Mansour Fahmy, Pioneer of Islamic Feminism in Modern Egyptian Thought

Mansour Fahmy (1886-1959), one of the dramatic figures in modern Arab philosophical and social thought. He was the reformist and enlightenment figure in modern Arab history. He is also the owner of a notable current that was subjected to a violent attack that silenced him for a long time and forced him to "hide" physically. However, this did not eliminate the new opinions and positions that came at the beginning of the twentieth century towards the issue of women. He is the first to write with a scientific methodology - from the point of view of sociology - on Islamic discourse and its dealings with women. he sought to differentiate between religion and the religious establishment, between the personality of the Prophet Muhammad and what later prevailed in the books of jurisprudence and others. When he discussed the headscarf issue, he concluded that it was the product of traditions and customs that the Hijab is not from the Islamic religion. Islamic law has nothing to do with the Hijab. Mansour Fahmy's creativity was at one of the sensitive stages in Egypt's modern history in which the political, social, national, cultural, and revolution clashed in each one. All this, in turn, identified the problem of Mansour Fahmy's intellectual personality in the battles of thought and politics. This research's main task is to redraw the features of his actual personality and the reality of his intellectual, social, and political positions. Besides, this study seeks to uncover the effect of philosophy on crystallizing Mansour Fahmy's critical personality and its role in laying the foundations of the critical vision with its practical, reformist, and enlightening dimensions.

Religion-State Relations in Europe

Europe is often taken to represent a global exception in matters of religion and secularity and some argue that much of the reason for this lies in the way religion-state relations are arranged. This chapter assesses these and related claims while summarily tracing the character, development, and impact of different relationship patterns in Europe as both ‘religion’ and ‘state’ have undergone massive change over the last 500 years. None of the fifty-odd current states of Europe meet any strict standard of religion–state separation; it can be argued nonetheless that the emergent and identifiable common European model is largely consistent with liberal egalitarian values. Key concepts are introduced: secular state, confessional state, religious state, religious establishment, and separationism.

Confessionalisation as a Prelude to Sectarianisation

This chapter notes the parallels between the well-studied process of confessionalization in Europe and an equivalent process that took place in the Islamic World. This latter process entailed the articulation of doctrine and ritual and the development of a religious establishment. The chapter looks at various stages of confessionalization within Sunnism and Shi’ism. It also addresses how the Ottoman–Safavid conflict accelerated the Ottomans’ development of a Sunni jurisprudential establishment based on Hanafism, even as the Shahs in Iran were building their own Imami Shi’i institution. Both institutions were hierarchical and enjoyed a division of functions between the army, the judiciary, and the fatwa-issuing apparatus. They were also closely involved in disciplining and socializing the population. Therefore, the chapter observes how the religious establishment plays an important role in the formation of a community of religion: it defines the creed, articulates it in a way comprehensible to the masses, links it with practices that invoke its historical narrative, and provides it with a canonical interpretation. It also Provides and analyses examples of confessionalization , sectionalization and sectionalization of confessions via ethnic conflict.

‘We Are the Dead’: The War Poets, metal music and chaos control

During the course of the First World War, the generation of British authors known collectively as the War Poets revolutionized the popular culture of their time. Due to their changing attitudes towards armed conflict, their portrayal of war chaos included realist descriptions of life in the trenches, unusual choices of subject matter and an eventual challenge to the political and religious establishment of their time. Metal music, a genre with an inherent lyrical and musical concern about chaos and control, has crafted several songs inspired on the First World War poetry. This specific relationship has not been studied before. Based on Weinstein’s and Walser’s insights on chaos and control in metal music, the aim of this article is to evaluate the ability of metal music to either transmit or refute the War Poets’ discourse on chaos, and to study the textual and musical resources metal bands use to relay and control said discourse. For this purpose, I perform a comparative analysis of nine metal music adaptations and appropriations of six different First World War poems they are based on. A chronological path of the evolution of the First World War poetry is followed. The study concludes that, besides effectively transmitting or contesting the War Poets’ discourse on chaos, metal music exerts chaos control through its use of musical resources, especially in the case of extreme metal subgenres.

Challenge and Conformity

Orthodox Jewish women are increasingly seeking new ways to express themselves religiously, and important changes have occurred in consequence in their self-definition and the part they play in the religious life of their communities. Drawing on surveys and interviews across different Orthodox groups in London, as well as on the author's own experience of active participation over many years, this is a study that analyses its findings in the context of related developments in Israel and the USA. Sympathetic attention is given to women's creativity and sophistication as they struggle to develop new modes of expression that will let their voices be heard; at the same time, the inevitable points of conflict with the male-dominated religious establishment are examined and explained. There is a focus, too, on the impact of innovations in ritual: these include not only the creation of women-only spaces and women's participation in public practices traditionally reserved for men, but also new personal practices often acquired on study visits to Israel which are replacing traditions learned from family members. The book is a study of how new norms of lived religion have emerged in London, influenced by both the rise of feminism and the backlash against it, and also by women's new understanding of their religious roles.

Conclusion

This chapter presents the conclusions of the research and its wider implications for the study of Orthodox Jewish women. The study suggests that three subgroups — haredi, Modern Orthodox, and traditionalist — exist, and that different patterns of belief, practice, and world-view characterize each group. Individual women from the American and Israeli Orthodox spheres, and British women who have spent significant periods of time in either country, form a disproportionately high percentage of those advocating change and greater participation for Orthodox women in the UK. Haredi women generally adhere to well-defined ideologies that reject Western liberal influences. In contrast, Modern Orthodox women have responded positively to Western feminist influences. They seek a compromise between shifting gender roles in Western culture and halakhic restrictions on women's ritual performance, rather than full egalitarianism. They tend to expect both greater male participation in the non-ritual aspects of the domestic sphere and greater female participation in the ritual aspects of the public sphere. Modern Orthodox women are also the most vocal in expressing dissatisfaction with the current status of and opportunities for Orthodox women, and often actively seek change. Many women believe that their role is actually more important than that of men. Women preserve a surprisingly wide spectrum of traditional customs and beliefs, many tolerated rather than approved of or promoted by the religious establishment, and most linked to the protection of their families. They show remarkable commitment to continuing these practices, even when these are labelled as 'superstitions' or are devalued by some religious authorities.

New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State

Drawing on novels, poetry, correspondence, religious publications, and legal writing, this book offers a new account of women’s political participation in the process of religious disestablishment. Scholars have long known that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women wrote pious, sentimental stories, but this book uses biographical and archival methods to understand their religious concerns as entry points into the era’s debates about democratic conditions of possibility and the role of religion in a republic. Beginning with the early republic’s constitutional and electoral debates about the end of religious establishment and extending through the nineteenth century, Murphy argues that Federalist women and Federalist daughters of the next generation adapted that party’s ideals and fears by promoting privatized Christianity with public purpose. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Sigourney, Judith Sargent Murray, and Sally Sayward Wood authorized themselves as Federalism’s literary curators, and in doing so they imagined new configurations of religion and revolution, faith and rationality, public and private. They did so using literary form, writing in gothic, sentimental, and regionalist genres to update the Federalist concatenation of religion, morality, and government in response to changing conditions of secularity and religious privatization in the new republic. Their project is shown to complicate received historical narratives of separation of church and state and to illuminate problems of democracy and belief in postsecular America.