What is Islamic about reform among Muslims and what is not? How can we differentiate reform within an Islamic paradigm and a paradigmatic shift from the Islamic tradition to something else in a Muslim community? How do we establish the connection between reform as an intellectual or scholarly project and the translation of that project into social reality (or, in some cases, the absence of such a translation)? This article addresses these questions in the context of the Volga-Ural region in the late Russian Empire, where reformist Muslims attempted to reform existing Islamic educational institutions, particularly the religious seminaries called “madrasas,” as a means to modernize the region's Muslim communities. Educational reform initiatives among Volga-Ural Muslims originated within the framework of Muslim networks and institutions. Yet, especially after Russia's Revolution of 1905, reform in a number of prominent madrasas came to be characterized by various non-religious and at times even anti-religious influences emerging from the globalization of Western European modernity. Consequently, in these madrasas, education and the overall student experience turned into a secularizing process, and Islam as a religious system lost its weight and appeal for many students, who then engaged in a reform movement that evolved beyond an Islamic paradigm.

Much history of the West has been dominated by the view that the seeds of modernity began in Greek Antiquity and that the birth of capitalism and the urbanization that created a bourgeoisie lay with the European communes of northern Italy in the Middle Ages. But from the wider perspective of world civilizations, did Europe in fact diverge significantly from the common Eurasiatic cultures of the Bronze Age, delineated by the Marxist Australian prehistorian, Gordon Childe, either in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages? Clearly there was a significant divergence in the nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution, and in certain respects after the Renaissance, but does that warrant the teleological search for what Wallerstein (1999) calls “civilizational” as distinct from “conjunctural” factors? I argue that the starting point for historical research into either Asiatic or European “exceptionalism,” as Marx called it, should be the convergences of the urban civilizations of the Bronze Age rather than the divergent paths of the nineteenth century.

The question of whether Japan can rightly be said to “have had feudalism” is by no means settled. Although Westerners have been writing about “Japanese feudalism” for well over a hundred years, the acceptability of this practice is still a matter of controversy among professional historians, notably among those who make the study of medieval Europe their specialty. To a long line of Western historians ending with Herbert Norman, however, there was no question about the appropriateness of placing the feudal label on Japan. Nor does the contemporary Japanese historian question a term which has become so important a part of his professional as well as everyday vocabulary. In a Japan in which the reading public is daily reminded that the “struggle against feudalism” is still being waged, feudalism seems a present reality which by its very nature cannot be denied to have existed in Japan's past.

Indian immigration into the West Indies generally during the nineteenthcentury, and in particular to British Guiana, forms a small portion of migrationmovements from one area to another in the world during thatperiod. But in terms of West Indian societies, this immigration representeda major influx and so had significant social effects, especially inBritish Guiana and in Trinidad. By 1917 when the system was terminated some 429,286 Indians had been introduced into the West Indies since 1838, of which 238,909 went to British Guiana, and 143,939 to Trinidad.

The Norman and Swabian monarchy has a rich and valuable bibliography. Scholarly interest has been refreshed at intervals by conferences on it, by comparative notes and latterly by polemics. But these occasional papers do not explain by themselves the continuing interest of the subject, which arises from the extraordinary political precocity of this monarchy, and from the personalities of two kings who stand among the great statesmen of all time, Roger II and Frederick of Swabia.

The origins and first uses of money have long been topics of interest to scholars. Although economists today still repeat Adam Smith's argument that money was created to eliminate barter, researchers with an extensive knowledge of archaic and primitive cultures have shown that money was often required for reasons other than the indirect exchange of goods. Irish evidence gives a European example of primitive money used to pay fines and to meet social obligations; what made the money valuable was that it enabled its recipients to perform these functions. Money was not used to facilitate the indirect exchange of goods.

As the quotation from R. Park's 1928 work demonstrates, sociologists have a rather longstanding interest in migration and its consequences, in “the conflicts and fusions of peoples.” The period of relative tranquility between 1925 and 1955 was followed by a marked resurgence of ethnicity and a revitalization of international migrations during the 1960s and 1970s. Neither of these phenomena was confined to the Western Hemisphere or the new countries in Africa and Asia, but included a revival of ethnic mobilization in such nationstates as Great Britain, France, and Spain and the migration of millions of workers from southern Europe to the advanced industrial countries in northern Europe.

Suppose there are two lines on a graph, close together and moving in thesame general direction and that at one point one of them begins to divergefrom the other. After some time the gap between them will have widenedvery considerably. This simple image would command general agreementas an illustration of the different paths taken by Western and MiddleEastern or Islamic civilizations in the course of the last thousand years.

