The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times
In this concluding volume of The Venture of Islam , Hodgson describes the second flowering of Islam: the Safavi, Timuri, and Ottoman empires. The final part of the volume analyzes the widespread Islamic heritage in today's world.
“I don’t know if he did that, but it was a fast way of saying he took Egypt.” — Ridley Scott
Would have been far more interesting and timely if Ridley Scott hired John Tolan (“Faces of Muhammad”) as an advisor on the life of Napoleon… Juan Cole would have also saved him couple of embarrassing scenes.
“Napoleon had an idealised, bookish, Enlightenment vision of Islam as pure monotheism: indeed, the failure of his Egyptian expedition owed partly to his idea of Islam being quite different from the religion of Cairo’s ulama. Yet Napoleon was not alone in seeing himself as a new Muhammad: Goethe enthusiastically proclaimed that the emperor was the ‘Mahomet der Welt’ (Muhammad of the world), and the French author Victor Hugo portrayed him as a ‘Mahomet d’occident’ (Muhammad of the West). Napoleon himself, at the end of his life, exiled on Saint Helena and ruminating on his defeat, wrote about Muhammad and defended his legacy as a ‘great man who changed the course of history’. Napoleon’s Muhammad, conqueror and lawgiver, persuasive and charismatic, resembles Napoleon himself – but a Napoleon who was more successful, and certainly never exiled to a cold windswept island in the South Atlantic.”
Muhammad: an anticlerical hero of the European Enlightenment
📗 The book “Portuguese Colonialism and Islam. Mozambique and Guinea, 1930 –1974: From Repression to Religious Seduction”, authored by Mário Machaqueiro, will be presented by Susana Trovão (CRIA) and Pedro Aires Oliveira (IHC) on the 15th of November.
His essay for @aeonmag is currently in my reading list:
Praying in shoes "The Sunni movement of Salafism was born at the beginning of the 20th century, with the goal of modelling life on the 7th" (by Aaron Rock-Singer):
📗 Liverpool University Press published the latest book authored by Mário Machaqueiro: “Portuguese Colonialism and Islam. Mozambique and Guinea, 1930 –1974: From Repression to Religious Seduction”.
In it, the author focuses on the ways Portuguese colonial administration dealt with Muslim communities in #Mozambique and #GuineaBissau.
There have been a number of attacks on journalists in Kosovo in recent years. Now, conservative Muslims in the southern Kosovar city of Prizren are agitating against a news portal and a journalist.
This is a piece of historical fiction that takes us to Sudan, during the 1880s, the end of the Ottoman empire. There are several main characters, but the one whose arc unites them all is a spirited young woman who loves the river as if it is her own mother. Her journey from the lush highlands, through the desert, to the cities of Sudan (mainly Al-Ubeid and Khartoum) introduces us to a young merchant turned Islamic scholar, a lout turned soldier, a mother-in-law who keeps her penchant for trading a secret, a widowed Scottish painter who wishes only to return to his daughter, and historical figures such as British Generals and Muhammad Ahmed ibn Abdullah, a self-styled messianic prophet and leader of the uprising against Egyptian rule.
5 stars, highly recommend. Follow me on #Bookwyrm for more!
Is conservative Islam gaining ground in secular Kosovo? (www.dw.com)
There have been a number of attacks on journalists in Kosovo in recent years. Now, conservative Muslims in the southern Kosovar city of Prizren are agitating against a news portal and a journalist.