The reformist religious intellectuals of the 1990s and the 2000s sought to articulate a new jurisprudence that drew inspiration from dynamic, reason-centered ijtihad. The characteristics of the new, reconstituted fiqh were meant to include a comprehensive research program of reformism, deconstruction of commonplace understanding of religion and religion hermeneutic, and reexamining religious experiences and expectations. It was also meant to historicize religion and reimagine jurisprudence through the application of secular and scientific tools and methods. The project’s spectacular failure, slowly made clear about a decade after its zenith in the mid-2000s, owed much to the right’s merciless and multipronged onslaught. But that failure – more accurately, its violent obstruction – did not come until after the project of deconstructing hermeneutics and ijtihad had been taken to their logical extension, namely efforts to construct a sustained theory of Islamic democracy.

The Introduction turns to Terry Eagleton’s comment on reading Naipaul (“Great art, dreadful politics”) and asks how critics have addressed this quandary about a great writer. It looks at the critical essays on Naipaul by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Sara Suleri in particular to examine how Naipaul’s works challenge the idea of “postcolonial arrival.” The overall thesis of the book is summed up as a reading in which an author “reads us.” To undertake this project, the work is grounded in a systematic examination of all of the author’s published and unpublished works, the secondary bibliography, and material deposited in the Naipaul Archive, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. To make a case for Naipaul’s place in global literary culture, there are four key impulses that govern the book. They are: history, aesthetics, textual engagement, and archival knowledge. To give meaning to that achievement, this book is written with thematic unities in mind. Although chronology is not totally dispensed with, the chapters are structured with the aim of establishing connections within Naipaul’s heterogeneous corpus. But for that interconnectedness to succeed, Naipaul followed an uncompromising commitment to writing as an aesthetic endeavour, uninhibited by fashion or ideology.

This chapter examines socialist-secularist intellectuals. Secularist intellectuals were noted both for their quick rise within the socialist party, which offered them newspaper editorships and Reichstag candidacies, and for their tendency to heresy. They provided many of the key figures in anarchism, revisionism and radicalism. The first section focuses on how an important oppositional movement of 1890 to 1893, the so-called “revolt of the Jungen” was led by some of the Berlin secularists introduced in Chapter 1. The Jungen have been the subject of a number of reflections on the role of intellectuals in the party; however, none of these has dealt with the secularist dimension of this conflict. By taking up this lacuna, the chapter reinterprets key aspects of the history and the theory of the intellectual. The second section of this chapter shows how Berlin secularists strategically employed heresy as a means of developing their charisma as autonomous intellectuals within the socialist milieu.

Since late antiquity, bishops have been regarded as possessing the highest authority among Christians. But there was no linear path leading there. Rather, there were different bearers of authority among Christians: James, as the respected brother of Jesus, was a key figure at the beginning; intellectuals were able to gain importance as teachers, prophets also appeared after Jesus, among them many women; widows and virgins attained a special position; finally, the authority of ascetics increased. Basically, authority could be derived from an office within the church or from personal charisma, which was considered God given. Good bishops tried to combine both, but charismatics could always challenge them and would continue to do so throughout the history of Christianity.

This chapter shows how the crisis of the early 1920s and the intellectual relief that followed were essential to shaping European discourses about intellectuals and their roles in democratic societies. It begins by exploring well-known inter-war polemics by Julien Benda, Karl Mannheim, and Antonio Gramsci against the social backdrop of intellectual crisis and reconstruction. The chapter centres on Geneva as a crucible for bureaucracy and home to bodies that sought to categorize and organize international intellectual life. The chapter shows how a wide range of national and international organizations emerged in the 1920s to codify and protect the status of intellectuals and intellectual workers, and argues that all of this activity was motivated and conditioned by the post-war humanitarian crisis. While, by the late 1920s, the rights of intellectuals were increasingly – but unevenly – protected by international legislation, the rise of totalitarianism showed the vulnerability of intellectuals.

Post-First World War intellectual relief failed; violence against intellectuals and sites of learning proved to be a reality of modern warfare, as demonstrated by attacks on universities in the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War, and the flight of intellectuals both within and from Europe after 1933. The symbolically rebuilt library at Louvain was destroyed again in 1940 during the Second World War. Meanwhile, the rise of totalitarianism showed that intellectuals were not bulwarks of democracy as post-war rhetoric had implied. The epilogue shows how post-First World War intellectual relief influenced the rescue of intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution as well as the way in intellectual life was rebuilt following the Second World War, notably through the establishment of UNESCO. The reconstruction of intellectual life after the Great War continues to resonate in the twenty-first century.

This chapter explores the displacement of knowledge following the First World War in two ways. First, it focuses on the displacement of people, specifically the Russian refugees displaced by the civil war in the early 1920s. It shows how thousands of intellectuals were combed out of the wider body of displaced people and relocated in sites across Europe and the wider world. Second, the chapter looks at how other forms of intellectual capital were displaced following post-war treaties and the redrawing of international borders, such as Hungarian institutions that found themselves ‘displaced’ in Czechoslovakia and Romania. Arguments about the displacement of knowledge demonstrated how individuals, institutions, and even modes of thinking were portrayed as synonymous with certain national identities in order to effect political change. The chapter explores the tension between the nationalization of knowledge and its simultaneous claims to universalism.

