http://habibiaislamicus.com/index.php/hirj/article/view/197

Kaab Bin Zuhair is one of the those important literary personalities who played a vital role in the field of Arabic poetry in pre-Islamic & Islamic era. This article deals with the status of the famous poem "Lamiya" and its topical and artistic study. This Qaseeda (Poem) consists of fifty-seven verses. This poem artistically presents the high moral stature. It is also known by Qaseeda Baanat Suaad. The research is divided into six parts: 1. Introduction to the poet and Qaseeda and its authenticity. 2. Literary Importance of Laamiya 3. Opinions of ancient & modern experts about the title of the poem 4. Topical study of the Qaseeda 5. Literary and prosodic analysis 6.Results In short, this Qaseeda of high artistic significance has got more than fifty interpretations and translations and is regarded as a basic source of seerat study.

Euripide, Ifigenia in Aulide

This volume contains the first Italian critical edition with introduction, translation and commentary of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. The tragedy, exhibited posthumously in 405 BCE, stages the first mythical segment of the Trojan War, namely the sacrifice of Iphigenia, daughter of king Agamemnon, head of the Greek army, in order to propitiate the winds that should lead the navy to Troy. A tragedy of intrigue and unveiling, in which all the characters try to oppose the sacrifice, judged to be an impiety despite its sacred essence. It is therefore a tragedy without gods, in which characters of modest moral stature move, unstable, ready to sudden changes of mind, and among whom the protagonist stands out: the girl who, having overcome the dismay for the destiny awaiting her, voluntarily moves towards death on the altar, for a flimsy patriotic ideal and with the illusion of achieving immortal glory. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the text of this tragedy, handed over to us by the manuscript tradition, has been exposed more than others to a rigorous philological criticism that has broken its unity, through considerable expunctions of entire sections and sequences of verses. The volume traces the phases of this critical work, showing its methods – and sometimes its excesses – and choosing a balance line in the constitution of the text. The overall exegesis of the tragedy, which I propose in this study, consists in the belief that, despite the exodus being spurious, the finale, in view of which the entire dramaturgy was composed, still had to contemplate Iphigenia’s salvation. In fact, if the Panhellenic ideal of defence against the barbarians is now meaningless, and if a war of destruction, to begin with, needs the death of an innocent person, then this death must be transcended and the horror of human sacrifice must dissolve. It therefore seems that, once political current events become opaque, the poet’s research tends to create situations of great patheticism in an aesthetic setting of refined beauty.

Reflection

This chapter reflects on the sequence of the book so far, and applies the discussion to some aspects of human life. It is false to say that an arch is explained by the properties of stones. It would still be false to say that an arch is explained by what stones are, even if all arches everywhere were made of stones. Similar observations extend throughout science, and from this it can, and should, be deduced that the moral stature of human beings is neither eroded nor replaced by the study of the physical mechanism of human beings. It is the duty of scientists writing for the general public to make this clear and not fudge it. It is false to say, for example, that the language of justice and responsibility is less objective than statements about wavefunctions coming from physics, or statements about genes in biology.

Casting Aspersions, Writing a Kingdom: Sexual Slander and Political Rhetoric in 2 Sam 3:6-11, 2 Sam 6:16; 20-23, and 1 Kgs 2:13-25

In the story of King David found in 1 Sam 16-1 Kgs 2, several episodes recount a sexual(ized) allegation made against a significant character: Ishbosheth accuses Abner of having relations with his father Saul’s consort in 2 Sam 3:6-11; Michal disparages David for flaunting himself during the cultic procession of the ark in 2 Sam 6:16; 20-23; and Solomon executes his half-brother Adonijah for requesting marriage to David’s former ‘attendant’ Abishag in 1 Kgs 2:13-25. This paper will argue that 2 Sam 3:6-11, 2 Sam 6:16; 20-23, and 1 Kgs 2:13-25 function as historiographic slander and serve the strategic literary purposes of the David narrative by providing explanations for political fallout between particular characters while simultaneously defending the moral stature of the kings David and Solomon.

Excerpt from “St Besse: A Study of an Alpine Cult”

