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incorrect-koh-posts · 1 year

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Other than leper king and his heirs which book would you recommend for research on Baldwin iv of Jerusalem?

All right then, buckle up for some nerdery! 😁

I will preface this by saying that I am not a total expert on Baldwin and haven't done a colossal amount of research specifically on him. I could chew your ear off prattling on about the general world of the crusader kingdoms, their politics, and about Raymond III of Tripoli and Sibylla of Jerusalem in particular, but Baldwin isn't my main interest here. Also, as far as I know, Hamilton's study is the only longer academic work centred solely around Baldwin. Hence, in order to learn more about your fav and the world he lived in, I'd recommend reading a little more broadly. Being a king, he is featured (at least in some capacity) in most publications that deal with the Latin kingdoms in the latter half of the 12th century.

That said, have a list:

Piers D. Mitchell: "Leprosy and the Case of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem: Microbacterial Disease in the Crusader States of the 12th and 13th Centuries", International Journal of Leprosy, vol. 61, no. 2, 1993, pp. 283-91. Pretty self-explanatory. You can find this article on the internet; Mitchell also has a few other publications that deal with medicine in the crusader states, so you might find some additional Baldwin stuff there as well.

Elma Brenner: "Recent Perspectives on Leprosy in Medieval Western Europe", History Compass, vol. 8, no. 5, 2010, pp. 388-406. Has a little bit on Baldwin, might be useful if you want to find out more about how the disease was regarded by his contemporaries.

Helen J. Nicholson: Sybil, Queen of Jerusalem, 1186-1190. Routledge, 2022. This is a really good and really recent one that I was lucky enough to find in my uni library. Of course Sibylla-centred, but gives a good overview of the politics in Outremer and of course has passages about Baldwin in it. Also look into some of Nicholson's other publications if you're interested in the role of women in the context of crusading.

Kevin James Lewis: The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century: Sons of Saint Gilles. Routledge, 2017. Obviously mostly a Raymond-centric source, but it is also relatively recent and has a good chunk on Baldwin in the chapter where Lewis talks about Raymond's time as Baldwin's regent.

Joshua Prawer: Crusader Institutions. Oxford University Press, 1980. More politics to be found here, but very well put together. Prawer was an extremely prolific scholar where the history of the Latin East and the crusades was concerned, so - once again: if you're interested, look up his other works.

Jonathan Riley-Smith: The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford University Press, 1997. Good overview that goes into detail about the mentality among crusaders and aspects of daily life. Again, Riley-Smith is one of the authorities in the field, so looking into his bibliography might be worth a shot.

If you're into military history, the works of Benjamin Z. Kedar, John France - or, if you want something more dated, R.C. Smail - might be of interest to you. They mostly cover general points of Frankish and Muslim warfare or the Battle of Hattin in particular (other than in Hamilton or in some of the primary sources from the crusader period, I've never come across an article on the Battle of Montgisard), but might be helpful if you want to get a feel for what life was like at the time.

Hans-Eberhard Mayer is also definitely worth a look as a scholar, even though his works are a bit older now. However, I'm not sure how much of his stuff you can find in translation - I've only read him in German.

For the physical setting of crusader-period Jerusalem and the material culture, I very heartily recommend two works written or edited by Adrian J. Boas: Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades: Society, Landscape and Art in the Holy City under Frankish Rule (Routledge, 2001) and The Crusader World (Routledge, 2016). I consult both of these frequently for world-building in my fic writing.

If you want something on the general concept of the knight / chivalry, Maurice Keen's Chivalry (Yale University Press, 2005) might be a good start. For a detailed analysis of medieval courtly culture, I recommend Joachim Bumke's Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages (2000, English translation by Thomas Dunlap). That thing was invaluable when I was writing my BA thesis. And if you'd like to know more about the literary life of the crusaders, there is a recent publication called Literature of the Crusades (Cambridge University Press, 2019) edited by Simon Parsons and Linda M. Paterson that I also found rather good.

For fashion: The various Osprey Military History books are a good choice if you want visual representations of knightly dress. There's also a collection of essays called Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) edited by Désirée Koslin and Janet Snyder, which is one of the better ones I've found, as most books about medieval fashion focus mostly on later centuries. This one might be a bit hard to get through, though, if you don't have some kind of background knowledge about medieval texts or architecture.

If you want something less strictly academic and more in the vein of popular history, you might want to try James Reston's Warriors of God (2002) or the much more dated but rather fanboy-ish The Crusades: A History (also sometimes titled The Dream and The Tomb) by Robert Payne, which is very pro-Baldwin.

Other than that, I'll link you an older post about fictional depictions of Baldwin and other assorted good bois and girls from KoH. I hope this will scratch the Baldwin itch for you!

And: If anyone has more suggestions, of course do feel free to add them!

#asks #kingdom of heaven 2005 #baldwin iv #sibylla of jerusalem #raymond iii of tripoli #balian of ibelin #crusades #snippets of actual history #book recommendations #i could add so many more books to that list lol #maybe i'll post a longer list of all the stuff i have read one day

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demi-shoggoth · 2 years

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2023 Reading Log, pt 2

006. Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films by Nina Nesseth. This book is about how and why people feel fear, incorporating ideas from neuroscience and psychology, it talks about what happens in the brain when someone is afraid, why a horror movie might be scarier when you’re going to bed at night then when you’re actually watching it, and a very good discussion of the controversies about whether exposure to media violence actually desensitizes people or makes them more likely to commit violence themselves. The authorial voice is fun, like a friend who has learned all this cool stuff and wants you to know about it. And the author is a married lesbian and brings her wife up very casually (her wife is terrified of ET, for example), which is always a plus in my book.

007. Heist by Pete Stegemeyer. This is another “podcast adapted into a book” that I didn’t know was based on a podcast. I Can Steal That!, specifically. The heists are classified into loose categories—ones involving unusual transportation, bank jobs, art theft, digital crimes, unusual items stolen. There’s some stories in here I knew; the James-Younger gang is mentioned twice, and the theft of the Mona Lisa is one of the art pieces mentioned. But a lot of it is new to me. The stories are told in a breezy way, but sometimes a little out of order: the organization of the book makes for some odd choices and reveals, maybe as a consequence of its origins in an audio medium. There are illustrations throughout by Rebecca Pry, in a style that is pretty distinctive. Objects are detailed and realistic, but people are cartoony.

008. Folk Tales of the Maldives by Xavier Romero-Frias. The Maldives are a country that I knew very little about before reading this. They’re an island nation in the Indian Ocean, with a majority Muslim population and cultural ties to Arabia and India. There’s a lengthy prologue about Maldivian culture, which bemoans that their unique traditions are being altered or erased by cultural assimilation. There are eighty stories in the book, ranging from overtly supernatural tales of magic and monsters, to animal fables of the kind found almost universally, to folk history of fairly recent events. Like WWII and the first tourist to bring a scuba tank to the island, level of recent. The author also illustrates some of the stories in an amateurish but charming pencil style.

