Translated/Edited Volumes by A. Azfar Moin
What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for... more What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings. Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches, periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests.
The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin's corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of "the people" in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book's contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.
Papers by A. Azfar Moin
Medieval History Journal, Feb 17, 2016
The goal of this forum is to open up a dialogue across regions and disciplines on the political r... more The goal of this forum is to open up a dialogue across regions and disciplines on the political role of astrology and divination in pre-modern Eurasia. The three short essays included here, by Johan Elverskog, a specialist of Mongol religion and history, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, an intellectual historian of early modern Iran and Islam and Audrey Truschke, whose historical scholarship on Mughal India brings together diverse archives in Sanskrit and Persian, should be read as opinion pieces in which the authors were encouraged to speculate and experiment, theoretically and comparatively, on themes of cosmos and power. All three scholars rose to the challenge and offered critical new perspectives. Before I review their findings, I would like to offer my own speculations on the broader question that inspired this dialogue in the first place: why should scholars take astrology and divination seriously—indeed, as seriously as other spheres of culture like historywriting and scriptural religion—for understanding politics? One can start with the simple observation that for much of recorded history, from the rise of the first kingdoms in Egypt and Mesopotamia till the time of the Enlightenment, movements of the heavens and their
The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (South Asia Across the Disciplin... more The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (South Asia Across the Disciplines) By A. Azfar Moin At the end of the sixteenth century and the turn of the first Islamic millennium, the powerful Mughal emperor Akbar declared himself the most sacred being on earth. The holiest of all saints and above the distinctions of religion, he styled himself as the messiah reborn. Yet the Mughal emperor was not alone in doing so. In this field-changing study, A. Azfar Moin explores why Muslim sovereigns in this period began to imitate the exalted nature of Sufi saints. Uncovering a startling yet widespread phenomenon, he shows how the charismatic pull of sainthood (wilayat)?rather than the draw of religious law (sharia) or holy war (jihad)?inspired a new style of sovereignty in Islam. A work of history richly informed by the anthropology of religion and art, The Millennial Sovereign traces how royal dynastic cults and shrine-centered Sufism came together in the imperial cultures of Timurid Central Asia, Safavid Iran, and Mughal India. By juxtaposing imperial chronicles, paintings, and architecture with theories of sainthood, apocalyptic treatises, and manuals on astrology and magic, Moin uncovers a pattern of Islamic politics shaped by Sufi and millennial motifs. He shows how alchemical symbols and astrological rituals enveloped the body of the monarch, casting him as both spiritual guide and material lord. Ultimately, Moin offers a striking new perspective on the history of Islam and the religious and political developments linking South Asia and Iran in early-modern times.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
The goal of the second constitutional amendment passed in 1974 was to excommunicate the Ahmadis a... more The goal of the second constitutional amendment passed in 1974 was to excommunicate the Ahmadis and establish Pakistan as a bona fide Islamic state. The Pakistani state accomplished this goal through an extraordinary process in which the National Assembly conducted a month-long examination of Ahmadi beliefs. Conducted by the attorney general of Pakistan, who was aided by the ulema members of parliament, these proceedings were a type of heresy inquisition in which the leaders of the Ahmadi community served as defendants. This article examines the key religious issues involved in these proceedings from a longer historical perspective that includes the Mughal and Safavid eras. In doing so, it highlights how pre-modern forms of religious persecution and accommodation came to be adapted to serve the ends of a modern constitutional nation-state.
