The Message of The Damascus Sermon for Muslim-Christian Relations

Author(s):  
Marten de Vries

AbstractThe context in which Bediüzzaman Said Nursi wrote the first version of his now famous Damascus sermon was a meeting on a continent and in an age in which Muslims were being forced to reflect on their identity due to negative interaction with non-Muslims.Meanwhile, the relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims have changed drastically. Nonetheless, not only Muslims but also Christians and even Muslims and Christians together in dialogue now have more rather than fewer reasons to be concerned about the question of how they, based on their authentic religious values, can contribute to a good society.Even the mid-20th century Turkish revision of the Damascus sermon is dated. The document does, however, offer a clarifying template that can still be highly beneficial for Muslims and Christians a century later in striving for what is beneficial for themselves and their environment while keeping their own identities in mind.Christians could also acknowledge a great deal in the six ailments and remedies the healer identifies in the “Six Words.” At the same time, it suits the spirit of the age to proceed not only via a set of major resemblances between both religions but also mutatis mutandis in connection with what is typical for each religion. As a Christian, I would like to flesh this out with “hope,” “faithfulness,” “love,” “unity,” “dignity,” and “consultation,” based on my faith, of which Jesus Christ is the centre.The challenge of today’s and tomorrow’s globalised reality that Muslims and Christians have to cope with is, for instance, to formulate a new Purifying paradigm based on the concepts listed by Nursi, designed to be fully respective of the well understood uniqueness of the other. Christian acceptance of Muslims should not depend on the extent to which they are integrated into Western society, nor should Christians be viewed by Muslims as pre-Muslims.This challenge goes further and is more difficult than striving to come to “a common word”: in fact, we will need to understand a variety of words. But if the efforts are crowned with success, this is a more valid way for Muslims and Christians - who together make up the majority of the world’s population - to be a good example for society.From a Christian point of view and that of the 20th century’s disenchantment, Nursi is overly optimistic when he suggests society can be affected by implementing religious values. Religious people and non-religious people alike in the current demographic will continue to co-exist and individually suffer from the cited and notcited maladies, and this was no different in the golden eras of yore.Nevertheless, we can point to signs of hope when we succeed together in resolving the dilemma of right-wing capitalism and liberalism on the one hand and left-wing communism and socialism on the other by means of our own religiously motivated values to allow Christians, Muslims, and others to sample a bit of the future heaven on earth.

APRIA Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
Florian Cramer

Publishing is increasingly being challenged through instantaneous social media publish- ing, even in the fields of scholarship and cultural, philosophical and political debate. Memetic self-publishers, such as the right-wing 'YouTube intellectual' Jordan Peterson and his left-wing counterpart Natalie Wynn, seem to tap into urgent needs that traditional publishing fails to identify and address. Does their practice amount to a new form of urgent publishing? How is it different from non-urgent publishing on the one hand and from propaganda on the other? Which urgencies can be addressed by urgent publishing? What is the role of artists and designers in it?


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikko Salmela ◽  
Christian von Scheve

Emotions are prevalent in the rhetoric of populist politicians and among their electorate. We argue that partially dissimilar emotional processes may be driving right- and left-wing populism. Existing research has associated populism with fear and insecurities experienced in contemporary societies, on the one hand, and with anger, resentment, and hatred, on the other. Yet there are significant differences in the targets of right- and left-wing resentment: A political and economic establishment deemed responsible for austerity politics (left) and political and cultural elites accused of favoring ethnic, religious, and sexual out-groups at the expense of the neglected in-group (right). Referring to partially different emotional opportunity structures and distinct political strategies at exploiting these structures, we suggest that right-wing populism is characterized by repressed shame that transforms fear and insecurity into anger, resentment, and hatred against perceived “enemies” of the precarious self. Left-wing populism, in turn, associates more with acknowledged shame that allows individuals to self-identify as aggrieved and humiliated by neoliberal policies and their advocates. The latter type of shame holds emancipatory potential as it allows individuals to establish bonds with others who feel the same, whereas repressors remain in their shame or seek bonds from repression-mediated defensive anger and hatred.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-186
Author(s):  
Óscar García Agustín

Abstract The emergence of left populism, mainly in Southern Europe, in the decade of 2010, questioned the impression that populism in Europe was only right-wing oriented. On the other hand, the expansion of populism as a common denomination favored the perception that all populisms were the same, regardless of ideology: a threat to democracy. It explains why many left parties are reluctant towards being labelled as populist. Besides, left-wing populism connected with the one from Latin America one decade before where the tensions between democratization and authoritarianism have been widely discussed. The European public opinion usually relates the Latin American left populist governments with authoritarianism, associated with the situation in Venezuela first with Hugo Chávez and, especially, now with Nicolás Maduro. For this reason, left populism in Europe was made suspicious of being authoritarian.


