Lenin, this article points out concepts on Reform, Reformism and Revolution with a look at the Latin American present. In the field of reforms within capitalist societies, it analyzes the differences between their use in certain contexts as a way to mitigate social problems affecting broad popular strata and the reformist positions denounced by Rosa Luxemburg and VI Lenin, which simply seek changes for the capitalism and sabotage revolutionary processes, aiming to achieve structural changes. Considering the experiences of the Cuban Revolution and the sociopolitical contributions of Fidel Castro, he reflects on the implementation of reforms in the process of socialist transition or the construction of socialism.

Whereas in other MENA countries the impact of neo-liberal policies has been the subject of intense debate, there are at present few voices that directly analyze or critique its social and political consequences in Iran. This article seeks to address this lacuna by analyzing the dynamics of reformism, economic liberalization and popular mobilization in Iran. It charts the country's move from a post-revolutionary populism to a liberalized yet increasingly exclusivist model of politics and compares this to trajectories of economic liberalization in Egypt. Two distinct outcomes of economic reform are analyzed in the first part of the article: Socioeconomic exclusion; and the contraction of political rights. In the second half, I investigate the ways successive postwar governments in Iran have packaged neoliberal reforms, and how their reimagining of the role of the state has led to differing levels of popular resistance. Finally I argue that under the present administration, political elites increasingly are oriented toward strengthening the state and seeking to limit opposition to their policies. However, the absence of neoliberal hegemony in Iran means that growing mobilization on socioeconomic issues is challenging these policies. The Right in Iranian politics is utilizing this mobilization to present a populist challenge to the reformists in power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article raises the question of how a person argues for social change by compromise. The study is about the leading theorist of the reformist Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), Ernst Wigforss, and how he argues for a compromise in the relations between capital and labour. My hypothesis is that social change is argued as necessary, possible, and desirable. The guiding idea for the analysis is to use Quentin Skinner's understanding of political thought and its expression as a political manoeuvre bounded by a historically given context. However, the latter needs to be specified as an analytical concept, as well as audience and interest. Despite his efforts Wigforss failed to create an agreement about new relations between capital and labour. His problem situation and his efforts to work through the problem mirror a general political problem, the possibilities of reformism to convert the existing society on crucial issues. More specifically, however, in his effort to redefine what the interest of each party should be, Wigforss had to consider the character of the object of conflict he was addressing, as this determined what the interest of each party was, and the sort of compromise that might be reached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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There is considerable consensus that social democracy is in crisis. But there remains room for more analysis of what social democracy was and why it has become a hollow political shell. Born in the late nineteenth century, social democracy was the product of a particular stage of economic development corresponding with two main forms of class struggle between those with a stake in the system and between those with and without. It is now a spent force, having outlived its usefulness as the policy reflection of successive phases of economic growth and class struggle characteristic of the history of capitalism. No longer a meaningful political form for capital, social democracy parades as life-support, as it always has, but now without the possibility of following through on its promises. Its legitimacy is in question everywhere, a fact it cannot change or reverse. At best, it can offer only what other parties offer – more retrenchment, more concessions to the corporate sector and more discipline for the working class. In general, the crisis of social democracy around the world today appears to signal nothing less than the end of the once imagined 'parliamentary road' to socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the cognitive stage of religious traditions, science, in the light of the authority of religious revelation and reason, was dominant in relation to culture, which means that it was possible to determine the true value of different cultures using scientific knowledge. Nowadays, the completely opposite approach is gaining in popularity. Namely, when they discovered the fundamental weaknesses of empiristic definition of science, postmodern philosophers started more vocally saying that culture actually has a crucial influence on the method and internal science structure. Thus, science loses its cognitive independence and becomes the product of culture. In other words, each culture creates a separate scientific knowledge in accordance with its other cognitive layers and needs of the members of that culture. Among the Muslim reformist thinkers, influential Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd wrote in a most comprehensive and thorough manner about the text of the Quran undergoing the influence of culture from the time of life of t he Prophet Muhammad. He explained that the interpreter necessarily has a crucial role in forming the meaning of a text and that the meaning of the text will not be determined on its own until the hermeneutical position of the person reading and interpreting it is taken into consideration. Abu Zayd believed that the primal meaning of the Quran was conditioned by cultural and historic contexts of the time when the Quran appeared and that meaning was no longer credible. However, according to his opinion, the essence of the Quran message will be discovered using hermeneutics, when we harmonize the text with our contemporary cultural realities. With his pioneering attitude, Abu Zayd broke all ontological and metaphysical principles of mystical hermeneutics in the traditional cognitive environment of Islam. The renowned representatives of Islamic mystical heritage insisted that essential and inner meanings of the Quran text are in no way opposing its outer meaning. Using various methods, they uncovered sophisticated secrets of the Quran teachings in the heart of outer layer of the words of God and, in that manner, they ascended to the heaven of metaphysical realities of the Quran and the whole universe.