009. The Lion Boy and Other Medical Curiosities by Jan Bondeson. I am torn on this book. I read it all the way through, but found it a somewhat unpleasant experience. The content is good: it alternates between biographies and possible diagnoses for various “human oddities” from the 18th through early 20th centuries and more general medical weirdness from that time. Like doctors debating how long a severed head retained consciousness and whether or not someone’ hair could literally go white from fear. A lot of the material is gleaned from primary sources—newspaper accounts and medical journal articles. What’s bad about the book is the authorial voice. He’s remarkably judgmental about people’s physical appearance (human oddity or not), very fatphobic and even manages to slip in a racist joke! He comes across as a huge asshole, is what I’m saying. I wish this book had been written by someone more humane and respectful, like a Ricky Jay type.

010. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World by David T. Courtwright. This book is about the history of drug use, the development of global capitalism, and how tightly the two are linked. It first discusses what the author deems are the most important drugs: caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, opiates, cocaine, cannabis. It then talks about the role that doctors and medicine play in promoting drugs, debates why some plant products became major international drugs and others didn’t, and discusses why total prohibition is a fool’s errand. The book was written in 2000, but still feels fresh and relevant—concepts like the ladder of technological development of drugs from raw plant product to fully synthetic analogues is relevant to the rise of vaping, and the section about how amphetamines were first promoted, then demonized by doctors could be an account of the opiod epidemic. Highly recommended.

#reading log #drugs are like that #drugs #medical history #medical oddities #true crime #horror movies #neuroscience #folklore #the maldives

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 years

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Jeremy Henzell-Thomas is an independent researcher, writer, speaker, educational consultant, former Visiting Fellow and Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Associate Editor of the quarterly journal Critical Muslim. He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2021 for services to the Civil Society and the Muslim Community.

We share an issue of the physical heart...This is his musing on getting older.

“Approaching my 75th birthday I am reminded that getting older is often regarded (even stigmatised or stereotyped) as a time of declining faculties, increasing disability, and progressive crystallisation (one might even say ‘cementing’) of existing habits and attitudes, including ‘living in the past’ and getting ‘set in one’s ways’. In As you Like It Shakespeare famously depicts the final stage in the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ as one of dotage, senility and second childishness, culminating in ‘mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’

Sadly, many seniors do see themselves as having been consigned to the ‘scrap-heap’, and even if they don’t they are often treated as such by others. I remember well a BBC interview with a very senior nursing officer on the mistreatment of elderly people in the healthcare system. Her explanation for the culture of neglect and abuse was simple. Fewer and fewer people, she said, had any religious faith or spiritual values, nor any belief in an afterlife. They therefore saw old people not as precious souls approaching the transition to the next stage of existence but only as dispensable material bodies which had outlived their usefulness. This rings true. Ageism and the culture of contempt for the old is the ultimate consequence of a brutal and nihilistic materialism which reduces everything to base physical utility, to a mere mortal body devoid of soul and spirit.

Well, I want to buck the trend and affirm that as we grow older, we are blessed with the opportunity to transcend the problems which come with age, and awaken those deeper faculties that connect us to our essential nature as fully human beings created ‘in the image of God’.For me, the experience of true intimacy is integral to that awakening. As the Qur’an tells us, God is ‘closer to you than your jugular vein.’ I love that affirmation because it confirms for me that aging offers a transformational opportunity to ‘come home’, to feel the Divine Presence intimately in the very core of the body. Several years ago I had a striking dream that I had descended from Mount Everest into the foothills, although I still had to descend further into the valleys and levels. The stunning 190-mile Pembrokeshire Coast Path in Wales, which I trekked at the age of 65, actually involves a total ascent of 30,000 feet, higher than Mount Everest, so the image of Everest in my dream was referring not only to the fact that it is the highest mountain but also that it was a ‘height’ that I had scaled in my walk.

I understand now that the gift of aging is to come down from the lofty heights of heroic personal achievement and transcendent spiritual experience and exercise more warmth, love, compassion, intimacy, reconciliation and tenderness in the immanence of our relationship with others and with the world at large. In short, to become more fully human.In one sense, the transition to a Heart-centred life runs counter to the process of aging, for the physical heart is subject to various diseases. These include coronary heart disease, which occurs when the heart muscle's blood supply is blocked by a build-up of fatty substances in the coronary arteries, and aortic stenosis, when calcification causes narrowing of the aortic valve which reduces blood flow. I am familiar with the latter, as I have a bicuspid aortic valve, a congenital condition which causes stenosis, and which is monitored annually by echocardiogram. It has recently progressed from a mild to a moderate level and I am told that when it reaches a severe level I will need a replacement valve, perhaps before I reach the age of 80.

The physical deterioration of the heart, as manifested in ‘narrowing’, ‘blocking’ and ‘hardening’ offers useful analogies to similar defects in the psyche. We can speak of someone having a ‘hard heart’ or a ‘narrow view’ without in any way implicating the physical organ. In the same way, the word ‘sclerotic’ can be used to describe someone’s thinking or behaviour as rigid and unresponsive, losing the ability to adapt, without referring to sclerosis as a physical condition.

Given the common stereotype of growing old as a time of the narrowing of one’s outlook, I am very much aware of how this tendency (one might say ‘disease’) needs to be countered by cultivating a soft, open and expansive Heart that brings light, love, healing words, and compassion into one’s life and the lives of others. As I age, and hopefully before I need a replacement aortic valve, I pray that I might be true to my own Heart, and thereby to exemplify the Sufi injunction to ‘die before you die’, to let go of the egoic or false self, and live and speak by the light of the true Self. There comes a time when one must sincerely embody and enact what one knows and expresses in words.I love the moment in the film Greystoke (accompanied by the noble opening theme of Elgar’s first symphony) when Tarzan returns home to the place of his ancestry, the beautiful country estate of his elderly grandfather, the Earl of Greystoke. My eyes fill with tears when Tarzan alights from his carriage and is embraced by the earl, played with great feeling by Ralph Richardson. This ‘coming home’ is deeply symbolic for me. Tarzan, lost in the jungle, comes home after years of exile from his family, culture and native land, to be welcomed with open arms by his grandfather.

But my response is not an intellectual response to symbolism but a profound emotional feeling of ‘returning’ to the place where we all belong. In so doing, we fulfil the purpose of our lives, which is none other than the realisation of our essential unity with the ground of being. It is coming to rest in old age, in that remembrance of our ‘origin’, which on the deepest level is none other than being embraced by the ultimate Source of Love.”

[Thank you Ian Sanders]

#love #ageing #Ian Sanders #Jeremy Henzell-Thomas #articles #the heart #age #metaphor #heart #words and writings

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I really appreciate your social and cultural historiography. While I'm familiar with English and French Monasticism from 1300 onward, my focus was on clerical life and theology having contemporaneous context is really helpful. Your explanations are also clear and funny, which I appreciate as well. I haven't gotten too far into your studies yet but do you have any knowledge of European Muslims outside of the O.E.?

