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She is everywhere: as a vehicle for both farmers and advertisers, a subject for research scientists and poets, and ever-present in the form of lucky charms, children's toys, or simply as a tasty sandwich-filler. The female of the bovine species is revered as sacred or reviled as stupid, but one thing she never inspires is indifference. After more than ten thousand years living alongside us, she remains a beguiling mystery. Combining a myriad of richly entertaining anecdotes and an abundance of illuminating discoveries, Florian Werner presents the curious cultural history of that most intriguing of animals: the cow. Since evolving from the aurochs, an ungulate that grazed the Persian grasslan...
Examines the continuity of traditions over millennia in the Near East by focusing on the traditions of pilgrimage and household.
Why has religion persisted across the course of human history? Secularists have predicted the end of faith for a long time, but religions continue to attract followers. Meanwhile, scholars of religion have expanded their field to such an extent that we lack a basic framework for making sense of the chaos of religious phenomena. To remedy this state of affairs, Martin Riesebrodt here undertakes a task that is at once simple and monumental: to define, understand, and explain religion as a universal concept. Instead of propounding abstract theories, Riesebrodt concentrates on the concrete realities of worship, examining religious holidays, conversion stories, prophetic visions, and life-cycle e...
This work gives a basic introduction to Hegel's religious thinking by seeing it against the backdrop of the main religious trends in his own day that he responded to.
This book chronicles the life and times of tribal leader Mujāhid Ḥaydar, scion of a prominent local dynasty, and his agency in highland Yemen’s political conflicts from the 1970s to the early 2000s. When the political elites of the Ṣāliḥ regime murder his father and his elder brothers, he is forced to exact revenge and lead his tribe through dramatic vicissitudes that culminate in the catastrophe of the Ḥūthī wars. Mujāhid’s life is a story of ongoing strife, heroism, resistance, commitment to the defence of honour, loss, and exile. His biography offers nuanced and original insights into how tribal politics in Yemen influence the domain of the state and are often intertwined with it – such that neither can be comprehended independently from the other.
Male Confessions examines how men open their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through confessional writing. This book examines writings—by St. Augustine, a Jewish ghetto policeman, an imprisoned Nazi perpetrator, and a gay American theologian—that reflect sincere attempts at introspective and retrospective self-investigation, often triggered by some wounding or rupture and followed by a transformative experience. Krondorfer takes seriously the vulnerability exposed in male self-disclosure while offering a critique of the religious and gendered rhetoric employed in such discourse. The religious imagination, he argues, allows men to talk about their intimate, flawed, and sinful selves without having to condemn themselves or to fear self-erasure. Herein lies the greatest promise of these confessions: by baring their souls to judgment, these writers may also transcend their self-imprisonment.
Unfree Lives illuminates Yemen’s forgotten history of slavery, as well as the transregional dimensions of slave trading in the Red Sea and wider Indian Ocean world. By analyzing Arabic narrative and administrative sources, Magdalena Moorthy Kloss reconstructs the lives of women and men who were trafficked to Yemen as children and then placed in various subaltern positions — from domestic servant to royal concubine, from quarryman to army commander. In this first in-depth study of unfree lives in Yemen, Moorthy Kloss argues that slaves and former slaves made significant contributions to social, economic and political processes in the medieval period. She highlights the gendered nature of slavery through a nuanced examination of the social identities of eunuchs and concubines. Unfree Lives also includes detailed information on slave trading between the Horn of Africa and Yemen in the 13th century, as well as an account of the little-known Najahid dynasty that was founded by Ethiopian slaves.
Jihadism has been an important issue of public discussions since 9/11. Internet media have been used by Jihadis as means of communication, propaganda, recruitment, and even training purposes. In this volume, the processes of interaction on Jihadi internet sites are analysed. Particular attention lays on the mechanisms of spreading propaganda via the internet by diverse technical means. The process of transformation of Islamic knowledge into Jihadi knowledge, the rhetorics of videos, the development of South Asian Jihadi organisations and some conceptual issues are discussed.
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A 1990s study on how the indigenous people in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East experienced, interpreted, and struggled with the changing living conditions of post-Soviet Russia. The book describes how Koriak women and men actively negotiated the manifold historical and social process, from tsardom, to Soviet state to democracy, by protesting, accommodating and reinterpreting the factors by which their conditions were made and remade. Special emphasis is on how the women in this culture are adjusting and combating their oppressed position in society. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR