The Sorcerer as Folk Devil in Contemporary Melanesia

This chapter ethnographically explores a Christian revival movement in Vanuatu led by children. Examining events surrounding the hanging of two adults accused of sorcery, the text challenges the assumption that moral panics are only created with the assistance of mass media. Instead, the chapter shows that they also arise in contexts where gossip, dreams and visions play a similar role in both defining social problems and moral panic.

Neo-Thomism in Action

In his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), Pope Leo XIII expressed the conviction that the renewed study of the philosophical legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas would help Catholics to engage in a dialogue with secular modernity while maintaining respect for Church doctrine and tradition. As a result, the neo-scholastic framework dominated Catholic intellectual production for nearly a century thereafter. This volume assesses the societal impact of the Thomist revival movement, with particular attention to the juridical dimension of this epistemic community. Contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds offer a multifaceted and in-depth analysis of many different networks and protagonists of the neo-scholastic movement, its institutions and periodicals, and its conceptual frameworks. Although special attention is paid to the Leuven Institute of Philosophy and Faculty of Law, the volume also discloses the neo-Thomist revival in other national and transnational contexts. By highlighting diverse aspects of its societal and legal impact, Neo-Thomism in Action argues that neo-scholasticism was neither a sterile intellectual exercise nor a monolithic movement. The book expands our understanding of how Catholic intellectual discourse communities were constructed and how they pervaded law and society during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

RELIGIOUS TOURISM: AN INSIGHT INTO THE ISLAMIC TOURISM OF TABLIGHI JAMAAT

Islam is not merely the set of religious rituals or beliefs but a complete way of life. There is not even a single matter, no matter how peculiar, awkward or dull it may seem, about which Islam does not deals or directs. In all behind every act, including tourism, there is sole purpose seeking the pleasure of God-Almighty Allah, by following His commandments. Islam encourages travel or tourism and hospitable behavior, and unlike west connects it with the most sublime and honorable values and morals. It is in this backdrop, the focus of the present study is ‘Tablighi Jamaat’- an Islamic revival movement, founded by Maulana Ilyas in Mewat region near Delhi-India, around 1920’s. This movement has come to establish its presence surprisingly in and over one hundred and fifty countries throughout the world with a large number of adherents in between 100 to 150 million. This is principally, because of its unique ‘travel and tourism’ approach, which it has adopted as a daw’ah (invitation towards Islam) methodology. Consequently and interestingly, because of this fact ‘the travel and tourism approach,’ the movement has also been named as ‘travelers in faith’. This paper is primarily based on secondary sources and the main objective of the paper is to provide an insight into the religious tourism of Tablighi Jama’at.

Continuity and hybridity in language revival: The case of Manx

This article presents a typology of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features illustrative of factors conditioning the usage of speakers and writers of Revived Manx, including substratal influence from English; language ideologies prevalent within the revival movement, especially forms of linguistic purism; and language-specific features of Manx and its orthography. Evidence is taken primarily from a corpus of Revived Manx speech and writing. The observed features of Revived Manx are situated within Zuckermann's (2009, 2020) framework of ‘hybridization’ and ‘revival linguistics’, which takes Israeli Hebrew as the prototypical model of revernacularization of a non-L1 language. However, Manx arguably provides a more typical example of what to expect when a revived minority language remains predominantly an L2 for an indefinite period, with each new cohort of speakers able to reshape the target variety in the absence of a firmly established L1 norm. (Manx, Celtic, language revival, language ideology, language shift, language contact)*

Sergey Nikitovich Savinsky (1924-2021) and the Historical Self-Awareness of Evangelical Christians-Baptists

The article presents biographical information about the first confessional historian of Russian Evangelical Christians-Baptists, S. N. Savinsky. He authored a number of chapters on the Russian-Ukrainian Evangelical-Baptist community in a book titled “History of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the USSR” (1989), until that time the only book on the history of his own denomination published during Soviet times. Described is his work as member of the Historical Commission of the All-Union Council of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists. The article traces four trajectories of the worldwide evangelical revival into Russia: the late German Pietism, the North America revival movement, the influence of the worldwide Evangelical Alliance, and the early German Pietism. S. N. Savinsky basic concepts of evangelical revival and uniqueness of the Russian Evangelical-Baptist community are analyzed.

