Sufism, subjectivity and parapsychology: refashioning the dirbāsha ritual among Sufis in modern Iraq

This paper explores the ritual of the dirbāsha as an extraordinary miracle performance and its role as a bodily practice in the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities among the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya Sufi communities in Iraq. During the climax of collective dhikr gatherings, male Sufi novices perform extraordinary and dangerous acts, perforating parts of their bodies with swords or long skewers without seriously injuring themselves. From the Sufi perspective, this ritual is, first of all, interpreted as the miracle of a Sufi shaykh and not of the performing Sufi novice since it is seen as an expression and proof of God’s power as transmitted through the shaykh. Moreover, it has been argued that the ritual is constitutive for the formation of the religious subjectivity of the performing Sufi novice since it allows the embodiment of mystical concepts as emotional, sensorial and existential realities. For the individual ritual experience to work, the social construction and constant reframing of these “miracles” needs to be taken into account as well, namely the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary which allow the miracles to be perceived as such. The present case of the Kasnazāniyya will show how Sufis combined their pious with a modern, critical and self-reflexive subjectivity and successfully managed to reframe this highly controversial practice – which is criticised by religious reformists and secularists alike – beyond its traditional ritual context with the modern science of parapsychology.

Religious Subjectivity Mahasiswa Pendidikan Keguruan

Existing research demonstrates a positive relation between religion and identity among adolescents. The subject of this study was students of Faculty of Education and Teacher Training, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta, who were taken by simple random sampling technique. The data were collected through semi-structural interviews using the Abdullah Sahin's subjectivity mode based on James Marcia's framework. Thus, this study finds that the subject are in foreclosure, moratorium and achievement status, and no respondents are in diffusion status. The novelty of this research is that religion provides a distinct settinh for identity exploration and commimtment trough offering ideological, social and spiritual context.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the relevance of prayer as an area of enquiry, noting that its quintessential position as an act of religious subjectivity means that it responds to the historical conditions of modernity and secularity in a different way from more objective phenomena like theology, denominational structures, or patterns of conceptual belief. It is noted that whilst Romanticist scholarship has always analysed the question of Romantic religion, it has overwhelmingly tended to do so through these objective contexts: this is all the more surprising when the deep historical and formal affinity of poetry (especially lyric poetry) to prayer is recognized. The Introduction concludes by laying out the basic thesis of this work: that poets used poetry as a uniquely positioned space to explore, critique, and even reinvent prayer in modernity.

George MacDonald's Doors: Suspended Telos and the Child Believer

George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) is frequently read as a reflection of the scandalous theological doctrine conventionally attached to the author's name, the principle of universalism. But if the fairy tale seems to serve up an optimistic teleology of faith—belief triumphant, no matter the long odds—it also undermines its own project. The very overwrought Christian symbols that most seem to depict MacDonald's universalism in fact suggest its opposite, imagining spiritual progress and individual growth as contingent, indeterminate, and perpetually in process. Recognizing that representations of progress in MacDonald's Princess books are compromised at best and deliberately diverted, more likely, reveals a surprisingly inconsistent treatment of childhood, which he imagines not—or not just—as the telos of spiritual growth but also as a state of suspended development. In this way, The Princess and the Goblin endorses the concept of terminal spirituality while theorizing religious subjectivity as an intermittent temporal process.

Muslim Women’s Haji Ali Movement in Mumbai: Reimagining Feminism and Piety in Islam

Muslim women’s engagement with Islam through Haji Ali Movement in Mumbai highlights an interesting as well as conflicting encounters between Islam, feminism, and women’s rights. It not only disturbs the quintessential images of them but also opens up an array of possibilities to comprehend that Muslim women can develop their own critique of religion and cultural practices from within. The study argues that the Muslim women’s Haji Ali movement or the mosque movement offers a surprising trade-off between Islam, feminism, and women’s rights by challenging the long-established idea that these are mutually exclusive entities and the distance cannot be bridged. Therefore, the study not only tries to find out the origin, nature, and unique characteristics of the movement but also the new ways of exploring the dialogue between Muslim women’s religious subjectivity, rights, and feminism in India.

Kedatangan dan Perkembangan Islam ke Indonesia

There are several theories about the arrival of Islam in Indonesia. The diversity of theories is due to the phenomenon of complexity, i.e. Islam does not originate from one place/country, nor is it carried by one group of people and not at the same time. Another factor influencing the diversity of theories is the difference in evidence, elements of interest, religious subjectivity, and the ideology of historians. Although there have been conclusions about the beginning of the entry of Islam into Indonesia in 1963, the process of coming and developing Islam in Indonesia is a changing study. So there is still an opportunity to correct or strengthen an existing theory. Ulama were central actors in the early arrival and development of Islam to Indonesia. Arabic scholars who work as traders are the first group to bring and develop Islam into the territory of Indonesia, then continued by preachers from the professional Sufi circles. The figure of the Sufi cleric is strongly attached to two figures: the merchant who spreads Islam through trade as well as the heartbeat of the people's economy, and to the sultan who spreads Islam through his power. These crystallized characteristics of the propagator of Islam make Islam develop effectively. Islam was developed by Ulama through three channels namely; cultural (da'wah, education, art, culture, and marriage), structural (politics and power), economy (trade routes). In other words, the process of Islamization in Indonesia is influenced by political power and the spirit of preaching.

The Normalizing Power of the Therapeutic God

This article analyses autobiographical letters on (perceived) shameful sexuality and religiosity written by Finnish Lutheran women. It examines how the affect of shame constructs gendered, sexualized and religious subjectivity and agency as an effect of normalizing power within an individual’s relationship with God. The psychologization process of late 20th century Western culture works as a framework for the discussion. The article argues that the modern psychoreligious ethos, within which the Christian God is understood as an all-loving being, restructures subjectivity and agency in a manner in which a self is seen as something to be liberated to its authentic state. At the same time, however, the image of an all-loving God normalizes gender, sexuality and religiosity in accordance with heteronormative ideals. Moreover, the article argues that examining the normalizing aspect of different affectual practices reframes the subordination/subversion paradox central to the discussion on women’s religious agency.

Rights and Relationships: Rhetorics of Religious Freedom among English Evangelicals

This paper uses evangelical reflections on the meaning of “rights” to explore the juridification of religion in contemporary England. Drawing on sixteen months of participatory fieldwork with evangelicals in London, I argue that English evangelicals’ critiques of Christian-interest litigation reflect the interaction of local theologies with developments in the law’s regulation of religion, developments that have contributed to the relativization of Protestant Christianity even as historic church establishment is maintained. Through an exploration of the tension between the goals of (rights-based) individualism and (Christian) relationalism as they concern the law, I show how litigation can affect religious subjectivity even in the absence of a personal experience with the pageantry of the court.

The Early Church

This chapter is the first of four to explore the ways in which the different layers of the Christian past came to symbolize distinctive Victorian problems. It focuses on the early church, and its significance for debates over the authority of Christian orthodoxy. Beginning with the Oxford Movement and its prehistory, a period during which high church Anglicans emphasized the static authority of patristic orthodoxy, the chapter highlights John Henry Newman’s role in distilling a more dynamic conception of the growth of religious mind. Anti-dogmatic liberals such as Arthur Penrhyn Stanley tried to separate early Christian progress from its doctrinal dimensions. But a larger number, beginning with Christian Karl Josias Bunsen, preferred to intensify the apologetic emphasis which Newman had placed on orthodoxy as the expression of developing religious subjectivity: a stance which gave new kinds of rational justification to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.