A Sufi Legacy in Tunis: Prayer and the Shadhiliyya

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. A. McGregor
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Spiritual Discipline ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The City ◽  
Ritual Practices

In the following article, I present an account of the legacy of the famous saintly mystic Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1258). The parameters of the study will be narrowed geographically to Tunis and thematically to prayer. Tunis played an important role in the formation of the saint'sṭariqa(mystical order or brotherhood, pi.ṭuruq), and the city today still has a branch of the brotherhood and a number of sacred sites. The theme of prayer as used here includes prayer texts and a wide variety of activity, from popular devotions to spiritual discipline. As will become clear, this is a central element in any discussion of theṭariqa'sorganization, ritual, and literature. In addition to the brotherhood and the sites, there is a Tunisian edition of the only recordedcompositions of the saint, his prayers—known asaḥzāb(sing,ḥizb). This study will thus reflect the saint, his brotherhood, and the use of theaḥzābas integrated elements of the living Shadhili legacy in Tunis. This presentation will go beyond the usual academic treatments of Sufism, which rarely enter the modern period and are concerned mostly with the larger Sufi treatises. I hope not only to bring to light the importance of some lesser known liturgical and ritual practices, but also to begin to appreciate the “lesser tradition,” as it were, of Sufi prayer texts.

scholarly journals Female Spaces in Ethnically and Religiously Mixed Shrines in the Western Balkans: Cases in Montenegro and Kosovo

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 317-341
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Dugushina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Specific Role ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
Female Communities

This paper discusses female spaces and rituals in two sacred sites in the Albanian-Slavonic borderlands that are shared by Christian and Muslim communities. Based on fieldwork material, the article first gives an overview of the infrastructure, various functions and female interrelations of the ‘Ladies’ Beach’ in the city of Ulcinj, Montenegro, which brings together stable local and spontaneously emerging female communities from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The second part explores an example of a mixed pilgrimage in the village of Letnica in Kosovo, paying special attention to female ritual practices related to fertility and childbirth as an integral context for the different scenarios in which the shrine is visited. By examining rituals experienced by women, the paper shows that female practices aimed at reproductive well-being play a specific role in inter-group contacts in shared shrines and have an impact on the process of sharing by different ethnic and confessional communities.

Coda: Repositioning Early Modern Prague on the Global Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The City

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

Die geschriebene Stadt

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Teresa Schröder-Stapper
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The City

The Written City. Inscriptions as Media of Urban Knowledge of Space and Time The article investigates the function of urban inscriptions as media of knowledge about space and time at the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period in the city of Braunschweig. The article starts with the insight that inscriptions in stone or wood on buildings or monuments not only convey knowledge about space and time but at the same time play an essential role in the construction of space and time in the city by the practice of inscribing. The analysis focuses on the steadily deteriorating relationship between the city of Braunschweig and its city lord, the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and its material manifestation in building and monument inscriptions. The contribution shows that in the course of the escalating conflict over autonomy, a change in epigraphic habit took placed that aimed at claiming both urban space and its history exclusively on behalf of the city as an expression of its autonomy.

Sex in the city: Uncovering sex-specific management of equine resources from prehistoric times to the Modern Period in France

2022 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 103341
Author(s):  
Benoît Clavel ◽  
Sébastien Lepetz ◽  
Lorelei Chauvey ◽  
Stéphanie Schiavinato ◽  
Laure Tonasso-Calvière ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Period ◽  
The City ◽  
Specific Management

scholarly journals The city and the war

2021 ◽  
pp. 114-121
Author(s):  
Leonid Salmin
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Ritual Practices

The article focuses on the city as a visual discourse. This topic was previously studied in the article “Invisible Moscow” (Salmin, 2018). The impact of the war on the concepts of visibility / invisibility of the city and their relationship is analyzed from the point of view of mytho-ritual practices. Inversions of the visible and invisible are considered in the context of evolution of the city's symbolism under the influence of the military threats.

scholarly journals Vuoret ja kaupunki vastakohtaisina tiloina Alisa Ganijevan teoksissa

2016 ◽  
pp. 7-22
Author(s):  
Anni Lappela
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Real ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The City ◽  
Geographical Space

Mountains and City as Contrary Spaces in the Prose of Alisa Ganieva I analyze Alisa Ganieva’s novel Prazdnichnaia gora (2012) and her novella Salam tebe, Dalgat! (2010) from a geocritical (Westphal, Tally) point of view. Ganieva was born in 1985 in Moscow, but she grew up in Dagestan, in North Caucasia. Since 2002, she has lived in Moscow. All Ganieva’s novels are set in present-day Dagestan, not only in the capital Makhachkala but also in the countryside.  I study the ways the two main spaces and main milieus, the mountains and the city, oppose each other in Prazdnichnaia gora. I also analyze how this opposition constructs the utopian and dystopian discourses of the novel. In this high/low opposition, the mountains appear as the utopian place of a better future, and the city in the lowlands is depicted as a dystopian place of the present-day life. The texts’ multilayered time is also part of my analysis, which follows Westphal’s idea of the stratigraphy of time. Furthermore, the mountains are associated with the traditional way of life and the Soviet past. In this way, the mountains have two kinds of roles in the texts. Nevertheless, the city is a central element of the postcolonial dystopian discourse of Prazdnichnaia gora. In my opinion, Ganieva’s texts problematize referentiality, one of the key concepts of geocriticism. Whilst the city tends to be very referential, the mountains escape the referential relationship to the “real” geographical space.