It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orientalists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical writings. Like every consensus, it contained many variations of detail, as we shall see, but as the view of experts it was widely influential for a long time. For example, R. C. Majumdar gave a thoughtful version of this view at the beginning of the multivolume History and Culture of the Indian People (Majumdar 1951) by Indian scholars, published shortly after independence. But the consensus was eroded by the rise of what we may call the “colonial knowledge” paradigm, which asserted a close connection between European rule and European knowledge of India. It tended to discredit the old consensus and to lighten the specific gravity of Orientalist knowledge, simplifying it as an object of historical explanation. This development has cleared an opening, in recent decades, for a rush of new studies tending to create an opposing consensus, that India did have history of a kind, it being the task of scholars to explicate what kind, exactly, that was (for example, Pathak 1966; Warder 1972; Thapar 1992; Wagoner 1993; Ali, ed. 1999; Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2001; Guha 2004; Mantena 2007). This in itself has been very much to the good, by reopening questions that had been closed by the old consensus. The old consensus itself, by contrast, was dismissed without much examination, and was attributed to colonial interest, cultural misunderstanding, or insufficient grasp of Indian languages and literatures. The old consensus now is seen as a simple ideological projection, easily explained and dismissed, with little complexity or interest for historical investigation. But this simplifying action of the prevailing paradigm renders invisible some of the very real effects of the old consensus, effects whose explanation can be very valuable to us. In order to gain the benefit it holds we have to take it seriously, trying both to explain it historically and to decide whether or in what way it is true.

On 15 August 1902, a battalion of Chinese police officers under the command of Superintendent Zhao Bingjun marched into city center of Tianjin and toward the Yamen Complex, the ceremonial site where the Eight Power Alliance was handing back the city to Governor General Yuan Shikai after two years of occupation following the Boxer Uprising. As they approached the complex, allied officials and commanders, standing with Yuan Shikai and his entourage under a “Friendship Forever” banner, were shocked and dismayed. As one of the preconditions for its resumption of the control of the city, the Qing government had agreed to the allied demand that its troops would not enter the vicinity of Tianjin, and some allied officials had even thought that Yuan would be compelled to beg the allied forces to stay and continue to maintain law and order. Yuan Shikai's sudden show of forces was a slap in their faces and potentially a violation of an international agreement. “What is the meaning of this?” asked an allied representative with raised voice. “Look carefully. These are not troops,” Yuan replied with a smirk, “They are policemen.” Not knowing what to do, allied officials pointed fingers at each other, blaming the stupidity of those who had designed the agreement. “It is not we who are stupid,” one said, “It is Yuan Shikai who is so cunning.”

At the turn of the nineteenth century in Southeast Asia, the Kingdoms of Burma and Siam were largely stable, independent polities: powerful in relation to their neighbors, self-sufficient in terms of food, and possessing little reason to believe that these parameters would be changing within the clearly foreseeable future.See Victor Lieberman, “Secular Trends in Burmese Economic History, 1350–1830, and their Implications for State-Formation,” Modern Asian Studies 25, 1 (1991), p. 22. A century later, Burma as an independent entity had disappeared off the map, and Siam—at least in terms of its official foreign trade—was an economic satellite of the British Empire. Burmese teak now floated downstream to British Rangoon, while Siamese rice was carried to the world in the hulls of British ships. The Burmese monarchy had been disbanded; 93 percent of all official Siamese imports and exports were in the hands of London's merchants.George Curzon, “The Siamese Boundary Question,” The Nineteenth Century 34, July (1893), pp. 53–54. How did these transformations occur, and why? Were the processes of domination geared toward the economies, politics, or “geobodies” of these two countries, or toward an integrated combination of all three? What role did material objects of trade themselves play in this process, objects that were often deemed illegal as they passed through unstable, liminal spaces along the frontier?

The madrasa is one of the many institutions which have seen recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when it first emerged as the principal institution of higher Islamic learning, the madrasa has undergone many changes, adapting in varying degrees to local cultures and changing times.On the madrasa in medieval Islam, see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Given the centrality of this institution in the preservation and production of knowledge as well as in the formation of the religious elite, the madrasa is crucial to the construction of religious authority. Profound changes in Muslim societies in modern times have not necessarily marginalized this institution, but such changes have frequently raised questions about the position and function of the madrasa in society and of the ‘ulama reared in it, about whether this institution ought to be reformed, and if so, to what end, how, and by whom.

The study of witchcraft seems to be globalizing in many respects. Not only are witches themselves supposedly globalizing, but the people who try to study them are also adopting a more global outlook. Moreover, witchcraft as a topic is no longer tied to specific areas of the world, but seems to crop up everywhere. For this essay I purposely chose three recent studies, out of a wide array of possible books, which come from very different parts of the world. Reading them comparatively can highlight key trends in this field, and also important differences.