Aha, I am afraid I don’t actually know what you mean by “outside of the O.E.” (this is on me for not being a Cool Kid, no doubt, but there you have it). However, if you mean Muslims in medieval Europe, medieval Europe’s perception of/interaction with Muslims, how this changed in the late medieval/early modern period, and where these sites of contact were most likely to happen: yes, I absolutely have all of that! (Edit: @codenamefinlandia kindly suggested that this might mean outside the Ottoman Empire, which I doubtless should have thought of, but I hope this is indeed what you mean? In which case, yes, the below resources will be very helpful for you in exploring the European Muslim presence well before the Ottomans.)

I wrote briefly about Muslims in my Historical People of Color in Europe post, including in the context of the crusades, their long-term settlements in medieval Spain and Italy, and the relationships of the Muslim empires with Elizabethan England. There are, as you might expect, many studies focusing on Muslim-Christian contacts in medieval Europe and in the wider medieval world, of which the crusades are probably the best-known example. Below follows a selection of some reading material which might be helpful:

Sea of the Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World by Christophe Picard (this is about medieval Islamic trade in the Mediterranean, as it says on the tin, starting in the 7th century with the original Muslim conquests, and focuses on its role in cultural contacts between Muslims and Christians of southern and eastern Europe)

The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe, ed. Dionisius A. Agios and Richard Hitchcock (a collection of essays about Arabic influence on medieval Europe, this one doesn’t have any e-version so you might need to consult a university library)

The Muslims of Medieval Italy by Alex Metcalfe (examines the rise and fall of the Islamic presence in southern Italy and Sicily between about 800--1300, and how this was transformed into a frontier of cultural contact, exchange, and conflict alike)

Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100--1450, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari (examines how the Islamic world was depicted in the ‘high’ medieval era, and the developments of some of these Orientalist images in the 19th century and onward)

Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages by John V. Tolan (in something of the same vein as the above; he has written another book called Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination which focuses more on the semiotic, literary, and narrative construction of the “othered Muslim”).

Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader, ed. Jarbel Rodriguez (a GREAT book with multiple types of examples, primary sources, regions, and types of contact between Muslims and Christians from the seventh through the fifteenth century, including Byzantine, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian authors of the time period)

Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050--1614, by Brian Catlos (another book which I really need to read more of, focusing on medieval Muslims who actually lived IN Europe, including in Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Balkans/Eastern Europe, and other places).

The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment, by Alexander Bevilacqua (studies how the study/approach to Islam changed i the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how many Enlightenment scholars learned Arabic and read Islamic texts)

As Catlos says in Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom: “In fact, the Muslims of medieval Europe included substantial communities scattered right across the Latin-dominated Mediterranean, from the Atlantic coast to the Transjordan, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. In some areas they survived for only a century or two, whereas in others they persevered for well over five hundred years. They did not live as isolated enclaves, they were not uniformly poor, and were not necessarily subject to systematic repression; rather, they comprised diverse communities and dynamic societies that played an important role in the formation of what would eventually emerge a modern European culture and society.” In other words, while we’ve discussed before that medieval Europe was never uniformly white and never uniformly Christian, people tend to think that Jews were the only other religion that lived permanently in Europe. While Italy, Iberia, and the Balkans maintained the most enduring Muslim communities, that was not the only place they lived, and they were not merely merchants passing through without settling (though there was plenty of interreligious trade). We’ve discussed before how Yusuf/Joe would not necessarily always be a surprising or unexpected sight in Europe, and how people there would be a lot more used to him than you might expect. So: yes, Islam was always embedded in the fabric of medieval Europe, both as enemies during the crusades and as long-term citizens and communities at home.

Bonus: have some work on queer medieval and early modern Muslims, because reasons!

Sahar Amer, ‘Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-like Women’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18 (2009), 215-236

Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Samar Habib, Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality, 850--1780 A.D. (Teneo Press, 2009)

Samar Habib, Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (London: Routledge, 2007)

Samar Habib, Islam and Homosexuality (Praeger, 2010)

E. J. Hernández Peña, ‘Reclaiming Alterity: Strangeness and the Queering of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Spain’, Theology & Sexuality, 22 (2016) 42-56

Gregory S. Hutcheson, ‘The Sodomitic Moor: Queerness in the Narrative of Reconquista’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glen Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 99-122.

Gregory S. Hutcheson et al., eds., Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)

Scott Alan Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflections on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (Oneworld Publications, 2010)

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997)

Anyway. Let me know if you want me to expand on any of these topics in more detail, and I hope some of these resources are helpful!

#history #medieval history #queer history #also #the old guard meta #for reference #a-little-bit-of-ultra-violence #ask

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thatheathen · 4 years

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“Seize the day. Then set it on fire.”

We are living in that cyberpunk dystopia now, the very type Philip K. Dick warned us that could happen and is slowly creeping its way into our personal lives/minds and that's mainly due to big internet providers and the fascist governments whipped by corporations hijacking all modes of freedom even virtual freedoms. everything is connected in the system the ruling class decided and you are a slave with in that caste system until you die. oh gee fun.

I feel bad for the devs that are forced to time crunch for this month. CD Projekt RED better compensate their workers for pushing this game out for them greedy selfish CEOs who are attached to this game that will no doubt be a hit and make tons of money, but at what cost? video game developers need to desperately unionize before its too late to even do so as most triple A games are made by wealthy liberal and or centrist elites who pretend to be progressive but actually hate unions, socialism, sharing, comradery, solidarity, grassroots fund raising cuz that’s all anti-capitalist and bad you see.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and that's exactly what cyberpunk is; it's a genre of unchained sci-fi yeah but it's also showing capitalism on steroids, corporations gone rogue and eating up all the earth's resources just to produce enough power and energy to run a whole city now requires a while country of power to push harder and harder to keep that light pollution at the maximum. animals should be going completely extinct in a cyberpunk future, what do humans even eat?

To my mind cyberpunk should be about breaking away from cultural programming that makes us hate each other, fight and kill, it always boils down to those who have and those who have not social structure. That's a lot like Feudalism and a false sense of safety for all people. Cyber-feudalism is how it's structured underneath the veil. “Seize the day. Then set it fire.”

Cyberpunk seems like a countercultural idea within the hyper-capitalist world that's still very male dominant. The feminine exist only to tantalize the masses, domestic females to slaves of profits and glamour. The brutal police forces ignoring human rights laws daily. Journalism is remotely impossible. So is the world of cyberpunk really a world of freedom and choices? Cyberpunk can be seen as a connection of like minded folk hungry for freedom and not need to fall into crime to survive. For many that’s the world you’re forced to live in or die in. rights are not natural handed from god, they are taken. cyber-rights seems like a fruitless fight in a hyper-cyber-capitalist reality; big brothers eyes everywhere. mass surveillance that would make PKD’s jaw drop. cyberpunk-world cops are thugs beyond what we could imagine and could kill you on sight if they chose and nobody will care or not be able to do anything. nobodies memories can be trusted unless you express a certain class. all the punks, rejects, anarchists, anti-corporation, hackers, etc. are all outsiders, terrorist suspects. Every queer person or Muslim or any kind of marginalized group of that era is vulnerable as the system doesn’t favor them nor see a reason to protect them, with fascist-leaning politicians WANTING certain groups of people to literally die out. Those who struggle in any unequal world are going to be feeling the most pain. Lots of pain may mean; drug addiction to numb this awful reality, mod addiction to be less human maybe or change your identity completely. Lots of pain could also mean lots of anger towards the system and the state that’s making life so miserable for the 90% the citizens who have no power. cyberpunk 2077s idea is an “anything-goes” kinda place. here’s a sci-fi GTA/Witcher3 sandbox about a fucked up capitalist future that’s super fun and action packed!! It’s okay it’s not real though. Meanwhile capitalism as it exists today is grinding down the working class including the Dev employees working on Cyberpunk as I type this. long hours for the same pay. was it worth it? will it be worth it? will cyberpunk be the GAME that will end labor abuse in the gaming industry?

