Syria’s descent into conflict is receiving growing scholarly attention. On their own, the sectarian and geopolitical interpretations of the Syrian conflict provide us with little understanding of the roots of the conflict. Recent studies have started to unpack the political economic and socioeconomics aspects of the conflict, highlighting issues such as the economic reforms in the 2000s, rising inequality, and climate change. This article aims to contribute to this growing literature by placing these issues in a broader analysis of Syria’s (...) political and economic institutions. It argues that the movement of 2011 should be seen as an unorganized protest movement driven by the consolidation and institutionalization of multisectarian elite rule through the economic reform process that started in the 2000s, following the expiration of the “developmental rentier fix” that had ensured authoritarian stability in Syria in earlier decades. (shrink)

In this essay, I interrogate the nature and grounds of Milbank's understanding of taste as it applies to differing mythic sensibilities, arguing that it is insufficiently responsive to the priority of God's action and so inadequate to a Christian theological account of the interplay of mythoi. By reading Milbank in light of The Song of Songs and Jean-Louis Chrétien's phenomenology of prayer, I suggest that rather than the subject embracing a mythos, it is instead the mythos which first embraces the (...) subject. Thus one no longer requires recourse to the implicitly violent language of ‘out-narration’, but can speak instead of willing seduction by God. By approaching taste in this way, especially in relation to ‘mythic sensibilities’, a more truly Christian approach to difference becomes possible. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of a shift in focus from political praxis to trauma work in the context of a failed democratisation movement. It investigates the various phenomena which emerge when intellectuals, under the traumatic impact of violence and atrocities, place trauma narration at the core of their interventions. Drawing on document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with twenty nine exiled Syrian intellectuals in Paris and Berlin who had participated in the revolutionary movement of 2011, the paper suggests (...) that an inversion of the normative power structures pertaining to how intellectuals relate to their publics occurs when they adopt, under conditions of extreme violence and trauma, what we call a radically embedded positionality vis-à-vis ‘the people’. This results in the dismantling of previous figurations of the ‘militant intellectual’ along with praxis-focused notions of the ‘responsibility of intellectuals’, ultimately undermining their ideational influence upon domestic publics and weakening their political impact and critical role within a revolutionary movement. (shrink)

In the recent history, the world seems to have taken notice of Afghanistan once the Soviet army overthrew Hafizollah Amin, who had pronounced himself as the leader of the Communist party “khalq” (people) and as the president of Afghanistan after eliminating his predecessor Noor Mohammad Tarakee, who had come to power through a Soviet-backed coup more than a year earlier in 1977. Amin's horrifying reign in the last months of 1978 was short-lived. It took the Soviets only five months to (...) replace him with the exiled Babrak Karmal, who was the leader of the other Communist party “parcham” (the flag).…. (shrink)

“The concern is to accommodate the ‘return of the sacred’ for a better future without a ‘clash of civilizations‘” (22). This vision stands at the center of Bassam Tibi's analysis of a post-bipolar world order. In light of the events of September 11, 2001, in the United States, March 11, 2004, in Madrid, November 2, 2004, in Amsterdam, and July 7, 2005, in London, as well as the uprising in Paris in October and November 2005 and the Danish cartoons controversy (...) in 2006, Tibi claims that a shift has taken place in world politics: from a nuclear East-West polarity to…. (shrink)

This book is a ‘curated’ anthology of what the curator considers to be witnesses to the momentous events associated with the early, Paleo-Muslim phase of the em.

This article considers Jack Goody’s studies of Islam in their various contexts. It starts with a consideration of Goody’s comparative historico-anthropological studies of specific topics such as flowers, cuisine, and kinship and the family, and of his studies of wider range and broader import. It analyses the elements and main thrust of his historical approach, paying attention to the conception of comparativism he uses, placing these in the context of current debates on method. It then moves on to Islamic material (...) incorporated into these studies, and seeks to place them in the context of his work overall. Finally, the essay discusses works Goody devoted specifically to Islam and seeks to draw out the relationship between his views of Islamic history and of contemporary Islam and his comparative historical sociology of civilizations, and measures his more recent views of Islam against his overall approach. (shrink)

In the first part of this text, the author attempts to demonstrate that sacral kingship might, in anthropological terms, be regarded an Elementary Form of socio-political life; not an autonomous elementary form, but one falling under the category of rulership. The reference to the anthropological notion of Elementary Forms renders virtually irrelevant the rigidity with which categorical distinctions are made between polytheistic and monotheistic kingship, as well as any civilisational divisions that might be imagined between Orient and Occident. The second (...) part of the text provides an illustration of these presuppositions, the author taking several examples from the history of monarchy – both in the Western World and in the Arab World. (shrink)