Sacred Kingship in World History
Sacred Kingship in World History
Journal of Law and Religion
South Asian Sovereignty, 2019
Un problema importante en el análisis de mercado de valores y la recuperación de información musi... more Un problema importante en el análisis de mercado de valores y la recuperación de información musical es el emparejamiento con preservación de orden. Este problema es una variante recientemente introducida del problema de emparejamiento de cadenas en el que busca subcadenas en el texto cuya representación natural coincide con la representación natural del patrón. La representación natural de una cadena X es una cadena que contiene los rankings de los caracteres que ocurren en cada posición de X. Entonces, el emparejamiento con preservación de orden considera la estructura interna de las cadenas en lugar de sus valores absolutos. Pero tanto en el análisis de mercado de valores como en la recuperación de información musical, se requiere más flexibilidad: no sólo las subcadenas con exactamente la misma estructura son de interés, sino también las que son similares. En este artículo se propone una versión aproximada del problema de emparejamiento con preservación de orden basada en las distancias δγ que permiten un error individual entre el ranking de los símbolos correspondientes (delimitada por δ) y un error global de todas los rankings (delimitadas por γ). Se presenta un algoritmo que resuelve este problema en O(nm+m log m). Los resultados experimentales verifican la eficiencia del algoritmo propuesto.
nnnnnnn be handled on a single GPU due to memory limitations. We have evaluated the performance w... more nnnnnnn be handled on a single GPU due to memory limitations. We have evaluated the performance with two multi-GPU workstations (with 4 and 8 GPUs, respectively) on cloth meshes with 0.5 − 1.65M triangles. Our approach can reliably handle the collisions and generate vivid wrinkles and folds at 2 − 5 fps, which is significantly faster than prior cloth simulation systems. We observe almost linear speedups with respect to the number of GPUs.
Modern Asian Studies
Sulh-i kull or ‘Total Peace’ with all religions was a policy introduced by the Mughal empire in S... more Sulh-i kull or ‘Total Peace’ with all religions was a policy introduced by the Mughal empire in South Asia in the late sixteenth century. It was a radically accommodative stance for its day, especially when compared to the intolerant manner in which other Muslim and Christian polities of the early modern world dealt with religious difference. This article introduces a new perspective on Mughal Total Peace by arguing that it was meant to solve a long-standing problem created by the monotheistic ban on oaths sworn on non-biblical deities. Such a ban restricted the ability of Muslim kings to solemnize peace treaties with their non-monotheist rivals and subjects. In the second half of the article, I examine two pre-Mughal cases, from the eleventh century (Mahmud of Ghazna) and the seventh century (the prophet Muhammad), respectively, to explore what other, less ‘total’, mechanisms were invented to suspend this ban and enable oath-taking and solemn peace-making between monotheist and non...
A general hybridization technique, potentially effective in improving algorithmic efficiency, is ... more A general hybridization technique, potentially effective in improving algorithmic efficiency, is presented for deterministic algorithms. Extensions of existing hybrid techniques for nondeterministic algorithms to deterministic ones are also described. The new technique uses one or more input parameters to predict the behavior of a group of algorithms and then takes advantage of the fastest method for that instance. We have applied this technique to Dijkstra's and Floyd's algorithms for the shortest path problem to create a hybrid dependent on the size and density of the input graph. An analysis based on complexity of the algorithms confirms our empirical results. We have also presented a performance gain analysis that quantifies the significant improvement due the new algorithm. The hybrid algorithm was able to provide 16% and 26% improvement over each parent algorithm respectively, for large graphs and a uniform distribution of density.
A distinguishing feature of the Mughal (or Timurid) Empire is that several of its most powerful r... more A distinguishing feature of the Mughal (or Timurid) Empire is that several of its most powerful rulers styled themselves not only as temporal sovereigns but also as sacred beings, and claimed authority over matters of religion. This aspect of Mughal sovereignty was institutionalized by Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) when he publicly proclaimed his spiritual lordship close to the turn of the first Islamic millennium and protected all religions and sects under a “universal peace” (sulh-i kull). This article connects and compares this style of Mughal sacred kingship to religious developments in Iran and Central Asia after the Mongol conquests led by Chinggis Khan. There the destruction of the caliphate and the strengthening of Sufi orders had given shape to saintly and messianic forms of sovereignty as exemplified by the Safavid dynasty of ‘Alid and Sufi origins. Less tolerant than the Mughals in India, the Safavids forcibly converted Iran to Shi‘ism.
The Empires of the Near East and India
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Translated/Edited Volumes by A. Azfar Moin
The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin's corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of "the people" in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book's contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.
Papers by A. Azfar Moin
The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin's corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of "the people" in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book's contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.