M Leezenberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 1094207 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Leezenberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Leezenberg |
| SIGNATURE | LEEZENBERG M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2269-2728 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Iraq
For a Multiple Decentering of the History of Knowledge
In this overview, I argue that the history of knowledge needs a decentering, not only with regard to geography and to the disciplines under scrutiny, but also with regard to the relations between knowledge ‘proper’ (i.e., discursive and secular knowledge) and religious or mystical forms of knowledge. Given the importance that religious practices and institutions have historically had for the development of different forms of knowledge, the changi…
Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddima , 1377
This article presents Ibn Khaldûn's Muqaddima, or 'Introduction,' as a classic of African humanities. It addresses, among others, the reception of this work in premodern and modern times, the question of whether he can be called a sociologist or economist in the modern sense of the word, and the accusations of racism occasionally lavelled against Ibn Khaldûn
Kurdish Vernacular Learning as Indigenous Knowledge: Decolonizing Ottoman Cultural and Intellectual History
This contribution explores in what ways the Kurdish experience may be called "colonial" and, by extension, what decolonizing Kurdish studies would or could amount to. Specifically, it explores whether and to what extent Kurdish vernacular learning may be qualified as "Indigenous learning" as it appears in decolonial critiques. The article suggests a genealogical approach to the epistemic dimensions of coloniality to explicate the radical historic…
The Kurdish Consociational Experiment in Post-Saddam Iraq: A Practice-Theoretical Approach
This paper addresses the application of consociationalism to post-authoritarian Iraq. Traditionally, consociationalism has served as simultaneously an analytical tool and a normative constitutional and institutional ideal; here, I discuss whether it presupposes a functioning liberal democracy or may also, conversely, help to create a (liberal) democracy in non-liberal (in particular Leninist) settings. As a case study, I focus on the consociation…
From Cosmopolitan to Vernacular in the Language Sciences: A Global History Perspective
Sheldon Pollock's justly famous work on cosmopolitan orders and processes of vernacularization in the worlds of Latinity and Sanskrit invites questions of a comparative and global‐historical character. I will raise such questions in the context of the Persianate cosmopolitan order, especially as exemplified by the early modern Ottoman Empire, focusing on the wave of vernacularizations this empire witnessed in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries.…
The Kurds Have Not Made Love Their Aim”: Love, Sexuality, Gender, and Drag in Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn
This paper explores the concepts and norms of gender and sexuality in Ehmedê Xanî's 17 th -century mathnawi poem Mem û Zîn , nowadays regarded as the Kurdish national epic. A reading of this poem with the aid of the conceptual tools of gender studies and the history of sexuality reveals how different its norms and concepts are not only from modern Kurdish ones, but also from those of classical Persian literature. Although the poem does not hint a…
Of Prophecy and Piety: Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus between al-Farabî and Erasmus
In this contribution, I discuss some less well-known premodern and early modern antecedents of Spinoza’s concepts and claims in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. On the one hand, I will argue, Spinoza’s notion of prophecy owes more to Moses Maimonides than to any Christian author; and through Maimonides, Spinoza may be linked to the discussion of prophecy in The Virtuous City by the tenth-century Islamic philosopher al-Farabî. Spinoza’s concern…
Introduction: Colonial Humanities and Criticality
Starting from the premise that the humanities are still in urgent need of being decolonized and deprovincialized, this forum, titled “The Rise and Decline of ‘Colonial Humanities,’” offers insights into the development of the humanities disciplines in what are often referred to as “area studies” (a field itself subject to criticism) since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The forum’s perspective on “colonial humanities” acknowledges the vi…
Internalized Orientalism or World Philology? The Case of Modern Turkish Studies
This article argues against some widespread beliefs concerning imperialist and orientalist influences on modern humanities in the non-Western world. Specifically, it contests the idea that modern Turkish philology in the reforming Ottoman Empire was shaped by the hegemonic categories of Western European historical-comparative linguistics, by comparing and contrasting Arthur Lumley Davids’s modern Turkish grammar (1832) with Ahmed Cevdet Pasha and…
