scholarly journals EN MINORITET SØGER IDENTITET: Drusisk religiøs identitet i den libanesiske offentlighed

Author(s):  
Jacob Skovgaard-Petersen

Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen: A Minority in Search of Identity. Druze Religions Identity in the context of the Lebanese Public In recent years a number of Middle Eastem religious minorities have been engaged in redefinitions of their religious identities. One of the impulses for this activity has been the growth of Islamic movements that give strict and narrow definitions of what constitutes proper Islam. Another impulse has been the growing awareness of civil and religious rights of minorities. The Druze in Lebanon constitute such a minority that seeks to establish its proper identity in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war 1975-90 and the general upheavals in the Lebanese national consciousness. Tracing the history of publications about the once-so-secretive Druze religion, the article explores the tendency to stress an Islamic identity for the Druze religion. This Islamization of Druze religion became apparent in a number of publications in the 1960s but has received a new impetus after the end of the civil war. Since this period more sophisticated arguments have centered on the Sufi character of the Druze holy writings and defended their Islamic character along the lines of Sufi apologetics. The article argues that this increased sophistication and professionalization of the agrument is partly due to the polemics against an Islamic identity of the Druze coming from Sunni and Maronite thinkers, some of whom were writing under Druze pseudonyms during the war. It is also due to a novel understanding of the Druze as a religious public which must be leamt about and adapt its Islamic identity through a public debate.

2020 ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Wael Sinno

Over the past years, popular uprisings across the Middle East continue to grow. Throughout these movements, public spaces have played a crucial role in allowing citizens to express their demands. Public spaces have brought people together, providing the space for citizens to assert their rights to freedom of speech and demanding basic rights. Since 17 October 2019, Lebanon has been experiencing a similar civic movement. Expressions and manifestations of this movement have used underutilized public spaces across the country. For instance, in Beirut, the retrieve of public spaces has taken place on three levels: - Multi-purpose public spaces: where the protestors are reshaping the wide formal streets of Beirut Central District to active and lively urban spaces. - Open public spaces: such as Samir Kassir garden, which was once a meditative space, is now a vibrant social place. - Public urban facilities: such as the abandoned Egg [1] and the deteriorated Grand Theatre are being brought to life by becoming respectively a community centre and an observatory. To date, the act of placemaking and the reclamation of public spaces has been observed throughout the 2019 Lebanese Uprising. It has reconfigured public spaces into ones of unity, thereby reuniting citizens of all ages, religions, gender and walks of life. Some see the uprising as a genuine end to the 1975 Civil War – a war that gave birth to religious, political, and social boundaries – by organically bringing together the country as one, demonstrating under one flag, the Lebanese flag. [1] The Egg, an unfinished cinema built in the 1960s, is a landmark urban facility that was closed to the public for a long time. The Egg is located in the heart of the city near the former Civil War green zone line. Designed by Architect Joseph Philippe Karam, work on this unfinished structure started in the 1960s, interrupted by the Lebanese Civil War during which the building was abandoned and suffered major structural damage.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 156-159
Author(s):  
Roy PP

Monica Ali was born in 1967 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but grew up in England. Her English mother met her Bangladeshi father at a dance in northern England in the 1960s. Despite both of their families` protests, they later married and lived together with their two young children in Dhaka. This was then the provincial capital of East Pakistan which after a nine-month war of independence became the capital of the People`s Republic of Bangladesh. On 25 March 1971 during this civil war, Monica Ali`s father sent his family to safety in England. The war caused East Pakistan to secede from the union with West Pakistan, and was now named Bangladesh.


Author(s):  
Ericka A. Albaugh

This chapter examines how civil war can influence the spread of language. Specifically, it takes Sierra Leone as a case study to demonstrate how Krio grew from being primarily a language of urban areas in the 1960s to one spoken by most of the population in the 2000s. While some of this was due to “normal” factors such as population movement and growing urbanization, the civil war from 1991 to 2002 certainly catalyzed the process of language spread in the 1990s. Using census documents and surveys, the chapter tests the hypothesis at the national, regional, and individual levels. The spread of a language has political consequences, as it allows for citizen participation in the political process. It is an example of political scientists’ approach to uncovering the mechanisms for and evidence of language movement in Africa.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Jamal Wakim

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.