Fazlur Rahman was a professor of Islamic Studies and Philosophy at prominent universities in England and America. He became the head of the Central Islamic Research Institute in Karachi a few years after the state of Pakistan was internationally recognized. At the request of the president of his homeland, he is actively committed to defining the religious strategies of the new state, which will be based on the cognitive principles of Islam and at the same time aligned with the changing needs of the modern world. Until the end of his life, and chiefly as a professor of the University of Chicago, Fazlur Rahman tirelessly explained that Muslims would not benefit from modernity until they established the correct model of understanding of the essence of religion in modern times. He believes that in traditional Islamic knowledge we cannot find adequate answers to the complex challenges of modern life and therefore proposes new basic guidelines for the interpretation of the Quran and Islam. Fazlur Rahman primarily stresses the importance of noticing the difference between the unchanging principles of Islam and historical Islam. In his view, all social teachings of the Quran in the form of Islamic regulations were established in the historical context of the needs of the first Muslim community, which means that these regulations are no longer credible today. Fazlur Rahman's model would practically evolve in the following manner: in the first step, we focus on history and analyze the historical contexts of the Quranic teachings, with the intention of recognizing and separating the general principles of the Quran. In the second step, the general principles thus obtained are aligned with the circumstances of the modern era with the help of modern social, political and economic sciences, and through this we come to formulate new social regulations of Islam. However, using the method of analyzing the contents of Fazlur Rahman's highly influential works, we will notice serious methodological weaknesses in his extreme reformist approach. His knowledge of the prominent theological heritage of the Muslims was obviously not vast enough, and he also did not try to exhaust all the possibilities of the rich instruments of the traditional Islamic methodology of jurisprudence. Our conclusion is that Fazlur Rahman's platform for the reconstruction of religious thought paves the way for the dominance of secularized Islam, despite the fact that Fazlur Rahman himself was most concerned of such a possibility.

Socrates is in search of a specific knowledge that by achieving it, one would both realize the moral virtues and practically become virtuous. Based on morality on knowledge, Socrates unifies his philosophy with his way of life, and discovers a criterion by which he could criticize the customary morality, religion, politics, and rhetoric of the Greeks, and expose their moral defects. The common defects that are the subjects of his moral examination and rectification include: the belief that committing injustice is better than suffering it; revenge and reciprocation (the lex talionis: a gift for a gift and an evil for an evil); popular piety based on the belief in the deceit and strife among gods, and deceitfulness and callousness of the gods towards human beings, and commercial transaction between gods and humankind (i.e. gods’ receiving sacrificial gifts from human beings in exchange for providing their needs); allowing the superordinate to exploit the subordinate; and lastly, the method of persuasive and deceitful rhetoric.

RESUMO Este trabalho lida com um momento da trajetória do Sindicato dos Empregados em Estabelecimentos Bancários do Espírito Santo (SEEB/ES), entre 1953 e 1964, que correspondeu a uma fase de progressiva radicalização política e alinhamento com o projeto das Reformas de Base. O propósito é o de explicar o abandono de uma orientação reformista moderada em favor de uma postura radical. Para tanto, busca-se articular as influências teóricas de E. P. Thompson e Adam Przeworski, de forma a considerar a relação entre a experiência de classe no plano da cultura e o papel das lideranças nas conjunturas dadas. Tendo em vista as diferenças entre o plano nacional e o regional, no caso, do Espírito Santo, defende-se a tese de que as elites sindicais articularam aspectos mais amplos com a realidade local, de forma a apelar aos bancários capixabas como membros da classe trabalhadora, sendo este o sentido instrumental das Reformas de Base. Foi tal estratégia que permitiu, ao mesmo tempo, mobilizar a categoria com base tanto em suas condições de trabalho quanto em um sentido mais geral. A base empírica usada constou de entrevistas, notícias da imprensa local e documentos da entidade.

