scholarly journals Ibn Khaldun's concepts in the mirror of Arab political and economic identity

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inna Kostyrya ◽  
Nataliia Yanchenko

The topic of the asymmetry of the processes of globalization, regionalization, localization of international life, for all its fame, does not negate the relevance of deep analysis, especially in the case of traditional societies. Therefore, we set ourselves the task of exploring the ethnohistorical, spiritual, cultural, economic and political spheres of the life of the peoples of the Arab region in retrospection and dynamics using historical-logical, comparative methods and a systematic approach. We also put forward hypotheses that: 1) the key subjective factor influencing the political decision-making markets are the interests of the elite, political leaders in the context of resolving conflicts in the tradition of Muslim diplomacy; 2) the economic, political, legal and philosophical-religious thought of the Arab countries developed under the influence of Islam set forth in the Koran - the holy book of Muslims; 3) the origins of these concepts were laid by Al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Khaldun and other thinkers of the XI-XV centuries; 4) by analogy with Western political economists, starting with Thomas Aquinas, one can carry out analysis in the paradigm of the so-called “moral economists”

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed O. El-Kholei

Purpose Sustainable development is an attempt to achieve three competing aims: economic development, social justice and environmental conservation. Localising sustainable development in the Arabian city might require a framework that originates from its reality manifested in the region’s history, culture and religion. Ibn Khaldun’s model seems suitable for planning a sustainable city in the Arab world. The purpose of this paper is to discuss suitability of Ibn Khaldun’s writing to localising sustainable development in the Arabian cities. Design/methodology/approach The paper used a qualitative research methodology. The researcher investigated the writings of Ibn Khaldun and other scholars who studied his work to derive lessons for planning the sustainable Arab city. Findings Many of Ibn Khaldun’s concepts lost their accuracy, meanings and intentions in the course of translating his work. Ibn Khaldun’s writings can be the source from which scholars, planners and city administrators derive lessons to assure the sustainable development of human settlements, particularly in the Arab region. The writings of Ibn Khaldun are relevant to the Arab countries. His writings are sensitive to the realities of the Arab world, including geography, environment, history, religion and culture. His writings can support efforts for localising sustinable development in the Arabian cities. Originality/value Interrogating Ibn Khaldun’s writings can enable scholars, planners, architects and city administrators to elaborate and implement plans for the sustainable Arabian city. The findings of the paper assure that Ibn Khaldun’s analysis is suitable for addressing the urban ills of the contemporary Arabian metropolis as they were in his time.


2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy B. Kellison ◽  
Michael J. Mondello

Direct democracy practices such as initiatives and referenda are increasingly ignored or circumvented by political leaders who allocate subsidies toward new professional sport stadium developments. In a democracy, such a means of governing may be problematic if the outcome is unreflective of the public will. The existing literature makes several theoretical connections for this line of political decision-making, including urban growth machines and trustee–delegate representation. In this paper, these concepts are integrated with empirical evidence to support the conceptualization of civic paternalism, a term that provides partial description of the political decision-making process. Civic paternalists justify their decisions by arguing that a city’s continued vibrancy and growth optimize community benefit while remaining acutely aware of their decisions’ political consequences. We illustrate the concept of civic paternalism by drawing from interviews with political leaders associated with one of the most recent cases of the no-vote subsidy.


Author(s):  
Hunter Rawlings

Thucydides self-consciously composed his history for an elite audience of reader-listeners who would pay close attention to his work, not simply hear parts of it recited once. On the surface, he organized it tightly according to rigidly heeded principles: strict focus on war and political decision-making; rigorous ordering of time and space by consecutive summers and winters, and by theaters of action. Behind these overt structures Thucydides imposed a number of implicit designs, which lead perceptive readers to see and appreciate recurring patterns in history, particularly in political leaders’ decision making and in the morale of their cities. Structural parallelisms, juxtapositions, and the ordering of the accounts, for instance, are important Thucydidean means of making readers engage with his history and with their own; verbal linkages also provoke readers to note the ironies, paradoxes, and incongruities of the events.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Todd Statham

Although beer had a profound cultural, economic and religious significance among traditional societies in central Africa, teetotalism – in other words, abstinence from alcohol – has become widespread in Malawian Protestantism (as elsewhere in African Christianity), and in many churches it is regarded as a mark of true faith. This article examines the origins of the antipathy to alcohol in the Presbyterian missionaries who evangelised Malawi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who drew a parallel between the ‘problem of drink’ among the working poor in their home culture and central Africans, to urge sobriety and its concomitant values of thrift and hard work among their converts. Yet research shows that it was new Christians in Malawi themselves (and not the missionaries) who took the lead in making temperance or teetotalism a criterion for church membership. By drawing upon the experiences of other socially and politically marginalised groups in the British Empire at this time, it is suggested that these new Christians were likely motivated to adopt temperance/teetotalism in order to assert to foreign missionaries their ability to lead and control their own churches and countries.


