https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

Series Editor's Preface. Introduction by John Breuilly. Acknowledgements. 1. Definitions. State and nation. The nation. 2. Culture in Agrarian Society. Power and culture in the agro-literature society. The varieties of agrarian rulers. 3. Industrial Society. The society of perpetual growth. Social genetics. The age of universal high culture. 4. The Transition to an Age of Nationalism. A note on the weakness of nationalism. Wild and garden culture. 5. What is a Nation. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. 6. Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society. Obstacles to entropy. Fissures and barriers. A diversity of focus. 7. A Typology of Nationalisms. The varieties of nationalist experience. Diaspora nationalism. 8. The Future of Nationalism. Industrial culture - one or many?. 9. Nationalism and Ideology. Who is for Nuremberg?. One nation, one state. 10. Conclusion. What is not being said. Summary. Select bibliography. Bilbliography of Ernest Gellner's writing: Ian Jarvie. Index

Nations and Nationalism

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

Like many major revolutions in history, the East European Revolution of 1989 caught its leaders, participants, victims, and observers by surprise. This paper offers an explanation whose crucial feature is a distinction between private and public preferences. By suppressing their antipathies to the political status quo, the East Europeans misled everyone, including themselves, as to the possibility of a successful uprising. In effect, they conferred on their privately despised governments an aura of invincibility. Under the circumstances, public opposition was poised to grow explosively if ever enough people lost their fear of exposing their private preferences. The currently popular theories of revolution do not make clear why uprisings easily explained in retrospect may not have been anticipated. The theory developed here fills this void. Among its predictions is that political revolutions will inevitably continue to catch the world by surprise.

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Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989

Mystical Dimensions of Islam.

Finally, while Meisami addresses the question of the homoerotic nature of the vast majority of ghazals, she has decided, "only for convenience" (p. 254), to use the female pronoun in her discussion of the ghazal whenever referring to the beloved. Since the beloved in the vast majority of Persian ghazals is either "he" or "He," and she regularly employs the masculine pronoun in her translations (p. 263), what purpose is served by the choice of "she/her" here except that of making the ghazal seem more like the grand chant courtois?

The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran

Dismissing oversimplified and politically-charged views of the politics of Shi'ite Islam, Said Amir Arjomand offers a richly researched sociological and historical study of Shi'ism and the political order of premodern Iran that exposes the roots of what became Khomeini's theocracy.

The shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, political order, and societal change in Shi'ite Iran from the beginning to 1890

In his magisterial studies on the Islamic educational system, George Makdisi (1961, 1981, 1990) traces three stages in the development of the madrasa (Islamic school) into colleges for the study of the Koran, the Traditions of the Prophet, and jurisprudence. These three stages, first suggested by Pedersen (1986), are the following: first, the development of teaching circles (halgas) for various subjects in mosques from the earliest times to the tenth century; second, the emergence of the “mosque-inn colleges” toward the end of the tenth century; and, finally, third, the development of the “madrasa colleges of law,” in which the functions of the mosque and the inn (or hostel, khān) were combined in an institution based on a single deed of endowment (Pedersen 1986: 1123). Makdisi includes the official establishment of the madrasas by the great Seljuq vizier, Nizam al-Murk, in the second half of the eleventh century in this stage. In the twelfth century, the college as developed in the Islamic world was, according to Makdisi, first imported into Europe by the Knights Templar of the Levant who founded the Inns of Court in London. The Inns of Court were attached to churches, as khāns had been attached to mosques. Somewhat later, one John of London who must have seen madrasas in or on the way to Jerusalem, endowed the College des Dix-Huit in Paris for 18 poor students in 1180. In the mid-thirteenth century, the first 3 colleges of Oxford were founded as charitable trusts. (Makdisi 1981:224–30; 1990:311–7). Whatever the merits of this argument for the world-historical importance of the madrasa as the prototype of the European university, the significance of its development in medieval Islam cannot be doubted. The subject is of particular theoretical interest because of the intricate connection between the evolution of the institutions of higher learning and the character of law and government. This connection can illuminate the dynamics of social agency in pre-modern Islamic society.

Saïd Amir Arjomand

Papers

Mystical Dimensions of Islam.

The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran

The shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, political order, and societal change in Shi'ite Iran from the beginning to 1890

The Law, Agency, and Policy in Medieval Islamic Society: Development of the Institutions of Learning from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century

From nationalism to revolutionary Islam