Imagined Religious Institutions: Pre-modern Hanbali Ulama in the Juristic Sphere from (850-1350)

Abstract

This article discusses the features of “religious institutions” in the pre-modern Hanbali context. As we will see, the religious institutions were somewhat like the “imagined communities” that Benedict Anderson describes in his seminal work. Most religious movements and productions are not directly traceable to formally organized institutions and even when such institutions happened to exist, their function was usually unrelated to the religious work, or to religious intellectual activities as a whole, or in any case less relevant tha Show more