Hinglaj Devi

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Schaflechner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Religious Performance ◽  
Rapid Ascent ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Proper Interpretation

The shrine of the Goddess Hinglaj is located in the desert of Balochistan, Pakistan, about 215 kilometers west of the city of Karachi. Notwithstanding its ancient Hindu and Muslim history, the establishment of an annual festival at Hinglaj took place only recently, “invented” in the mid-1980s. Only after the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway (MCH), a road that now—coincidentally—connects the formerly distant desert shrine with urban Pakistan, was the increasingly confident minority Hindu community able to claim Hinglaj as their main religious center, a site for undisturbed religious performance and expression. This book describes the dynamics that emerged after this dislocation, examining the political and cultural influences at work at the Hinglaj temple, and tracks this remote desert shrine’s rapid ascent to its current status as the most influential Hindu pilgrimage site in Pakistan. Primary among these dynamics is the influence that the temple organization, the Hinglaj Sheva Mandali (HSM), has exerted and continues to exert on the holy site’s ascent to prominence. The book demonstrates how the HSM’s members from the Lohana community (a Sindhi merchant caste) utilize discourses of rationality and enlightenment to propagate and solidify their own parochial beliefs and rituals at the shrine, holding them out as the only “proper” interpretation of the tradition for the Goddess’s worship. The book deals with the overarching theme of the Pakistani-Hindu community’s beliefs and practices at their largest place of worship in the Islamic Republic today.

A Religious Institution Goes Public

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deonnie Moodie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Management System ◽  
East India Company ◽  
District Court ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

In the mid-twentieth century, Kālīghāṭ became a site that middle-class actors could not only write about but also act upon in an official capacity. Because Kālīghāṭ was never royally patronized, East India Company and British official bodies did not take over the role of departing royal powers there as they did at other temples across India. Instead, middle-class actors took it upon themselves to modernize Kālīghāṭ’s management system in the mid-twentieth century. One Brahmin temple proprietor brought a complaint against 84 others to a district court in the 1930s, alleging that his brethren had mismanaged temple funds. Lawyers and judges at the district, state, and national levels worked to declare Kālīghāṭ a public temple and impose upon it a management committee that would be selected by educated, civically conscious Hindus in the city. This effectively removed authority from the temple’s Brahmin proprietors and put it in the hands of middle-class Hindus unaffiliated with the temple.

scholarly journals Situating Pārśva’s Biography in Varanasi

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Ellen Gough
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

This study shows how Varanasi, a site that many people understand to be a sacred Hindu city, has been made “Jain” through its association with the lives of four of the twenty-four enlightened founders of Jainism, the jinas or tīrthaṅkaras. It provides an overview of the Jain sites of worship in Varanasi, focusing especially on how events in the life of the twenty-third tīrthaṅkara Pārśva were placed in the city from the early modern period to the present day in order to bring Jain wealth and resources to the city. It examines the temple-building programs of two Śvetāmbara renunciants in particular: the temple-dwelling Kuśalacandrasūri of the Kharataragaccha (initiated in 1778), and the itinerant Ācārya Rājayaśasūri of the Tapāgaccha (b. 1945). While scholars and practitioners often make a strong distinction between the temple-dwelling monks (yatis) who led the Śvetāmbara community in the early modern period and the peripatetic monks (munis) who emerged after reforms in the late nineteenth-century—casting the former as clerics and the latter as true renunciants—ultimately, the lifestyles of Kuśalacandrasūri and Rājayaśasūri appear to be quite similar. Both these men have drawn upon the wealth of Jain merchants and texts—the biographies of Pārśva—to establish their lineage’s presence in Varanasi through massive temple-building projects.

scholarly journals Médicaments et thermalisme à Pautalia, Thrace

Gesnerus ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 57 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 238-249
Author(s):  
Valentina Grigorova
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Surgical Instruments ◽  
Thermal Springs ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Town

The city of Pautalia (Kyustendil in Bulgaria) is located near thermal springs in the Strymon valley (Strouma),on a site occupied from the Iron Age onward by the Thracian tribe of Dentheletes. The temple of Asclepios and the walls of Pautalia, located on the hill of Hissarlaka, as well as the roman thermae in the center of modern Kyustendil are among the more important archaeological vestiges in the area. In 1990, near the village of Dragodan, district of Kyustendil, different surgical instruments in bronze were unearthed in a tumulus attributed to the roman period (Ilnd century A.D.). During the excavation of another tumulus in 1992, a truly exceptional discovery was made near the town of Kotcherinovo, district of Kyustendil: A variety of medicines were discovered in a small bronze case, dating from the roman period (Ilnd century A.D.). The complete results of the analysis of these substances and few hypotheses about their possible use are presented in this publication.

