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Presents the political, social, and cultural context behind Ottoman charity.
Muslim beliefs have inspired charitable giving for over fourteen centuries, yet Islamic history has rarely been examined from this perspective. In Charity in Islamic Societies, Amy Singer explains the basic concepts and institutions of Muslim charity, including the obligation to give on an annual basis. Charitable endowments shaped Muslim societies and cultures in every era. This book demonstrates how historical circumstances, social status, gender, age and other factors interacted with religious ideals to create a rich variety of charitable practices, from the beginnings of Islam to the present day. Using written texts, buildings, images and objects to anchor the discussions in each chapter, the author explores the motivations for charity, its impact on the rich and the poor, and the politicisation of charity. This lucidly written book will capture the attention of anyone who is interested in the nature of Islamic society and the role of philanthropy throughout history.
Written with a searing honesty and published for the tenth anniversary of Amy Winehouse's death, My Amy is an evocative portrait of unbreakable lifelong friendship – and a devastating study into fame, addiction and self-sabotage. Only one person knows what really happened to Amy, other than Amy herself. He is Tyler James, Amy’s best friend from the age of thirteen. They met at stage school as two insecure outsiders, formed an instant connection and lived together from their late teenage years right up until the day she died, aged just twenty-seven. Tyler was there by her side through it all. From their carefree early years touring together to the creation of the multiple Grammy-winning B...
In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, an organized vegetarian movement began warning of the health risks and ethical problems of meat eating. Presenting a vegetarian diet as a cure for the social ills brought on by industrialization and urbanization, this movement idealized South Asia as a model. In colonial India, where diets were far more varied than Western admirers realized, new motives for avoiding meat also took hold. Hindu nationalists claimed that vegetarianism would cleanse the body for anticolonial resistance, and an increasingly militant cow protection movement mobilized against meat eaters, particularly Muslims. Unearthing the connections among these developments and ma...
Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond explores the cultural ramifications of food and foodways in the Mediterranean, and Arab-Muslim countries in particular. The volume addresses the cultural meanings of food from a wider chronological scope, from antiquity to present, adopting approaches from various disciplines, including classical Greek philology, Arabic literature, Islamic studies, anthropology, and history. The contributions to the book are structured around six thematic parts, ranging in focus from social status to religious prohibitions, gender issues, intoxicants, vegetarianism, and management of scarcity. Contributors are: Tarek Abu Hussein, Yasmin Amin, Kevin Blankinship, Tylor Brand, Kirill Dmitriev, Eric Dursteler, Anny Gaul, Julia Hauser, Christian Junge, Danilo Marino, Pedro Martins, Karen Moukheiber, Christian Saßmannshausen, Shaheed Tayob, and Lola Wilhelm.
Camille Claudel, an old lady confined to the Asylum for the Insane in Montdevergues, France, reviews her life. She says, aI hope my memoir will illustrate the heights of passion Rodin and I reached, and unravel the mystery of why they were transformed into vinegar and ashes.a The tragedy is not only hers, she adds, but that of many female artists who found it impossible to achieve the success of men artists of lesser ability. The book illuminates her childhood and the rise of her career in the setting of her ecstatic life with Rodin. Their ten years of bliss are followed by the disintegration of her love for him, and its evolution into hatred and psychosis. The last third of the book describes the horrors of Claudelas life in the asylum, ending with the highly original manner in which she comes to terms psychologically with Rodin and the other important figures in her life.
In the 19th century hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly migrated northward to Egypt and other eastern Mediterranean destinations, yet little is known about them. The nine essays in this volume examine the lives of slaves and freed men and women in Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean.
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Want. Disease. Ignorance. Squalor. Idleness. Taken together, these comprise the “giant evils” expressed in the Social Question—first raised in mid-nineteenth-century Europe to diagnose the crises produced by the emergence of the industrial society. Due to a globalized switch to neoliberalism in the final quarter of the twentieth century, the Social Question has made a worldwide comeback. The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century maps out the linked crises across regions and countries an...
This collection of articles discusses various political, social, cultural and economic aspects of the Ottoman Middle East. By using various textual and visual documents, produced in the Ottoman Empire, the collection offers new insights into the matrix of life during the long period of Ottoman rule. The different parts of the volume explore the main topics studied by Amnon Cohen: Ottoman Palestine, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent under Ottoman rule, Ottoman Jews and their relations with the surrounding societies and various social aspects of Ottoman societies.
"This book investigates daily life in Anatolia during the fourteenth century, the dawn of the Ottoman era, through the many ways in which humans experience food. This includes meals and the social interactions that they entail, of course, but also the production activities of peasants and gardeners, the exchanges of food between the common folk, merchants and the state, and the religious landscape that unfolds around food-related beliefs and practices. Using an array of sources ranging from hagiographies to archaeology and from Sufi poetry to endowment deeds, the resulting study presents a broad picture of a society's daily life and worldviews through the multiplicity of its interactions with food, in a style that both scholars and non-specialists will enjoy"--