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 punitively general causes of revolution 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 Mohammad’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 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 10th century, the Berber revolution of Mahdi Ibn Tumart in Southwestern Maghreb in the mid-twelfth century, and the Safavid Revolution in 1500-1501 with the focus on Shi’ite Messianism in occupied Iraq and the Sunni reaction to it in the form of Daesh.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and Iranian Studies Initiative (ISI-NYU)