People who are different, people who reject authority and anti-human social constructs, people who are spiritual without an organized religion, people so different and taboo to where the ruling elites see them as a threat, mocking those gross punks/queers/dissidents, but love their style and aesthetic because the rich have no soul and ZERO creativity. stealing is what rich assholes do best. rich people steal everyone’s aesthetic claiming it as their own and you begin to see YOUR aesthetic in the media regardless if it's offensive, it’s just unfettered anarcho-capitalist-land, there's no more restrictions to anything really. like ayn rand vision that would result in Bioshock’s world. that was a steampunk nightmare to an extent. point being the rich can do anything. money is power and it only matters to those who thirst for power. Many people just deal with money and hate at the same time cuz what other choice do people have? Poor people get no choices and all the bad days.

The rich and powerful will indulge in the vices of the poor to get another experience; meanwhile the real poor struggle to survive in this electronic hell world and your only choices are to fight and kill these hyper-corporations that run the planet's economy basically and that sucks. seems prophetic in a way to see what the future would be like if capitalism still stood and there was business as usual. I think a true dystopian cyberpunk world is full of dark skies and contagious air due to the extreme pollution i.e. climate change the previous generations of humans ignored and still ignore because profits and luxury and drugs and opulence and legacies and authoritarian rule is far more important to uphold you see. "human nature" is always condescendingly professed as an argument killer to why capitalism is the only way because hooomons are deep down real mean and violent... which is not true.

Human infants literally can't live without being held and nurtured in a healthy environment. Humans are wired to love and communicate. humans lived a long time cuz they worked together. Humans lived even longer when they learned to domesticate animals leading to agriculture. only in the last 20,000 years have humans begun to grow their ego and misunderstand its message and purpose. fascists and billionaires take advantage of human minds and fool people into thinking there's no other way to live. it's a fucking lie. human beings are disconnected with nature. wires and cables are not non-nature, those are materials derived from nature. everything is nature, but not everything is natural like human concepts fabricated by civilizations.

“Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.” ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

I want a cyberpunk game where it's a good kind compassionate civilization, a star trek like society, full of infinite exploration into the cosmos and into our minds... I want a cyberpunk world worth protecting, protecting the people from sneaky politicians (demagogues) and authoritarian thugs ready to install the capitalist religion of endless self-destruction and pain. remnants of evil scatter and reform, we must always help people who struggle under capitalisms spell.

#thatheathen #cyberpunk #crunch #capitalism

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weirdletter · 4 years

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The Journal of Gods and Monsters, Vol. 1, No. 1. Special Issue: The Monstrosity of Displacement, edited by Michael E. Heyes, Natasha L. Mikles, and John Morehead, Texas State University, Summer 2020. Info: godsandmonsters-ojs-txstate.tdl.org.

The Journal of Gods and Monsters is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that seeks to explore the connections between the sacred and the monstrous. We encourage a wide variety of methodologies and approaches, and are open to analyses of monstrosity as it relates to all religious traditions. We are published by the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University. Monsters are often defined as those unfortunate beings displaced from the “normal,” and in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters, we are exploring this displacement and the role of religious traditions in its construction, maintenance, and complication. Such beings labeled as monsters might be displaced from biology, such as the cynocephalic protagonist of the Greek Life of St. Christopher. Then again, a monster’s displacement could be cultural, as seen in contemporary efforts by some Burmese Buddhists to displace and monstrosize the Rohingya minority. Or it could be soteriological, like the transhistorical phenomenon of Jews and Muslims being made into monsters via their exclusion from some structures of Christian salvation. In this special issue, we present three methodologically-diverse submissions that tackle the issue of monstrosity and displacement from a wide range of regional and temporal arenas, including 1960s West Virginia, 16th-century France, and 1940s science fiction literature. We also present reviews of new and important materials in the field of Monster Theory.

Articles “Reality – Is it a Horror?” Richard Shaver's Subterranean World and the Problem of Evil by Gabriel Mckee Quilting with Lacan by Melissa Conroy Devilish Domestication in the Theater of the Monstrous: Towards a Taxonomy of the Monster – Mike Heyes

Reviews Review for Hannah Macpherson, Into the Dark: “Pure” by Courtney Dreyer “So we’re just going to ignore the bear”: Imagining Religion at Midsommar by Douglas Cowan Filippo Del Lucchese, Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture by Andrea Di Carlo Basil Glynn, The Mummy on Screen. Orientalism and Monstrosity in Horror Cinema by Madadh Richey

#journal #magazine #literary journal #monstrous #weird essay #weird studies #weird reviews #horror essay #horror studies #horror reviews #monster theory #monstrosity

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terefah · 5 years

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someone asked me if i could share my readings for my Religion and the Body class: here’s a big list. i think jstor gives free access to like 6 papers a month but if anyone wants a pdf of any of these just lmk!

THE BODY IN THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION

Douglas, Mary. “Ritual Uncleanness,” in Purity and Danger: An analysis of concept of pollution and taboo (London: Routledge, 1966, pp. 8 – 35).

Gerber, Lynne. “Sin,” in Seeking the straight and narrow: Weight loss and sexual reorientation in evangelical America (Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 19-51).

Griffith, R. Marie. “Body Salvation: New Thought, Father Divine, and the Feast of Material Pleasures,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation Vol. 11(2), 2001, pp. 119 – 53.

Daugherty, Mary Lee. “Serpent Handling as Sacrament,” Theology Today, 33(3), 1976, 232-243.

Haitian Vodou McAlister, Elizabeth. “Love, Sex, and Gender Embodied: The Spirits of Haitian Vodou,” in Love, Sex and Gender in the World Religions, Edited by Joseph Runzo & Nancy M. Martin (Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2000, pp. 128-45).

GENDERS IN THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION

Nanda, Serena. “The Hijras: An Alternative Gender in Indian Culture,” in Stephen Ellingson & M. Christian Green (Eds), Religion and Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective (NY: Routledge, 2002, pp. 137-63).

Najmabadi, Afsaneh, “Iran Transing and Transpassing across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran,” Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36(3/4), Trans- (Fall - Winter, 2008), pp. 23-42

Niculescu, Mira, “Women with shaved heads: Western Buddhist nuns and Haredi Jewish wives: Polysemy, universalism and misinterpretations of hair symbolism in pluralistic societies,” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 2011, Vol. 23, pp 309-32.

Langenberg, Amy Paris. “Buddhist Blood Taboo: Mary Douglas, Female Impurity, and Classical Indian Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 84(1), Mar 2016, pp. 157-191.