2018 ◽  
Vol 93 ◽  
pp. 101-112
Author(s):  
Gilda Zazzara

AbstractThis article deals with the Italian working-class attitude to vote right-wing, seen in a long-term perspective, in particular in the northern and more industrialized regions. It stresses the fact that the left-wing parties reached their largest majority among working-class voters only for a short period. The end of the long cycle of factory conflicts of the 1970s on the one side, and the crisis of the “local political subcultures”—Catholic and Communist—in mediating the relationship between the working class and the central State on the other, marked the outbreak of a new political phenomenon: the establishment of the Lega Nord party in the 1980s. This party has been able to shift progressively from identity-based claims and secessionist proposals to xenophobia and the demand that a priority be accorded to Italian workers on the labour market. In the most recent years workers’ support for the Lega Nord has been contended by a new populist competitor, the Five Star Movement, whose ability to intercept a widespread “working-class malaise” will be tested in years to come.


2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
pp. 538-566
Author(s):  
Sandra Issel-Dombert

AbstractFrom a theoretical and empirical linguistic point of view, this paper emphasizes the importance of the relationship between populism and the media. The aim of this article is to explore the language use of the Spanish right wing populism party Vox on the basis of its multimodal postings on the social network Instagram. For the analysis of their Instagram account, a suitable multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) provides a variety of methods and allows a theoretical integration into constructivism. A hashtag-analysis reveals that Vox’s ideology consists of a nativist and ethnocentric nationalism on the one hand and conservatism on the other. With a topos analysis, the linguistic realisations of these core elements are illustrated with two case studies.


1984 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Bruyn

AbstractFrom 1911 to 1961 Félix Chrétien, secretary to François de Dinteville II, Bishop of Auxerre in Burgundy, and from 1542 onwards a canon in that town, was thought to be the author of three remarkable paintings. Two of these were mentioned by an 18th-century local historian as passing for his work: a tripych dated 1535 on the central panel with scenes from the legend of St. Eugenia, which is now in the parish church at Varzy (Figs. 1-3, cf. Note 10), and a panel dated 1550 with the Martyrdom of St. Stephen in the ambulatory of Auxerre Cathedral. To these was added a third work, a panel dated 1537 with Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh, which is now in New York (Figs. 4-5, cf. Notes I and 3). All three works contain a portrait of François de Dinteville, who is accompanied in the Varzy triptych and the New York panel (where he figures as Aaron) by other portrait figures. In the last-named picture these include his brothers) one of whom , Jean de Dinteville, is well-known as the man who commissioned Holbein's Ambassadors in 1533. Both the Holbein and Moses and Aaron remained in the family's possession until 1787. In order to account for the striking affinity between the style of this artist and that of Netherlandish Renaissance painters, Jan van Scorel in particular, Anthony Blunt posited a common debt to Italy, assuming that the painter accompanied François de Dinteville on a mission to Rome in 1531-3 (Note 4). Charles Sterling) on the other hand, thought of Netherlandish influence on him (Note 5). In 1961 Jacques Thuillier not only stressed the Northern features in the artist's style, especially in his portraits and landscape, but also deciphered Dutch words in the text on a tablet depicted in the Varzy triptych (Fig. I) . He concluded that the artist was a Northerner himself and could not possibly have been identical with Félix Chrétien (Note 7). Thuillier's conclusion is borne out by the occurrence of two coats of arms on the church depicted in the Varzy triptych (Fig. 2), one of which is that of a Guild of St. Luke, the other that of the town of Haarlem. The artist obviously wanted it to be known that he was a master in the Haarlem guild. Unfortunately, the Haarlem guild archives provide no definite clue as to his identity. He may conceivably have been Bartholomeus Pons, a painter from Haarlem, who appears to have visited Rome and departed again before 22 June 15 18, when the Cardinal of S. Maria in Aracoeli addressed a letter of indulgence to him (without calling him a master) care of a master at 'Tornis'-possibly Tournus in Burgundy (Note 11). The name of Bartholomeus Pons is further to be found in a list of masters in the Haarlem guild (which starts in 1502, but gives no further dates, Note 12), while one Bartholomeus received a commission for painting two altarpiece wings and a predella for Egmond Abbey in 1523 - 4 (Note 13). An identification of the so-called Félix Chrétien with Batholomeus Pons must remain hypothetical, though there are a number of correspondences between the reconstructed career of the one and the fragmentary biography of the other. The painter's work seems to betray an early training in a somewhat old-fashioned Haarlem workshop, presumably around 1510. He appears to have known Raphael's work in its classical phase of about 1515 - 6 and to have been influenced mainly by the style of the cartoons for the Sistine tapestries (although later he obviously also knew the Master of the Die's engravings of the story of Psyche of about 1532, cf .Note 8). His stylistic development would seem to parallel that of Jan van Scorel, who was mainly influenced by the slightly later Raphael of the Loggie. This may explain the absence of any direct borrowings from Scorel' work. It would also mean that a more or less Renaissance style of painting was already being practised in Haarlem before Scorel's arrival there in 1527. Thuillier added to the artist's oeuvre a panel dated 1537 in Frankfurt- with the intriguing scene of wine barrels being lowered into a cellar - which seems almost too sophisticated to be attributed to the same hand as the works in Varzy and New York, although it does appear to come from the same workshop (Fig. 6, Note 21). A portrait of a man, now in the Louvre, was identified in 197 1 as a fragment of a work by the so-called Félix Chrétien himself (Fig. 8, Note 22). The Martyrdom of St. Stephen of 1550 was rejected by Thuillier because of its barren composition and coarse execution. Yet it seems to have too much in common with the other works to be totally separated, from them and may be taken as evidence that the workshop was still active at Auxerre in 1550.


