This paper reviews the structural factors that led to the cessation of pilgrimage ship assignments for the ḥajj from Southeast Asia, which temporarily ceased from 1915 to 1917 during World War I. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pilgrimage ship business between ports in Southeast Asia and Jeddah, conducted by Western steamship companies in connection with colonial governments, enabled Muslims in the Indian Ocean region to create the modern Islamic world via the ḥajj. In 1914, two Japanese steamship companies realized the significance of pilgrim transport as a business opportunity, becoming the first non-Muslim and non-Western sources of capital. However, they were unable to make much profit because of the interference of monopolistic companies, also experiencing compensation problems with the colonial governments. With the outbreak of World War I, the cost of chartering ships increased, leading to the allocation of ships to other more profitable businesses. As a result, the pilgrimage ship project proposed by the Japanese Consulate in Batavia was not implemented in 1915. The irony is that the ḥajj, which was made possible by the economic actions of non-Muslims, was also suspended as a result of economic rationality on the part of non-Muslims.

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Since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Lebanon’s Hezbollah has militarily confronted both Israel and the Syrian rebels, which has led it to articulate its discourse of resistance that targets both the ‘enemies’ simultaneously. When and how did Hezbollah change its framing of the resistance between these two ‘enemies’? What factors motivated these changes? This study investigated these questions through a quantitative text analysis of the Arabic speeches delivered by the organisation’s charismatic leader, Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah.
First, this paper configured the critical phases of the Syrian conflict to provide an overview of the political environment surrounding Hezbollah. Second, it employed a quantitative text analysis method, namely Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS). Third, it verified the results through statistical analysis.
The study found that Nasrallah’s speeches emphasised the ‘takfiri frame’ rather than the ‘Israeli frame’ since 2011. This was particularly evident after the declaration of the formation of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria. However, Nasrallah’s emphasis on the ‘Israeli frame’ gained prominence when Israel’s military intervention began and escalated. The overall result shows and statistically confirms that Hezbollah’s framing of the ‘two-front resistance’ was influenced by the dynamics of the Syrian conflict.

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“Kitāb al-Bukhalā’ ” (The book of Misers) of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868/9), a light-hearted collection of stingy tales, is the most famous work not only for its funny anecdotes but also for being the major subject of many academic studies on al-Jāḥiẓ. Each character appearing in this work as “bakhīl” (miser) is the target of ridicule and criticism. However, readers may be baffled to learn that some of these misers were al-Jāḥiẓ’s masters, who contributed to his intellectual formation, or renowned academic scholars.
This paper examines al-Jāḥiẓ’s awareness and attitudes towards his reader through the stories of five literary figures: Sahl b.Hārūn (d. 830), Abū al-Aswad al-Du’alī (d. 688/9), Thumāma b. Ashras (d. 828), Abū al-Hudhayl (d. 842), and al-Aṣma‘ī (d. 828). Our study clarifies what kind of tales al-Jāḥiẓ intended to write for his readers.
To acquire a wide readership, al-Jāḥiẓ has made efforts to use various strategies. As one of these strategies in Kitāb al-Bukhalā’, this paper analyzes his criterion for selecting anecdotes and characters through analyzing the stories of those five literary intellectuals.
In conclusion, it turned out that al-Jāḥiẓ tried to present lesser-known stories that the public wanted to read, taking into account the appropriateness between the anecdote and the character as well as the veracity of the anecdotes. These ideas and strategies of al-Jāḥiẓ are a clear reflection of his awareness and concern toward the emerging reading public of that time.