“A Rare Pearl Passed from Hand to Hand”: Cosmopolitan Orders and Pre-Modern Forms of Literary Domination
Pascale Casanova’s notion of the “world republic of letters” systematically transcends national boundaries, as well as the opposition between internalist structural analyses and externalist political reductions, arguing that individual works of literature acquire their meaning only against the background of this transnational literary field with its own, irreducibly literary forms of domination. Yet, I will argue, Casanova’s work is not yet suffi…
Between Islamic Learning and Philological Nationalism: Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî's Auto-ethnography of the Kurds
This article deals with the ethnographic and philological works of the nineteenth-century Kurdish scholar Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, which mark a crucial stage in the history of vernacular Kurdish-language learning. It turns out that Bayazîdî, although working in the service of the then Russian consul, Auguste Jaba, cannot be called either a "native informant" nor an "orientalist scholar". After providing some historical background, I discuss Bayaz…
History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction
Language, Kingship, and Nation: The Ambiguous Politics of Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn
In this article, I argue that discussions of whether any Kurdish nationalism may be found in Xanî’s Mem û Zîn proceed from rather anachronistic assumptions. Through an exploration of the language ideology found in this work, I demonstrate that the work’s mystical meaning interacts in rather complex ways with its political views. In particular, the king or prince plays a crucial, if ambiguous, political, linguistic, and eschatological role in the …
Obituary: In memoriam: Faleh Abdul Jabar (1946-2018)
This obituary sketches life and work of the prominent Iraqi social scientist Faleh Abdul Jabar with a focus on his relevance for Kurdish studies. The article briefly discusses his major publications and his continuing dialogue with Marxist social theory. ABSTRACT IN KURMANJIJi bo bîreweriya Faleh Abdul Cebar (1946-2018)Ev yadname wêneyê jiyan û xebata zanyarê Iraqî yê navdar Faleh Abdul Cebar dikêşe, bi taybetî berê xwe dide ser girîngiya wî bo l…
Transformations in Minority Religious Leadership
This paper discusses three religious communities in Northern Iraq that are characterized by the shared fate of having been targeted by the 2014 "Islamic State" ( IS ) offensive. These events dramatically brought home the vulnerability of these communities in post-Saddam Iraq; but the precarious status of these groups was already painfully visible even to the most casual observer prior to the IS onslaught. In this paper, I trace the rather differe…
The ambiguities of democratic autonomy: The Kurdish movement in Turkey and Rojava
This paper traces the ideology of democratic autonomy, as developed by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan from the libertarian and anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin, as an alternative to the authoritarian and centralist nation state, not only in the Kurdish-inhabited provinces, but in Turkey at large. It explores, first, the ideological underpinnings and second, the practical implementation of democratic autonomy both in south-eastern Turkey and in n…
The Vernacular Revolution: Reclaiming Early Modern Grammatical Traditions in the Ottoman Empire
This article explores the remarkable shift toward new literate uses of vernacular languages in the early modern Ottoman empire. It argues that this vernacularization occurred independently of Western European (and, more specifically, German romantic) influences. It explores, first, how vernacular languages like modern Greek, Armenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Albanian acquired a new status as a medium of high literature and learn…
Discursive violence and responsibility: Notes on the pragmatics of Dutch populism
This article discusses the discursive strategies of the Freedom Party (PVV), a contemporary Dutch populist and Islamophobic party. After tracing its ideological roots to mainstream liberalism rather than earlier forms of extreme right political movements, I will discuss its discourse about Muslims. It will appear that this discourse goes far beyond the legitimate expression of opinion. Using some of Judith Butler’s ideas about the performativity …
A People Forgotten by History”: Soviet Studies of the Kurds
The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Said's sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced he…
Elî Teremaxî and the Vernacularization of Medrese Learning in Kurdistan
