Held in trust : Waqf in the Islamic world
Waqfs (pious endowments) long held a crucial place in the political, economic, and social life of the Islamic world. Waqfs were major sources of education, health care, and employment; they shaped the city and contributed to the upkeep of religious edifices. They constituted a major resource, and their status was at stake in repeated struggles to impose competing definitions of legitimacy and community. Closer examination of the diverse legal, institutional, and practical aspects of waqfs in different regions and communities is necessary to a deeper understanding of their dynamism and resilience. This volume, which evolved from papers delivered at the 2005 American University in Cairo Annual History Seminar, offers a meticulous set of studies that fills a gap in our knowledge of waqf and its uses.
Citizens of Piety: Networks of Piety and the Public Sphere in Early Modern Ottoman Cities
abstract:This paper explores the early modern Ottoman public sphere through the concept of "piety," a potent identity marker that projected social and moral authority. In Ottoman towns, piety functioned as a social paradigm denoting approval and significance in a vibrant urban culture that relied on "the pious" for various functions such as dispensation of justice, informal education, upward mobility, and everyday sociability. This paper presents, for the first time, a sociocultural analysis of the discursive uses of "the pious of the community" as a consistent, shared expression of a public sphere that negotiated moral authority vis-a-vis the state sphere. Two understudied biographical dictionaries that list "the pious" from approximately sixty Ottoman cities provide a full sense not only of who "the pious" were, but also of their role in organizing urban social life and imbuing it with moral and political meaning. The authors of these biographical collections were provincial judges, which provides the article a unique vantage point for questioning the state-society dichotomy. Instead of this dichotomous view, this article posits a public sphere that grew out of local social organization around state functions. These local communities inhabited a public sphere that simultaneously overspread and transcended the material city.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.