THE RACIALIZED BODY

Lapidus, Steven. “Bottoming for the Queen: Queering the Jews in Protestant Europe at the Fin de Siècle,” in Frederick S. Roden (ed.) Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2009, pp. 105-25).

Douglas, Kelly B. “Stereotypes, False Images, Terrorism: The White Assault upon Black Sexuality,” in D. L. Boisvert & C. Daniel-Hughes, The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality, and Gender (NY: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 16 – 27).

Douglas, Kelly B. “Crazy Blues,” in Black bodies and the black church: A blues slant (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 3- 29)

Bowen, John, R. “How the French State Justifies Controlling Muslim Bodies: From Harm-Based to Values-Based Reasoning,” Social Research, Vol. 78(2), The Body and the State: How the State Controls and Protects the Body, Part I (Summer, 2011), pp. 325-348.

MATERIAL BODIES

Buenting, J. “Rehearsing vulnerability: BDSM as transformative ritual.” Chicago Theological Seminary Register, 93(1), 2003, pp. 39-49

Conklin, Beth A. ““Thus Are Our Bodies, Thus Was Our Custom”: Mortuary Cannibalism in an Amazonian society.” American Ethnologist, Vol. 22(1), 1995, pp. 75-101.

Glick, Leonard, B. “This Little Operation,” in Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 179 – 214.

Kopelman, Loretta M, “Female Circumcision/Genital Mutilation and Ethical Relativism,” Second Opinion, 1994, Vol. 20(2), pp. 55-71.

#i'm only just making my way thru the first section tho!#readings

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eretzyisrael · 5 years

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Last year, Bedar attended a five-day summer teacher training course on how to teach about “the dynamics of the Middle East,” provided by a Massachusetts-based organization called Primary Source. Primary Source claims to work “to advance global and cultural learning in schools,” and has partnerships with more than 50 schools and school districts in New England.

It is funded by four foundations. Two are Massachusetts government agencies, the Mass Cultural Council and Mass Humanities. The third, the Cummings Foundation, is one of the largest private foundations in New England. The fourth is Qatar Foundation International (QFI), an arm of the Qatari ruling family’s Qatar Foundation. Through QFI since 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal, Qatar’s Al Thanis have given more than $30 million directly to American K-12 public schools, and an untold amount to teacher training outfits like Primary Source.

To get a sense of the Qatar Foundation’s perspective on things, it is helpful to know that recipients of its largesse include hate preachers who spew ISIS-style ideology, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader and so-called “Theologian of Terror” Yusuf Qaradawi, as well as the Hamas politburo chairman, Ismail Haniyeh.

As Somali-American scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution: “Powerful foundations such as the Qatar Foundation continue to grant financial support and legitimacy to radical Islamic ideology around the world.”

They also just might be training your kid’s history teacher without your knowledge. In this age of concern over foreign influence on American politics, Al Jazeera videos are slapped with this warning label on YouTube: “Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government.” Primary Source makes no such disclaimer for its training materials, and neither do the teachers who use them.

#teacher training #massachusetts #middle east #israel #qatar #david bedar #indoctrination #history #newton massachusetts

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zamancollective · 5 years

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Fiction, Poetry, and the Shaping of Mizrahi Cultural Consciousness

By Sophie Levy

This article was originally published in the Fall 2019 issue of The Current, a journal of politics, culture, and Jewish affairs at Columbia University.

“So sometimes people think we are Arabs

and they are Jews?

[My nephew’s] words make flocks of birds fly through my body

ripping my blood vessels in the commotion

and I want to tell him about my Grandmother Sham’a

and Uncle Moussa and Uncle Daoud and Uncle Awad

But at the age of six he already has

Grandmother Ziona

Grandmother Yaffa

lots of uncles

and fear and war

he received as a gift

from the state.”

- Adi Keissar, “Clock Square”

I read Adi Keissar’s poetry for the first time at fifteen years old, when my mother forwarded me a link to Haaretz’s Poem of the Week under the headline “Who’s who? Who’s an Arab, who’s a Jew?”

The poem was a vignette of a conversation between Keissar and her young nephew as they walked beside the clock tower in Jaffa, tracing the aftermath of his distant observation of a man speaking Arabic. With each consecutive line, I felt like an anvil had been dropped on my chest (in the best way possible). Why did a Persian girl from Los Angeles who hadn’t really thought about her Judaism in years feel such a punch in the gut from a poem by a Yemeni woman in Israel? It felt incomplete and a little tacky to exclusively attribute my reaction to our shared Judaism. There was another layer to consider— a quiet but strong common denominator between the way I thought of my family and the way Keissar wrote about hers, even though I grew up hearing Farsi spoken more than Arabic, and I am American, not Israeli.

I only heard the word Mizrahi used to describe people from Middle-Eastern and North African Jewish backgrounds a few weeks before I read “Clock Square.” It made sense to me that there was another word for us out there—for Jewish people who called ourselves Sephardi even though our supposedly Spanish lineage seemed less-than-factual. It felt good to become aware of this new, audibly articulated way of making a distinction I wanted made—not because I resented the Sephardi label, but because I noticed something different about the community from which I came, and those differences were bound to Iran, not Spain. I let the word roll around inside my head and off my tongue. Mizrahi. So that’s what I’m called.

Of course, label-picking in the age of identity politics can sometimes take on a flattening or superficial connotation. It’s understandable that pinning any one label onto a multifaceted self can feel stifling, and there's been no shortage of analysis surrounding the derogatory or Orientalist undertones of Mizrahi’s literal translation to eastern. It’s a subject that often comes up in the company of other young Arab and Persian Jews I know, some of whom also feel distanced from the term’s relatively recent or “artificial” origin in Israel’s political lexicon.

Bearing this nuance in mind, I would still argue that identification with and critical thought surrounding the issue of Mizrahiut can open the doors for a new, constructive, collective self-perception— one that’s rooted in a consciousness of culture, heritage, and history. In her essay “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Ella Shohat acknowledges how the Mizrahi label can be seen as a construct born from societal formation under Zionism, but also sheds light on its strengths. She notes that Mizrahi identity “celebrates a Jewish past” in Southwest Asia and North Africa, and that in turn, it can imply a “future of revived cohabitation” with other peoples of the region. In the meantime, its inclusion of a diverse range of Jewish communities places value on the cultural dialogue that ensued between them once they encountered each other in Israel (or in Western countries, as in my family’s case).

The story of Mizrahi immigration to Israel is not a smooth one. Between 1948 and 1951, roughly 325,000 Southwestern Asian and North African Jews migrated there, following their departure or expulsion from their countries of origin. Upon their arrival, many were placed in transitory refugee camps (ma’abarot) with poor conditions, later being displaced to remote development towns or vacated Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem—situating them in Israel’s geographic and socioeconomic periphery. Their ensuing civil rights struggle would continue for decades.

Mizrahi refugees at a ma’abara in the early 1950s.

