The Presence of the Prophet: Muhammad in the mirror of his community in early modern and modern Islam
Asian Studies
Modern and Contemporary History
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Final Report Abstract
The aim of the project was to explore the various forms of attachment to the Prophet which have contributed to the formation of the Muslim individual and to the development of Muslim culture and politics since the early modern period. Its research program, arranged in three thematic axes, focused in the first phase (thematic axis 1) on the development of the doctrinal, literary, and aesthetic representations of the Prophet. The second phase (thematic axis 2) dealt with his role as a source of personal and collective authority and empowerment, from the Muslim empires of the early modern era to the Islamic states and movements of 20th century to the present. The third phase (thematic axis 3) was devoted to the dynamics of individual and collective Prophetic piety and of the personal identity formation associated with it. The aim of the project was to provide the groundwork for a methodological approach to the history of Prophetic piety that integrated its religious, socio-cultural and political dimensions. The interplay of religion, society, and politics, which is typical for Islam but has so far been rather inadequately recorded, was to be exemplified by one of the central areas of Islamic culture, which has become the focus of increasingly globalized conflicts in recent years. The results of the Project found their expression in three volumes of the Handbook of Oriental Studies. The first volume, titled The Prophet Between Doctrine, Literature and Arts: Historical Legacies and Their Unfolding, describes the doctrinal development of Islamic prophetology in interaction with the various forms of aesthetic representation of the Prophet in literature and arts. Here as elsewhere, the focus is on the tension between the divine and the human spheres that are linked in the person and message of the Prophet, and on their different different forms of textual and aesthetic representation. This integrated approach to doctrinal, literary, and artistic perspectives on the Prophet may serve in our view to provide valuable insights into the interplay of knowledge and culture in Muslim societies, both in their historical and contemporary dimensions. The theme of the second volume, titled Heirs of the Prophet: Authority and Power, is the legacy of the Prophet's image as a divinely guided military leader and statesman, as a source of legitimacy and guarantor of universal peace and justice, and as a model of action, who inspired many Muslim communities of different times and regions in their diverse and often conflicting political ventures. These included the establishment and leadership of political entities, from rural and tribal federations to imamates and sultanates, to modern nation-states and to Islamic political movements. The exploratory studies of the various political representations of the Prophet gathered in this volume highlight both the secularization and sacralisation processes linked with his persona, which were often determined by the confrontation with European expansion and its political as well as cultural consequences.The globally contested image of the Prophet seems to reflect the conflicts within contemporary Muslim societies themselves, and their strained relations with the non-Muslim world. The third volume, titled Prophetic Piety: Individual and Collective Manifestations, examines the various practices of piety associated with the Prophet, whether as individual activities or as group expressions, combining historical and anthropological case studies and approaches. These studies illustrate the close interplay of individual and collective forms of expression in Muslim piety with regard to the Prophet. This is evident in the development of prayer practices and vision reports, in the structuring of religious emotions through poetic and musical forms and through the cult of relics, as well as in the festive culture that developed for Mawlid celebrations in many different regions. Individual ties to the Prophet continue to permeate communal and national identities to this day, and are in turn strengthened and sustained by them. Taken together, the results of the project that found expression in these three volumes illustrate in our view the productivity of the basic notion of “presence”, that has shown its capacity to integrate the divergent socio-cultural and political spheres connected with the figure of the Prophet of Islam in the periods under study.
Publications
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Le prophète de l’islam. Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 178. OpenEdition.
Requate, Jörg; Schumannn, Dirk & Terhoeven, Petra (Eds.)
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Regards croisés sur le prophète de l’Islam. Trivium(29).
Chiabotti, Francesco & Sanseverino, Ruggero Vimercati
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“Jaysh Rijāl Al-Ṭarīqa al-Naqshbandīya. The Sufi Resistance of the Former Baʿth Party in Iraq,” In Jihadism Revisited. Rethinking a Well-Known Phenomenon, ed. by Rüdiger Lohlker and Tamara Abu-Hamdeh, 53–86. Berlin: Logos, 2019.
David Jordan
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The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. BRILL.
Gril, Denis; Reichmuth, Stefan & Sarmis, Dilek (Eds.)
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Denis Gril, Le Serviteur de Dieu. La figure de Muhammad en spiritualité musulmane. Bulletin critique des Annales islamologiques(37).
Amri, Nelly
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Rachida Chih, David Jordan, Stefan Reichmuth (eds.), The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. Vol. 2 Heirs of the Prophet: Authority and Power. Bulletin critique des Annales islamologiques(37).
Avon, Dominique
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The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. BRILL.
Amri, Nelly; Chih Rachida & Reichmuth, Stefan (Eds.)
