ACO Women in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: Transitions and Persisting Patterns

Author(s):  
Rima Nasrallah

After the independence of Syria and Lebanon Protestant missionary work in the Middle East changed dramatically. The women missionaries who worked in the service of the ACO had to come to terms with new realities such as the social and political turmoil of decolonisation, missiological shifts, and partnership agreements with the local churches. Drawing on written memoirs and oral history sources, this article explores their female agency and leadership in a changing context. It also analyses the perception of these missionaries by local agents.

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.


Author(s):  
Ronen Steinberg

This book examines how those who lived through the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. It shows that, contrary to claims that are made often in the literature, there were complicated, painful, and often honest debates about how to deal with the effects of mass violence on self and society after the Terror. Revolutionary leaders, relatives of victims, and ordinary citizens argued about how to hold those responsible for the violence accountable, how to offer some sort of relief to the victims, and how to commemorate this controversial episode in the politically charged climate of post-revolutionary France. Their solutions were not perfect, but their debates were innovative. The dilemmas that they struggled with, dilemmas around retribution, redress, and remembrance, derived from the democratizing impulses of the Revolution. Drawing on the concept of transitional justice and on the literature about the major traumas of the twentieth century, this book argues that the modern question of what to do with difficult pasts was born out of the social and political upheavals of the 18th century’s Age of Revolutions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedict Cuddon

This article examines the formation and display of collections of Islamic art in Boston-area museums over the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the holdings of three main institutions: the Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It explores some of the key personalities involved in the formation of collections, such as Denman Waldo Ross, Hervey Wetzel, Joseph McMullan, and Stuart Cary Welch. It also looks at early curators of the collections, in this era a largely amateur pursuit. Through these considerations it traces changing approaches to the study of Islamic art and discusses the various local and international forces (including the Aesthetic Movement, emerging nationalist discourses and ethno-racialist interpretations of art, and the growing American hegemony in the Middle East) that shaped the social and political context in which Islamic art was received and interpreted in this period.


2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-146
Author(s):  
Sulayman S. Nyang

The arrival of Islam in the United States ofAmerica has been dated backto the coming of slaves fromAfrica. During this unfortunate trade in humancargo from the African mainland, many Muslim men and women came tothese shores. Some of these men and women were more visible than others;some were more literate in Arabic than the others; and some were betterremembered by their generations than the others. Despite these multiple differencesbetween the Muslim slaves and their brethren from various parts oftheAfrican continent, the fact still remains that their Islam and their self-confidencedid not save them from the oppressive chains of slave masters. Thereligion of Islam survived only during the lifetime of individual believerswho tried desperately to maintain their Islamic way of life. Among theMuslims who came in ante bellum times intoAmerica one can include YorroMahmud (erroneously anglicized as Yarrow Mamout), Ayub Ibn SulaymanDiallo (known to Anglo-Saxons as Job ben Solomon), Abdul Rahman(known as Abdul Rahahman in the Western sources) and countless otherswhose Islamic ritual practices were prevented from surfacing in public.1Besides these Muslim slaves of ante bellumAmerica, there were otherswho came to these shores without the handicap of slavery. They came fromSouthern Europe, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. TheseMuslimswere immigrants to America at the end of the Nineteenth Century andthe beginning of the Twentieth Century. Motivated by the desire to come toa land of opportunity and strike it rich, many of these men and women laterfound out that the United States ofAmerica was destined to be their permanenthomeland. In the search for identity and cultural security in their newenvironment, these Muslim immigrants began to consolidate their culturalresources by building mosques and organizing national and local groups forthe purpose of social welfare and solidarity. These developments among theMuslims contributed to the emergence of various cultural and religious ...


1970 ◽  
pp. 36-47
Author(s):  
Fadwa Al-Labadi

The concept of citizenship was introduced to the Arab and Islamic region duringthe colonial period. The law of citizenship, like all other laws and regulations inthe Middle East, was influenced by the colonial legacy that impacted the tribal and paternalistic systems in all aspects of life. In addition to the colonial legacy, most constitutions in the Middle East draw on the Islamic shari’a (law) as a major source of legislation, which in turn enhances the paternalistic system in the social sector in all its dimensions, as manifested in many individual laws and the legislative processes with respect to family status issues. Family is considered the nucleus of society in most Middle Eastern countries, and this is specifically reflected in the personal status codes. In the name of this legal principle, women’s submission is being entrenched, along with censorship over her body, control of her reproductive role, sexual life, and fertility.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-137
Author(s):  
Roxanne Christensen ◽  
LaSonia Barlow ◽  
Demetrius E. Ford

