A. Azfar Moin
Autore di The millennial sovereign : sacred kingship and sainthood in Islam
Opere di A. Azfar Moin
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- Opere
- 2
- Utenti
- 22
- Popolarità
- #553,378
- Voto
- 5.0
- Recensioni
- 1
- ISBN
- 6
Like every history that knocks my socks off lately, it calls itself anthropological and ethnographic. What does that entail? In this case, that he puts aside the ‘intellectual tradition’ by which we tend to write of Islamic statecraft in the past: the prescriptive literature, doctrine, law, political theory, mirrors for princes. Because kings didn’t necessarily operate by the intellectual tradition. Moin looks at practice, at acts, more or less naked of the the highbrow level of culture.
Another thing he does is ignore present-day political or religious frontiers, which capture too much written history in divides that weren’t applicable back then. This means he passes freely from Central Asia to Iran to India and sees connections.
Astrology and saints were in fashion; he thinks astrology is neglected now as irrational, but it was both popular practice and elite science then. Kings made cults of themselves on the pattern of Sufi saints, in a manner ‘transgressive’ or ‘heretical’ by doctrine, but that spoke to people. Akbar’s religious experimentation is put into this context; he’s the axle of the book, I suppose. Akbar is among the most fascinating if puzzling of kings, and Moin has a new way to look at him.… (altro)