scholarly journals The Rite of Male Circumcision among the Muslim Population in the Western Balkans

2020 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 151-168
Author(s):  
Alexander Novik ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Male Circumcision ◽  
Field Data ◽  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
The Status ◽  
Actual Field ◽  
Ritual Practices

The article deals with the rite of circumcision among the Muslims in the Western Balkans, one of the most widespread ritual practices, held with some variations mostly at the age of 3 to 7. The tradition that never gets explicitly brought up in the sacred text of the Quran has become practically mandatory. Among the rites of passage, circumcision is considered by Muslims a significant act, as it symbolizes the transition from the status of a child to the status of an adult who has all the rights of a “full-fledged” man. In the Balkan Muslim community, an uncircumcised man is regarded as an exception to the rule. In the second half of the twentieth century, the technical side of the rite was radically changed, but it has not affected its sacred and traditional elements. Nowadays, in its origins, its religious roots, its folk depictions and its place in the relations between “us” and “them”, the circumcision ceremony is a rite of initiation and is one of the most remarkable ritual practices that demonstrates committal to Islam. The article is mainly based on the actual field data gathered by the author in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and other countries of the region during the last three decades.

scholarly journals The origins of Muslim nationalism in British India

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrique Baltar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
British India ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Status ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
Hindu Community

<p>British rule of India stripped Muslim elites of their traditional status of ruling class and reduced them to the status of a religious minority doubly pressured by the new conditions of colonial society and competition of the majority Hindu community. These pressures strengthened in the collective imagination the perception of a minority at a disadvantage and it helped the Muslim elites to become gradually aware of their right to constitute in nationhood and the need to organize politically to defend their interests. This article aims to analyze how Islamic nationalism was taking shape during the second half of the nineteenth century and an early twentieth century from two fundamental assumptions: the backwardness of the Muslim community and the fear of Hindu hegemony.</p>

The Jesuit Rites Controversy

2018 ◽  
pp. 890-917
Author(s):  
Claudia von Collani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
China And India ◽  
The Status ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Global World ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
The Catholic Church

The rites controversies in China and India were part of a larger debate on the status of rites and customs in an already global world and within global Catholicism. To understand the deeper meanings of Chinese and Indian concepts and rites and assess their compatibility with Christianity, the Jesuits proposed a method based on dialogue with the local literati. First tolerated, the method of accommodation was finally forbidden by the Catholic Church in the early eighteenth century out of fear of religious syncretism, which led to the stigmatization of other cultures’ rites as “pagan” and “superstitious.” Therefore, Christianity remained a foreign and marginal religion in the East until the reform of the liturgy in the twentieth century, when the Indian ritual practices were accepted. After the decree “Ad Gentes” by Vatican II, the Catholic Church endeavored to bridge the gap between cultures and religions, partly created during the rites controversy.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

Islam and Colonial Rule in Lagos

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Olakunle A. Lawal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
Southwestern Nigeria ◽  
Urban Settlement ◽  
Islam And Politics ◽  
British Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
Process Of Urbanization

IntroductionThis essay provides an explanation of the dynamics of the interactionbetween Islam and politics by placing emphasis on the role played byMuslims in the collision of traditionalism and British rule as colonialismtook root in Lagos. The focus is on the development of a political schismwithin the nascent Muslim community of metropolitan Lagos at the startof the twentieth century up until the end of the 1940s. It highlights therole of Islam in an emerging urban settlement experiencing rapid transformationfrom a purely rural and traditional center into a colonial urbancenter. The essay is located within the broader issues of urban change andtransition in twentieth-century tropical Africa. Three major developments(viz: the central mosque crisis, the Eleko affair, and the Oluwa land case)are used as the vehicles through which the objectives of the essay areachieved.The introduction of Islam into Lagos has been studied by T. G. O.Gbadamosi as part of the history of Islam in southwestern Nigeria. Thisepic study does not pay specific attention to Lagos, devoted as it is to thegrowth of Islam in a far-flung territory like the whole of modem southwesternNigeria. His contribution to a collection of essays on the historyof Lagos curiously leaves out Islam’s phenomenal impact on Lagosianpolitics during the first half of the twentieth century. In an attempt to fillthis gap, Hakeem Danmole’s essay also stops short of appreciating the fundamentallink between the process of urbanization, symbolized in this caseby colonial rule, and the vanguard role played by Muslims in the inevitableclash of tradition and colonial rule in Lagos between 1900 and 1950.