scholarly journals Petra Revisited: An Astronomical Approach to the Nabataean Cultic Calendar

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1 and 2) ◽  
pp. 131-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Antonio Belmonte ◽  
A. César González García
Keyword(s):  
Source Analysis ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Winter Solstice ◽  
Field Campaign ◽  
Main Research ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Petra, the ancient Nabataean capital, has been one of our main research objectives since the first field campaign on site in 1996. 1 In December 2015 a new visit to the city was made to coincide with the winter solstice. Historical, ethnographic, epigraphic and archaeological records are compared in order to gain an insight on the Nabataean calendar. From this multi-source analysis two main points arise: the importance of both equinoxes and winter solstice within the lunisolar calendar and the relevance of some processions and pilgrimages. These combined with illumination effects observed and broadcasted at the principal monuments of Petra, and new important hierophanies, predicted in previous campaigns,2 indicate the relevance of these dates at the time of the Nabataeans. Winter solstice was an important event in the Nabataean cultic calendar when a festival of the main deities of the city, the God Dushara and his partner the goddess Al-Uzza, was commemorated. This probably took the form of a pilgrimage, and related cultic activities, such as ascending from the temples at the centre of the city (presumably from Qsar el Bint and the Temple of the Winged Lions), to the Monastery (Ad-Deir) through an elaborated stone-carved processional way. The relevance of the spring and autumn equinox within the cultic calendar will also be emphasized in relationship to other sacred sites in Petra, such as the Zibb Atuff obelisks, and additional Nabataean sites.

Moscow: The Third Rome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Russian

In the mid-19th century, three 16th-century Russian sources were published that alluded to Moscow as the “third Rome.” When 19th-century Russian historians discovered these texts, many interpreted them as evidence of an ancient imperial ideology of endless expansion, an ideology that would go on to define Russian foreign policy from the 16th century to the modern day. But what did these 16th-century depictions of Moscow as the third Rome actually have in mind? Did their meaning remain stable or did it change over the course of the early modern period? And how significant were they to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly? Scholars have pointed out that one cannot assume that depictions of Moscow as the third Rome were necessarily meant to be imperial celebrations per se. After all, the Muscovites considered that the first Rome fell for various heretical beliefs, in particular that Christ did not possess a human soul, and the second Rome, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453 precisely because it had accepted some of these heretical “Latin” doctrines. As such, the image of Moscow as the third Rome might have marked a celebration of the city as a new imperial center, but it could also allude to Moscow’s duty to protect the “true” Orthodox faith after the fall—actual and theological—of Rome and Constantinople. As time progressed, however, the nuances of religious polemic once captured by the trope were lost. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the image of Moscow as the third Rome took on a more unequivocally imperialist tone. Nonetheless, it would be easy to overstate the significance of allusions to Moscow as the third Rome to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly. Not only was the trope rare and by no means the only imperial comparison to be found in Muscovite literature, it was also ignored by secular authorities and banned by clerics.

Perspective istoriografice privind spațiul sacru al Sibiului în evul mediu

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 43-58
Author(s):  
Maria Crîngaci-Țiplic
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Urban Hierarchy ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

This paper presents an overview of the historiography that describes and investigates the components which compose the sacred spaces of Sibiu in the Middle Ages. It is well known that Sibiu had a preeminent position in the urban hierarchy of medieval Transylvania and of the south-eastern Europe. The city was attested for the first time in 1191 as an ecclesiastical center of the Transylvanian Saxons and was home to numerous places of worship and sacred sites (churches, monasteries, chapels, cemeteries, hospitals etc.). However, with the advent of the Reformation in the 16th century and the noticeable changes that occurred during the industrial age and the communist dictatorship (the 19th and 20th centuries), the medieval sacred building and their neighborhoods have been deeply transformed and medieval ecclesiastical topography became unrecognizable in modern day Sibiu. The recreation of the ecclesiastical topography and even more of the sacred spaces could be recreated through analyses and research of different type of sources from charters and town chronicles of the 16th-18th centuries to the most recent archaeological studies or papers on medieval art, architecture, or historical urban evolution. With this in mind, the study aims to provide references on the topic and establishes the main periods of the historiography and their relevant ideological and theoretical changes during over 400 hundred years of debates or research.

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