Tens of thousands of European ‘intellectuals’ faced starvation by 1920 and Vienna was the epicentre for international humanitarian aid. This chapter focuses on how the feeding of intellectuals was organized by a range of humanitarian organizations in this period. The most striking example of this was the phenomenon of the ‘intellectual kitchen’, a site where intellectuals were fed away from the wider populations of their towns and cities. The chapter explores the mechanics of food and clothes aid, and argues that issues of class, gender, and race shaped the status of the ‘intellectual’ for humanitarian organizations as well as aid workers.

The book opens with an exploration of the cultural violence of the First World War and sets this in wider historical and historiographical contexts. It explores three key themes which inform the monograph: cultural destruction, humanitarianism, and the role of the intellectual. While none of these themes began with the First World War, the conflict transformed them in significant ways. Cultural destruction was a key component in how the First World War was presented to belligerent and neutral populations and intellectual sites were particularly important in this process of cultural mobilization. The introduction argues that because cultural destruction was crucial to popular understandings of the war, its opposite, cultural and intellectual reconstruction, would in turn be an important part of the process of post-war stabilization.

The Conclusion summarises pathways towards a wider theoretical trajectory for studying theatre anthropologically. What can public art institutions, especially theatres, tell us about the ethical relevance of art in German and European society today? How do artists in such institutions reflect on their practice, methods, and theories, and in doing so, what kinds of expertise do they develop? What methods and theoretical frameworks do we require to develop new approaches to professional public theatre today? The conclusion constitutes an outlook on the wider import and significance of this interdisciplinary study for anthropology, theatre, and performance theory.

The lives and struggle of intellectuals in an anti-intellectual environment

The transformation of the film industry was tightly bound up with the plan of the Chinese Communist Party for creating the new nation and its socialist culture and the “revolutionization” of film stars was an essential part of it. This chapter focuses on the story of one individual, the actress Li Ming, who started out as a military arts soldier in the New Fourth Army, to illustrate the everyday politics at the Shanghai Film Studio in the 1950s. Li Ming suffered an identity crisis as both actress and party cadre, witnessed the complicated relationship between the new nation and film stars, and experienced the impact of the “organization” on her new individual career. From a perspective of “the party’s own,” her story provides us with an intriguing way to understand the revolutionary cultural agenda, examine the degree to which the power of the Party permeated the grassroots, and comprehend the everyday politics in the socialist transformation of the urban culture.

Using the example of 1950s historiography, this chapter aims to analyze why the CCP has not succeeded in dominating China’s collective memory. In doing so, it will identify four main reasons for the party’s failure: first, the weaknesses of the resolution from 1981; second, the phase(s) of intellectual and academic freedoms in the 1980s; third, the CCP’s inability to overcome inner-party disagreements on the question of how the Party should assess its own “historical mistakes”; fourth, the fact that memories cannot be suppressed permanently. The chapter shows that the historiography is an ongoing process that is not yet completed, and that China’s current president Xi Jinping’s politics of history has led the CCP into a dead end since this political approach attempts both to suppress alternative views of post-1949 history and to finally establish official narratives on a long-term basis.

This chapter focuses on Bolaño’s writings that confront the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973–1990) and the complicity of intellectuals with Pinochet’s dictatorial state. Prior to Bolaño, few if any Chilean writers had reflected on complicity at such length or with such scathing intentionality. His works illuminate the moral gray zones to which the dictatorship gave rise and the myriad ways civilians and intellectuals became implicated in the regime’s reign of terror. Focusing especially on Bolaño’s 1996 novel Estrella distante (Distant Star, 2004) and his 2000 novel Nocturno de Chile (By Night in Chile, 2003), the chapter evokes several scenes from Bolaño’s two “dictatorship” novels to illustrate a wide spectrum of characters that range from fully complicit subjects to “implicated subjects” (Michael Rothberg). If the poet-killer Carlos Wieder, also known as Alberto Ruíz-Tagle, is clearly an accomplice to the Pinochet regime in Distant Star, figures such as the Opus Dei priest Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix or the belle of the literary salons María Canales in By Night in Chile, might be more aptly characterized as implicated subjects whose example brings into relief the ways a “civilized” culture inhabited by barbarism becomes part and parcel of dictatorial rule.

This chapter reconsiders the radicalization process of the May Fourth youth through the founding of the CYP in Europe and the collapse of the YCA in China. This chapter first highlights how the different material conditions in Europe laid a significant foundation for the emergence of different ideologies among those Chinese students working and studying in Europe. Subsequently, by examining the radicalizing political confrontations between the founders of the CCP and CYP in both Europe and China, this chapter demonstrates how the CYP founders became radicalized and set out for a national socialist revolution in 1923.

Central to a number of manifestations of antisemitism is anti-Zionism, which in our time has become not only intellectually fashionable but morally required: One cannot be deemed morally good without supporting those who are bent on the annihilation of the Jewish state. This is the topic of Chapter 7. Like most manifestations of antisemitism, but although it is one that has the explicit endorsement both of the left-wing elite and of Islamic Jihadists, anti-Zionism is cloaked in the self-righteous garb of moral indignation. Here anti-Zionism is understood as an opposition not to the policies of the Jewish state but to the existence of the Jewish state. The chapter explains how notions of Holy Land and sacred history are tied to anti-Zionism, how anti-Zionism is tied to a contempt for Judaism, and what this has to do with the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state. Once again, we find that demonization introduces a metaphysical dimension that will not tolerate any compromise or half-measures. Like most manifestations of antisemitism, but one that has yet distinct from them in that it has become intellectually fashionable, anti-Zionism is cloaked in the self-righteous garb of moral indignation.