Revising the Assumption that Ḥadīṯ Studies Flourished in the 11th/17th-Century Ḥiǧāz: Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī’s (d. 1101/1690) Contribution

The Ḥiǧāz in the 11th/17th century has long been considered the center of a “revival” movement in ḥadīṯ studies. This assumption has spread widely among scholars of the 11th-/17th- and 12th-/18th-century Islamic world based on the fact that the isnāds of many major ḥadīṯ scholars from almost all parts of the Islamic world from the 11th/17th century onward return to a group of scholars in the Ḥiǧāz. The scholarly group that is assumed to have played a critical role in the flourishing of ḥadīṯ studies in the 11th/17th-century Ḥiǧāz is called the al-Ḥaramayn circle or network. However, to date, there have been no studies that investigate what was actually happening in that century concerning ḥadīṯ studies. Examining the actual ḥadīṯ studies of one of the scholars at the core of al-Ḥaramayn circle, i.e. Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan al-Kūrānī, will unpack the main interest of Ḥiǧāzī scholars in ḥadīṯ literature, reveal previously unstudied aspects of ḥadīṯ studies in the 11th/17th-century Ḥiǧāz, correct some unexamined assumptions, and situate the ḥadīṯ efforts of scholars of the 11th/17th-century Ḥiǧāz within a general framework of developments within ḥadīṯ studies.

The Rise of the Ni‘matullāhī Order. Shi'ite Sufi Masters against Islamic Fundamentalism in 19th-Century Persia

How were the Ni‘matullāhī masters successful in reviving Ni‘matullāhī Sufism in Shi‘ite Persia? This book investigates the revival of Ni‘matullāhī Sufi order after the death of the last Indian Ni‘matullāhī master, Riḍā ‘Alī Shāh (d. 1214/1799) in the Deccan. After the fall of Safavids, the revival movement of the Ni‘matullāhī order began with the arrival in Persia of the enthusiastic Indian Sufi master, Ma‘ṣūm ‘Alī Shāh, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Persian masters of the Ni‘matullāhī Order were able to solidify the order’s place in the mystical and theological milieu of Persia. Ma‘ṣūm ‘Alī Shāh and his disciples soon spread their mystical and ecstatic beliefs all over Persia. They succeeded in converting a large mass of Persians to Sufi teachings, despite the opposition and persecution they faced from Shi‘ite clerics, who were politically and socially the most influential class in Persia. The book demonstrates that Ḥusayn ‘Alī Shāh, Majdhūb ‘Alī Shāh, and Mast ‘Alī Shāh were able to consolidate the social and theological role of the Ni‘matullāhī order by reinterpreting and articulating classical Sufi teachings in the light of Persian Shi‎‘ite mystical theology.

Adaptation, Authenticity, and Ethics in Carl Davis’s Score to the Thief of Bagdad

Contributor Geoffrey Wilson notes Davis’s self-proclaimed practice of reviving the score the films might have had in their original release but he faults the leading composer in the silent film revival movement for failing to realize his aim. Wilson cautions that a number of contemporary practices mark Davis’s scores, including his use of leitmotivs to denote characters, a willingness to allow those leitmotivs to shape the overall narrative, and his readiness to adopt a unified musical style for the film. Each practice belongs to a more contemporary period of film scoring. Wilson contends that one of the only aspects of silent scoring Davis keeps is a willingness to create musical cues that present non-Western characters and settings in essentialist if not outright racist ways. The choice makes Davis’s claim to authenticity misleading. While Davis’s scores may make a historical film more accessible to modern audiences, they do so by promoting reductive stereotypical constructs.