Author(s):  
Yves Mausen

Abstract The logic of evidence in Bartolistic literature, A reading of the Summa circa testes et examinationem eorum (Ms. Bruxelles, B.R., II 1442, fol.101 ra – 103 rb). – Bartolus teaches how to read testimonies from a logical point of view. On the one hand, the facts that the witness recounts constitute the minor premise of a syllogism, its conclusion being their legal characterization; therefore he is prohibited from pronouncing directly on any legal matter. On the other hand, given that the witness' knowledge of the facts has to stem from sensory perception, the information he provides has at least to constitute the minor premise of another syllogism, making for establishing the causa of his testimony.


1928 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 665-735 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy J. Jackson

It is well known that in many orders of typically winged insects species occur which in the adult stage are apterous or have the wings so reduced in size that flight is impossible. Sometimes the reduction of wings affects one sex only, as in the case of the females of certain moths, but in the majority of cases it is exhibited by both sexes. In many instances wing dimorphism occurs irrespective of sex, one form of the species having fully developed wings and the other greatly reduced wings. In some species the wings are polymorphic. The problem of the origin of reduced wings and of other functionless organs is one of great interest from the evolutionary point of view. Various theories have been advanced in explanation, but in the majority of cases the various aspects of the subject are too little known to warrant discussion. More experimental work is required to show how far environmental conditions on the one hand, and hereditary factors on the other, are responsible for this phenomenon. Those species which exhibit alary dimorphism afford material for the study of the inheritance of the two types of wings, but only in a few cases has this method of research been utilized.


PMLA ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 1183-1190
Author(s):  
George W. Whiting

To the student of writing and literature few inquiries are more interesting and valuable than that into an author's practices in revising his own work. To observe the various stages in the evolution of the final version, to note carefully an artist at his work of pruning the dead wood, adding fresh material, smoothing away harsh phrases, selecting just words, and letting light into obscure places—to do this is to come somewhat nearer to an understanding of what in spite of all analysis will remain essentially a mystery. Especially fascinating and instructive is the study of Conrad's revision, for here one sees a supreme artist at work. In his vigorous hewing and rebuilding there is conclusive proof of the artist's untiring industry and consummate skill. Conrad's revision of Nostromo is of particular interest, for this novel occupies a critical place in the evolution of Conrad's prose. Mr. Richard Curie has justly characterized the change that came over Conrad's prose—a change perceptible in the “Amy Foster” of Typhoon and fully marked in from Under Western Eyes onward. This evolution has smoothed away the cadence, has concentrated the manner, has toned down the style of Conrad's former exuberance. At first glance the later and the earlier Conrad appear two totally different men. The unruly splendor of the one has given way to the subtle and elastic suavity of the other … His earlier prose is sometimes uncertain, sometimes exaggerated, but his later prose has the uniform temper of absolute mastery.


Diogenes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitko Momov

Rosemberg (1991) has made a critical review of a long-standing discussion between Eastern philologists and Buddhist philosophers. The discussion is centered around the translation of the doctrine on the one hand, and its philosophical systematization on the other hand. When scientific-philological translation prevails, the literal meaning of Buddhist terminology is declared to be its basis. The young scholar, who had specialized in Japan, studied Buddhism from Japanese and Chinese sources and collected lexicographic material from non-Hindu sources. After comparing them, he encountered inaccuracies in the translation. In an attempt to overcome them, he preferred the point of view of the philosophy of Buddhism. The conclusion that he has drawn in the preface of this edition is that the study should begin with a systematization of antiquity.


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