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This paper unpacks the stereotyped view that polarizes two groups of religious authorities in the Maghrib. This view has conventionally divided the Islam practiced in the Maghrib into the scripturist ulama (Muslim scholars) and that of the “marabouts,” the personalities whom the Muslim community believes possess transcendent powers.
The paper begins by tracing this dichotomous view back to the French sociology of Islam, established in the 19th century by colonial administrators, who served as fieldworkers researching Algerian Islam. Second, it discusses the heritage of the French sociology of Islam found in today’s scholarly works on Muslim society. The new discourse associated Islamic reformism with capitalism, whereas marabouts were understood as being rooted in preindustrial society. Third, it deals with how Algerian intellectuals have adopted this view by using the term “marabout” as a category. Finally, it presents a case study of the development of the Islamic reform movement in Biskra (southern Algeria) to demonstrate the way in which colonial policies of surveillance and intervention created two conflictual fields (that of the Islamic reformists and the Sufi orders). Islamic reformism, involving both independent Muslim scholars and elements of Sufi orders, reacted against the colonial socioeconomic system rather than the preindustrial orders.

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This article will study the development and emergence of the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama (AUMA) in the department of Algiers since its creation in 1931 until its dissolution in 1956. We are trying to question the way in which militant discourses and practices of the Ulama redefine geographic space and its socioeconomic specificities, whether by means of persuasion or confrontation. To do this, we will work from endogenous sources, those produced by AUMA itself without neglecting the documents of colonial power.
Studying the AUMA in the historical context of Algeria will shed light not only on the colonial system of the French administration against the so-called “Muslim” Algerians, their associative movements and its spaces of sociability but also show the internal debates within the Algerian society colonized between 1931 and 1956. The profound changes in Algeria after a century of colonization are clearly manifested in the definition of space and time among the Ulama, their visions and structures for practicing the reform of religion as well as society.

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In 1903 Ibnou-Zakri (1852–1914), who was a native of a small hamlet in Kabylia named Ivessekriene, published an epistle (risāla) in which he pled an urgent and radical reform (iṣlāḥ) of zāwiyas in Kabylia. The project of Ibnou Zakri was neither a competitor nor an imitation of French model schools, but an attempt “from the inside” to modernize and rationalize traditional religious institutions, which were on their way to deterioration following their involvement in rural insurrections in Kabilya, especially those of the 1871 led by Shaykh el-Haddad. For this purpose, he suggested to introduce academic reforms to give zāwiyas a “school identity.” He also claimed he would revise part of the traditional customs concerning Kabyle women. Ibnou-Zakri’s example invites us to consider that Kabyle of that period was a society with elite who had various careers divided by fault lines and differences. The epistle objectifies the reformist ideas of Ibnou-Zakri, while the factual expansion of the reformist ideas of Ibn Badis suggests that Ibnou-Zakri’s reformism was a reform of concentration, which was aimed at the local level. Contrary to this, the reform of Ibn Badis was an Iṣlāḥ of expansion and totalization, which aimed at national and global levels.

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The purpose of this article is to clarify through two different perspectives the role of the Sufi ṭarīqas in the anticolonial and moral movement, on the basis of the ṭarīqa newspapers. The first perspective consists on the one hand of an analysis of articles on moral and religious degradation, the proselytizing of Christian missionaries, naturalization, the teaching of the French language and so on, all of which were severely criticized by the ṭarīqa newspapers as progressive and negative phenomena of colonization, and it consists also on the other hand of an examination of the influence of the anti-colonialist attitude, on the nationalist tendency.
The second perspective highlights first of all the political mindset of double standards of the newspapers, which castigate the conquest of Libya by Italy as well as the Palestinian policy of Britain and Israel while ignoring interior political problems, and then examines the relationship between the anti-colonial politics underlying the political stance of double standards, and the nationalist intention.
This attitude of two-facedness highlights the contradictory position of the ṭarīqas and zāwiyas, as being hostile to colonial policy itself. This hidden political will was manifestly expressed by the clandestine newspaper al-Rūḥ, which severely condemned the insurrection and subsequent massacres of May 8, 1945, and indicated that the young people of Zāwiyat al-Hāmil envisaged political independence without ruling out recourse to armed insurrection, by becoming aware of Algerian nationalism based on the Arabic language and Islam.

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