The works of French sociologist Robert Hertz (1881–1915) are now staple readings in general anthropology. This study of the cult of a saint in the Italian Alps is lesser known than Hertz’s celebrated essay on the symbolism of death and sin, “Death and the Right Hand” (1907), yet it remains a model of classic ethnography. Hertz was raised in a devout Parisian Jewish family, studied at the École Normale Supérieure under Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and later became a critical member of the famous Année Sociologique group. The influence of the Année—its concern with theoretically driven, detailed, holistic, and integrative analyses of social phenomena—can be seen in his essay “Saint Besse: Étude d’un culte alpestre” (first published in 1913 in the French Revue de l’Histoire des Religions and translated into English in 1988).1 The essay is a painstaking, eloquent ethnohistory, locating Saint Besse intimately in divergent paths of regional history and local tradition, where Saint Besse’s shrine in a rocky Alpine overhang is, quite literally, embedded in the landscape. The essay portrays beautifully the independent spirit of popular Catholicism, especially in the flexibility of the hagiography of Saint Besse, which allows each community—whether mountain peasants or village dwellers, even church authorities—to lay claim to the saint through the qualities he is seen to manifest: the courage of a soldier, the moral stature of a bishop, and the devotion of a pious shepherd. The work is methodologically unorthodox for a Durkheimian, for Hertz not only draws on oral and archival sources, popular, local, and ecclesiastical traditions, but also has left his Parisian armchair for direct, “participant observation” in the field. In the Italian Alps, as elsewhere, a vibrant popular Catholicism evolves from pagan, telluric sources, sometimes articulating with official Catholicism, sometimes not. In typically Durkheimian fashion, Hertz describes the tremendous power of Saint Besse to knit together diverse communities of people morally and physically through collective religious devotion. In Hertz’s focus on Saint Besse as a material source and mediator of social identity we can read this work as a precursor to many other great ethnographies on Catholic saints (popular and more official), whether in Europe, Latin America, or elsewhere. But we can also read in the essay the political and moral vision of a socialist, activist—and Jewish—scholar who saw in a popular rural Catholic saint cult the vitality of community life that he might have seen as missing in his own social milieu of pre–World War I France.

Toward Tort Liability for Bad Samaritans

Good Samaritan laws are common throughout Canada and the United States. The rationalefor the development of Good Samaritans law has been that the benefit of immunity for GoodSamaritans is more altruistic than the punishment of liability for Bad Samaritans. However,our tort law’s declaration that one need not assist one in danger weakens the moral statureof our law. Our law supports those who do the right thing and denounces those who do thewrong thing. The intrusiveness of liability for bystanders is usually argued against BadSamaritan laws. However potential liability is rare; the moral stature of our law is worththe effort to resolve this issue.

Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa, and Political Morality in Contemporary Tanzania

Since the 2000s, Tanzania has witnessed the return in the public sphere of a reconfigured version of Ujamaa as a set of moral principles embodied in the figure of the first president of Tanzania, Julius Kambarage Nyerere. The persisting traces of Nyerere and Ujamaa are not so evident in actual political practices or economic policies, but rather in collective debates about politics and morality—in short, in contemporary imaginaries of the nation. Contributing to a long-standing discussion of the moral stature of Tanzania’s “father of the nation,” the article explores how and why a shared historical memory of Nyerere is being built or contested to define, mediate, and construct Tanzanian conceptions of morality, belonging, and citizenship in the polis today.

The Social and Political Implications of Demographic Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The cohort of young people born between the early 1980s and early 1990s consitute a demographic bulge in the South African population. The sheer size of this cohort renders it especially important in terms of the changing political, economic, and social life of the country. The cohort grew up for the most part after apartheid had ended, entered the labor market at a time of high unemployment, is having children as marriage is in decline, and reached voting age just as the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) moral stature began to decline. All these factors might be expected to result in distinctive disaffection and a propensity for dissent. In terms of their attitudes and behavior, however, this cohort looks much like older (or immediately preceding) cohorts of South Africans. Where this cohort is likely to leave its mark is in entrenching some of the social, economic, and political changes that, until recently, might have appeared transient.

Venice

The city of Venice was unique in European history: an independent republic that endured for more than one thousand years, from the 8th to the 18th century. It was a commercial powerhouse, a laboratory of political systems, an exemplar of social cohesion, a principal contributor (along with Florence and Rome) to the culture of the Renaissance, and above all, an entity severed from the mainland, a creature of the sea, and the single most important intermediary between Europe and the regions of the eastern Mediterranean, especially Byzantine and Islamic countries. The city understood itself as unique, as much as we do, almost from the beginning of its rise to prominence during the 12th century. In chronicles and treatises, in the arts and literature, and in distinctive civic and religious rituals, its advocates portrayed the city as exceptional in achievement, capacity, and moral stature, constructing what has come to be known as the “myth of Venice.” For these reasons, scholars have returned often to consider again the principal features of the Venetian phenomenon in every century since its rise, resulting in a complex historiographical tradition. This article maps out major resources and categories of investigation for Venice proper, not the larger Veneto region, and confines itself to printed materials, without citing manuscripts.

Notorious Support: The America First Committee and The Personalization of Policy

In a political world characterized by social movement rivalry, advocates routinely use reputation work to discredit the motivations and character of their adversaries. Reputational entrepreneurs undercut organizational legitimacy by depicting members with disreputable or radical affiliations as representative of their opponents. These attacks on character must be countered, costing resources and limiting organizational reach. Through reputation work, advocates assert that groups they oppose have a large proportion of stigmatized supporters, are affiliated with prominent disreputable figures, and espouse policies favored by such figures. Such claims direct attention from the substance of the debate, directing attention to the moral stature of claimants. Those attacked must rely on counter strategies to defend themselves. They deny that disreputables are representative, demonstrating their bona fides by exclusive practices, claim that opposing groups have the same problem, and suggest that stigmatized supporters are agents of their opponents. To study these reputational strategies, I examine struggles over the character of members of the America First Committee in the period immediately prior to World War II.