Dreambooks

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-73
Author(s):  
Bronwen Neil
Keyword(s):  
Primary Concern ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Special Training ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The Many ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Early Islamic

This chapter on dreambooks from our three main religious traditions concentrates on the differences between reported male and female dreaming, and the different interpretative strategies that were applied in these sources to men’s and women’s dreams. It starts by considering where dreambooks or dream key manuals began in the Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman traditions. The importance of generic context is again paramount. Dreambooks were written as manuals for interpreters but eventually came to be used by laypersons without any special training. The problem of discernment between good and evil dreams, and their causes, was not the primary concern of dreambook writers or those who used them, nor did they worry about how dreams related to a future that was governed by providence. They were simply concerned with what a specific dream meant for the present and future: was it good or bad? Dream interpreters attempted to lend scientific credibility to the profession by laying out in detail the many factors that could influence the interpretation of a dream. One of these variables was the gender of the dreamer, as seen in a survey of dream symbols from the Oneirocriticon of Artemidorus, the Book of Blessings, Byzantine dreambooks, and the early Islamic tradition.

Channelling the Divine

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-101
Author(s):  
Bronwen Neil
Keyword(s):  
Limited Evidence ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Female Saints ◽  
Holy Place

This chapter surveys pagan, Christian, and early Islamic attitudes to dream divination and oracles, and the associated practice of incubation at shrines that continued from Antiquity in a religious guise. Divine messages received in oracular dreams in the pagan, Judaeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman, and early Islamic traditions required specialist interpreters and specific locations for gaining privileged access to the divine. It shows how the pagan practices of consulting oracles and sleeping at shrines were adopted and adapted by Byzantine Christians and early Muslims. The first half of the chapter deals with the pagan and monotheist reliance on oracles. Oracles came in many shapes and sizes, but one thing they had in common across the various religious traditions was a starring role for women. Oracles were usually delivered in a state of ecstatic frenzy, the sign of possession by a god or a demon. The process of dream incubation also involved visitations by a god or a saint, gained by sleeping at a holy place, temple, or shrine. The second half of the chapter examines pagan records of the practice of incubation, before discussing how this tradition was transformed in the miracle collections of male and female saints in the Byzantine milieu, where it attained spiritual overtones. The limited evidence for incubation in the Talmud will be treated, as well as early Islamic incubation practices.

Reflections on the work of John Wansbrough

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-90
Author(s):  
Charles J. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Near Eastern ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
Historical Reconstructions ◽  
The Many ◽  
Early Islamic

At least some of the negative reactions to and neglect of Wansbrough's work is due to the breadth of his erudition and the turgidity of his style. However, these do not detract from the intriguing methods and theories that he brings to the study of early Islamic texts. Wansbrough's literary method is as problematic for what he believes it suggests about the development of early Islam as for his assertion about what it cannot tell us. Two of his speculative historical reconstructions produced by this method deserve special note. His theory concerning the relatively late canonization of the Qur¸ān has certainly generated considerable opposition. His argument that Near Eastern monotheism played a much greater role in the formation of Islam accounts for the many affinities between Islam and Judaism and Christianity, but perhaps not for Islam's distinctiveness. These contributions, among others, are of such great significance, that no student of Islamic origins can afford to ignore them.

Governing Diversity: Reflections on the Doctrine and Tradition of Religious Accommodation in Islam

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr. Muhammad Mushtaq ◽  
Muhammad Riaz Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
Power Sharing ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Religious Accommodation ◽  
Pluralistic Approach ◽  
Inclusive Governance ◽  
Multicultural Policies ◽  
Islamic Values

The problématique of governing diversity has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention but literature has largely overlooked the challenges appertaining to growing religious diversity in many places. The contemporary power sharing models and multicultural policies which are of a secular nature fall short of the expectations to foster peaceful coexistence in multi-religious societies. The primary concern of this paper is to manifest how religion can help us to lessen faith based violence. It is argued that religious traditions may offer valuable insights to design more inclusive governance. In this backdrop, the current paper evaluates the Islamic values of religious accommodation to gauge how helpful they are for designing inclusive policies in religiously diverse societies. The analysis illustrates that Islamic doctrine contemplates the politics of accommodation and forbearance. The pluralistic approach of Islam offered religious autonomy to non-Muslims in the state of Madinah. The ‘millet system’ established by the Ottoman Empire is widely admired for granting non-territorial autonomy in the matters related to religion, culture, and personal laws to non-Muslims. This display of an Islamic pluralistic approach at different junctures of Muslim history attests the capacity of the Islamic values of accommodation to nurture peaceful coexistence in modern societies. However, it requires a more unbiased and rigorous analysis to convince the global audience in this regard.

Theorizing Charismatic Authority in Early Islamic Law*

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-158
Author(s):  
Jonathan E. Brockopp
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Model ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Do So

In Islamic Studies, charisma has usually been reserved for the study of marginalized individuals. I argue here that charisma may also be applied to leadership among legal scholars. To do so, I join a long line of scholars who have modified Max Weber’s initial insights, and put forth a new, dynamic model of charismatic authority. The purpose of my model is to account for the fact that religious histories emphasize the uniqueness of the originating charismatic event, be that Prophet Muhammad’s revelations, Jesus’ theophany or the Buddha’s enlightenment, while at the same time recognizing that the charismatic cycle never quite ends. In contrast with Weber, I argue that charismatic authority in religious traditions is best understood as a network of influence and interaction through which the routinization of charisma reinterprets and redefines the meaning of the originating charismatic event.

