128 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 1 6 2 Abstracts The European aristocratic imaginary and the Eastern paradise: Europe, Islam and China 1100-1780. Batchelor. Robert Kinnaird, Jr. Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 1 9 9 9 . 2 1 8 ~ ~ . Advisers: John Brewer and David Sabean. The d i s s e a i o n investigates changes in the social imaginary of the European aristocracy, which centered on the garden as a space of social and cultural production, to argue that first Islam and later China played an integral role in the formation of conceptions of both aristo- cratic society and later the nation in Europe. The nineteenth century institution of Orientalism as a scholarly and literary form of writing about the East cannot be understood without an historical understanding of its basis in earlier aristocratic attempts to define and maintain their class status in emerging nation states by drawing upon cultural models per- ceived as external and superior to Europe. An interest in the unique combination of sensu- ality and emtic love with formal geometry and a strict ordering of nature in the Islamic gar- den drove this process during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, while in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England, the “irregular” nature of the Chinese garden with its “management of contrasts” and “concealment of the bounds’’ captivated the atten- tion of a “patriotic” and nationally oriented aristocracy and gentry. These exchanges came out of, and were in turn shaped by, a formal commerce in writings and images that devel- oped first locally in the Meditemean and then globally between Europe and China. Bayazid Bistami a n analysis of early Persian mysticism (ninth century, Islam). Tehmi, Diane. Ph.D. Cofwnbia University, 1999. 147pp. Adviser: Hamid Dabashi. This study is an analysis of the development of early Persian mysticism with specific ref- erence to the ninth century Islamic mystic Bayazid Bistami. The study contains historical, political, social, religious, and literary background of Bayazid in Islamic thought. A com- plete translation of the sayings of Bayazid, certain metaphors employed by him for the clar- ification of his doctrine, and an alphabetized list of names of the persons and places men- tioned in the text are also brought into consideration. This study also contains background of his life. contemporaries, and contribution to Sufism. as well as terminology, symbolic metaphors, and annotation of expressions and technical terms in his work. Terrorism in the name of religion: perceptions and attitudes of religious leaders from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the United States. Al-Khattar, Aref M. Ph.D. Idiana University of Pennsylvania, 1998. 365pp. Adviser: W. Timothy Austin. This dissertation analyzes the way in which spiritual leaders representing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam perceive terrorism. In-depth, semistructured interviews were con- ducted to explore how Rabbis, Priests, and Imams/Sheiks from three monotheistic religions define and justify terrorism in the name of religion. Also addressed are what functions, if any, religious leaders can or should play in fostering better understanding of terrorism in the U.S.A. or elsewhere. A stratified, purposive sample of 24 participants was drawn from an available population of religious leaders (representing their major sects) from the Northeast region of the United States. Following traditions appropriate to qualitative research, data was collected, sorted and analyzed. Findings of this study confiied the difficulty of defin- ing terrorism. All participants agree that terrorism cannot be justified in their religions. Nevertheless, many of them gave some justifications of certain terrorist acts without specif- ically considering these acts as terrorism. It was concluded that violence, but not terrorism, 129 could be justified by the three religions in certain ckes such as “self-defense,” “just War” or “jihad,” and ‘‘fighting occupants and oppressors” against one’s country. Religious educa- tion, mutual communications and religious-based punishments appear to be the best policies to deal with this kind of violence. This study, also, concluded that misreading and misinter- pretation of Scriptures combined with self-justifications are the major factors in motivating religious-based terrorists. Thus, punishments for this kind of offender must also be religious or religious-based. The dissertation also provides clarification of how neutralization theory applies to religious-based terrorism. Mullah on the mainframe: Islamization and modernity among the Daudi Bohras. Blank, Jonah Bernard, Ph.D. Harvard University, 1998. 163pp. Adviser: Stanley J. Tambiah. Since the end of the Cold War, Muslim fundamentalists seem to have replaced Soviet communists as the West’s bugbear of choice. Both in academic and in popular circles, the core values of traditionalist Islam are commonly portrayed as being inherently hostile to those of a modem, pluralistic society. The reality, of course, is considerably more complex. The case study of the Daudi Bohras, I suggest, challenges this definition of Islamic tradi- tionalist identity -and, by extension, of organic identities in general. The Daudi Bohras are a denomination of Ismaili Shias, numbering some one million individuals residing in over fifty countries around the world. They are concentrated in India, Pakistan and East Africa, particularly in the Westem Indian states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. Due to the exception- al degree of clerical control over all aspects of community life, the Bohras have never before permitted themselves to become the subject of ethnographic fieldwork. Although descend- ed From Hindu Vaishya converts, the Bohras are among the most highly Islamized commu- nities on the subcontinent. They avoid not only alcohol and nonhalal food, but riba (mone- tary interest) as well. Both men and