Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

There is not much of a connection between Louis Brandeis and rabbinics scholar Daniel Boyarin. But in this paper, I argue that Brandeis’ 1915 essay on Zionism “The Jewish Problem and How to Solve it” and Boyarin’s 2023 anti-Zionist manifesto No-State Solution share a great deal in their understanding of the Diaspora and Jewish nationalism/nationality. I will argue that we can see Brandeis’ Zionism anew through the lens of Boyarin and Boyarin’s anti-Zionism anew though the lens of Brandeis, each aware of the dangers of an ethnostate and each committed to a robust Jewish life lived among others, particularly in America.

This conference coincides with the 100-year anniversary of the caliphate’s abolition. Initially sensational, the sense of shock it precipitated dissipated fairly quickly. Thus, it might be asked: why, beyond historical interest, is the caliphate a topic for conversation in 2024? Beyond the endurance of the caliphal ideal, however imaginary, one may point to a turn occurring around the end of the twentieth century. The sense that secularisms had failed to deliver led to interest in revisiting the caliphate and the works of those who had embraced, reimagined, or rejected it. This paper examines the works of two such authors: Rashid Rida and Ali Abdel Razek. While the two were rhetorically opposed, some authorities find that the implications of their discourses actually have much in common. This reading rests on the claim that Rida, in effect, pointed towards a partitioning of religious and secular. I argue that this claim overreaches.

Throughout the period of separatist conflict, women in Aceh organized to remediate the effects of armed conflict on women, including addressing the use of sexual violence as a tactic of war. Like women across the world, they sought to have women’s experiences (of violence) and material reality integrated into the political sphere. If Acehnese women’s conflict-era discourse represented an attempt to expand the sphere of the political, then their post-conflict discourse signals a multiplication of axes of expansion. Tracing the transformation of politics in Aceh from the conflict period to the post-conflict sharia regime allows us to see how women’s organizations coordinated a challenge to the instantiation of Islamist politics with a distinct, Islamically-sourced Muslim politics of solidarity. The political project of women’s organizations in post-conflict Aceh, especially their opposition to the new sharia criminal code, can thus be characterized as a struggle to make solidarity legible to the state.

Constituent authority refers to the idea of the original source of legitimate government, the right to authorize the exercise of political power, or the authority to create a new constitutional order. Modern Islamic legal and political theory has struggled with the concept of constituent authority (al-sulṭa al-taʾsīsiyya). On the one hand, most Islamic political doctrines hold that governance itself is divinely ordained and specific offices are also required by the divine law. On the other hand, modern Sunni political thought has sought to deepen its commitment to popular sovereignty and the ultimate authority of the people over public institutions. This has led to a rich debate in modern Islamic thought about the scope of constituent authority: are specific offices and institutions seen as ordained by God, thus locating all constituent authority in the interpretation of divine law, or are powers to create and authorize new institutions assigned to other agents?

This paper explores the symbiosis of state-sangha relations in premodern Buddhist Japan, where temples gained state sponsorship in exchange for performing state-protecting rites. It specifically examines how Buddhist doctrine, art, and ritual equated the emperor’s own body with the greater state polity of Japan, and how these imperial body-schemes rhetorically invoked, artistically imagined, and ritually reinforced religio-political authority throughout Japan’s clerical and governmental power structures. It primarily focuses on the Nara (710-794) and Heian (794-1185) periods, but it also notes modern echoes of these themes as well. The Buddhist reformer Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903) used the Buddha’s hand as a metaphor for discussing the inseparability of personal and state morality, and Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948) integrated pre-existing Buddhist corporeal tropes into his ‘organ theory of government.’ As a result, this paper demonstrates the centrality of the emperor’s body in bridging both religious authority and political power in Japan.