Eli Teremaxi's Serfa Kurmancî has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. It was dismissed by Auguste Jaba as a text of “minor interest,” but in fact it is of paramount importance both for the study of the Kurdish language and for the history of Kurdish learning. Not only does it contain the oldest extant detailed remarks on Kurdish grammar, in all likelihood preceding even Garzoni's 1787 Grammatica; it is also among the first exampl…
The Historiographic Perversion
From Cognitive Linguistics to Social Science: Thirty Years after Metaphors We Live By
In the thirty years since the appearance of Metaphors We Live By , cognitive linguistics has developed into a flourishing autonomous branch of inquiry. Interdisciplinary contacts, however, have largely been restricted to literary studies and the cognitive sciences and hardly extended towards the social sciences. This is the more surprising as, in 1970s anthropology, metaphor was seen as a key notion for the study of symbolism more generally. This…
Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, No. 21)
A Linguistic Anthropology of Practice and Language Shift: Arvanítika (Albanian) and Greek in Contact
Iraqi Kurdistan: Contours of a post-civil war society
Iraqi Kurdistan began the road to reconstruction after it became an autonomous region following the 1991 Gulf war. Although many of the difficulties facing post-Saddam Iraq are similar to those facing Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 1990s, the experience of the North cannot be treated mechanically as a model for the country as a whole. The paper traces political and economic developments since 1991 and concludes that many of the factors which led to…
The Vernacular Revolution: Reclaiming Early Modern Grammatical Traditions in the Ottoman Empire
This article explores the remarkable shift toward new literate uses of vernacular languages in the early modern Ottoman empire. It argues that this vernacularization occurred independently of Western European (and, more specifically, German romantic) influences. It explores, first, how vernacular languages like modern Greek, Armenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Albanian acquired a new status as a medium of high literature and learn…
Elî Teremaxî and the Vernacularization of Medrese Learning in Kurdistan
Eli Teremaxi's Serfa Kurmancî has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. It was dismissed by Auguste Jaba as a text of “minor interest,” but in fact it is of paramount importance both for the study of the Kurdish language and for the history of Kurdish learning. Not only does it contain the oldest extant detailed remarks on Kurdish grammar, in all likelihood preceding even Garzoni's 1787 Grammatica; it is also among the first exampl…
Power in communication: Implications for the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface
A People Forgotten by History”: Soviet Studies of the Kurds
The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Said's sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced he…
Between Islamic Learning and Philological Nationalism: Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî's Auto-ethnography of the Kurds
This article deals with the ethnographic and philological works of the nineteenth-century Kurdish scholar Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, which mark a crucial stage in the history of vernacular Kurdish-language learning. It turns out that Bayazîdî, although working in the service of the then Russian consul, Auguste Jaba, cannot be called either a "native informant" nor an "orientalist scholar". After providing some historical background, I discuss Bayaz…
Transformations in Minority Religious Leadership
This paper discusses three religious communities in Northern Iraq that are characterized by the shared fate of having been targeted by the 2014 "Islamic State" ( IS ) offensive. These events dramatically brought home the vulnerability of these communities in post-Saddam Iraq; but the precarious status of these groups was already painfully visible even to the most casual observer prior to the IS onslaught. In this paper, I trace the rather differe…
From Cognitive Linguistics to Social Science: Thirty Years after Metaphors We Live By
In the thirty years since the appearance of Metaphors We Live By , cognitive linguistics has developed into a flourishing autonomous branch of inquiry. Interdisciplinary contacts, however, have largely been restricted to literary studies and the cognitive sciences and hardly extended towards the social sciences. This is the more surprising as, in 1970s anthropology, metaphor was seen as a key notion for the study of symbolism more generally. This…
Between Assimilation and Deportation: The Shabak and the Kakais in Northern Iraq
Power in communication: Implications for the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface
Iraqi Kurdistan: Contours of a post-civil war society
Iraqi Kurdistan began the road to reconstruction after it became an autonomous region following the 1991 Gulf war. Although many of the difficulties facing post-Saddam Iraq are similar to those facing Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 1990s, the experience of the North cannot be treated mechanically as a model for the country as a whole. The paper traces political and economic developments since 1991 and concludes that many of the factors which led to…
