Saïd Amir Arjomand
Biographic Data
| ID | 3590773 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saïd Amir Arjomand |
| GIVEN NAMES | Saïd Amir |
| FAMILY NAME | Arjomand |
| SIGNATURE | ARJOMAND S A |
| AFFILIATIONS | State University of New York |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-0083-5852 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 116 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 226 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 105 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 8 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Mohsen Zakeri (1954–2024)
The Second Decade of Persianate Studies
Manichæism as a World Religion of Salvation and Its Influence on Islam
Māni created a new religion of salvation out of the Mazdæan religion of ancient Iran and named himself as its final prophet. The decisive impact of Manichæism as a salvific faith on Islam is evident in the Qurʾan’s prophetology and Christology, its conceptions of wisdom and knowledge, and the idea of the salvation of the soul through light. Just like Māni, Mohammad in the Qurʾan is the “Seal of the Prophets ( khātem al-nabiyyin ),” though he is f…
From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond
From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond
Anatomies of Revolution
Macrohistory of the legal transformations in Iran from the reception of Turk-Mongolian law to the inception of legal modernization
Two major transformations in the constitutional history of the Islamic Middle East are examined with reference to Iran. Two snapshots sketch the consequences of the reception, respectively, of the Turko-Mongolian since the first half of the fifteenth century, marked the reconciliation of Turko-Mongolian and Islamic law, and of the legal framework of the international system of modern nation-states in the nineteenth century. The turning point from…
The Emergence and Development of Persianate Sufism
This paper examines the emergence of Sufism and its differentiation from other religious trends in early Islamic Khorasan and Transoxania and traces the influence of Buddhism and Manichæism on the development of Sufism. The corresponding professionalization of the Sufi sheikhs in this formative process went hand in hand with the elaboration of Sufi mystical theory. The theoretical elaboration of Sufism consisted in the development of a theory of …
Revolution
Constitution-Making in Islamic Iran
Max Weber noted that the rationalization of sacred laws is substantive in character because there is no interest in separating law and ethics. Therefore, the theocratic influence produces legal systems that are combinations of legal rules and ethical demands. The result is a specifi cally nonformal type oflegal system (Weber 1978:810-811). Islamic law
The rise of interdisciplinary studies in social sciences and humanities and the challenge of comparative sociology
After briefly surveying three generations of comparative sociologists, interdisciplinary regional and trans-regional studies are shown to complement the work of the third generation of comparative sociologists on civilizational analysis and multiple modernities. Drawing examples from the interdisciplinary Persianate studies, promoted by the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies in the last two decades, and by other recent interdiscipl…
Sociology of Shiʿite Islam
Sociology of Shi'ite Islam is a comprehensive study of the development of Shi'ism. Its bearers first emerged as a sectarian elite, then a hierocracy and finally a theocracy. Imamate, Occultation and the theodicy of martyrdom are identified as the main components of the Shi'ism as a world religion. In these collected essays Arjomand has persistenly developed a Weberian theoretical framework for the analysis of Shi'ism, from its sectarian formation…
Unity of the Persianate World under Turko-Mongolian Domination and Divergent Development of Imperial Autocracies in the Sixteenth Century
The promotion of the Persianate normative model of imperial kingship was the major ecumenical contribution of the Persian bureaucrats who served the Saljuq and Mongol rulers of Iran and Anatolia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to state-building. The phenomenal growth of popular Sufism in Timurid Iran and early Ottoman Anatolia had a highly paradoxical impact on the legitimacy of kingship, making its conception increasingly autocratic. …
State Formation In Early Modern Muslim Empires
Chinggis Khan’s empire of conquest unified much of the Eurasian ecumene in the thirteenth century. A constitutional reading by sedentary Persian bureaucrats of the Mongol empire is used as the background for contrasting the divergent developmental paths of imperial autocracy in the three early modern Muslim successor empires. This developmental path was historically contingent upon the transformation of ascetic Sufism into a millenarian mass move…
A Decade of Persianate Studies
La théologie politique shi'ite
Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age
Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age