women wear a type of clothing unique to the denomi- nation and easily recognizable as Muslim - a fact which has greatly increased the p u p ’ s exposure to sectarian violence since the imposition of a community dress code in the late 1970s. This strict orthopraxy, however, is accompanied by a surprising openness to a wide range of modem and/or Westem practices, technologies and ideas. The Bohras are among the most forward-thinking. progressive, and socially well-integrated Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Areas in which their modernist outlook are particularly noteworthy include education, communication technology, and gender relations. Such a dual identity - simul- taneously traditionally Islamic and thoroughly modernistic - is no accident. It is the result of a carefully ~ 0 0 r d i ~ t e d program instituted by the clerical authorities over the course of the last half-century. Bodies, places and time: Islamic visibilities in the public sphere and the contestations of secular modernity in Turkey. Cinar, Alev, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1998. 426pp. Adviser: Anne Norton. This dissertation explores the ways in which the current fonstitutional system in Turkey is being contested and negotiated around the constitutive norm of secularism and the place and role of Islam, as these negotiations are canied out in various sites of everyday life. Islamic identities began to emerge in the secular public sphere around mid- 1980s and gained a more forceful presence after 1994 when the Islamist political party, Refah, came to power in Istanbul upon winning the municipal elections. Tracing Islamist interventions in public spaces, I explore the formations of political identities around the categories of gender, class, nationalism and religious orientation, and how the performance of such identities contest and call into question established norms around which the public sphere is organized. My analysis focuses on bodies (the construction of the national subject), places (the construction 130 The American Joumal of Islamic Social Sciences 1 6 2 of social space) and time (the construction of national history) as three main sites from which interventions and contestations are carried out. I examine interventions regarding (1) the clothing of bodies through state regulations, the proliferation of women’s imagesjn the media and the propagation of the image of the veiled woman in various public performanc- es; (2) the construction of social space, as illustrated in the representations of the city of Istanbul and the restructuring of various city spaces in the performance of both secular and Islamic identities; and (3) the making and contestations of national history. as illustrated in the unofficial commemoration of May 29, 1453 by Islamic circles as “the Conquest of Istanbul Day” I conclude that, under Refah party, Islamic discourse turns into a nationalist political project, which contests the authority of secularism, but retains the national, homog- enizing and authoritative systems of state control intact and uncontested. This is partially the reason why Islamism is perceived as a threat to the secular system, which compelled the mil- itary to intervene in 1997 and led to the eventual closure of Refah Party. This intervention allowed the military to establish itself as the ultimate overseer of the secular system, and closed all venues to the formal negotiation of the constitutional norm of secularism. Migrating Islam: religion, modernity, colonialism (migration, raaal theory, Edward Wilmot Blyden, M d d m X, Salman Rushdie). Bayoumi, Moustafa Mohamed, Ph.D. Columbia University, 1 9 9 8 . 3 8 0 ~ ~ . This dissertation investigates the role Islam plays inside Western modernity and asks how Muslims have remade themselves as Muslims within colonial and postcolonial migrations. The development of private belief was a founding moment for Western modernity. Yet, implicit in this move is a reconceptualization of what kind of religious subject is validated within the scheme. Religious faith becomes something that cannot challenge the liberal state, and new forms of identity, based upon property and acquisition, are inaugurated. Western expansionism thus develops a form of colonial modernity that can conquer those who do not reflect this rational use of property and who are thus viewed as premodern. Islam, representing the old world, is central to this reconceptualization. Liberty, individual- ism, free commerce, and national belonging thus become defined in opposition to Islam. The development of racial theory cornsponds with this shift in religious identity, and the reli- gious faith of conquered peoples becomes articulated within a language of race. Thus, only a specific form of religious subjectivity is endorsed within modernity. Those who live out- side it are considered outside of modernity. Muslims living in Western liberal states hence- forth become subject to a nexus of racial and religious controls. Their struggles to resist these definitions and oppressions is the other focus of this dissertation. Chapter One exam- ines Richard Burton’s colonial travels to the Muslim holy lands and establishes the role of racial theory in the subjugation of a people’s faith through racial theory. Chapter Two charts a long-neglected history of antebellum Islam in North America and investigates one African Muslim slave who maintains his Muslim identity in the face of racial and religious pres- sures. Chapter Three continues this history into the twentieth century and considers African American Islam from the perspective of h+torical memory, popular struggle, and diasporic consciousness. Chapter Four reads the architectural history of the first mosque in Paris as a form of the colonial management of faith and race in the metropole. The final chapter finds Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to be a work that conservatively imagines the possi- bilities of postcolonial refashioning in the face of racial and religious oppression