Contemporaneously, an underground Arabic literary network began to take shape, connecting Mizrahim in Jerusalem and the ma’abarot with Palestinian writers who remained in Israel proper after 1948. Fiction writers like Sami Michael and Shimon Ballas got their start publishing short stories in al-Jadid, an Arabic-language, left-aligned journal that served as a vital platform for Mizrahim and Palestinians alike in the early decades of Israeli statehood. The novel soon emerged as a favorite medium of Mizrahi writers (many of whom were Iraqi men), their characters’ psycho-emotional turmoil reflecting the tumult of the political changes in which they were caught. Whether set in Baghdad, Jerusalem, or Haifa, these novels lamented the waning reality of integrated Muslim-Jewish life, criticized the treatment of Mizrahim in Israel, and conveyed wistful longing for Iraq— all in Arabic.

However important this underground fiction movement was, its tangible success in spurring Mizrahi cultural consciousness among a wider public was limited. Contributors to al-Jadid were writing almost exclusively in intellectual circles, hiding themselves from wider readership in ma’abarot or other communities of Arabic-speaking immigrants to Israel. Further, the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Labor Zionist Ashkenazi literary canon and the disenfranchisement of Mizrahim on a material level led to practical obstacles to publishing. Thirdly, although the deliberate decision on the part of these authors to write (sometimes exclusively) in Arabic was a commendable act of resistance against the state’s efforts to stifle the language’s use, this reduced their novels’ wider appeal to a Hebrew-speaking public. Amid the political activism of the Mizrahi Black Panthers and the decline of the Labor Party in the 1970s, Mizrahi novelists were able to publish their work more frequently; yet even then, they mostly remained on the margins of literary life in Israel— dear to a burgeoning community of Mizrahi academics, but largely unknown to a wider audience.

Despite these barriers to recognition, Mizrahi fiction was and is of value. The often explicitly-stated goal of these novelists was to encourage a sustained connection to and appreciation of the worlds they were a part of before their displacement to Israel. By writing in Arabic, they demonstrated acute political and historical consciousness, challenging the state’s prevailing narratives about Mizrahi primitiveness, its effective demonization of Arab language and culture, and its dismissal of any positive bond to diasporic life. Most importantly, in the words of the writer Almog Behar, their work “carried a torch” for Mizrahim of future generations — like Adi Keissar, and like me.

After “Clock Square,” I started reading Keissar’s work almost voraciously, scouring Haaretz and the Forward for translated poems when I couldn’t understand enough of her Hebrew. As a flagrantly opinionated teenager, I got a high from her blunt feminism and indulged in the refreshing matter-of-factness with which she expressed the depth of her emotions. After having left my majority-Mizrahi Jewish day school for the odd funhouse mirror of a secular, preppy, majority-white high school, it felt like a comforting exhale to settle in the sweet, relatable sadness of poems like “Black on Black:”

"My grandmother loved me with a thick accent

spoke to me Yemeni words

I never understood,

and as a child

I remember

how scared I was to stay alone with her

out of fear that I wouldn’t understand the tongue in her mouth [...]

the sounds far, far away

even when she spoke closely.”

I didn’t yet know enough about Israeli history to fully grasp the political subversiveness of Keissar’s poetry, but I did know that her work made me feel seen. I felt estranged from the no-questions-asked Zionism of the Reform, Ashkenazi institutions I belonged to as a child, and I felt detached from my high school’s country-clubby, all-American ethos. Sometimes, as much as it embarrassed me to admit it, I felt the same distance from my large and (lovingly) overbearing Persian family, and even from other Mizrahi kids. Yet the more I looked into Adi Keissar’s work, the more I understood I wasn’t alone in those feelings, and the more I understood there were ways to address them constructively.

The fact that my mother came across “Clock Square” on Haaretz in English translation was not only indicative of Keissar’s increasing success as an individual poet, but of the rising recognition of a poetic movement she had ignited a few years prior. Keissar is the founder of Ars Poetica, a collective whose name is a double-entendre between Horace’s The Art of Poetry and the word ars عرص — a slur reserved for Mizrahi men that essentially translates to pimp in Arabic. Bringing together Mizrahi poets of diverse ages and backgrounds under an all-women roster of leaders, the group has put a new spin on the poetry reading by reinventing it as the hafla (Arabic for party).

Adi Keissar at a poetry reading.

Since Keissar organized a night of rousing performances by spoken-word poets, alternative DJs, and belly dancers at her first hafla in 2013, Ars Poetica’s loud, multifaceted reclamation of Mizrahi cultures has sent shockwaves through Israel and beyond. Keissar, Roy Hasan, and Tehila Hakimi— additional members of the group and renegade poets in their own right— all won the Bernstein Literary Prize within two years of Ars Poetica’s launch. Change is also felt elsewhere. Erez Biton, often seen as a father figure of this poetic movement, faced many of the same obstacles to mainstream success as his fiction-writing contemporaries for decades, until he became the first Mizrahi writer to win the Israeli Prize for Literature in 2015. The next year also presented a huge milestone, when Biton was appointed as chairman of a new governmental committee dedicated to promoting the inclusion of Mizrahi history and literature in school curricula. Since Ars Poetica’s founding, the group’s impact has garnered extensive media attention, with Jewish newspapers and poetry magazines in the US and Britain publishing article after article about the “Mizrahi Revival” cropping up in Israel.

Ars Poetica may well have triggered the strongest shake-up of Liberal Zionist, Ashkenazi hegemony in the context of Israeli literature to date. Of course, as we’ve seen, the written fight for Mizrahi recognition didn’t begin with Keissar, but her collective does much more than function as a simple continuation of the efforts of writers who preceded them. The group’s unprecedented headway is the result of taking that history, learning from it, and building on it in a new direction.

One thing this “new direction” has entailed is a deeper, more intersectional, subversive strain of political consciousness. Written attacks on the structural subordination of Mizrahim now often serve double functions; when Adi Keissar writes in embracement of her body and physical features as a Mizrahi woman, she is also writing to undo the internalization of racialized misogyny. When Roy Hasan bristles against the performative liberalism of centrist Ashkenazi elites, he is also tackling Israel’s class divide as it occurs along ethnic lines. Keissar and Hasan’s ability to synthetically address a broader range of societal issues in their work with relative brevity enables it to speak to a readership wider than that of the novelists before them.

Furthermore, Ars Poetica’s rejection of elitism goes beyond the content of their poems and permeates their approach to language itself— their verses often full of curses and reclaimed slurs, their Hebrew colloquial, their tone raw and piercing. Hasan points to Jay-Z and the Wu-Tang Clan as important influences on his writing, and it only takes feeling the rhythm of repetition and line breaks in his poem “In the Land of Ashkenaz” to feel their impact on his work:

“...I am the armed fucking robbery

The crook with the kippah

In the court of law

I am the graves of holy men

And talismans

I am a pimp

I am clapping hands

And cheap music

Low culture

Low grade

A stubborn root

And a pain in the ass…”

Between the subject matter of its members’ poetry, their use of vernacular language, and their formulation of the hafla as a truly grassroots method for communal ingathering and artistic promotion, Ars Poetica has shown itself to be founded on a sense of radical accessibility. These poets are stripping their medium of the sterile, elite connotation it has borne for many working-class Mizrahim and presented it as a reachable, usable medium for readers, thereby breaking down the barriers that kept Keissar herself from writing poems until she was in her thirties. It’s predictable, of course, that this accessibility has garnered some backlash from prominent Ashkenazim in mainstream literary institutions; critics have branded their poems as too angry, unrefined, or unsophisticated— arguably recalling decades-old biases about Mizrahi primitiveness. I think it’s safe to say that Keissar and Hasan would meet their discomfort with a scoff and a smile.