A pioneering approach to social theory that rectifies overreliance on Western historical experience of development and modernization. In this pioneering volume, leading international scholars argue for the development of a new approach to social theory that draws on regional studies for the conduct of comparative analysis in the global age. Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age moves beyond facile generalizations based on the histo…
Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age
Justice Interrupted
Elizabeth Thompson's original and ambitious book begins with the last visit in 1599 of the Ottoman statesman, Mustafa Ali, to Egypt, a province of the empire. Although the date given in the heading for Part I on the “constitutional model of justice” is 1839, it is, in fact, not until after the first 30 pages that Thompson gets to her analysis of the famous Rose Garden (Gulhane) Decree of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Majid in 1839, which granted secur…
Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran
The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran
Shiʿite Jurists and the Iranian Law and Constitutional Order in the Twentieth Century
The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran
Introduction to Worlds of Difference
The turban for the crown
Iran's Islamic Revolution in Comparative Perspective
The Islamic Revolution in Iran is analyzed as the latest of the “great revolutions” in a comparative perspective ranging from the early modern European revolutions to fascism. The analysis highlights the neglected importance of reactive elements, communal solidarities, and tradition in a wide variety of revolutions and revolutionary movements. Comparative inferences bring out the serious deficiency of the Marxian theory of revolution as well as o…
Rethinking Civilizational Analysis
Although the concept of civilization has deep roots in the social sciences, there is an urgent need to rethink it for modern times. This book addresses the methods of social analysis required to get to grips with 'soft power' & to understand aspects of globalization
Constitutions and the struggle for political order
The constitutions of the last two centuries are monuments to an eminently modern enterprise: the reconstruction of the political order by rational human effort. Constitution-making is a deliberate attempt at institution-building at the fundamental level of laying down the normative and legal foundations of the political order. Framing a constitution always purports to be an act of foundation; an act intended to break with the past, and with the e…
Shi'ite Islam and the Revolution in Iran
BARON HOLBACH'S EPIGRAMMATIC DESCRIPTION OF RELIGION as ‘the “eau de vie” of the people’ will undoubtedly outlive the memory of its author. On the other hand, Kingsley's advocacy of Christian socialism to the masses clearly implied the presumption that religion could also be their amphetamine. This latter possibility was systematically explored by Troeltsch with reference to Christianity. Weber deepened the analysis of the revolutionary potential…
The Constitution of Medina
One of the oldest extant documents in Islamic history records a set of deeds executed by Muhammad after his migration ( hijra ) in 622 from Mecca to Yathrib, subsequently known as “the City [ madīna ] of the Prophet.” Marking the beginning of the Islamic era, the document comprising the deeds has been the subject of well over a century of modern scholarship and is commonly called the “Constitution of Medina”—with some justification, although the …
Law, Political Reconstruction and Constitutional Politics
The purpose of this introductory article is to put the constitutional reconstruction that followed the collapse of Communism in 1989 in historical and macrosociological perspective. The 'new constitutionalism' is considered the novel feature of the post-1989 transition to democracy, and is analytically contrasted with the old constitutionalism and the classic idea of rule of law, and with the ideological constitution-making of the intervening era…
Islam, Political Change and Globalization
This article examines the ways in which Islamic civilization has faced the challenges of the modern age and of globalization. The expansion of Islam in world history is itself a global or proto-global process with its own distinctive internal dynamics. The main challenge to modern Islam, coming from the global political culture in the form of constitutionalism and democratization and human rights, has set in motion a civilizational encounter that…
The Ulama's traditionalist opposition to parliamentarianism
The significance of the opposition of the great majority of the middleand highranking 'ulama' to constitutionalism has long been obscured in the historiography of Iran's constitutional revolution. This opposition began in 1907, gathered considerable momentum in the second half of that year, and prevailed until the very end of 1908. A number of factors account for the lack of attention to this important chapter in the history of the Revolution: th…
Three Generations of Comparative Sociologies
Surveying three generations of comparative sociologists, separated by abrupt discontinuities, the study reaches the conclusion that the original promise of comparative sociology set in motion a century ago remains largely unfulfilled. It will then be argued that the work of the third generation of comparative sociologists on civilizational analysis and multiple modernities can redeem the promise of comparative sociology by rectifying the neglect …
