Attitudes to the Use of Fire in Executions in Late Antiquity and Early Islam: The Burning of Heretics and Rebels in Late Umayyad Iraq

Author(s):  
Andrew Marsham

Capital punishment can be understood as simultaneously an exercise of actual power – the ending of a human life – and an exertion of symbolic, or ritual, power.1 In this combination of symbolic transformation with real physical change, executions are unusual rituals. But the use of extreme violence against the human body certainly does have ritual characteristics, in that it has established rules (which may, of course, be deliberately challenged or broken) and in that these rules are used to make the drastic transformation in the status of the executed party seem legitimate and proper, to reassert more general ideas about the correct social order and to communicate threats and warnings to others who might seek to upset it. The victim of the execution is quite literally marked out as beyond reintegration into society. Their body becomes a kind of text, which can be read in a multitude of ways: the authorities carrying out the killing usually have one set of messages in mind, but the victim themselves, and those who witness or remember the act, may have very different ideas.

Verbum Vitae ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-326
Author(s):  
Michał Kosche

The notion of moral fairness of application of capital punishment is stretched between two poles of opposite interpretative meanings. On the one hand, there is an imperative related to maintaining the social order and good that justifies in some specific cases killing an individual for the good of the community; on the other hand, there is the message of the Gospel about holiness of each human life. In this regard, at the attempt to investigate the fairness of death penalty, a certain hermeneutic tension related to the overlapping of rights and obligations both with regard to the criminal and society that needs to be protected against him or her. The starting point of this article is an outlook on death penalty with due regard of a ‘hermeneutic charge’ contained both in the duty to protect common good and each individual’s life. Next, the ‘genuine paradox’ was analysed that emerges in a situation where the right to live and the right to protect overlap. All the considerations are concluded with a question whether the recent abolitionist interpretation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church should be classified as the continuity hermeneutic or rather the discontinuity hermeneutic.


rahatulquloob ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Dr. Muhammad Fakhar ud din ◽  
Dr. Shahab Ashraf Khatak

The beauty of religion Islam is not only to provide the complete life style and charter for one to lead his life smoothly but it flourishes the human life with its eternal directions and commands full of hidden pleasures coupled with physical and spiritual care of human body. In fact, the everlasting religion comprised of such rulings that help individuals in every walk of life until and unless these rulings are implemented and executed in a proper way according to the prescribed codes of Almighty Allah and his Messenger, Prophet Muhammad PBUH. The thorough study of Shariah rulings reveals the fact that to protect the man’s life or even to make it in comfort and ease, the gradual and steady relaxation has been observed like the one unable to perform prayer in standing position, legitimate for him to sit or even through gestures according to the status of his illness and disease. Similarly, the fasting is important part of Worship, obligation upon Muslim to observe fasting during Ramadan with intentions to get Allah’s pleasure and piousness. This research study emphasis on highlighting the shariah rulings about the medication during fasting in order to know the extent of use, specification in drugs like injections and drips along with some relevant discussion about the spirit of medicine permission. The study will be the real addition to the knowledge and will be fine guidance for the Practiced Muslims.


2013 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattia Guidetti

AbstractThis article examines the transformation of the sacred landscape in the cities of Syria and Palestine from late antiquity to early Islam. This phase of urban and architectural history, often obscured by the changes brought in during the medieval period, is investigated through a close comparison of textual and material evidence related to the main urban religious complexes. It is suggested that the new Friday mosques were frequently built contiguous to Christian great churches, creating a sort of shared sacred area within the cities. Legal issues related to the Islamic conquest and the status of minorities are considered in order to explain the rationale behind such a choice by Muslims.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-51
Author(s):  
Debashree Mukherjee