Africa ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Anthony

AbstractBefore the civil war, conversion to Islam for Igbo men resident in the predominantly Hausa city of Kano in northern Nigeria usually meant becoming Hausa. More recent converts, however, have retained their Igbo identity and created an organisation, the Igbo Muslim Community. Three case studies from the first group detail the process and criteria of becoming Hausa, including immersion in Hausa economic and social networks; three case studies from the second group demonstrate that, while Hausa-centred networks remain important, converts have worked to construct new, Igbo-centred support structures. The watershed in the changing relationship between religious and ethnic affiliation for Igbo converts is the end of the war in 1970 and resultant changes in Igbo perceptions of Muslims, and changes in Igbo community structures.


Author(s):  
Inés Aquilué ◽  
Estanislao Roca ◽  
Javier Ruiz

Regarding topological interpretation of space, this research aims to identify urban morphologies, whose topology becomes increasingly determining under high uncertainty. This topological approach has been applied in an evolutionary analysis of urban spaces under siege, fear and conflict, which conducted to the construction of a specific method. This method analyses the transformation of urban areas in five consecutive phases: urban form [1], increase of uncertainty [2], application of the apparatus [3], change in urban form [4], information flows [5]. These five phases were applied to different empirical studies, analysed through specific morphological and topological models. In the light of this method, two selected urban morphologies Dobrinja –a suburb in Sarajevo– and the Beirut Central District have been examined. The urban morphology of both areas was dramatically transformed after both civil conflicts –the Bosnian War and the Lebanese Civil War–. Dobrinja suffered severe modifications, first provoked by the violence of the siege during the Bosnian War [1992-1995], and then by the Inter-Entity Boundary Line as a result of the Dayton Peace Agreement [December 1995], which divided the neighbourhood and caused serious alterations in its ethno-demographic and spatial structure. The Beirut Central District was first destroyed by the violence experienced in the Lebanese Civil War [1975-1990] and then by the process of subsequent reconstruction [since 1992], which led to a simplification of its structure. The two morphological and topological analyses enable us to determine the initial causes and their spatial consequences in both urban areas, regarding their conflict and post-conflict stage.


2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Joaquim Espinós Felipe

The diverse literary expressions comprised in the concept “Hispanic literature” —Catalan, Castilian, and Basque as well as the literature from Galicia— form a polysystem of great hermeneutical possibilities, according to the model proposed by Itamar Even-Zohar. A common historic and institutional context gives cohesion to this polysystem, but the existence of particular national traditions introduces differences within it. The study that we present in this article centers on a precise time and genre —post Civil War poetry— and should be considered as another aspect of this vast analytic territory, which could be extended to other periods and other genres. The Castilian system has been at the center of the polysystem, due in large part to political factors. In the 1960s Castilian hegemony gives rise to a form of polycentrism that would have its most innovative and dynamic foci in Castilian and Catalan literatures respectively. The symbolism-realism dialectic —inherited from the pre-War time— extends across the entire period. Francoist refression produced a politicization of literary creation that subordinated forma aspects to the will to denounce. The realist repertoire, which except for the Basque system manifested mainly in exile, is the principal cohesive factor of the Hispanic systems. When this closed code automates itself in the 1960s, codes that had been marginalized will emerge.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-131
Author(s):  
Pentti Paavolainen

The Centennial of one of the cruelest of European civil wars fought in Finland between the Reds and the Whites from January to May 1918 has evoked a spectrum of theatre productions illustrating variations of styles and approaches on the events. The turn in the treatment of this cultural trauma occurred with the interpretations and narrative perspectives that were fixed in the 1960s, when an understanding for the defeated Red side was expressed in historiography, literature and theatre. Since that, the last six decades the Finnish theatre and public discourse on the Civil War have been dominated by the Red narrative as the memory of the 1918 Civil War provided an important part in the new identity politics for the 1969 generation. Since the 1980’s the topic was mostly put aside so that before the 2018 revivals of the Civil War topic, the productions seem to have been reactions by the artists confronting the developments at the end of the Cold War. Some theatrical events can even be tied to the cultural trauma of the 1969 left evoked by the collapse of the socialist block. The Centennial productions repeated the Red narrative but they also provided more balanced interpretationson the tragic events.


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