Two rulers, one in Africa, one in Asia, are about to undergo the ceremony of baptism following first contact with the Portuguese maritime expansion—but they insist that the rite be conducted in secret. The African ruler is a regional governor (the Mani Soyo) of the Congo King Nzinga Nkuwu who has just converted in 1491. The high king's diplomatic exchanges with the sea captain Diogo Cão had not elicited any real sensation of vulnerability to Portuguese imperial designs, yet he had been happy to convert nonetheless. Now the Mani Soyo is about to follow suit, but he will not have any of his subordinates witnessing the ritual because he does not want them benefiting from the enhanced status and power that the ritual could bestow. In the highlands of Sri Lanka some fifty years later, the King of Kandy is equally intent on keeping his baptismal rites hidden from public view. But his reasons are strikingly different. He does this “lest his people should kill him.” When news of the baptism did leak out rioting followed, and the king had to spread the story that it had all been a ploy to deceive the Portuguese.

In March 1998, the political leadership of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel was looking for ways to commemorate al-Nakba (“The Disaster,” in Arabic), referring to the war of 1948, during which about 700,000 Palestinians were uprooted and hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed. This leadership, organized in the Follow-Up Committee (FUC), nominated a Nakba and Steadfastness Committee (NSC) chaired by the author Muhamad Ali Taha. Among the Committee's several initiatives, one gained front-page headlines in the Arabic media: a call for Arab municipalities to establish memorial monuments for the Palestinian martyrs (shuhada) of 1948.

The title of the panel at which this paper was originally presented — “Nationalism and the Growth of States”, at the 1960 meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City — suggested a concern with nationalism as a political phenomenon. We were not speaking primarily about love of country, the cultivation of a national style or hatred of the foreigner, but about political convictions, attitudes or movements and their relation to the state. The dilemma of nineteenth-century Russian nationalism, so defined, consists in this — that it could only with difficulty, if at all, view the tsarist state as the embodiment of the national purpose, as the necessary instrument and expression of national goals and values, while the state, for its part, looked upon every autonomous expression of nationalism with fear and suspicion.

The first years following independence in Africa were an exciting time for scholars who rushed off to observe the emerging politics of new states across the continent. The analytical frameworks these scholars brought with them for the purpose of interpreting what they saw were largely borrowed from mainstream models derived from the study of American politics that were widely popular at the time. However, soon after the early independence era (1956–1966), it became obvious that a sole focus on the formal structures and functions of state and society revealed little about the actual practice of politics. Across the continent, governments were suffering from constitutional failures, an inability to offer a consistent application of regulatory mechanisms or enforceable law; and few states could even extract sufficient revenue to support either pre-existing colonial-era governmental structures or the many new ambitious projects undertaken by politicians soon after independence.

In the face of the dominating tradition of British structural functionalism, anthropological studies of political leadership represented an important move towards accounting for the dynamics of centralized, as well as acephalous, polities (for example, Barth 1959 and Baily 1970; cf. Schapera 1956). Moreover, in focusing upon political actors and, by extension, political relations, these studies necessarily took account of the role of the subjects. Yet, despite Gluckman's innovative notion of “rituals of rebellion” (1954; cf. Beidelman 1966), the issue of political leadership has rarely focused upon the political dynamics of the ruler-subject relationship, examining the concerns and responses of those who more or less voluntarily subject themselves to an authority figure. Even such an important contribution as Succession to High Office (Goody 1966) completely ignores this issue.

Le même mouvement de la pensée scientifique qui rattachait définitivement l'homme à l'échelle des titres et l'intégrait parmi les phénomènes de la nature n'a pas manqué d'apporter une attention plus objective et plus systématique que jadis aux manifestations de la vie sociale. L'enfantement des sciences sociales en cours sous nos yeux ne se fait pas pour autant sans peine et it semble qu'on y puisse trouver une raison, si discrète soit-elle, dans la difficulté de constituer un vocabulaire apte à traduire des concepts définis et vérifiés. La remarque de Descartes n'y est pas moins vraie que dans les sciences de la nature: “Si de verborum significatione inter Philosophos semper conveniret, fere omnes illorum controversiae tollerentur.”

On the evening of March 17, 1940, about 600 workers gathered together inside the Marievale Consolidated Compound on the far southeastern tip of the Witwatersrand goldmining crescent (see Figure 1). The workers demanded that the gates of the compound be opened, as they intended to march the forty miles to Johannesburg to present their grievances to Henry Taberer at KwaMzilikazi, the headquarters of the Native Recruiting Corporation. At about 8 pm, thirty-five policemen arrived from the nearby towns of Nigel, Springs, and Brakpan and demanded to know what was troubling the workers. After considerable discussion, the policemen discovered that the Marievale mine had run out of the regulation shift tickets normally used to record the labor of African workers and that older tickets were being used in their place. These tickets were printed with the higher wage rates received by workers during the early development of the mine: The mine officials had simply crossed out the 2 shillings and 6-pence rates and stamped the standard minimum of 2 shillings onto each slip of paper. The workers were suspicious about this conspicuous reduction of wage rates, arguing that they were due the original rate established by the Native Recruiting Corporation.