Evolution of the Persianate Polity and its Transmission to India
The critical importance of the Samanid dynasty for the emergence of New Persian as a language destined to serve as the lingua franca of the Persianate world has long been recognized. Not so of the distinctive Persianate polity that first emerged under the Samanids in Central Asia in the tenth/fourth century and was later transplanted throughout the Persianate civilizational zone. As this paper was written as an address to the 4th ASPS convention …
Islamic Constitutionalism
As the first survey of the topic, this review covers Islamic constitutionalism since its emergence a century ago, showing a significant range of historical variation. The first two phases of Islamic constitutionalism are separated by a watershed, the late coming of the age of ideology, which began with the creation of Pakistan in 1947, thus predating the contemporary resurgence of Islam by some two decades. In the first phase, Islam appeared as a…
Coffeehouses, Guilds and Oriental Despotism. Government and Civil Society in Late 17 th to Early 18 th Century Istanbul and Isfahan, and as seen from Paris and London
Montesquieu popularized the notion of Oriental Despotism as the type of government pertaining to a lawless society based on the equality of subjects in fear and powerlessness. It typified Europe's Other in the age of absolutism. This essay does not examine the idea of total despotic power directly but rather the assumption of the absence of law and its guarantee of a sphere of civil autonomy and agency which will anachronistically be called “civi…
Perso-Indian Statecraft, Greek Political Science and the Muslim Idea of Government
The conditions of civilizational borrowing, the principles of selectivity and the emergent qualities of civilizational synthesis are examined with reference to medieval Muslim conceptions of state and society. The article highlights the features of pristine Islam which invited the political thought of other civilizations, or more precisely, the Indian science of government and Greek political science. With the cultural integration of Iran into th…
International Sociology into the New Millennium
L'A. souligne que la revue «International Sociology» et l'International Sociological Association s'efforce de regrouper des chercheurs de tous horizons et de promouvoir les perspectives de recherche les plus significatives developpees dans le monde. Il analyse ce que recouvre le processus d'internationalisation de la recherche en sociologie. Il estime que le modele centre-peripherie ne permet pas veritablement de rendre compte des relations au se…
The Law, Agency, and Policy in Medieval Islamic Society
In his magisterial studies on the Islamic educational system, George Makdisi (1961, 1981, 1990) traces three stages in the development of the madrasa (Islamic school) into colleges for the study of the Koran, the Traditions of the Prophet, and jurisprudence. These three stages, first suggested by Pedersen (1986), are the following: first, the development of teaching circles (halgas) for various subjects in mosques from the earliest times to the t…
The Crisis of the Imamate and the Institution of Occultation in Twelver Shiʿism
The formative period of Imami Shiʿism from the mid-8th century to the mid-10th century remains obscure in many respects. This study is an attempt to organize the historical information about the period around a central problematic: the twin crisis of the nature of the Imamate and the succession to this office. The crisis of the Imamate and the efforts to resolve it serve as a focal point for constructing a conceptually coherent overview of these …
Abd Allah Ibn al-Muqaffa’ and the ‘Abbasid Revolution
The life and works of ‘Abd Allah b. al-Muqaffa', probably the Abdala the Saracen with whose mention the Christian humanist Pico della Mirandola opens his great Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), have received some attention in modern scholarship. His life and work, however, have not been systematically studied in the context of the revolution of his time—namely, the ‘Abbasid revolution. This paper will try to show that Ibn al-Muqaffa's impress…
Imam Absconditus and the Beginnings of a Theology of Occultation
The last quarter of the ninth century is the most obscure in the history of Imami Shiism-bedeviled as it is by confused and tendentious documentation. Following the death of the eleventh Imam with no offspring, it represents a period of severe crisis and yet, within it, are found the beginnings of a number of far reaching doctrinal and institutional trends which shaped Shiism permanently. Two important documents are used as a window for viewing t…
SouthernTheory
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The Consolation of Theology
History, Structure, and Revolution in the Shi'ite Tradition in Contemporary Iran
The aim of this article is to draw theoretical lessons from the contemporary transformation of Shi'ism by examining the bearing of history, structure and cultural tradition on the causes and consequences of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. It is argued that the Islamic Revolution can be viewed as the traditionalization of a modernizing nation-state, and at the same time the modernization of the Shi'ite tradition. This apparently paradoxical charac…
