Myths of nationhood: Cultural nationalism, political Islam, and the movement against sculptures in Bangladesh

In November 2020, the government of Bangladesh announced plans to erect a 25-foot-tall sculpture of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the national memorial located in the country's capital, Dhaka. This announcement caused a massive uproar among the religious ulema and quickly turned into a quasi-mass scale movement, sparking a torrent of political and religious rhetoric from both sides. This article argues that behind the religious rhetoric, the true cause underlying this fracas was purely political in nature, and tied to the clash of two contrasting nationalist dogmas. The country's Islamic political parties and the Qawmi madrasas leaders face a clear and perceived threat from the nationalist narratives expounded by the ruling political party, the Bangladesh Awami League, and this movement was a retaliatory attempt and will not be the last.

The Theatre of Affectionate Hearts : Izabela Czartoryska’s Musée des Monuments Polonais in Puławy (1801–1831)

This chapter discusses the so-called Temple of the Sibyl, the first Polish museum, opened in 1801 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska in Puławy. The idea of the creation of the temple originated from the reaction to the loss of Polish independence in 1795. The temple offered an exceptional, very emotional way of experiencing history, which here is called affective. It is argued that this manner of experiencing is the key to understanding the remarkable success of the Puławy museum among Poles. The intensity of feelings that visitors experienced was achieved by appealing to religious rhetoric and through theatrical references. Making it similar to a religious ritual ensured a sublime, solemn atmosphere, the theatrical nature of which allowed guests to freely express their feelings.

A New Europe: Erasing the Destruction

Monte Cassino became a fitting symbol for post-war recovery efforts. Its lived experiences account for the abbey’s role in the second half of the twentieth century as the binding agent and promoter for a unified Europe. This chapter makes sense of this unique designation by examining the way(s) in which the abbey’s fractured past has been harnessed into this synthetic vision. It asks how Monte Cassino’s ‘destruction tradition’ – that evolving narrative and shared reality from the Middle Ages to the present day – served as an instrument for promoting the abbey’s faith and prosperity well into the twentieth century. It shows how the abbey’s cumulative experiences with death and resurrection were transformed into a secular and religious rhetoric of hope, unity, and essential European identity.

Securitization as a Tool of Regime Survival: The Deployment of Religious Rhetoric in Bashar al-Asad's Speeches

This article analyzes the role of Sunni Islam in speeches given to religious scholars by Syrian president Bashar al-Asad in 2014 and 2017. I discuss how religion was used in these speeches as a security tool to consolidate authority, legitimize the Ba'thist regime, and marginalize political dissidents. I specifically highlight the emphasis Asad placed on convincing government-recognized 'ulama to support state security measures and to the novel links he constructed between Islam and national unity.

Ambiguities of the Priesthood

The unstable category of priesthood brought with it ambiguities and sometimes unfortunate implications. For Brahms the bachelor, whose own performances garnered occasional feminized rhetoric even from Eduard Hanslick, the priesthood could be interpreted as an avoidance of sexuality. This chapter contextualizes art-religious rhetoric of asceticism and martyrdom with burgeoning psychological approaches to artistic identity, including Max Klinger’s own psychological interpretation of the martyr Prometheus in his Brahms-Phantasie. Priestly abstinence is then contextualized with contemporary notions of chastity seen in Paolo Mantegazza’s studies of sexuality and with Friedrich Nietzsche’s ascetic ideals. The author suggests that, on one level, some of Brahms’s most heteronormative supporters such as Philipp Spitta and Josef Viktor Widmann wrote masculinized rhetoric in response to these negative implications.

Priestesses of Art

This chapter delves into the largely unexplored intersections of gender stereotypes and art-religious rhetoric in music criticism. It introduces case studies on the priestesses of art—and champions of Brahms’s compositions—Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, showing how for these performers, repertoire selection and performativity influenced the creation of motherly priestesses. In the context of nineteenth-century discourses on gender and sex roles, intensified by the nascent women’s rights movement, we encounter a paradox of the pure style: Priestesses were invested with a kind of natural sensual authority that was suited only to women as primordial life-givers. This analysis establishes a more nuanced gendered context for understanding the priestly rhetoric and its criticism.