There’s also something to be said about the rise of poetry as the medium of choice for many of today’s Mizrahi writers. Prose still has its merits, of course; fictional narratives are a way of emotively articulating and preserving a fairly developed sense of what life was like for Mizrahim before 1948. It remains relevant, as demonstrated by the writer Ayelet Tsabari, for instance, in her use of short stories to create strikingly beautiful vignettes of modern Mizrahi life. But poetry, by virtue of its performability and new aura of accessibility, has demonstrated a special potential for change— not only in Ars Poetica’s move closer to the spotlight in Israel, but in its ability to effectively reaffirm the value of Mizrahiut in the eyes of an ordinary reading public.

This new wave of Mizrahi writing is turning heads toward old and new writers alike. A sweet consequence of the poets’ success today has been rising recognition of yesterday’s novelists, and that recognition is happening in contexts much more interesting than just Israeli academia. This past October, Mahmoud Abbas requested the printing of Ishaq Bar-Moshe’s novel Departing Iraq for distribution at a “conference for Arab leaders” in the West Bank, echoing the author’s hopes for cooperation and consistent interaction with Palestinian Arabs. Meanwhile, the media buzz around Ars Poetica has exposed young Mizrahim in the diaspora to the concept of cultural revival, creating real potential for us to process what we’ve been through, scrutinize where we are, and connect to where we come from.

That’s certainly what new Mizrahi poetry has done for me. I should clarify that my close family doesn’t have a history of immigration to Israel, and I will not erroneously claim to understand what it’s like to grow up in a majority-working class, Mizrahi development town. Even so, amid the difficulties of toggling between life in a huge, close-knit Persian family and finding myself lost in Ashkenazi-run, ardently Zionist institutions, I’ve noticed links between the kinds of alienation many Mizrahim feel from our cultures, whether we were raised in Israel or in the Western diaspora.

The experience of occupying any larger, Ashkenormative framework presents its commonalities: being discouraged or prohibited from speaking Farsi or Arabic as if it were a vulgarity, receiving minimal formal education in Jewish history aside from shadowy mentions of the Holocaust or sanitized tales of Israel’s establishment. From another angle, the legacy of our parents’ or grandparents’ exile from Muslim countries presents its own unique implications: a precarious relationship to the languages that came before English or Hebrew because of the political stigmas they bear, the angst or detachment that results from not being able to see your family’s country of origin because of blacklisting or hostile diplomatic relations. All of this feels disorienting, to say the least.

Written endeavors to foster Mizrahi cultural consciousness— whether academic or creative, intellectual or grassroots— have not only sought to combat this disorientation, but to engage with it on a deeper level, to wrestle with it and derive something of substance from that struggle. The Mizrahi writing with the strongest impact and the most meaningful legacy does more than shallowly advocate that we “connect to our roots;” rather, it demands that we unravel feelings of disorientation and displacement by facing our histories in full, envisioning what we want for the future, and giving ourselves a voice to communicate that effectively. This means reckoning with our relationships to Ashkenazi institutions and communities, but also to non-Jewish Middle-Eastern ones. Iraqi novelists sought to reach across the latter divide by writing in Arabic, and progressive Mizrahi writers today do the same in their advocacy for increased solidarity with oppressed populations across the region.

Engaging with Mizrahiut in a modern context also prompts us to reevaluate the idea of the “homeland.” There is discomfort in an awareness of our communities’ intense estrangement from places and worlds that were once inextricable from our existence. But out of this awareness, and out of the complex implications of exile, there is room for a new understanding of what constitutes a “homeland” for Mizrahim. Alphabets and accents, stories and poems, flavors and smells, songs and images become objects of longing often as deep as the desire for physical return to an inaccessible place. I think a lot of us quietly yearn for that feeling of home, even if we don’t always know how to articulate that or put a finger on what it is. I find it most often in the celebration of dialogue between Mizrahim, in recognizing the connections we have to the things we’ve been conditioned to forget, and in the words of writers like Roy Hasan:

“From the ruins of the language of my parents

I shall build a house for my children."

