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First comprehensive study of the Baha’i community of Iran Wide range of topics covered, including the role of women, schools and literature Includes many chapters authored by leading academics in Iranian Studies Fills a gap in the study of modern Iran
Tom Lantos was a Hungarian-born U.S. Congressman remembered for raising awareness and respect for human rights around the world. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1980 becoming the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the Congress. In 1983 he co-founded and chaired the Congressional Human Rights Caucus renamed in his honour as the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. With articles authored by leading academics this Festschrift remembers Tom Lantos’s extensive human rights activism on the human rights themes he was passionately involved with around the world. The essays offer new insights on a range of topical human rights issues, such as human rights education, religious freedom, post-conflict justice, minority rights and identity politics.
This ground-breaking work presents original research on cultural politics and battles in Egypt at the turn of the twenty first century. It deconstructs the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture drawing on conceptual tools in cultural studies, translation studies and gender studies to analyze debates in the fields of literature, cinema, mass media and the plastic arts. Anchored in the Egyptian historical and social contexts and inspired by the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu, it rigorously places these debates and battles within the larger framework of a set of questions about the relationship between the cultural and political fields in Egypt.
"This book articulates a religious rationale for political secularism in the Iranian/shi'i context. The genealogy of Twelver shi'i political theology shows that the bitter experience and lack of success of the shi'ia in the field of governance in the early centuries of Islamic history led them to link the realisation of their ideal political system to transcendental factors. Belief in theocracy has always been the basis of shi'i political theology, but with the messianic conception of the 12th Imām in the fourth/tenth century, its realisation came to depend on the will and intervention of the divine. As a result, shi'i leaders, while awaiting the return of the 12th Imām, not only do not ha...
Over the past quarter century, the people of the Arabian Peninsula have witnessed a revolutionary transformation in higher education. In 1990, there were fewer than ten public universities that offered their Arabic-language curricula in sex-segregated settings to national citizens only. In 2015, there are more than one hundred public, semi-public, and private colleges and universities. Most of these institutions are open to expatriates and national citizens; a few offer gender integrated instruction; and the language of instruction is much more likely to be in English than Arabic. Higher Education Revolutions in the Gulf explores the reasons behind this dramatic growth. It examines the cause...
This is the first ever comprehensive English-language survey of Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest living religions Evenly divided into five thematic sections beginning with an introduction to Zoroaster/Zarathustra and concluding with the intersections of Zoroastrianism and other religions Reflects the global nature of Zoroastrian studies with contributions from 34 international authorities from 10 countries Presents Zoroastrianism as a cluster of dynamic historical and contextualized phenomena, reflecting the current trend to move away from textual essentialism in the study of religion
Clear introduction to the Bahá'í vision and development of its community.
In contrast to many books on Islam that focus on political rhetoric and activism, this book explores Islam's extraordinarily rich cultural and artistic diversity, showing how sound, music and bodily performance offer a window onto the subtleties and humanity of Islamic religious experience. Through a wide range of case studies from West Asia, South Asia and North Africa and their diasporas - including studies of Sufi chanting in Egypt and Morocco, dance in Afghanistan, and "Muslim punk" on-line - the book demonstrates how Islam should not be conceived of as being monolithic or monocultural, how there is a large disagreement within Islam as to how music and performance should be approached, such disagreements being closely related to debates about orthodoxy, secularism, and moderate and fundamental Islam, and how important cultural activities have been, and continue to be, for the formation of Muslim identity.
In Pious Citizens, Ringer tells the story of a major intellectual revolution in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India and Iran, one that radically transformed the role of religion in society. At this time, key theological debates revolved around Zoroastrianism’s capacity to generate “progress” and “civilization.” Armed with both the destructive and creative capacities of historicism, reformers reevaluated their own religious tradition, molding Zoroastrian belief and practice according to contemporary ideas of rational religion and its potential to create pious citizens. Ringer demonstrates how rational and enlightened religion, characterized by social responsibility and the...
This book examines, in comparative perspective, the different ideals about family and society and how they have impacted on real family life across a number of countries in the Middle East.