Three personal reflections provided by doctoral students of the Michigan School of Professional Psychology (Farmington Hills, Michigan) address identification of individual perspectives on the tragic events surrounding Trayvon Martin’s death. The historical ramifications of a culture-in-context and the way civil rights, racism, and community traumatization play a role in the social construction of criminals are explored. A justice orientation is applied to both the community and the individual via internal reflection about the unique individual and collective roles social justice plays in the outcome of these events. Finally, the personal and professional responses of a practitioner who is also a mother of minority young men brings to light the need to educate against stereotypes, assist a community to heal, and simultaneously manage the direct effects of such events on youth in society. In all three essays, common themes of community and growth are addressed from varying viewpoints. As worlds collided, a historical division has given rise to a present unity geared toward breaking the cycle of violence and trauma. The authors plead that if there is no other service in the name of this tragedy, let it at least contribute to the actualization of a society toward growth and healing.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-168
Author(s):  
Celal Hayir ◽  
Ayman Kole

When the Turkish army seized power on May 27th, 1960, a new democratic constitution was carried into effect. The positive atmosphere created by the 1961 constitution quickly showed its effects on political balances in the parliament and it became difficult for one single party to come into power, which strengthened the multi-party-system. The freedom initiative created by 1961’s constitution had a direct effect on the rise of public opposition. Filmmakers, who generally steered clear from the discussion of social problems and conflicts until 1960, started to produce movies questioning conflicts in political, social and cultural life for the first time and discussions about the “Social Realism” movement in the ensuing films arose in cinematic circles in Turkey. At the same time, the “regional managers” emerged, and movies in line with demands of this system started to be produced. The Hope (Umut), produced by Yılmaz Güney in 1970, rang in a new era in Turkish cinema, because it differed from other movies previously made in its cinematic language, expression, and use of actors and settings. The aim of this study is to mention the reality discussions in Turkish cinema and outline the political facts which initiated this expression leading up to the film Umut (The Hope, directed by Yılmaz Güney), which has been accepted as the most distinctive social realist movie in Turkey. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-237
Author(s):  
Eyal Clyne

Drawing on speech acts theory, this article discusses the illocutionary and perlocutionary forces of discursive practices with which certain academic circles seek to discredit the Saidian ‘Orientalism’ framework. Identifying the unusual value attached to Said as object of attachment or detachment, desirability and exceptionality, this analysis turns away from deliberations about ‘orientalism’ as a party in a battle of ideas, and studies common cautionary statements and other responses by peers as actions in the social (academic) world, that enculture and police expectations. Cautioning subjects about this framework, or conditioning its employment to preceding extensive pre-emptive complicating mitigations, in effect constructs this framework as undesirable and ‘risky’. While strong discursive reactions are not uncommon in academia, comparing them to treatments of less-controversial social theories reveals formulations, meanings and attentions which are arguably reserved for this ‘theory’. Conclusively, common dismissals, warnings and criticisms of Said and ‘Orientalism’ often exemplify Saidian claims, as they deploy the powerful advantage of enforcing hegemonic, and indeed Orientalist, views.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saty Satya-Murti ◽  
Jennifer Gutierrez

The Los Angeles Plaza Community Center (PCC), an early twentieth-century Los Angeles community center and clinic, published El Mexicano, a quarterly newsletter, from 1913 to 1925. The newsletter’s reports reveal how the PCC combined walk-in medical visits with broader efforts to address the overall wellness of its attendees. Available records, some with occasional clinical details, reveal the general spectrum of illnesses treated over a twelve-year span. Placed in today’s context, the medical care given at this center was simple and minimal. The social support it provided, however, was multifaceted. The center’s caring extended beyond providing medical attention to helping with education, nutrition, employment, transportation, and moral support. Thus, the social determinants of health (SDH), a prominent concern of present-day public health, was a concept already realized and practiced by these early twentieth-century Los Angeles Plaza community leaders. Such practices, although not yet nominally identified as SDH, had their beginnings in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social activism movement aiming to mitigate the social ills and inequities of emerging industrial nations. The PCC was one of the pioneers in this effort. Its concerns and successes in this area were sophisticated enough to be comparable to our current intentions and aspirations.


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