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Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and ...
This book examines how the prominent Muslim scholar Said Nursi developed an integrative approach to faith and science known as "the other indicative" (mana-i harfi) and explores how his aim to reconcile two academic disciplines, often at odds with one another, could be useful in an educational context. The book opens by examining Nursi’s evolving thought with regards to secular ideology and modern science. It then utilizes the mana-i harfi approach to address a number of issues, including truth and certainty, the relationship between knowledge and worldview formation, and the meaning of beings and life. Finally, it offers a seven-dimensional knowledge approach to derive meaning and build good character through understanding scientific knowledge in the mana-i harfi perspective. This book offers a unique perspective on one of recent Islam’s most influential figures, and also offers suggestions for teaching religion and science in a more nuanced way. It is, therefore, a great resource for scholars of Islam, religion and science, Middle East studies, and educational studies.
From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the `ulama) across contemporary Muslim societies. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes the transformations the centuries-old culture and tradition of the `ulama have undergone in the modern era--transformations that underlie the new religious and political activism of these scholars. In doing so, it provides a new foundation for the comparative study of Islam, politics, and religious change in the c...
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.
D. THE INDIGENOUS LANDS
Human Rights Watch’s annual World Report 2016 highlights the armed conflict in Syria, international drug reform, drones and electronic mass surveillance and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.
To a substantial degree cinema has served to define the perceived character of the peoples and nations of the Middle East. This book covers the production and exhibition of the cinema of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabi, Yemen, Kuwait, and Bahrain, as well as the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, and the Jewish state of Israel. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on individual films, filmmakers, actors, significant historical figures, events, and concepts, and the countries themselves. It also covers the range of cinematic modes from documentary to fiction, representational to animation, generic to experimental, mainstream to avant-garde, and entertainment to propaganda. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Middle Eastern cinema.
A critical survey of the development and achievements of Arabic poetry over the last 150 years.
Momentous events since September 11, 2001-Operation Enduring Freedom, the global war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq-have dramatically altered the political environment of the Muslim world. Many of the forces influencing this environment, however, are the products of trends that have been at work for many decades. This book examines the major dynamics that drive changes in the religio-political landscape of the Muslim world-a vast and diverse region that stretches from Western Africa through the Middle East to the Southern Philippines and includes Muslim communities and diasporas throughout the world-and draws the implications of these trends for global security and U.S. and Western intere...
A great religious teacher of the 18th century, Shah Waliullah of Delhi distinguished himself as a major thinker from the age of 15. He helped to revive the Islamic consciousness by "channeling the streams of the Sufi spiritual heritage into traditional Islam" (Professor Aziz Ahmed, Toronto) and returned to the essentials of Sufi experience in order to show that, essentially, Sufism is one discipline. He showed, for instance, that the long-standing assumption that Sufi doctrine was divided between Apparentism and Unity of Being was a difference of expression alone, the latter doctrine (of Ibn Arabi) being seen as merely a less-advanced stage of projection. Many of the subjects dealt with by him in these two treatises are closely studied today. These include stages of being, the perceptive faculty, the relation of the abstract with the universe, the universal soul and the souls of man, after death, essence, miracles, the scope of man, the soul of the perfect, universal order, source of manifestation, and the transformation of mystics from quality to quality.