Postclassical Poetics: The Role of the Amatory Prelude for the Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-225
Author(s):  
Sahar Ishtiaque Ullah
Keyword(s):  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Ongoing Effort ◽  
Classical Function ◽  
The Republic ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
Classical Arabic

AbstractThe prophetic encomia—panegyrics dedicated to the prophet Muhammad—are one of the most often recited forms of Arabic poetry up to today and are grounded in a cultural milieu where hagiography, competitive circulation of narrative and counter-narratives, rituals and esoteric practices, and educational institutions have a role in its formation. The unifying of the classical erotic poetic with the postclassical devotional created out of the encomium a vehicle that encapsulated palpable memory, nostalgia, and aspirational ideal for a greater past and beloved subject and successfully left a lasting cultural imprint. Against a general disregard for the postclassical tradition as one of decadence argued by Arab modernists, I join the ongoing effort to debunk the myth of premodern decadence as interrogated by Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part article “The Republic of Letters: Arab Modernity?” by considering the role of the postclassical prophetic encomia’s amatory prelude—a convention from the classical Arabic ode—as a site of continuity and innovation. Within specifically the famousQaṣīdat al-Burdah(trans.The Mantle Ode) by Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būsīrī (d. 693/1294) and thebadī’iyyātmodeled after theBurdahin meter and rhyme initiated by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349), the prelude takes a significant poetic turn replacing the classical abandoned desert campsites of the Arabic ode with the city of Madīnah. Operating as a unifying repository of the medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, the amatory prelude continued to perform its classical function as a liminal space but innovatively transformed that space for the reading/listening public as a collective reimagining of the Beloved as Muhammad and the abandoned desert campsite as the City of the Prophet outside of the discursive borders of the imperial.

The “Ketu Nation” of Brazilian Candomblé in Historical Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Lisa Earl Castillo
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Ethnic Origins

Abstract The Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé arose during the Atlantic slave trade and has unmistakable Yorùbá influences. In the city of Salvador, the term nação ketu [Ketu nation] is used among the oldest temples in describing Yorùbá heritage. This has led some scholars to assume that the founders came from the Yorùbá kingdom by that name. This paper critically examines the idea of Kétu origins, taking as a case study the temple Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká, a national historic heritage site in Brazil that is recognized by UNESCO as a site of diasporic memory. The paper shows that the first generations of leadership were dominated by people from Ọ̀yọ́ and that the term ketu emerged not as an allusion to ethnic origins but perhaps as a metaphor for a heterogeneous cultural context in which Yorùbá speakers from disparate regions lived in close coexistence.

Death in the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Sloan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Intimate Friend ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
European Heritage ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.

The Reformation of Prophecy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Sujin Pak
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Developmental Analysis ◽  
Sacred History

The Reformation of Prophecy presents and supports the case for viewing the prophet and biblical prophecy as a powerful lens by which to illuminate many aspects of the reforming work of the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It provides a chronological and developmental analysis of the significance of the prophet and biblical prophecy across leading Protestant reformers in articulating a theology of the priesthood of all believers, a biblical model of the pastoral office, a biblical vision of the reform of worship, and biblical processes for discerning right interpretation of Scripture. Through the tool of the prophet and biblical prophecy, the reformers framed their work under, within, and in support of the authority of Scripture—for the true prophet speaks the Word of God alone and calls the people, their worship and their beliefs and practices, back to the Word of God. The book also demonstrates how interpretations and understandings of the prophet and biblical prophecy contributed to the formation and consolidation of distinctive confessional identities, especially around differences in their visions of sacred history, Christological exegesis of Old Testament prophecy, and interpretation of Old Testament metaphors. This book illuminates the significant shifts in the history of Protestant reformers’ engagement with the prophet and biblical prophecy—shifts from these serving as a tool to advance the priesthood of all believers to a tool to clarify and buttress clerical identity and authority to a site of polemical-confessional exchange concerning right interpretations of Scripture.

Global Justice at the Municipal Scale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fonna Forman ◽  
Teddy Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Global City ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Cities or municipalities are often the most immediate institutional facilitators of global justice. Thus, it is important for cosmopolitans and other theorists interested in global justice to consider the importance of the correspondence between global theories and local actions. In this chapter, the authors explore the role that municipalities can play in interpreting and executing principles of global justice. They offer a way of thinking about the cosmopolitan or global city not as a gentrified and commodified urban space, but as a site of local governance consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitan moral aims. They work to show some ways in which the city of Medellín, Colombia, has taken significant steps in that direction. The chapter focuses especially on how it did so and how it might serve as a model in some important ways for the transformation of other cities globally in a direction more consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitanism.

Temple Destruction, Mourning and Curse in Elephantine, with a View to Lamentations

2020 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Gard Granerød
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

AbstractThe article discusses the lament over the Temple of YHW in Elephantine from three angles: from the perspective of the internal rhetoric or composition of the letter, from the perspective of the world of the Judaeans who wrote the petition, and from the perspective of the world of the intended recipient of the letter. In addition, the article explores how the mention of collective mourning and curse in the petition letter from Elephantine may provide a text of comparison – and context – for the laments over the destruction of the city of Zion and her temple found in the Book of Lamentations.

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