scholarly journals Sharī‘a Scripts

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 108-109
Author(s):  
Andre Gingrich

While the Yemen seems to be stumbling from one disaster into the next, it is good to see how some of the best experts in Yemeni studies continue their work in ways that will be useful in the country’s future. The present volume is not only bound to become recognized soon as the magnum opus by Brinkley Messick, professor of  anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies at Columbia University and one of the world’s leading experts in Yemeni studies today. More importantly still, Sharī‘a Scripts features all the qualities required for a true academic milestone in Yemen-related scholarship for decades to come, with potential ramifications for the historical and legal anthropology of the Middle East at large. This volume is based on half a lifetime of analytical and comparative studies that began during the author’s first fieldwork period in the central and southern highlands of northern Yemen during the 1970s. Messick meticulously examines the structures of jurisprudence (the “library” in his terms) with the methodologies and techniques of textual scholarship, while relating it to the “archive” of records concerning everyday interactions in legal life as embedded within the practical interplay of fields between orality and scriptural statements. To download full review, click on PDF.

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 108-109
Author(s):  
Andre Gingrich

While the Yemen seems to be stumbling from one disaster into the next, it is good to see how some of the best experts in Yemeni studies continue their work in ways that will be useful in the country’s future. The present volume is not only bound to become recognized soon as the magnum opus by Brinkley Messick, professor of  anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies at Columbia University and one of the world’s leading experts in Yemeni studies today. More importantly still, Sharī‘a Scripts features all the qualities required for a true academic milestone in Yemen-related scholarship for decades to come, with potential ramifications for the historical and legal anthropology of the Middle East at large. This volume is based on half a lifetime of analytical and comparative studies that began during the author’s first fieldwork period in the central and southern highlands of northern Yemen during the 1970s. Messick meticulously examines the structures of jurisprudence (the “library” in his terms) with the methodologies and techniques of textual scholarship, while relating it to the “archive” of records concerning everyday interactions in legal life as embedded within the practical interplay of fields between orality and scriptural statements. To download full review, click on PDF.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahrai Saeed ◽  
Alka M Kanaya ◽  
Louise Bennet ◽  
Peter M Nilsson

Nearly a quarter of the world population lives in the South Asian region (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives). Due to rapid demographic and epidemiological transition in these countries, the burden of non-communicable diseases is growing, which is a serious public health concern. Particularly, the prevalence of pre-diabetes, diabetes and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) is increasing. South Asians living in the West have also substantially higher risk of CVD and mortality compared with white Europeans and Americans. Further, as a result of global displacement over the past three decades, Middle-Eastern immigrants now represent the largest group of non-European immigrants in Northern Europe. This vulnerable population has been less studied. Hence, the aim of the present review was to address cardiovascular risk assessment in South Asians (primarily people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), and Middle-East Asians living in Western countries compared with whites (Caucasians) and present results from some major intervention studies. A systematic search was conducted in PubMed to identify major cardiovascular health studies of South Asian and Middle-Eastern populations living in the West, relevant for this review. Results indicated an increased risk of CVD. In conclusion, both South Asian and Middle-Eastern populations living in the West carry significantly higher risk of diabetes and CVD compared with native white Europeans. Lifestyle interventions have been shown to have beneficial effects in terms of reduction in the risk of diabetes by increasing insulin sensitivity, weight loss as well as better glycemic and lipid control. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.36.7.3292 How to cite this:Saeed S, Kanaya AM, Bennet L, Nilsson PM. Cardiovascular risk assessment in South and Middle-East Asians living in the Western countries. Pak J Med Sci. 2020;36(7):---------. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.36.7.3292 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabra J. Webber

Despite the physical proximity of the birthplace of Subaltern Studies, South Asia, to the Middle East and despite the convergent, colliding histories of these two regions, scholars of the Middle East attend very little to the Subaltern Studies project or to the work of Subaltern Studies groups. Although certain stances of Fanon and Said, with their focus on cultural strategies of domination and resistance, have a currency in Middle Eastern studies, no literary theorist, folklorist, anthropologist, political scientist or historian in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, so far as I am aware, explicitly draws upon Subaltern Studies with any consistency as an organizing principle for his or her studies. It is the Latin Americanists (and to a lesser degree Africanists) who have been most eager to build on South Asian Subaltern Studies to respond to Latin American (or subsanaran African) circumstances. Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at what Subaltern Studies might contribute to Middle Eastern studies if we were to make a sustained effort to apply and critique that body of literature.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 160-168
Author(s):  
Afif Pasuni