In both Spain and Chile, Civil Society and Elites participated in the process leading to the transition to democracy and in the transition itself, although their role and implication were different in each country. In Spain, Civil Society was the main actor until the foundational elections of June 15, 1977, after which elites play the major role. In Chile, this latter always played a predominant role, turning exceptionally to Civil Society, as for instance the campaign for registration on the electoral rolls prior to the October 5, 1988, plebiscite. After the plebiscite, its exclusive leadership encouraged social demobilization.

Implementing practical religious rules in his personal and social life, a Muslim is approaching secrets of eternal bliss and supreme realities of the universe. In fact, these rules are the result of God's knowledge. B rilliant representatives of Islam's juristic heritage found their final formulation in religious sources - through a professional process called ijtihad. In order to get to know the subject of these rules, they were necessarily focused on empirical achievements and social contexts of their time. Under the influence of the dominant modern science, Muslim reformers identify ijtihad with empirical research. In this way, they reject sublime and unchanging cognitive bases of ijtihad, which comprise religious revelation and rational knowledge. However, they ignore the fact that modern science has absolutely no power to judge all the realities and values as scientists from XIX century naively wanted. In this paper, we try to follow fundamental changes in the meaning of ijtihad, primarily using a detailed content analysis of popular works of two famous Muslim reformist thinkers, Muhammad Iqbal and Ali Shariati. The former insists that today only modern, empirical knowledge has scientific credibility and that it is the only one to follow in all aspects of life. In the works of the latter, we read that in the light of ijtihad, Islam has to change and go in line with modern science and new social needs.

Mohammed Arkoun, who was the professor of Islamic Studies at the New Sorbonne University for many years, can be considered one of the most influential reformist thinkers of the contemporary Islamic world. In the light of his most fundamental views about the critique of the Islamic reason, he brought about many changes in the methodology of understanding of intellectual and cultural inheritance of Islam in most expert circles in the West and throughout the Islamic world. He writes in detail about this and says that the epistemological foundations and traditional analytical tools of Islam lack any kind of value today. From his epistemological standpoint, modern man, he says, sees them to be irrational. He emphasizes that traditional Muslim theologians and jurisprudents have erroneously been teaching that the Islamic reason is an absolute reason and that it is not connected to any historical contexts. In the same vein, he attempts to prove that the reason (that) the Qur'an mentions is simply a practical and empirical reason. In this article, by using the philosophical analytical method, we will examine the content of some of the most important works of Arkoun. In those, he has explained in detail his critique of the Islamic reason. While answering his criticism, we will explain that the Qur'an and the totality of the Islamic scientific inheritance gives cosmological value to the different levels of the reason and that it does not in any manner reduce truth and knowledge at the level of instrumental and empirical reason. We will talk about 11 types of reasons that have been mentioned in Islam. These are the following: conceptual reason, theoretical reason, practical reason, metaphysical reason, common sense, universal reason, particular reason, empirical reason, instrumental reason, intuitive reason and sacred reason. In contrast to Arkoun, who considers Western thought to be the standard by means of which one must reconstruct the Islamic reason, we will explain that in the West today most people have lost hope in modern enlightenment. More than this, modern instrumental science has lost its connection to all of the higher levels of the reason. Now, it follows the lower levels of rationality in which social and media power delineate its foundations and direction. We will come to the conclusion that the truth and the solution to the crisis of the modern world can only be sought out in the buried treasures of the sacred reason and the theoretical and practical reason of Islamic tradition and religion in general.

The symposium on Francesco Guala's Understanding Institutions was thought provoking. Five critical papers took issue with Guala's reconciliation of the game-theoretical view of institutions and the rule-governed view. We offer some critical commentary that adopts a different perspective. We agree that institutions are central to social life and, thus, also to the social sciences; they are also prior to and more fundamental than individuals. We add some historical points on the ways previous philosophers thought about institutions, and we come at this from a philosophical viewpoint that is not that of analytic philosophy but rather that of Popper's critical rationalism. In that framework, we espouse an idea of the relation between philosophy and the philosophy of science that is different from that of Guala and his commentators, and we recommend a reformist philosophy of institutions that is neither radical nor traditionalist and that makes better sense of the institution of the scholarly symposium than do games or rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]