R Charles Weller – författare

This is the first comparative study of Mosaic and Islamic law in American history to be published. Constructing a complex picture in trans-Atlantic, trans-European and world historical perspectives, this book elucidates the intersections that lie beneath and behind the rise of the debates in the 1990s and 2000s over the promotion of the Ten Commandments and Mosaic Law as alleged sources of American Constitutional law and symbols of American national identity. These debates have taken shape in close connection with resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Sharia protests and anti-Sharia legislation throughout the United States and other Western societies.

This book engages the diverse meanings and interpretations of Islamic and Western law which have affected people and societies across the globe, past and present, in correlation to the epistemological groundings of those meanings and interpretations. The volume takes a distinctively comparative approach, advancing dialogue on crucial transnational and global debates over the history of Western and Islamic approaches to law, politics and society and their relevance for today. It discusses how fundamental concepts are understood and even translated from one historical or political context or one semantic domain to another. The book provides focused studies of key figures and theories in a manageable, accessible format useful for specialized academic courses and research as well as general audiences.

The book traces the conceptual lens of historical-cultural ‘survivals’ from the late 19th-century theories of E.B. Tylor, James Frazer, and others, in debate with monotheistic ‘degenerationists’ and Protestant anti-Catholic polemicists, back to its origins in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions as well as later more secularized forms in the German Enlightenment and Romanticist movements. These historical sources, particularly the ‘dual faith’ tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, significantly shaped both Tsarist and later Soviet ethnography of Muslim Central Asia, helping guide and justify their respective religious missionary, social-legal, political and other imperial agendas. They continue impacting post-Soviet historiography in complex and debated ways.

Drawing from European, Central Asian, Middle Eastern and world history, the fields of ethnography and anthropology, as well as Christian and Islamic studies, the volume contributes to scholarship on ‘syncretism’ and‘conversion’, definitions of Islam, history as identity and heritage, and more. It is situated within a broader global historical frame, addressing debates over ‘pre-Islamic Survivals’ among Turkish and Iranian as well as Egyptian, North African Berber, Black African and South Asian Muslim Peoples while critiquing the legacy of the Geertzian ‘cultural turn’ within Western post-colonialist scholarship in relation to diverging trends of historiography in the post-World War Two era.