Author(s):  
Ahmed Fadel Jassim Dawood

The Arab region is of great importance as an important part of the Middle East for both international and regional powers.This importance has placed it and its peoples in the suffering of international and regional interventions and has placed it in a state of permanent instability as it witnessed international and regional competition that increased significantly after the US intervention in Iraq in 2003. Accordingly, the research aims to shed light on the strategic directions of the global and regional powers by knowing their objectives separately, such as American, Russian, Turkish, Israeli and Iranian. The course aims at determining the future of this region in terms of political stability and lack thereof. Therefore, the hypothesis of the research comes from [that the different strategic visions and political and economic interests between the international and regional powers have exacerbated the conflicts between those forces and their alliances within the Arab region.. The third deals with the future of the Arab region in light of the conflict of these strategies. Accordingly, the research reached a number of conclusions confirming the continuation of international and regional competition within the Arab region, as well as the continuation of the state of conflict, tension, instability and chaos in the near term, as a result of the inability of Arab countries to overcome their political differences on the one hand and also their inability to advance their Arab reality. In the face of external challenges on the other.


2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-259
Author(s):  
Etienne Verhoeyen

Met dit boek levert Frank Seberechts een nagenoeg volledige studie af van een van de minder fraai kanten van de Belgische samenleving in 1940: de administratieve arrestatie en de wegvoering naar Frankrijk van enkele duizenden personen (de ‘verdachten’), Belgen of in België verblijvende vreemdelingen. De extreem-rechtse en pro-Duitse arrestanten hebben na hun vrijlating dit feit politiek in hun voordeel uitgebaat, waardoor volledig in de schaduw kwam te staan dat de overgrote meerderheid van de weggevoerden joodse mensen waren die in de jaren voor de oorlog naar België waren gevlucht. Dat het beeld van de wegvoeringen niet volledig is, is grotendeels te wijten aan het feit dat de meeste archieven die hierop betrekking hebben tijdens de meidagen van 1940 vernietigd werden. Met name de politieke besluitvorming over de wegvoeringen vertoont nog steeds schemerzones, zodat het vastleggen van verantwoordelijkheden ook vandaag nog een gewaagde onderneming is.________Deportations and the deported during the Maydays in 1940 By means of this book Frank Seberechts provides an almost complete study of one of the less admirable sides of Belgian society in 1940: the administrative arrest and the deportation to France of some thousands of people (‘the suspects’), Belgians or foreigners residing in Belgium. The extreme-right and pro-German detainees politically exploited this fact after they had been freed, but this completely overshadowed the point that the large majority of the deported people were Jews who had fled to Belgium during the years preceding the war. This incomplete portrayal of the deportations is mainly due to the fact that most of the archives relating to the events had been destroyed during the Maydays of 1940. The history of the political decision-making about the deportations in particular still shows many grey areas and it is therefore still a risky business even today to determine which people should be held accountable.


Author(s):  
Ronen Mandelkern

This chapter analyzes the role Israeli economists have played as purveyors of pro-market economic ideas and political entrepreneurs of economic liberalization in Israel. Israeli economists were strongly committed to economic liberalism already in the 1950s, but they were lacking decisive political influence. Two mechanisms increased their power over policy. First, long-term institutional changes gradually eroded “political” decision-making mechanism and opened the way to greater involvement of professional economists. This long-term trend was joined and reinforced by economists’ institutional entrepreneurship at the height of the 1980s economic crisis, when they initiated changes of macroeconomic governance. These changes enhanced the political power of the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Israel and supported the institutionalization of neoliberalism in Israel.


Author(s):  
Waleed M. Sweileh

Abstract Objective The current study aimed at investigating the contribution of researchers in the Arab region to the field of mental health and well-being of university students using bibliometric tools. Method Relevant literature was obtained from the Scopus database for the period from 2001–2020. Examples of keywords used in the query included “college student”, “university student”, and undergraduate student” combined with keywords such as wellbeing, wellness, suicide, and anxiety. No language restriction was used. Only research articles were considered. The search query was validated. Bibliometric indicators and mappings such as active countries, institutions, authors, highly cited documents, and the most frequently encountered topics were identified and discussed to shed light on research gaps in the Arab region. Research gaps were also identified. The analysis was carried out on February 12, 2021. Results The search query returned 309 research articles published by authors from 17 different Arab countries. Less than one-third (n = 97, 31.4%) of the retrieved articles were carried out in collaboration with authors from 39 non-Arab countries, mainly from the United Kingdom and the United States. The overall contribution of researchers from the Arab region to global research in the field was 5.6%. In total, 1212 authors from 791 different institutions participated in publishing the retrieved research articles. At the country level, Saudi Arabia (n = 125, 40.5%) ranked first, followed by Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon. At the institutional level, The University of Jordan (n = 25, 8.1%) ranked first, followed by King Saud University, and Kuwait University. The retrieved articles included 132 (42.7%) articles on stress/distress, 95 (30.7%) on anxiety, 61 (19.7%) on depression. Knowledge gaps on suicide, eating disorders, substance use, and happiness were identified. The retrieved articles appeared in 193 different journals and approximately two-thirds of the active journal were in general medicine, public health, and education. Conclusions The contribution of researchers in the Arab region to the field showed a noticeable increase with time. However, important research gaps were identified. The contribution was confined to authors from a limited number of Arab countries. Funding and international research collaboration for the mental health and well-being of students need to be strengthened.


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