In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios in Poona, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the film industry. In Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?, 1940), she highlighted the durational depletion of the human body that is specific to acting work. This article interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events—a strike and a book—opening them up toward a history of embodiment as production experience. It embeds Apte's emphasis on exhaustion within contemporaneous debates on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the status of cinema as work. Reading Apte's remarkable activism as theory from the South helps us rethink the meanings of embodiment, labor, materiality, inequality, resistance, and human-object relations in cinema.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
Elena I. Yaroslavtseva

The article examines the impact of digitalization on human life and intellectual experience. The development of computer technology demands an understanding of new aspects of human development and requires a capability to overcome not only external conditions but also ourselves. Entering a new level of development cannot imply a complete rejection of previous dispositions, but should be accompanied by reflection on personal experience and by the quest for new forms of interaction in society and with nature. Communicative and cognitive activity of a person has an ontological basis and relies on processes that actually evolve in nature. Therefore, the creation of new objects is always associated with the properties of natural material and gives rise to new points of support in the development of man. The more audacious his projects, the more important it is to preserve this connection to nature. It is always the human being who turns out to be the initiator who knows how to solve problems. The conformity of complex technical systems to nature is not only a goal but also a value of meaningful construction of development perspectives. The key to the nature orientation of the modern digital world is the human being himself, who keeps all the secrets of the culture of his natural development. Therefore, the proposed by the Russian philosopher V.S. Stepin post-non-classical approach, based on the principle of “human-sizedness,” is an important contribution to contemporary research because it draws attention to the “human – machine” communication, to the relationship between a person and technological systems he created. The article concludes that during digital transformation, a cultural conflict arises: in an effort to solve the problems of the future, a person equips his life with devices that are designed to support him, to expand his functionality, but at the same time, the boundaries of humanity become dissolved and the forms of human activity undergo simplification. Transhumanism engages society in the fight against fears of vulnerability and memory loss and ignores the flexibility and sustainability of natural foundation.


Author(s):  
Didier Fassin

If punishment is not what we say it is, if it is not justified by the reasons we invoke, if it facilitates repeat offenses instead of preventing them, if it punishes in excess of the seriousness of the act, if it sanctions according to the status of the offender rather than to the gravity of the offense, if it targets social groups defined beforehand as punishable, and if it contributes to producing and reproducing disparities, then does it not itself precisely undermine the social order? And must we not start to rethink punishment, not only in the ideal language of philosophy and law but also in the uncomfortable reality of social inequality and political violence?


1996 ◽  
Vol 101 (5) ◽  
pp. 1528
Author(s):  
Timothy D. Barnes ◽  
Richard Lim
Keyword(s):  

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 315-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhenhua Su ◽  
Yang Cao ◽  
Jingkai He ◽  
Waibin Huang

Existing studies have traced China’s high political trust to three sources: traditional culture, the state’s success in fostering economic growth, and ideological propaganda. We identify a fourth source: perceived social mobility. We argue that when people perceive a reasonable chance for upward mobility based on personal initiatives and efforts, the status quo becomes more justifiable because individuals are responsible for their own successes and failures. Perceived social mobility thus instills a sense of optimism and fairness and exonerates the regime from many blames, thereby enhancing political trust. Regression analysis of the China portion of the 2007 World Values Survey data shows that respondents who saw themselves as having choices and control in life were indeed more likely to trust the ruling communist party. The respondents’ overall level of perceived social mobility is also high, which is consistent with the massive shake-up of the preexisting social order in China’s reform era.


1988 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. D. Griffiths ◽  
J. E. Grundy

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a common infectious agent which is well adapted to its host. Following primary infection, which is almost always asymptomatic in people with normal immunity, the virus establishes latency at sites which are unknown. The virus is probably maintained in this latent state by immune surveillance mechanisms since immunosuppression frequently leads to reactivation of virus.Cytomegalovirus has been identified in most anatomical areas of the human body. The aim of this article is to define criteria for pathogenicity so that clinical and experimental data can be reviewed to determine if CMV is likely to cause disease at these various clinical sites. Thus, patients have been shown to die frequentlywithCMV but do they diefromit?


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