“To Promote the Cause of Christ's Kingdom”: International Student Associations and the “Revival” of Middle Eastern Christianity

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-163
Author(s):  
Deanna Ferree Womack

This article traces the presence in the Arab world of international Christian student organizations like the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and its intercollegiate branches of the YMCA and YWCA associated with the Protestant missionary movement in nineteenth-century Beirut. There, an American-affiliated branch of the YMCA emerged at Syrian Protestant College in the 1890s, and the Christian women's student movement formed in the early twentieth century after a visit from WSCF secretaries John Mott and Ruth Rouse. As such, student movements took on lives of their own, and they developed in directions that Western missionary leaders never anticipated. By attending to the ways in which the WSCF and YMCA/YWCA drew Arabs into the global ecumenical movement, this study examines the shifting aims of Christian student associations in twentieth-century Syria and Lebanon, from missionary-supported notions of evangelical revival to ecumenical renewal and interreligious movements for national reform.

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
Deanna Ferree Womack

This article considers the history and contemporary reality of Middle Eastern Christianity in light of new demographic information available from the World Christian Encyclopedia. For readers interested in church history and World Christianity, it identifies key lessons to be learned about Christians in and from the Middle East today. It focuses on understanding the region’s Christian diversity, the complexities of recent demographic decline, the relationship between Middle Eastern and global Christianity, and the interreligious realities of Christian life in the region.


2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 754-757
Author(s):  
Johan Mathew

There are few figures as universally beloved and yet recognizably “Middle Eastern” as Sindbad. The text of Sindbad's seven voyages travel easily across continents and languages and many of the tales blur imperceptibly into those of Homer'sThe Odysseyand Swift'sGulliver's Travels. Yet this swashbuckling adventurer is also firmly situated in the world of Abbasid Iraqandthe Indian Ocean world. Sindbad is clearly identified as a good Muslim and respected Baghdadi merchant, and while fantastical, there are recognizable geographic and cultural markers that locate his voyages within the Indian Ocean world. This iconic character of Arab popular culture pushes us to contemplate how easily the Arab world flows into that of the Indian Ocean.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-151
Author(s):  
Adhitya Mohammad Maheswara ◽  
Nur Fatwa

This article analyzes the depiction of Middle Eastern Islamic locality in video games that has a bad image. This research uses qualitative research method and a literature study approach. It reveals the representation of the Arab world and Muslims in video games developing after the September 11 attacks. The representation had significant impacts on Muslims around the world. It can damage the positive image of Islam and Muslims in the world community. The representation of Muslims in video games, such as in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Kuma/ War, uses stereotypes in Western societies. Muslims appear to be terrorists and live in a country that seems isolated


First Monday ◽  
2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramzi Nasser ◽  
Kamal Abouchedid

Publishing in the Arab world still is in its development stage. Many journals discontinue publication because of financial pressures, while those that asynchronously function are almost totally dependent on institutional (academic) funds. Other barriers as editorial hegemony, national and political instability, and institutional discouragement that hinder researchers and writers to submit or even try to publish work in indigenous Arab journals. Scholarly output is generally tied to the epistemological perspective of the researcher-writer; this in itself has been the major milestone to the lack and absent electronic journals in the Arab world. Electronic publishing has not appealed to the scholarly community in the Arab and Middle Eastern society and remains to be in dormant state. Scholars need to understand the World Wide Web and recognize the revolutionary elements of electronic journals as pacifiers to the hegemony of traditional publishing.


2001 ◽  
pp. 85-90
Author(s):  
O. V. Kozerod

The development of the Jewish religious movement "Khabad" and its organizations in the first quarter of the twentieth century - one of the important research problems, which is still practically not considered in the domestic Judaica. At the same time, this problem is relevant in connection with the fact that the religious movement "Khabad" during the twentieth century became the most widespread and influential area of Judaism in Ukraine and throughout the world.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
Janet Klein ◽  
David Romano ◽  
Michael M. Gunter ◽  
Joost Jongerden ◽  
Atakan İnce ◽  
...  

Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 352 pp. (ISBN: 9780199603602).Mohammed M. A. Ahmed, Iraqi Kurds and Nation-Building. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 294 pp., (ISBN: 978-1-137-03407-6), (paper). Ofra Bengio, The Kurds of Iraq: Building a State within a State. Boulder, CO and London, UK: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012, xiv + 346 pp., (ISBN 978-1-58826-836-5), (hardcover). Cengiz Gunes, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey, from Protest to Resistance, London: Routledge, 2012, 256 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-415—68047-9). Aygen, Gülşat, Kurmanjî Kurdish. Languages of the World/Materials 468, München: Lincom Europa, 2007, 92 pp., (ISBN: 9783895860706), (paper).Barzoo Eliassi, Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden: Quest for Belonging among Middle Eastern Youth, Oxford: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 234 pp. (ISBN: 9781137282071).


This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.


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