A Linguistic Anthropology of Practice and Language Shift: Arvanítika (Albanian) and Greek in Contact
Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, No. 21)
From Cognitive Linguistics to Social Science: Thirty Years after Metaphors We Live By
In the thirty years since the appearance of Metaphors We Live By , cognitive linguistics has developed into a flourishing autonomous branch of inquiry. Interdisciplinary contacts, however, have largely been restricted to literary studies and the cognitive sciences and hardly extended towards the social sciences. This is the more surprising as, in 1970s anthropology, metaphor was seen as a key notion for the study of symbolism more generally. This…
The Historiographic Perversion
Elî Teremaxî and the Vernacularization of Medrese Learning in Kurdistan
Eli Teremaxi's Serfa Kurmancî has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. It was dismissed by Auguste Jaba as a text of “minor interest,” but in fact it is of paramount importance both for the study of the Kurdish language and for the history of Kurdish learning. Not only does it contain the oldest extant detailed remarks on Kurdish grammar, in all likelihood preceding even Garzoni's 1787 Grammatica; it is also among the first exampl…
Discursive violence and responsibility: Notes on the pragmatics of Dutch populism
This article discusses the discursive strategies of the Freedom Party (PVV), a contemporary Dutch populist and Islamophobic party. After tracing its ideological roots to mainstream liberalism rather than earlier forms of extreme right political movements, I will discuss its discourse about Muslims. It will appear that this discourse goes far beyond the legitimate expression of opinion. Using some of Judith Butler’s ideas about the performativity …
A People Forgotten by History”: Soviet Studies of the Kurds
The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Said's sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced he…
The ambiguities of democratic autonomy: The Kurdish movement in Turkey and Rojava
This paper traces the ideology of democratic autonomy, as developed by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan from the libertarian and anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin, as an alternative to the authoritarian and centralist nation state, not only in the Kurdish-inhabited provinces, but in Turkey at large. It explores, first, the ideological underpinnings and second, the practical implementation of democratic autonomy both in south-eastern Turkey and in n…
The Vernacular Revolution: Reclaiming Early Modern Grammatical Traditions in the Ottoman Empire
This article explores the remarkable shift toward new literate uses of vernacular languages in the early modern Ottoman empire. It argues that this vernacularization occurred independently of Western European (and, more specifically, German romantic) influences. It explores, first, how vernacular languages like modern Greek, Armenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Albanian acquired a new status as a medium of high literature and learn…
Obituary: In memoriam: Faleh Abdul Jabar (1946-2018)
This obituary sketches life and work of the prominent Iraqi social scientist Faleh Abdul Jabar with a focus on his relevance for Kurdish studies. The article briefly discusses his major publications and his continuing dialogue with Marxist social theory. ABSTRACT IN KURMANJIJi bo bîreweriya Faleh Abdul Cebar (1946-2018)Ev yadname wêneyê jiyan û xebata zanyarê Iraqî yê navdar Faleh Abdul Cebar dikêşe, bi taybetî berê xwe dide ser girîngiya wî bo l…
Transformations in Minority Religious Leadership
This paper discusses three religious communities in Northern Iraq that are characterized by the shared fate of having been targeted by the 2014 "Islamic State" ( IS ) offensive. These events dramatically brought home the vulnerability of these communities in post-Saddam Iraq; but the precarious status of these groups was already painfully visible even to the most casual observer prior to the IS onslaught. In this paper, I trace the rather differe…
History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction
Language, Kingship, and Nation: The Ambiguous Politics of Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn
In this article, I argue that discussions of whether any Kurdish nationalism may be found in Xanî’s Mem û Zîn proceed from rather anachronistic assumptions. Through an exploration of the language ideology found in this work, I demonstrate that the work’s mystical meaning interacts in rather complex ways with its political views. In particular, the king or prince plays a crucial, if ambiguous, political, linguistic, and eschatological role in the …
“A Rare Pearl Passed from Hand to Hand”: Cosmopolitan Orders and Pre-Modern Forms of Literary Domination
