This article reveals late Ottoman (1876–1908) debates over agrarian policy in the empire’s Arab provinces that set the parameters for a fully articulated discourse of national economy emerging after the constitutional revolution of 1908. Debates between imperial officials, regional capitalists and foreign consular agents produced protectionist restrictions on the newly constructed agrarian land market, especially in an extended geography encompassing Palestine and the Hijaz Railway. Ottoman officials viewed the Arab provinces both as an untapped resource and as a possible alternative base in the event of Anatolia’s occupation. Restrictions on the land market constructed Muslim cultivators as ideal landholders and non-Muslim subjects, both Christian and Jewish, as potentially suspect and unfit for landholding. Protectionist and exclusionary agrarian policies responded to a wider context of imperial capitalism in which Ottoman officials occupied a subordinate, but still sovereign, position. These policies had an unrecognized legacy in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, creating a durable state domain that aimed to shield large swaths of land as territory from foreign investment and occupation. The much-discussed work of Frederick List on national economy focused on practices of import substitution and tariffs with empirical examples culled mainly from the United States and Germany. In the Ottoman Empire, in contrast, agrarian policy played a crucial role in practices of national economy because of the urgent prerogative to maintain territorial sovereignty in the face of imminent colonial expansion. The article suggests a reappraisal of the contributions of Ottoman policy debates to the broader history of capitalism.

The jamʿiyyāt (learned societies) are hallmarks of the Arab Nahḍa (“Renaissance”) in Beirut. This article focuses on the agency of Syrian members and studies the earliest three institutions in the context of social dynamics, economic linkages, political aspirations, and religious contestations. Centred around Syrians and Protestant missionaries, the Syrian Society of Arts and Sciences (1847) functioned as a site of growing American religious and cultural soft power. At the Oriental Society (1849), Syrian Catholic notables from the recently collapsed political regime assembled, alongside French Jesuit missionaries, to maintain their erstwhile power and prestige. Lastly, at the Orthodox Syrian Society (c. 1850), the traditional Orthodox elite attempted to preserve their flock and prove sociopolitical relevance in the face of Protestant and Catholic encroachments. Through the religious and political struggles that played out at the three jamʿiyyāt, this article demonstrates the politicization of confessional identities at the hands of Syrians and foreigners alike.

This article investigates the rules that were put into the mouth of the Buddha by Indian Buddhist jurists in order to differentiate monks from non-Buddhist (particularly Jaina and Ājīvika) ascetics as observed in extant Vinaya literature. It demonstrates that the Buddhist jurists were fully aware of Jaina and Ājīvika modes of asceticism, and that they consciously used legislation as a tool to construct Buddhist identity, particularly through legally differentiating the physical appearance, customs, practices, and even social status of monks from those of their śramaṇic rivals. The Buddha’s prescription of a rule to make monks distinguishable from non-Buddhist ascetics often occurs as an immediate response to the laity’s criticism or misunderstanding. This arrangement indicates that the monastic jurists were concerned not only with differentiating Buddhist and non-Buddhist renunciants, but also with protecting the public image of the Buddhist monastic institution and ultimately with maintaining the laity’s trust and support.

Is individual support for internationally agreed military humanitarian interventions (MHIs) subject to a religious bias? Conducting a vignette-based survey experiment, the paper provides micro-level evidence for such a bias within a highly unlikely sample: German university students. Participants in our survey experiment were more compassionate and indeed more supportive of an MHI when the victims of war-related violence were Christians rather than Muslims. The paper thus contributes to the literature on support for MHIs in two important ways: first, whereas the existing literature has a strong focus on the United States, this paper studies individuals’ support in another Western country that regularly contributes to MHIs, namely Germany. Second, while the existing literature has mainly examined how other social factors, such as the race or gender of the victims, affect individuals’ support for MHIs, drawing on social identity theory, this paper claims that religious identification also has an impact. Moreover, by showing that the religion of the victims of war-related violence shapes individuals’ attitudes towards MHIs through compassion, the paper also speaks to more recent literature that demonstrates that individuals’ attitudes towards refugees depend on – among other things – their religion. Against the background of a general rise of identitarian politics in many Western societies, our findings seem to be of particular relevance.

Does attending communal religious services heighten the tendency to express exclusionary attitudes? Drawing on responses from thousands of Muslims, we identify how the ritual Friday Prayer systematically influences congregants' political and social attitudes. To isolate the independent role of this religious behavior, we exploit day-of-the-week variation in survey enumeration, which we assume to be plausibly uncorrelated with likely confounders, including self-reported religiosity. In our primary analysis, six variables charting various modes of intolerance each indicate that frequent attenders interviewed on Fridays (that is, proximate to the weekly communal prayer) were significantly more likely to express sectarian and antisecular attitudes than their counterparts. To test the potential mechanism behind this tendency, we rely on a controlled comparison between Egyptian and Algerian subgroups, as well as an original survey experiment in Lebanon. Evidence from both analyses is consistent with arguments that elite political messaging embedded in religious rituals spurs much of the observed variation.