The all-too-human proclivity to short-sightedness colludes with political perspectives of the moment, to project a fragmentary image of the present instant into the essence of eternity, and to postu- late Islam as the trans-historical protoplasm in the life of all Muslims. I shall propose to you that this construal of Islam as a culture which in itself explains the affairs of Muslim collectivities and overdetermines their economies, societies, and non-religious cultures, is the fundamental element in the culture of misrecognition that (...) I am address- ing, the condition of possibility for valorising the trope of return. What I do intend to do is to return to the present point in time, and to try and understand why it is that misrecognition is so passionately willed; to probe the conditions for the exceptionalism attributed to Muslim peoples, which places them outside the remit of the historical and sociological understanding and relegates them to ethnological folklore, to consider why it is that I, like many others, have to waste so much of your time on matters that ought to be taken for granted. (shrink)

Healthcare systems and health professionals are facing a litany of stressors that have been compounded by the pandemic, and consequently, this has further perpetuated suboptimal mental health and burnout in nursing. The purpose of this paper is to report select findings from a larger, national study exploring gendered experiences of mental health, leave of absence (LOA), and return to work from the perspectives of nurses and key stakeholders. Given the breadth of the data, this paper will focus exclusively on the (...) qualitative results from 53 frontline Canadian nurses who were purposively recruited for their workplace insight. This paper focuses on the substantive theme of “Breaking Point,” in which nurses articulated a multiplicity of stress points at the individual, organizational, and societal levels that amplified burnout and accelerated mental health LOA from the workplace. These findings exemplify the complexities that underlie nurses' mental health and burnout and highlight the urgent need for multipronged individual, organizational, and structural interventions. Robust and timely interventions are needed to restore the health of the nursing profession and sustain its future. (shrink)

Nowadays, due to restrictions on fossil fuels, the use of renewable energies is increasing day by day. Among renewable energies, solar energy has received more attraction due to its availability in all places. Among solar energy technologies, the solar tower has been welcomed due to its high power generation of electrical energy. For accurate modeling of the studied system, each component of the system has been evaluated and modeling has been done. Therefore, in this research, solar tower modeling has been (...) conducted to achieve high electrical energy production, and to better compare the production rate, 5 cities in Iran with different weather conditions have been considered. According to the results, it can be mentioned that the highest production power by the studied system is related to Shiraz city with an average production of 20 kW/m2, and among the cities studied, the lowest rate is related to Mashhad with a production power of 15 kW/m2. (shrink)

Aziz Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship. Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities, Tauris, 2001.

Philosophers, novelists, and intercultural comparisons : Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens /​ Richard Rorty Lifeworlds, modernity, and philosophical praxis : race, ethnicity, and critical social theory /​ Lucius Outlaw Modern China and the postmodern West /​ David L. Hall From Marxism to post-Marxism /​ Svetozar Stojanović Incommensurability and otherness revisited /​ Richard J. Bernstein Incommensurability, truth, and the conversation between Confucians and Aritotelians about the virtues /​ Alasdair MacIntyre The commensurability of Indian epistemological theories /​ Karl H. Potter Pluralism, relativism, and (...) interaction between cultures /​ Bimal K. Matilal The problem of relativism /​ Jiang Tianji. Between relativism and fundamentalism : hermeneutics as Europe’s mainstream political and moral tradition /​ Ferenc Feher Conceptual schemes and linguistic relativism in relation to Chinese /​ A.C. Graham The origins of the question : four traditional Japanese philosophies of language /​ Thomas P. Kasulis Meaning as imaging : Prolegomena to a Confucian epistemelogy /​ Roger T. Ames On the dual nature of traditional Chinese thought and its modernization /​ Li Zhilin A planetary macroethics for humankind : the need, the apparent difficulty, and the eventual possibility /​ Karl-Otto Apel Reasonable challenges and preconditions of adjudication /​ Antonio S. Cua The French Revolution and the Holocaust : can ethics be ahistorical? /​ Hilary Putnam Tradition and moral progress /​ Joel J. Kupperman The shape of artistic pasts, East and West /​ Arthur C. Danto. Surrealistic distortion of landscape and the reason of the milieu /​ Megumi Sakabe Why art changes /​ Richard Wollheim The transcendental in a comparative context /​ Frederick J. Streng Reflections on religious pluralism in the Indian context /​ Margaret Chatterjee Three enduring achievements of Islamic philosophy /​ Lenn E. Goodman Two dimensions of religion : reflections based on Indian spiritual experience and philosophical traditions /​ G.C. Pande Between nationalism and nomadism : wondering about the languages of philosophy /​ Graham Parkes The discourse of cultural authenticity : Islamist revivalism and enlightenment universalism /​ Aziz Al-Azmeh Traditional political values and ideas : an examination of their relevance to developments in contemporary African political order /​ Kwame Gyekye On the interpretation of traditional cultures /​ Maria L. Herrera. The concept of progress and cultural identity /​ Roop Rekha Verma Moses, Hsüan-tsang, and history /​ Agnes Heller Secularism : sacred and profane /​ Daya Krishna Scientific progress and content loss /​ Larry Laudan A dialectical view of scientific rationality and progress /​ Marcello Pera Scientific progress reconsidered /​ Ilkka Niiniluoto Does progress in science lead to truth? /​ Lorenz Krüger. (shrink)