Islam: The Arabic and Persian Traditions, Eleventh–Fifteenth Centuries

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konrad Hirschler
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
Middle Period ◽  
Early Islamic

This chapter deals with how the Islamic historical writing of the Middle Period developed directly from the early Islamic tradition, and its legacy remained deeply inscribed into the ways history was written and represented between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. However, as historians started to develop new styles and new genres, they turned to previously neglected aspects of the past, their social profile changed, and the writing of history became a more self-conscious, and to some degree self-confident, cultural practice. Most importantly, those issues that had motivated earlier historians, such as the legitimacy of the Abbasid Caliphate, declined in significance and historians of the Middle Period turned to new and more diverse subjects.

Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple: Southern Blacks and American Alternative Spirituality in 1920s Chicago

2002 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Nance
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Black Scholar ◽  
Legitimate Business ◽  
Alternative Spirituality ◽  
The Many ◽  
Moorish Science ◽  
Southern Migrants ◽  
The Church ◽  
Moorish Science Temple

In 1926, the well-known black scholar Ira De Augustine Reid complained that storefront churches were “a general nuisance. Neither their appearance nor their character warrants the respect of the Community.” Mortified, he described the founders of these informal assemblies: “He conducts his Services on such days as he feels disposed mentally and indisposed financially. To this gentleman of the cloth… the church is a legitimate business.” More to the point, he described his perception of the many southern migrants who aspired to found their own churches and religions, recounting how one “young swain” had announced to the leadership of a large traditional black congregation that he had had a dream. “In this dream a still small voice told him to ‘G. P. C.’ and when he heard it he knew that he was instructed to ‘Go Preach Christ.’ After further questioning by the Council, the chairman told him that he had misinterpreted his dream, for it certainly meant ‘Go plant corn’” For many educated African Americans, the idea of southern migrants presuming to enjoy their own religious traditions on their own terms in the urban North was ludicrous.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Michael Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
The World ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
Good And Evil

Although Nietzsche's greatness is recognized more universally now than ever before, the nature of that greatness is still widely misunderstood, and that unfortunately means that before I discuss any of Beyond Good and Evil (henceforth BGE) in any detail, I must make some general remarks about his work, his development and the kind of way in which I think that it is best to read him. Unlike any of the other philosophers that this series includes, except Marx and Engels, Nietzsche is very much concerned to address his contemporaries, because he was aware of a specific historical predicament, one which he would only see as having worsened in ways which he predicted with astonishing precision in the century since he wrote his great series of works. For he was above all a philosopher of culture, which is to say that his primary concern was always with the forces that determine the nature of a particular civilization, and with the possibilities of achievement which that civilization consequently had open to it. One of the reasons that The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, published when he was twenty-eight, created such a surge of hostility in the world of classical scholarship was that in it, whilst undertaking an investigation of what made possible the achievements of fifth century BC Greece in tragic drama, he felt it necessary to elicit the whole set of fundamental beliefs which the Greeks shared, and also to draw metaphysical conclusions from the fact that they were able to experience life in such a way that they needed great tragedies in order to endure it.

Tirumala Tirupati: Wait a Moment

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Stephen E. Maiden ◽  
Gerry Yemen ◽  
Elliott N. Weiss ◽  
Oliver Wight
Keyword(s):  
Waiting Times ◽  
Throughput Rate ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Temple Complex ◽  
The World ◽  
Hindu Temples ◽  
Challenging Students ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Temple

This case examines the queueing issues caused by the growth in popularity of one of the most visited Hindu temples in the world. On January 2, 2015, Ramesh and Vasantha Gupta visit Tirumala Venkateswara Temple, just a day after some 210,000 people crowded the 2,000-year-old site. The case describes the many enhancements that the temple administrator, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), has implemented since its management of the temple complex began in 1932. The soaring popularity of the temple, however, has led to safety and comfort concerns for pilgrims. While challenging students to consider additional improvements that might benefit pilgrim throughput rate and time in the temple system, the case highlights the tension TTD must manage between maximizing efficiency and maintaining religious traditions. Additionally, the case demonstrates the importance of perceived waiting times in the management of queues.

scholarly journals Women Entrepreneurship across Nations

2016 ◽  
pp. 189-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suja R. Nair
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Family Support ◽  
Women Entrepreneurs ◽  
Female Entrepreneurs ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Women Entrepreneurship ◽  
Significant Contributor ◽  
The Past ◽  
Work Family ◽  
The Many

Since the past two decades the concept of women entrepreneurship has gained recognition as a significant contributor towards the economic growth of the country. This can be attributed to the many encouraging factors like family support, flexibility in work family schedule, encouraging policies etc. Nevertheless, there also exist certain barriers that hinder their path of progress. In the context of globalization today, women entrepreneurs across nations are also engaged in identifying opportunities for further growth. In this pursuit they face a number of challenges amidst the opportunities. The chapter intends to make a contribution to the topic of women entrepreneurship by examining what initiates entrepreneurship among individuals, comparison between male and female entrepreneurs, factors that encourage women entrepreneurs as well as those that inhibit their growth and on ways to overcome the challenges they face.

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