The paper discusses the narratives of Jews from Mashhad, who were forced to convert to Islam in 1839. The community narrative as well as academic research is dominated by a modern understanding of religious identity and religious boundaries that fail to account for the diversity of practices among the community of converts, including multiple forms of religious belonging, and the switching of identities according to time and place. Based on historical sources and interviews with descendants from the Mashhadi community, the paper traces how a particular narrative of the history of the Jews from Mashhad prevailed and which significance this narrative entails for Mashhadi community and identity until today. While the Jews from Mashhad are a rather unique case among Iranian Jews–due to the long period in which they lived as converts–their pattern of memory building reflects a general trend among Jews from the Muslim world to assimilate to modern ideas of being Jewish.

A now conventional model, developed by Robert Markus, sees late Roman cities as fundamentally secular landscapes. Focusing on Augustine's sermon against a feast of the genius of Carthage (Sermo 62), this article argues that narratives of ‘secularity’ have neglected pagans’ own attitudes and the circumstances that drove ordinary Christians’ participation in civic rites. Behind Augustine's charges of ‘idolatry’ lay the religious convictions of the feast's non-Christian sponsors and behind their expectations of Christian attendance lay the recent destruction of a pagan shrine on church property. For Augustine's listeners to construe the feast as religiously irrelevant was an expression not of routine social solidarity, but of fear before powerful patrons. What was ‘secular’ was open to doubt and negotiation, both here and in empire-wide celebrations such as the Kalends of January; the boundary between the ‘pagan’ and the ‘secular’ can be located only with careful attention to the diversity of opinions about each particular rite.

Indonesia has seen recent expansions of fundamentalist movements mobilising members in support a change to the current constitution. Against this background, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, we explored the intersection of religious and national identity among Indonesian Muslims quantitatively, and in Study 2, we qualitatively examined religious and national identification among members of moderate and fundamentalist religious organisations. Specifically, Study 1 (N = 178) assessed whether the association of religious and national identity was moderated by religious fundamentalism. Results showed that strength of religious identification was positively associated with strength of national identification for both those high and low in fundamentalism. Using structured interviews and focus group discussions, Study 2 (N = 35) examined the way that self-alignment with religious and national groups develops among activists of religious movements in Indonesia. We found that while more fundamentalist activists attached greater importance to their religious identity than to any other identity (e.g., national and ethnic), more moderate activists represented their religious and national identities as more integrated and compatible. We conclude that for Indonesian Muslims higher in religious fundamentalism, religious and national identities appear to be less integrated and this is consequential for the way in which collective agendas are pursued.

This article tackles a relatively under-studied aspect of the Christianisation of the Roman aristocracy. It considers the influence of Christian norms on a key stage in the elite male life course: service to the state. Drawing on the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, Augustine of Hippo and Theodoret of Cyrrhus to imperial officials, this article argues that a Christian rhetoric of office-holding had developed across the Mediterranean by the first half of the fifth century. It traces these authors’ varying expectations of how the religious identities of elite Christian men would shape their political agency. Their letters demonstrate the diffusion of Christian political ideas within the imperial state — and the terms on which Christian affiliations and traditional public careers were understood to be compatible — under the Theodosian dynasty.

The present study looks into the unifying and divisive effects of ethnopolitical and religious social identities, and an emerging superordinate Bangsamoro identity of Muslims in the southern region of the Philippines. We surveyed 394 Muslims with a mean age of 32.6 and standard deviation of 13.3 from the Tausug, Maranao, and Maguindanaoan ethnopolitical affiliations using various measures of social identities. Findings showed that the Muslims in our sample identify themselves more strongly with their religious identity over their ethnopolitical affiliations. Religious identity may thus be a unifying element in the conflict-ridden context of Mindanao, as a significant correlation was also found between their Muslim identity and attitudes toward the superordinate Bangsamoro identity. Qualitative data on the meaning of Bangsamoro were also analysed and revealed that Bangsamoro means a fusion of Mindanao, Islam, and peace/unity. However, data also reveal the divisive effects of ethnic identity. A moderately high overlap was found between their own ethnic identity and the Bangsamoro identity. The Tausugs, the low-power group in the peace talks, showed lesser overlap compared to Maguinanaons, suggesting that ethnopolitical, or what observers of Mindanao conflict have referred to as ‘tribal’ relations, implicates the respondent's perception of a superordinate Bangsamoro identity.

This article considers some of the men and women who served in the Privy Chamber of Elizabeth I and those men who held significant positions in her outer Chamber for evidence of Catholic beliefs, sympathies or family connections. It then discusses the careers of five men who at various times in Elizabeth’s reign were members of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners. It will show that their court careers were decisively affected by their Catholic beliefs and connections and, in one case, by a temporary repudiation of Catholicism. Their careers witness both to a fluidity of religious identity that facilitated their advancement at Court and to a narrowing of this identity over the course of the reign.