La tarda antichità fu un periodo di profondi cambiamenti che coinvolse l’Europa, il mediterraneo e il cosiddetto Vicino Oriente, dal IV-V al VII-VIII secolo. Questo paradigma è ormai ampiamente utilizzato negli studi islamici, dagli studi coranici, dove Angelika Neuwirth ha ampiamente scritto sul tema delle basi bibliche della rivelazione coranica come manifestazione dello scritturalismo tardo antico, agli studi storici relativi al Corano e all’Arabia preislamica, come nel libro di Aziz al-Azmeh _The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity_, che riprende (...) il filone di studi instaurato da Julius Wellhausen e Toufic Fahd. Sono pienamente d’accordo con la necessità di inserire l’Islam, la sua nascita e il suo sviluppo storico, religioso e filosofico nel contesto della tarda antichità, ma è necessario sottolineare quali temi hanno fatto dell’Islam una nuova religione rispetto al giudaismo e al cristianesimo. Questo è il tema del presente articolo che si articola nei seguenti momenti: 1) una breve rassegna critica della letteratura sulla tarda antichità; 2) il rapporto tra gli imperi – romano, bizantino e sasanide – della tarda antichità e il trionfo del monoteismo; 3) il concetto di _hanifiyya_. La conclusione è che il messaggio coranico trasmesso da Maometto ha diviso la storia in due parti: prima e dopo la venuta della _verità_. Late Antiquity describes a period of profound transformations that involved Europe, the Mediterranean world and the so-called Near East, from IV-V to VII-VIII centuries. This paradigm has now become widely used in Islamic studies, from Qurʾānic studies, where Angelika Neuwirth has extensively published in the past on the subject of the biblical underpinnings of the Qurʾānic revelation as a manifestation of late antique scripturalism, to historical studies related to the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Arabia, as in Aziz al-Azmeh’s book _The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity_, which takes up the trend of scholarship established by Julius Wellhausen and Toufic Fahd. I completely agree with the need to put Islam and its historical, religious, philosophical birth and development in the context of the Late Antiquity, but what is at stake is to emphasize which themes made Islam a new religion with respect to Judaism and Christianity. This is the focus of the present paper which deals with: 1) a brief critical survey of the literature on Late Antiquity; 2) the relationship between the empires – Roman, Byzantine and Sasanid – of Late Antiquity and the triumph of monotheism; 3) the concept of _hanifiyya_. The conclusion is that the Qurʾānic message conveyed by Muhammad broke the history into two parts: before and after the coming of _truth_. (shrink)

Many Western historians, cultural and literary critics have viewed travel and exploration as purely western. This total exclusion of Arabo-Islamic travel has been done to demonstrate the Western sense of modernity and cultural superiority over the constructed weak “other”. However, Moroccans, Arabs and Muslims in general have been curious about the lands of the Christians and managed to break the cultural and religious barriers by reaching such lands. In this paper 1 I examine the Moroccan presence in the lands of (...) the Christians and mainly in France through analyzing the work of Ahmad Bin Qasim Al Hajari’s Nasir al-Din ala al-Qawm al Kafirin or to dwell not only at the different instances of anger and wrath but also of love and respect towards the Christians and to demonstrate the way Arab and Muslim travelers remained different from their Christian counterparts in their discursive productions. I also question Occidentalism in Ahmad Bin Qasim Al Hajari’s narrative and assert that al-Azmeh’s vision to the systems of division as essentially part of human discourse is an exaggeration. So, while Westerners get fully entangled in the process of dehumanizing the Arab and Muslim “other”, Muslims produced an ambivalent discourse that sometimes revealed their anger but not hate towards the Christians. (shrink)