Book Talk
Speaker
Saïd Amir Arjomand
Distinguished Service Professor, Sociology
State University of New York, Stony Brook
When
Thursday, October 17, 2019
5-7pm
Where
Richard Ettinghausen Library at the Hagop Kevorkian Center
50 Washington Square South
NYC 10012
The talk will highlight the forthcoming companion volume to Revolution: Structure and Meaning in History (University of Chicago Press, 2019) with regard to the motivation to revolutionary action. This approach shifts the focus of analysis from the putatively general causes of revolutions to the specific motivation and consequences of revolutionary social action in historical and comparative perspective. Within this framework, major instances of Islamicate revolutionary transformation beginning with Muhammad’s constitutive revolution and the rise of Islam in seventh-century Arabia, followed by four cases of medieval and early modern Mahdist revolutions are examined in the companion volume I am working on. The persistence as well as radical transformation of the millennial motivation in revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be treated in the concluding chapters. The presentation will briefly outline my conclusions regarding the Fatimid revolution in North Africa at the beginning of the tenth century, the Berber revolution of Mahdi Ibn Tumart in Southwestern Maghreb in the mid-twelfth century and the Safavid revolution in 1500-1501 but mostly focus in the Shi’ite Messianism in occupied Iraq and the Sunni reaction to it in the form of DA’ESH/ISIS.