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Modern states increasingly seek to regulate religious expression, practice and discourse. This is profoundly evident at many levels of Islamic policy interaction: from debates about the banning of the Muslim face-veil in Europe to civic re-education programmes for Muslim citizens in China. Governance of Islam in Pakistan provides a systematic account of how interactions between multiple public and private bodies direct the regulation and standardisation of Islam in one of the largest Muslim-majority states in the world. Analysis centres on the institutional development of the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body tasked with issuing advice to the executive and legislature about ...
This book examines the representation of women in relation to violence in Chinese crime films made on the mainland, and in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It introduces a new trajectory in the investigation of the cinematic representation of female figures in relation to gender issues by interweaving Western feminist and postfeminist critiques with traditional Chinese sociocultural discourse. An in-depth narrative identifies three major representations of women: the female victim, the female perpetrator of violence, and the female professional. Salience to contemporary society shows up in many ways, passive and active, all of which reinforce a sense of male dominance and patriarchal power. Analysis br...
Disruption tells the story of the conspiracy to simultaneously destroy several passenger jets over the Atlantic Ocean in 2006 and the desperate efforts by the British, Americans, and Pakistanis to crush the conspiracy before the bombs went off in the largest counterterrorism investigation in history.
Drawing primarily upon oral history interviews, this study presents a woman-centred history of the Indonesian occupation. It reveals the pervasiveness of violence as well as its gendered and gendering dynamics within the social and cultural everyday of life in occupied East Timor. The violence experienced by East Timorese women ranged from torture, rape, and interrogation, to various forms of surveillance and social control, and the structural imposition of particular feminine ideals upon their lives and bodies. Through women, East Timorese familial culture was also targeted via programmes to develop and modernise the territory by transforming the feminine and the domestic sphere. Women expe...
In secular Europe the veracity of modern science is almost always taken for granted. Whether they think of the evolutionary proofs of Darwin or of spectacular investigation into the boundaries of physics conducted by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, most people assume that scientific enquiry goes to the heart of fundamental truths about the universe. Yet elsewhere, science is under siege. In the USA, Christian fundamentalists contest whether evolution should be taught in schools at all. And in Muslim countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan and Malaysia, a mere 15 per cent of those recently surveyed believed Darwin's theory to be 'true' or 'probably true'. This thoughtful and passionately argued...
Pakistan at Seventy-Five investigates the countrys multi-layered issues in the context of a post-colonial polity marked by diversity, heterogeneity, stratification and volatility. This wide-ranging discourse engages with diverse formal and informal actors as markers of identity, historical events and social conditions, as well as global geo-political and neo-colonial centreperiphery relations that shape narratives about the nation and the constructions of a sense of belonging. The editors and contributors utilise multi-faceted and multi-layered approaches, focusing on (1) identities, and questions of diversity and pluralism; (2) horizontal and vertical technologies and geographies of power r...
Exporting Japanese Aesthetics brings together historical and contemporary case studies addressing the evolution of international impacts and influences of Japanese culture and aesthetics. The volume draws on a wide range of examples from a multidisciplinary team of scholars exploring transnational, regional and global contexts. Studies include the impact of traditional Japanese theatre and art through to the global popularity of contemporary anime and manga. Under the banner of soft power or Cool Japan, cultural commodities that originate in Japan have manifested new meanings outside Japan. By (re)mapping meanings of selected Japanese cultural forms, this volume offers an in-depth examinatio...
How did Rodrigo Duterte earn the support of large segments of the Philippine middle class, despite imposing arbitrary authority and offering little tolerance for dissent? Has the Filipino middle class, heroes of the 1986 People Power Revolution, given up on democracy? Chasing Freedom retells the history of Philippine democracy, employing a genealogical approach that makes visible the forms of power that have shaped and constrained understandings of democracy. The book traces the attitudes of the Filipino middle class from the beginning of American colonization in 1898, to the present. It argues that democracy in country has been, and continues to be, lived in an ambivalent way a result of th...
This study sets out to explain and understand the worldview of students at Female madrasas (FeM) in Pakistan. Beginning as an indigenous informal institute for female education at home, FeM has evolved to country-wide formal theological seminaries that award women graduate degrees in Islamic studies. Since the 1970s, state intervention and social engagement have influenced not only the structure of FeMs but their locations. Attendance is from all socio-economic strata of society. A recent development, especially in urban centers, is the teaching of the state curriculum to enable young students to access mainstream education. Public opinion is divided about the role of FeMs in society. Some b...
This book aims to contribute to the discourse on women and politics in Southeast Asia. The chapters, covering Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Timor-Leste and Singapore, analyse the asymmetrical power relationships between the sexes and how power differentials between men and women play out in the realm of politics are a reflection of the power contestations women face with men in other spheres of everyday life. Each chapter seeks to ask a different question in terms of where women viz. men stand in the political landscape of their countries, in an effort to answer the question of Where are the women in the gender trope in Asian politics. While the chapters are primarily empirical as the...