scholarly journals Veil and Headscarf: Five Aspects of a Cultural Phenomenon

Author(s):  
Hannes D. Galter

The discussions about the use of headscarves and veils shape the living conditions of Muslim women in the Middle East and in Europe to this day. To overcome this situation, a thorough and dispassionate documentation of the cultural history of veiling is necessary. This paper will give a short overview of the long history of veiling and it will deal in detail with five different aspects of this phenomenon and with the various connections between Europe and the Middle East: the relationship between death and the veil in the Ancient Near East; the veil in early Christianity; the hair as an erotic symbol in the Ancient Near East; the traditional costume of the Transylvanian Saxons as a European example of the use of veils and the veil of mystery.

This book covers the whole of the period in which Rome dominated the Mediterranean world. The belief shared by all the contributors is that the Roman empire is best understood from the standpoint of the Mediterranean world looking in to Rome, rather than from Rome looking out. The chapters focus on the development of political institutions in Rome itself and in her empire, and on the nature of the relationship between Rome and her provincial subjects. They also discuss historiographical approaches to different kinds of source material, literary and documentary — including the major Roman historians, the evidence for the pre-Roman near east, and the Christian writers of later antiquity. The book reflects the immense complexity of the political and cultural history of the ancient Mediterranean, from the late Republic to the age of Augustine.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Fleming

AbstractAlthough the “new social history” of the 1960s and 1970s quickly bequeathed its universal ambitions to a “new cultural history” in the 1980s, the attraction of the social historical category for study of the ancient Near East remains its potential to transform how we see the entire landscape of each past setting, still evoking E. P. Thompson’s history “from the bottom up.” Cuneiform writing offers a wealth of materials from the transactions of everyday life, in spite of the fact that the scribal profession served the centers of power and families of means, and a social historical perspective allows even documents from administrative archives to be viewed from below as well as from the rulers’ vantage. The potential for examining ancient society from below, in all its variety and lack of order, is illustrated in the archives of Late Bronze Age Emar in northwestern Syria. It is to be hoped that specialists in the ancient Near East will join a larger conversation among historians about how to approach the movement of societies through time.


2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152
Author(s):  
Carolyn J. Sharp

Biblical narratives about ostensibly “local” barter (Abraham’s purchase of the cave at Machpelah), protection of battle spoils (Achan’s theft and subsequent execution), and commodification of labor and bodies (Ruth gleaning for hours and offering herself to Boaz) reveal much about ideologies of economic control operative in ancient Israel. The materialist analysis of Roland Boer provides a richly detailed study of Israelite agrarian and tributary practices, offering a salutary corrective to naïve views of Israelite economic relations. Highlighting labor as the most ruthlessly exploited resource in the ancient Near East, Boer examines the class-specific benefits and sustained violence of economic formations from kinship-household relations to militarized extraction. Boer’s erudite study will compel readers to look afresh at the subjugation of the poor and plundering of the powerless as constitutive features of diverse economic practices throughout the history of ancient Israel.


Author(s):  
Gábor Sulyok

AbstractThe history of the breach of treaties can be traced back to the ancient Near East. The relative abundance and diversity of contemporary sources attest that the breaking of treaty obligations must have been a rather persistent problem, and that such occurrences were regarded as events of utmost importance throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The present study strives to demonstrate how peoples of old may have perceived and reacted to the breach of treaties on the basis of selected writings—the Legend of Etana, the Indictment of Madduwatta, the Indictment of Mita, the plague prayers of Mursili and the Old Testament—that provide, beyond the exposition of actual or alleged facts, a deeper insight into the psychological and procedural aspects of the subject.


2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emi Goto

Though veiling by Muslim women has been discussed from many angles and with various methodologies, the very basis of the discussion – the relationship between the Qur'a¯n and the veil – still remains unclear. This paper returns to this basis, focusing on three relevant passages from the Qur'a¯n (33:59, 33:53, 24:31). An analysis of the first two of these passages in association with a number of prophetic traditions [hadi¯th] shows clearly that one of the main purposes of veiling in early Islamic society was to distinguish, and secure the safety or status of, privileged women. Problematic is Verse 24:31, which contains another reason for veiling in Islam: to cover women's beauty. Because of the ambiguity of the words contained in this passage, and the absence of any solid hadi¯th concerning it, ample room for interpretation was provided for later religious authorities. The extent of covering changed over time and so did the grounds for argument. By following major exegetic texts [tafsi¯r] on this verse from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, this paper shows the relationship between the Qur'a¯n, hadi¯th, tafsi¯r, and the veil.


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