Islamic Feminism from A Liberal Muslim Perspective

The challenge addressed herein are impacts from feminism on Muslims in particular. The authors discuss this based on an understanding of the position of women in the west vis-à-vis variegated Muslim societies. Some believe that Islamic feminism obtains full sovereignty for women and thus gel with western rejection of male chauvinism and dominance with arguments straight from the Quran. Liberal Muslim feminists believe a woman must be given equal considerations in various circumstances to include inheritance rights, legal testimony and so forth. Based on hermeneutic interpretations, socio-historical analysis and relativism, Muslim feminists believe the Quran needs a robust dusting and reinterpretation that allow socio-historical reconsiderations for this worthy cause. Since Muslim societies embrace Islam and its prevailing patriarchal culture, it is difficult to accept the concept of Islamic feminism. This paper investigates feminism from a liberal muslim perspective. A literature review provides a thematic analysis that refers to emerging trends in gender issues. Findings reveal that ideas and practices regarding rights and freedom seek to enhance the status of women. The discussion solely focuses on historical and contextual analysis to realize the expanding potential of feminism’s path to freedom of choice in the Islamic context.

Report Writing and Testimony

In this chapter, the authors offer suggestions on how to write a report that answers the organizational client’s referral questions in a logical and effective manner. The chapter informs readers of the multiple audiences, well beyond the retaining party, that can be expected to scrutinize a written report, and offers guidance on how to write the report in a manner that anticipates the uses those various audiences may eventually make of the report and on how to avoid common errors. In recognition of the fact that the written report establishes the foundation for any future legal testimony, the authors describe the requirements for the admissibility of expert testimony in federal courts and differences between fact and expert witnesses. Finally, the chapter contains guidance on providing written reports and testimony in instances where the psychologist is retained by the examinee or the examinee’s attorney, as well as referrals for tie-breaking opinions.

Voices of the Enslaved

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators. Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.

Auto/biographics and Graphic Histories Made for the Classroom

This chapter raises questions about how the grammar of the comics form, the aesthetics of its visual/textual interface, and the ethics of identification and empathy are affected when historical figures are reanimated and their life narratives remediated for the classroom. Abina and the Important Men casts the legal testimony of a nineteenth-century woman who was enslaved in the Cape Colony region of what is now Ghana as a graphic history and offers historical, geographic, social, and visual “pathways” to foster engagement with colonial African history and historiography. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth combines the quest of young Bertrand Russell to conceptualize the first principles of mathematics with both Russell’s later autobiographical reflections on the logic and madness of logicians in the early twentieth century and the metacritical story of how the authors and artists composed the comic. Logicomix, which is not explicitly designed for courses but assumes some conversancy with philosophy, interweaves its triple narrative in ways that invite students and scholars to engage with foundational issues in philosophy and mathematics, while enjoying a “real” comic.

Do we miss half of the injuries sustained during rape because we cannot see them? An overview of the use of toluidine blue tissue stain in the medical assessment of rape cases

The prosecution of rape cases is difficult due to the absence of eyewitnesses. McCauley found that the detection of vaginal lacerations increased from one in 24 to 14 in 24 in reported adult rape cases when toluidine blue was used. Proof of injuries consistent with sexual penetration adds significantly to the evidentiary value of the medico-legal testimony. Although rape is not a clinical diagnosis and there are no diagnostic criteria to confirm rape, the possibility of genital injury during rape far exceeds the possibility of injury with consensual intercourse. If a complete examination, including the use of toluidine blue, is not used a rapist may walk away to rape again, while the victims remain with the stigma that they may have made a false allegation. Toluidine blue is a basic thiazine metachromatic dye. It has a high affinity for acidic tissue components, thereby staining tissues rich in DNA and RNA. The epithelium of the external genitalia does not have nucleated cells and prevents contact of stain with nuclei. Where the epithelium is damaged and the underlying nucleated cells are exposed, the nuclei stain blue. Injuries sustained during genital penetration show a distinctive distribution.Toluidine blue stain is easy and safe to use, available, inexpensive and does not interfere with other medico-legal evidence, therefore it is recommended to be used in the examination of all cases of alleged rape.

Daniel [De]Foe’s Virginia venture: Mutiny and indiscipline at sea during the 1680s and 1690s

This article uses evidence from the English High Court of Admiralty to examine the problem of mutiny and indiscipline among seafarers in the transatlantic trades during the 1680s and 1690s. It focuses on a venture of 1688, which is of particular interest not only for the light it sheds on maritime conditions, but also because it involved Daniel Defoe, a young and ambitious trader who was trying to establish a commercial opening in Chesapeake Bay. The article contextualizes this previously unknown venture, relating it to the development of the tobacco trade and its dependence on an expanding market and widening patterns of consumption. The failure of the voyage, in association with other business problems, had serious consequences for Defoe, leading to bankruptcy in 1692 and his withdrawal from direct involvement in overseas trade. Against a broader background of other voyages, the legal testimony heard by the court draws attention to the wider problem of mutinous conduct at sea. These cases were provoked by a range of grievances including pay, labour conditions and discipline. Repeatedly they raise questions about the conduct of masters at sea, including their rights and responsibilities. At the same time, the article argues that the upsurge in mutiny and indiscipline at sea, while revealing the inexorable tension between pay and productivity, also exposed deeper issues regarding seafaring custom and contract.

‘A Matter of Time and a Matter of Place’: Colonial Inquiries and the Politics of Testimony

Through an examination of the deaths of two young men in a detention center fire in Kashechewan, Ontario, this article examines links between legal testimony, temporality, competing forms of evidence (oral histories, visual recordings and corporeal forms of memory) and the consolidation of particular racial and historical logics through these discursive and visual fields. I argue that an analysis of testimony in colonial inquiries reveals that the relationship between everyday life and exceptional violence often restricts the development of narrative coherence between historical forms of injustice and contemporary instances of violence.