Punarvivaham vs. Pativratyam: Pulugurta Lakshmi Narasamamba and the Widow Remarriage Question in Colonial Andhra

2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110017
Author(s):  
Shaik Mahaboob Basha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Child Marriage ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Women's Journals

The question of widow remarriage, which occupied an important place in the social reform movement, was hotly debated in colonial Andhra. Women joined the debate in the early twentieth century. There was a conservative section of women, which bitterly opposed the widow remarriage movement and attacked the social reformers, both women and men. Pulugruta Lakshmi Narasamamba led this group of women. Lakshmi Narasamamba treated widow remarriage (punarvivaham) with contempt and termed it as an affront to the fidelity (pativratyam) of Hindu women. According to her, widow remarriage was equal to ‘prostitution’, and the widows who married again could not be granted the status of kulanganas (respectable or chaste women). Lakshmi Narasamamba’s stand on the question of widow remarriage led to the emergence of a fiery and protracted controversy among women which eventually led to the division of the most famous women’s organization, the Shri Vidyarthini Samajamu. She opposed not only widow remarriage but also post-puberty marriage and campaigned in favour of child marriage. This article describes the whole debate on the widow remarriage question that took place among women. It is based on the primary sources, especially the woefully neglected women’s journals in the Telugu language.

scholarly journals The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity †

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Yuxiao Su
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Parallel Study ◽  
The Status ◽  
Implicit Belief ◽  
Objective Value ◽  
Medieval Model ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Spiritual Resource

This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the objective worldview. The paper argues that Tao, as an explicit theme of The Abolition of Man, is also a determining undercurrent in The Discarded Image. In the former work, Tao is what Lewis wants to defend and restore against twentieth-century secular ideologies, which Lewis condemns as infected with “the poison of subjectivism”. In the latter work, where Lewis presents one of the best accounts of the European medieval model of the Universe, objective value (the Tao in Lewis’ argument) underlies both how the model has been shaped, and how Lewis, as a medievalist, accounts for and draws upon it as an intellectual and spiritual resource. The purpose of this parallel study is to show that Lewis’ explication of the Tao in The Abolition of Man, which is a “built-in”, implicit belief in The Discarded Image, provides a critique of tendencies towards the subjectivism prevalent in Lewis’ lifetime. These tendencies can be traced into the moral relativism, pluralism and reductionism of the twenty-first century, giving Lewis’ work the status of twentieth-century prophecy.

‘A Heap of Broken Images’? Reviving Austro-German Debates over Musical Meaning, 1900–36

2013 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Educational Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Critical Hermeneutics ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Force And Motion ◽  
The Status ◽  
Musical Interpretation ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractThis article examines a range of writings on the status of musical interpretation in Austria and Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century, and argues their relevance to current debates. While the division outlined by recent research between popular-critical hermeneutics and analytical ‘energetics’ at this time remains important, hitherto neglected contemporary reflections by Paul Bekker and Kurt Westphal demonstrate that the success of energetics was not due to any straightforward intellectual victory. Rather, the images of force and motion promoted by 1920s analysis were carried by historical currents in the philosophy, educational theory and arts of the time, revealing a culturally situated source for twenty-first-century analysis's preoccupations with motion and embodiment. The cultural relativization of such images may serve as a retrospective counteraction to the analytical rationalizing processes that culminated specifically in Heinrich Schenker's later work, and more generally in the privileging of graphic and notational imagery over poetic paraphrase.

Re-designation of Ethnic Muslims as Bosniaks in Montenegro

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-157
Author(s):  
Mehmed Đečević ◽  
Danijela Vuković-Ćalasan ◽  
Saša Knežević
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Continuous Exposure ◽  
Slow Dynamics ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Elite Theory ◽  
Analogous Process ◽  
Positive Sentiment ◽  
Comparison Of The Results ◽  
The Relationship

The purpose of this article is to analyse the dynamics of the process of re-designation of ethnic Muslims as Bosniaks in Montenegro. Through a comparison with the analogous process in Serbia, certain specificities are indicated in the context of Montenegro. In line with the premises of the elite theory, we point to the divergent influence of the socially engaged members of the Slavic Muslim cultural corpus in Montenegro on the process of ethnic self-identification of Slavic Muslims in the country. The willingness of a part of this corpus to adhere to the views of the elite part of the population that opposed the ethnonym “Bosniak,” and insisted on retaining the ethnic designation “Muslim,” is interpreted through the lens of social constructivism. The article indicates the formation of the socio-political constructs of “Montenegrin” and “Muslim” that occurred in the last decade of the twentieth century. These two constructs are interlinked; the former is superior as it has ethnic and ethical-political semantic layers, while the latter is subordinate, and it partially stems from the positive sentiment of Slavic Muslims towards Montenegro as the country they inhabit. The relationship between these constructs interferes with the process of accepting national Bosniakhood in a part of the Muslim population in Montenegro. A comparison of the results from the last two population censuses in Montenegro indicates a trend of acceptance of the ethnonym “Bosniak” among the Slavic Muslim population in Montenegro. However, given the slow dynamics of the process, affected by the continuous exposure to factors that increase its complexity, national divergence of Slavic Muslims in Montenegro will most likely prevail.

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