Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold D. Morales
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Propositional Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Struggle For Recognition

The conclusion provides a summary of key developments in the history of Latino Muslim communities and also critically explores future possibilities. While weaving a trail among the history of Islamic Spain, the Alianza Islamica, and subsequent Latino Muslim organizations, the struggle for recognition through solidarity groups emerges as a prominent theme throughout the book. However, this approach to liberation raises complex issues regarding the efficacy and logics of identity politics. Drawing on various sources, I argue that practical knowledge of how to know and how to be in relation with one another may circumvent identity politics premised on static propositional knowledge of groups like Latino Muslims.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

scholarly journals What Stymies Action on Climate Change? Religious Institutions, Marginalization, and Efficacy in Kenya

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lauren Honig ◽  
Amy Erica Smith ◽  
Jaimie Bleck
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Vulnerability To Climate Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Critical Link

Addressing climate change requires coordinated policy responses that incorporate the needs of the most impacted populations. Yet even communities that are greatly concerned about climate change may remain on the sidelines. We examine what stymies some citizens’ mobilization in Kenya, a country with a long history of environmental activism and high vulnerability to climate change. We foreground efficacy—a belief that one’s actions can create change—as a critical link transforming concern into action. However, that link is often missing for marginalized ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups. Analyzing interviews, focus groups, and survey data, we find that Muslims express much lower efficacy to address climate change than other religious groups; the gap cannot be explained by differences in science beliefs, issue concern, ethnicity, or demographics. Instead, we attribute it to understandings of marginalization vis-à-vis the Kenyan state—understandings socialized within the local institutions of Muslim communities affected by state repression.

Kissing the Old Class Politics Goodbye

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 54-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy Sue Cobble
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Class ◽  
Alternative Reading

Verity Burgmann's call for a reinvigorated class politics and language is timely. This essay shares her goal of strengthening social movements in which class is taken seriously. It argues, however, that her efforts to resuscitate an antiquated class politics dressed up in identity clothes will not further that goal. This response offers an alternative reading of the nature and history of the “new” and the “old” social movements, of what can be learned about class and class-conscious movements from “identity politics” and from cultural theorists, and of what is needed to encourage future movements for social and economic justice. It calls for a class politics that recognizes the diversity of the working classes, embraces multiple class identities, reflects the fluid and multitiered class structures in which we live, and honors the aspirations of working people for inclusion, equity, and justice.

Theory, Practice, Improvement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Bertucci
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Practice Improvement ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mechanical Arts

This chapter talks about early attempts to constitute associations dedicated to the improvement of the mechanical arts, casting light in particular on the earlier, little-known Société des Arts founded in Paris during the Regency (1718). It frames such associations within the broader economic history of France, with special attention to the history of artisans' migrations between France and England, and the demands deriving from France's colonial expansion. Artistes involved in these associations advocated a clear distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge, which aimed to discredit the expertise of academic institutions in technical matters. Appropriating Francis Bacon's distinction between operative and speculative knowledge, artistes contrasted the philosophers' search for truth to their expertise on practical matters and their concern with public good.

scholarly journals The ‘naturalistic’ fallacy: Leveraging the power of media to drive cognition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Grall ◽  
Emily S. Finn
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Stimulus Selection ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Affective Psychology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Research ◽  
The Rich ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Rich History

So-called “naturalistic” stimuli have risen in popularity in cognitive, social, and affective psychology and neuroscience over the last 15 years. However, a critical property of these stimuli is frequently overlooked: Media—like film, television, books, and podcasts—are fundamentally not natural. They are deliberately crafted products meant to elicit particular human thought, emotion, and behavior. Given the rich history of scholarship on media as an art and science, subsuming media stimuli under the term “naturalistic” in psychological and brain sciences is inaccurate and obfuscates the advantages that media stimuli offer because they are artificial. Here, we argue for a more informed approach to adopting media stimuli in naturalistic paradigms. We empirically review how researchers currently describe and justify their choice of stimuli for a given experiment and present strategies to improve rigor in the stimulus selection process. We assert that experiencing media should be considered a task akin to any other experimental task(s), and explain how this shift in perspective will compel more nuanced and generalizable research using these stimuli. Throughout, we offer theoretical and practical knowledge from multidisciplinary media research to raise the standard for the treatment of media stimuli in psychological and neuroscientific research.

scholarly journals How “Muslim” are Central Asian Muslims? A Historical and Comparative Enquiry

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-269
Author(s):  
Galina M. Yemelianova
Keyword(s):  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
The Common ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
High Level ◽  
Soviet Central Asia

The article analyzes the social, political, and symbolic functions of Islam in contemporary Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Over many centuries, Central Asians developed a particular form of Islam based on a productive and fluid synergy among Islam per se, their tribal legal and customary norms, and Tengrian and Zoroastrian beliefs and practices. It is characterized by a high level of doctrinal and functional adaptability to shifting political and cultural environments, the prevalence of mystical Islam (Sufism) and oral, rather than book-based, Islamic tradition. These qualities have defined distinctive Islamic trajectories in post-Soviet Central Asia, which differ significantly from those in other Muslim-majority countries and in Muslim communities in the West. At the same time, the common Eurasian space and lengthy shared political history of Central Asians and other peoples of Muslim Eurasia are also reflected in the considerable similarities in their Islamic trajectories.

Identity Turn: Managing Decolonialization and Identity Politics in the Study of Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jørn Borup
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Theoretical Orientations ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Western Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academic Study

Abstract The academic study of religion, with its concepts and theories that originate in a Western, Protestant context, has justly been criticized in postmodern and identity-focused discourses, in recent years under the umbrella of decolonization and social justice activism. It has been suggested that allegedly universally-applicable theories and methodologies are relativized and revealed as particularized Eurocentrism in the hegemonic representations of “white” or “Western” power regimes. While acknowledging such reorientations in the philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history of religion, this article also critically investigates and discusses the “critical study of religion.” It is suggested that the revisionist deconstruction emphasized by contemporary identity perspectives, with their discourses of difference and re-essentialized understandings of religion and culture, are not only problematic as theoretical orientations. Radical identity politics also imply methodological constraints on the academic study of religion, where comparison, analytical categories, and reflexive emic–etic distinctions must remain key factors.

Religion and Culture in Uganda

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
David A. Hoekema
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities

In the past two centuries, relations among Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim communities in Uganda have been marked by competition and mistrust more than cooperation. The interfaith initiative of northern religious leadersv is a noteworthy exception. In this chapter the history of these communities is briefly reviewed, setting the background for the group’s formation. An important historical event that helped bring Catholics and Protestants together was the execution of 45 Christian pages to the Buganda king in 1886. Mention is also made of the far more prominent role that religion plays in public life in East Africa than in Europe and North America, and of the persistence of traditional beliefs and practices.

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