The opposition Islamist PAS (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or Pan Malaysian Islamic Party) is one of the oldest political parties in Malaysia. Inspired by Egypt’s Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood [MB]), PAS is also influenced by occurrences in the Middle East; following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, its leaders revamped their organizational structure to entrust key decisions to religious scholars. The ramifications of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, arguably one of the most significant Middle Eastern political events in recent times, thus deserves a closer look. This short article attempts to look at this revolution’s possible impact on Islamists in Malaysia. I argue that Malaysia had already undergone its own version of a revolution in the 1998 reformasi (reformation) due to the shared characteristics between the two events: both (1) shared the same premise of alleged political injustice; (2) provided opportunities for Islamists to influence the political discourse, with the difference that in Egypt there was a political vacuum; and (3) utilized the Internet heavily to rally the masses. However, due to Malaysia’s freer democratic and electoral processes, political changes there will not be as abrupt as in Egypt. Furthermore, both Egypt’s revolution and Malaysia’s reformasi have hardly ended; the former is a tumultuous ongoing process of battling for the legitimacy of rule by appealing to the masses, while the latter is an ongoing process of appealing to voters in order to come to rule.


Author(s):  
Christian C. Sahner

How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? This book explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, the book introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity; high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet; and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. The book argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. The book examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim–Christian relations in the centuries to come.


2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-432
Author(s):  
Donna Robinson Divine

An argument that the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians can be resolved no longer seems utopian, and some might even assert that it no longer needs to be made. It is in this sense that this book of essays by the Israeli journalist and essayist Amos Elon is important, for it describes how deeply the conflict has structured regional political developments and how much is involved in breaking the cycles of violence and hostility. Elon's perspective on the prolonged confrontation between Israel and the Arab world conveys a strong sense of contingency: the confrontation that is taken for granted as a fixture of Middle Eastern politics is interpreted by Elon as the result of bad choices made by politicians whose attachment to the past turned into an unbearable burden for the future. With his powerful prose, Elon raises fundamental questions about the authoritarian polities characteristic of the Arab states, as well as about the nature of Israeli democracy and its concentration of political power. These essays, mostly drawn from previously published articles in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books from 1967 through 1995, provoke a serious critique of Israel's dominant culture even as they are very much a product of it.


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.


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.


Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Panji Maulani

ABSTRAKProses penelitian ini dilakukan dengan melakukan penelitian lapangan danpenelitian kepustakaan. Analisis mendalam terkait akulturasi budaya pada arsitektur MasjidAgung Jawa Tengah didapat melalui penggunaan metode deskriptif-analitik dengan langkahlangkahobservatif. Langkah-langkah tersebut disesuaikan dengan sumber terkait, sehinggadata pada objek penelitian dapat dideskripsikan serta dianalisis dengan pendekatan budayadan arsitektur. Penelitian ini menjadi penting untuk dilakukan karena Masjid Agung JawaTengah memiliki ornamen eksterior yang sangat khas, berbeda dengan ornamen masjidraya-masjid raya lain di Indonesia, yang umumnya memiliki ornamen eksterior yang hanyaberakulturasi dengan budaya Timur Tengah. Pada Masjid Agung Jawa Tengah kita dapatmerasakan suasana seperti di masjid Nabawi dan suasana Colloseum di zaman Romawi.Terdapat 6 buah payung hidrolik seperti di masjid Nabawi dan gerbang Al-Qanathir yangmenyerupai Colloseum pada pelataran masjid akibat pembangunan Masjid Agung JawaTengah menggunakan paduan tiga unsur budaya: Jawa, Timur Tengah, dan Romawi.Kata kunci: akulturasi, ornamen, masjid agung, Jawa TengahABTRACTThe research process was conducted by field research and library research. Depthanalysis related to acculturation on the architecture of the Central Java Great Mosque obtainedusing descriptive-analytic method with observational measures. The steps are adapted to thecorresponding source, so that data on the research object can be described and analyzed withcultural and architectural approach. This research becomes important thing to do because ofthe Great Mosque of Central Java has a very distinctive exterior ornament, in contrast to theother great mosques in Indonesia, whose the exterior ornament is generally only acculturatedwith Middle Eastern culture. In Central Java Great Mosque we can feel the atmosphere likeat the Nabawi Mosque and the atmosphere of the Colosseum in Roman times. There are sixpieces of hydraulic umbrella like in Nabawi Mosque and Al-Qanathir gate that resembles theColosseum in the courtyard of the mosque as the result of the construction of the Central JavaGreat Mosque using a combination of three elements of culture: Java, Middle East, and Roman.Keywords: acculturation, ornament, grand mosque, Central Java


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