Max Weiss

Faysal Khartash

Roundabout of Death

Using Arabic-language sources that have never before been studied or analyzed, Max Weiss paints a nuanced picture of sectarianism in Lebanon under the French Mandate. He demonstrates that sectarianism evolved long before the phenomenon known as “political Shi’ism.” This groundbreaking and deeply researched book is not merely narrative history; it also incorporates some of the latest critical theory about religious modernity and colonialism. Weiss illustrates the power of sectarianism as both a conceptual category and as a set of practices which can be a force for good and positive change as well as for division and destruction. By foregrounding historical forces that shape and direct sectarianism, he also shows how dimensions of sectarianism that no longer serve a society can be overcome with time.

In the Shadow of Sectarianism

Assistant Professor of History Max Weiss

Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon

Jens Hanssen

Cutting-edge scholarship on post-war Arab intellectual history that challenges conventional thinking about authoritarianism, religion and revolution in the modern Middle East.

Towards an Intellectual History of the Present

Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age

Nihad Siris

States of Passion

A fundamental overhaul of modern Arab intellectual history, reassessing cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship.

Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda

Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age

Michael Laffan

Fear is ubiquitous but slippery. It has been defined as a purely biological reality, derided as an excuse for cowardice, attacked as a force for social control, and even denigrated as an unnatural condition that has no place in the disenchanted world of enlightened modernity. In these times of institutionalized insecurity and global terror, Facing Fear sheds light on the meaning, diversity, and dynamism of fear in multiple world-historical contexts, and demonstrates how fear universally binds us to particular presents but also to a broad spectrum of memories, stories, and states in the past. From the eighteenth-century Peruvian highlands and the California borderlands to the urban cityscapes of contemporary Russia and India, this book collectively explores the wide range of causes, experiences, and explanations of this protean emotion. The volume contributes to the thriving literature on the history of emotions and destabilizes narratives that have often understood fear in very specific linguistic, cultural, and geographical settings. Rather, by using a comparative, multidisciplinary framework, the book situates fear in more global terms, breaks new ground in the historical and cultural analysis of emotions, and sets out a new agenda for further research. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Alexander Etkind, Lisbeth Haas, Andreas Killen, David Lederer, Melani McAlister, Ronald Schechter, Marla Stone, Ravi Sundaram, and Charles Walker.

The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective

Facing Fear

Philip Nord

Katja Guenther

For decades, scholars and public intellectuals have been predicting the demise of religion in the face of secularization. Yet religion is undergoing an unprecedented resurgence in modern life—and secularization no longer appears so inevitable. Formations of Belief brings together many of today's leading historians to shed critical light on secularism's origins, its present crisis, and whether it is as antithetical to religion as it is so often made out to be. Formations of Belief offers a more nuanced understanding of the origins of secularist thought, demonstrating how Reformed Christianity and the Enlightenment were not the sole vessels of a worldview based on rationalism and individual autonomy. Taking readers from late antiquity to the contemporary era, the contributors show how secularism itself can be a form of belief and yet how its crisis today has been brought on by its apparent incapacity to satisfy people's spiritual needs. They explore the rise of the humanistic study of religion in Europe, Jewish messianism, atheism and last rites in the Soviet Union, the cult of the saints in colonial Mexico, religious minorities and Islamic identity in Pakistan, the neuroscience of religion, and more. Based on the Shelby Cullom Davis Center Seminars at Princeton University, this incisive book features illuminating essays by Peter Brown, Yaacob Dweck, Peter E. Gordon, Anthony Grafton, Brad S. Gregory, Stefania Pastore, Caterina Pizzigoni, Victoria Smolkin, Max Weiss, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman.

Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular

Formations of Belief

Max Weiss

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