Pascale Casanova’s notion of the “world republic of letters” systematically transcends national boundaries, as well as the opposition between internalist structural analyses and externalist political reductions, arguing that individual works of literature acquire their meaning only against the background of this transnational literary field with its own, irreducibly literary forms of domination. Yet, I will argue, Casanova’s work is not yet suffi…
Between Islamic Learning and Philological Nationalism: Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî's Auto-ethnography of the Kurds
This article deals with the ethnographic and philological works of the nineteenth-century Kurdish scholar Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, which mark a crucial stage in the history of vernacular Kurdish-language learning. It turns out that Bayazîdî, although working in the service of the then Russian consul, Auguste Jaba, cannot be called either a "native informant" nor an "orientalist scholar". After providing some historical background, I discuss Bayaz…
Of Prophecy and Piety: Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus between al-Farabî and Erasmus
In this contribution, I discuss some less well-known premodern and early modern antecedents of Spinoza’s concepts and claims in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. On the one hand, I will argue, Spinoza’s notion of prophecy owes more to Moses Maimonides than to any Christian author; and through Maimonides, Spinoza may be linked to the discussion of prophecy in The Virtuous City by the tenth-century Islamic philosopher al-Farabî. Spinoza’s concern…
Introduction: Colonial Humanities and Criticality
Starting from the premise that the humanities are still in urgent need of being decolonized and deprovincialized, this forum, titled “The Rise and Decline of ‘Colonial Humanities,’” offers insights into the development of the humanities disciplines in what are often referred to as “area studies” (a field itself subject to criticism) since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The forum’s perspective on “colonial humanities” acknowledges the vi…
Internalized Orientalism or World Philology? The Case of Modern Turkish Studies
This article argues against some widespread beliefs concerning imperialist and orientalist influences on modern humanities in the non-Western world. Specifically, it contests the idea that modern Turkish philology in the reforming Ottoman Empire was shaped by the hegemonic categories of Western European historical-comparative linguistics, by comparing and contrasting Arthur Lumley Davids’s modern Turkish grammar (1832) with Ahmed Cevdet Pasha and…
The Kurds Have Not Made Love Their Aim”: Love, Sexuality, Gender, and Drag in Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn
This paper explores the concepts and norms of gender and sexuality in Ehmedê Xanî's 17 th -century mathnawi poem Mem û Zîn , nowadays regarded as the Kurdish national epic. A reading of this poem with the aid of the conceptual tools of gender studies and the history of sexuality reveals how different its norms and concepts are not only from modern Kurdish ones, but also from those of classical Persian literature. Although the poem does not hint a…
The Kurdish Consociational Experiment in Post-Saddam Iraq: A Practice-Theoretical Approach
This paper addresses the application of consociationalism to post-authoritarian Iraq. Traditionally, consociationalism has served as simultaneously an analytical tool and a normative constitutional and institutional ideal; here, I discuss whether it presupposes a functioning liberal democracy or may also, conversely, help to create a (liberal) democracy in non-liberal (in particular Leninist) settings. As a case study, I focus on the consociation…
From Cosmopolitan to Vernacular in the Language Sciences: A Global History Perspective
Sheldon Pollock's justly famous work on cosmopolitan orders and processes of vernacularization in the worlds of Latinity and Sanskrit invites questions of a comparative and global‐historical character. I will raise such questions in the context of the Persianate cosmopolitan order, especially as exemplified by the early modern Ottoman Empire, focusing on the wave of vernacularizations this empire witnessed in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries.…
For a Multiple Decentering of the History of Knowledge
In this overview, I argue that the history of knowledge needs a decentering, not only with regard to geography and to the disciplines under scrutiny, but also with regard to the relations between knowledge ‘proper’ (i.e., discursive and secular knowledge) and religious or mystical forms of knowledge. Given the importance that religious practices and institutions have historically had for the development of different forms of knowledge, the changi…
Philosophy (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Islamic Studies and History (12 works) · History (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (9 works)