The Shiʿite Hierocracy and the State in Pre-modern Iran
With the progressive development of secularism in the West, of which Spain's formally becoming a secular state in 1978 may be taken as a symbolic culmination, the Church-State problem has long receded from the foreground of the Occidental memory. Yet, in other parts of the world, where God is not dead, the analogue problem of the relationship between the hierocracy and the state merits attention. As the Islamic revolution of February 1979 eloquen…
The Islam and Democracy Debate after 2011
The Salience of Political Ethic in the Spread of Persianate Islam
Persianate Islam developed in close connection with the rise of independent monarchies and state formation in Iran from the last decades of the ninth century onward. Political ethic and norms of statecraft developed under the Sāmānids and Ghaznavids, and constituted a major component of Persianate Islam from the very beginning. When Islam spread to India under the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century and to the Sultanates in Malaysia and Ind…
Weber and Islam
Mystical Dimensions of Islam
Religion and Political Modernization. Donald E. Smith
Religion and Ideology in the Constitutional Revolution
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Religion, Political Action and Legitimate Domination in Shiʿite Iran
The power and prestige of the Persian religious élite, the 'ulamā', during the Qājār period (1795-1926), and their political importance, in contrast to the relative political feebleness of the 'ulamā' of Sunni Islam in modern times, has attracted the attention of students of Persian history and politics
The Revolution in Iran
The State and Khomeini's Islamic Order
The Iraqi invasion of southwestern Iran on September 22, 1980, appears to have halted, though not reversed, one of the most intriguing experiments in modern history: Khomeini's attempt to create a Shi'ite theocracy in which the state is totally subordinated to the clergy and its powers are drastically circumscribed. What follows is an analysis of the theoretical foundations of this attempt, and of the way it has been carried out in practice. In t…
Muslim Puritans
On the Sociology of Islam
Iran
The Ulama's traditionalist opposition to parliamentarianism
The significance of the opposition of the great majority of the middleand highranking 'ulama' to constitutionalism has long been obscured in the historiography of Iran's constitutional revolution. This opposition began in 1907, gathered considerable momentum in the second half of that year, and prevailed until the very end of 1908. A number of factors account for the lack of attention to this important chapter in the history of the Revolution: th…
Shi'ite Islam and the Revolution in Iran
BARON HOLBACH'S EPIGRAMMATIC DESCRIPTION OF RELIGION as ‘the “eau de vie” of the people’ will undoubtedly outlive the memory of its author. On the other hand, Kingsley's advocacy of Christian socialism to the masses clearly implied the presumption that religion could also be their amphetamine. This latter possibility was systematically explored by Troeltsch with reference to Christianity. Weber deepened the analysis of the revolutionary potential…
The Shiʿite Hierocracy and the State in Pre-modern Iran
With the progressive development of secularism in the West, of which Spain's formally becoming a secular state in 1978 may be taken as a symbolic culmination, the Church-State problem has long receded from the foreground of the Occidental memory. Yet, in other parts of the world, where God is not dead, the analogue problem of the relationship between the hierocracy and the state merits attention. As the Islamic revolution of February 1979 eloquen…
Marx and the End of Orientalism
Religion and Revolution in Iran
Islamic Studies
Islam and Development
The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq
The Office of Mulla-Bashi in Shi'ite Iran
Introduction
The essays presented in this volume focus on the endogenous factors in the emergence and growth of social movements in the contemporary Near and Middle East. The broader context of the incorporation of the Middle East into the world economic system and, more recently, the increasing importance of the region in world politics are taken for granted and not subjected to analysis. Of the variety of contemporary social movements considered by the part…
Traditionalism in Twentieth-century Iran
By traditionalism I mean to designate the type of social thought, action or movement which arises when a tradition becomes self-conscious either in missionary rivalry with competing traditions or in the face of a serious threat of erosion or extinction emanating from its socio-political or cultural environment. Traditional social action is spontaneous and unreflective, whereas traditionalist action is self-conscious, accompanied by some apologeti…
From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam
The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam
Islam
The Clerical Estate and the Emergence of a ShiIte Hierocracy in Safavid Iran
Political science (79 works) · Islamic Studies and History (73 works) · Philosophy (62 works) · Law (61 works) · Sociology (58 works) · History (56 works) · Politics (45 works) · Islam (44 works) · Theology (38 works) · Ancient history (28 works)