#nonfiction & opinion #sophie levy

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orbemnews · 3 years

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What is Going on with China, Cotton and All of These Clothing Brands? Last week, calls for the cancellation of H&M and other Western brands went out across Chinese social media as human rights campaigns collided with cotton sourcing and political gamesmanship. Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on and how it may affect everything from your T-shirts to your trench coats. What’s all this I’m hearing about fashion brands and China? Did someone make another dumb racist ad? No, it’s much more complicated than an offensive and obvious cultural faux pas. The issue centers on the Xinjiang region of China and allegations of forced labor in the cotton industry — allegations denied by the Chinese government. Last summer, many Western brands issued statements expressing concerns about human rights in their supply chain. Some even cut ties with the region all together. Now, months later, the chickens are coming home to roost: Chinese netizens are reacting with fury, charging the allegations are an offense to the state. Leading Chinese e-commerce platforms have kicked major international labels off their sites, and a slew of celebrities have denounced their former foreign employers. Why is this such a big deal? The issue has growing political and economic implications. On the one hand, as the pandemic continues to roil global retail, consumers have become more attuned to who makes their clothes and how they are treated, putting pressure on brands to put their values where their products are. One the other, China has become an evermore important sales hub to the fashion industry, given its scale and the fact that there is less disruption there than in other key markets, like Europe. Then, too, international politicians are getting in on the act, imposing bans and sanctions. Fashion has become a diplomatic football. This is a perfect case study of what happens when market imperatives come up against global morality. Tell me more about Xinjiang and why it is so important. Xinjiang is a region in northwest China that happens to produce about a fifth of the world’s cotton. It is home to many ethnic groups, especially the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority. Though it is officially the largest of China’s five autonomous regions, which in theory means it has more legislative self-control, the central government has been increasingly involved in the area, saying it must exert its authority because of local conflicts with the Han Chinese (the ethnic majority) who have been moving into the region. This has resulted in draconian restrictions, surveillance, criminal prosecutions and forced-labor camps. OK, and what about the Uyghurs? A predominantly Muslim Turkic group, the Uyghur population within Xinjiang numbers just over 12 million, according to official figures released by Chinese authorities. As many as one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been retrained to become model workers, obedient to the Chinese Communist Party via coercive labor programs. So this has been going on for awhile? At least since 2016. But after The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Axios and others published reports that connected Uyghurs in forced detention to the supply chains of many of the world’s best-known fashion retailers, including Adidas, Lacoste, H&M, Ralph Lauren and the PVH Corporation, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, many of those brands reassessed their relationships with Xinjiang-based cotton suppliers. In January, the Trump administration banned all imports of cotton from the region, as well as products made from the material and declared what was happening “genocide.” At the time, the Workers Rights Consortium estimated that material from Xinjiang was involved in more than 1.5 billion garments imported annually by American brands and retailers. That’s a lot! How do I know if I am wearing a garment made from Xinjiang cotton? You don’t. The supply chain is so convoluted and subcontracting so common that often it’s hard for brands themselves to know exactly where and how every component of their garments is made. So if this has been an issue for over a year, why is everyone in China freaking out now? It isn’t immediately clear. One theory is that it is because of the ramp-up in political brinkmanship between China and the West. On March 22, Britain, Canada, the European Union and the United States announced sanctions on Chinese officials in an escalating row over the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Not long after, screenshots from a statement posted in September 2020 by H&M citing “deep concerns” about reports of forced labor in Xinjiang, and confirming that the retailer had stopped buying cotton from growers in the region, began circulating on Chinese social media. The fallout was fast and furious. There were calls for a boycott, and H&M products were soon missing from China’s most popular e-commerce platforms, Alibaba Group’s Tmall and JD.com. The furor was stoked by comments on the microblogging site Sina Weibo from groups like the Communist Youth League, an influential Communist Party organization. Within hours, other big Western brands like Nike and Burberry began trending for the same reason. And it’s not just consumers who are up in arms: Influencers and celebrities have also been severing ties with the brands. Even video games are bouncing virtual “looks” created by Burberry from their platforms. Backtrack: What do influencers have to do with all this? Influencers in China wield even more power over consumer behavior than they do in the West, meaning they play a crucial role in legitimizing brands and driving sales. When Tao Liang, otherwise known as Mr. Bags, did a collaboration with Givenchy, for example, the bags sold out in 12 minutes; a necklace-bracelet set he made with Qeelin reportedly sold out in one second (there were 100 made). That’s why H&M worked with Victoria Song, Nike with Wang Yibo and Burberry with Zhou Dongyu. But Chinese influencers and celebrities are also sensitive to pleasing the central government and publicly affirming their national values, often performatively choosing their country over contracts. In 2019, for example, Yang Mi, the Chinese actress and a Versace ambassador, publicly repudiated the brand when it made the mistake of creating a T-shirt that listed Hong Kong and Macau as independent countries, seeming to dismiss the “One China” policy and the central government’s sovereignty. Not long afterward, Coach was targeted after making a similar mistake, creating a tee that named Hong Kong and Taiwan separately; Liu Wen, the Chinese supermodel, immediately distanced herself from the brand. And what’s with the video games? Tencent removed two Burberry-designed “skins” — outfits worn by video game characters that the brand had introduced with great fanfare — from its popular title Honor of Kings as a response to news that the brand had stopped buying cotton produced in the Xinjiang region. The looks had been available for less than a week. So this is hitting both fast fashion and the high end. How much of the fashion world is involved? Potentially, most of it. So far Adidas, Nike, Converse and Burberry have all been swept up in the crisis. Even before the ban, additional companies like Patagonia, PVH, Marks & Spencer and the Gap had announced that they did not source material from Xinjiang and had officially taken a stance against human rights abuses. This week, however, several brands, including VF Corp., Inditex (which owns Zara) and PVH all quietly removed their policies against forced labor from their websites. That seems squirrelly. Is this likely to escalate? Brands seem to be concerned that the answer is yes, since, apparently fearful of offending the Chinese government, some companies have proactively announced that they will continue buying cotton from Xinjiang. Hugo Boss, the German company whose suiting is a de facto uniform for the financial world, posted a statement on Weibo saying, “We will continue to purchase and support Xinjiang cotton” (even though last fall the company had announced it was no longer sourcing from the region). Muji, the Japanese brand, is also proudly touting its use of Xinjiang cotton on its Chinese websites, as is Uniqlo. Wait … I get playing possum, but why would a company publicly pledge its allegiance to Xinjiang cotton? It’s about the Benjamins, buddy. According to a report from Bain & Company released last December, China is expected to be the world’s largest luxury market by 2025. Last year it was the only part of the world to report year on year growth, with the luxury market reaching 44 billion euros ($52.2 billion). Is anyone going to come out of this well? One set of winners could be the Chinese fashion industry, which has long played second fiddle to Western brands, to the frustration of many businesses there. Shares in Chinese apparel groups and textile companies with ties to Xinjiang rallied this week as the backlash gained pace. And more than 20 Chinese brands publicly made statements touting their support for Chinese cotton. Source link Orbem News #brands #China #clothing #Cotton

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 years

Text

getting older

We share an issue of the physical heart...This is his musing on getting older.

Approaching my 75th birthday I am reminded that getting older is often regarded (even stigmatised or stereotyped) as a time of declining faculties, increasing disability, and progressive crystallisation (one might even say ‘cementing’) of existing habits and attitudes, including ‘living in the past’ and getting ‘set in one’s ways’. In As you Like It Shakespeare famously depicts the final stage in the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ as one of dotage, senility and second childishness, culminating in ‘mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’

For me, the experience of true intimacy is integral to that awakening. As the Qur’an tells us, God is ‘closer to you than your jugular vein.’ I love that affirmation because it confirms for me that aging offers a transformational opportunity to ‘come home’, to feel the Divine Presence intimately in the very core of the body. Several years ago I had a striking dream that I had descended from Mount Everest into the foothills, although I still had to descend further into the valleys and levels. The stunning 190-mile Pembrokeshire Coast Path in Wales, which I trekked at the age of 65, actually involves a total ascent of 30,000 feet, higher than Mount Everest, so the image of Everest in my dream was referring not only to the fact that it is the highest mountain but also that it was a ‘height’ that I had scaled in my walk.

I love the moment in the film Greystoke (accompanied by the noble opening theme of Elgar’s first symphony) when Tarzan returns home to the place of his ancestry, the beautiful country estate of his elderly grandfather, the Earl of Greystoke. My eyes fill with tears when Tarzan alights from his carriage and is embraced by the earl, played with great feeling by Ralph Richardson. This ‘coming home’ is deeply symbolic for me. Tarzan, lost in the jungle, comes home after years of exile from his family, culture and native land, to be welcomed with open arms by his grandfather.

[Thank you Ian Sanders]

#age #aging #Ian Sanders #Jeremy Henzell-Thomas #heart #metaphor #words and writing #reflections

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Hi. I'm the lucky person who's (hopefully) gonna have to write a term paper on the diachronic transformation of the idea and definition of the crusades through the middle ages, based on the first crusade. Do you have literature suggestions? Thanks!

Aha, okay. I’ve rummaged through some of my old bibliographies from my master’s thesis (some of which was turned into my book chapter about the crusades in the modern world; I’m willing to send you said book chapter if you want to DM me your email) and my PhD dissertation, and this is a rough list of things that might be useful to you. These all focus on the crusades after the crusades were over -- in other words, they’re not historiographies of the actual period (though some of them obviously do touch on that), but focus on their subsequent political impacts, cultural legacies, scholarly approaches, and modern-day usages. Some of them also discuss the intellectual and legal aspects of the crusades over the time period in question, and how that was perceived by medieval society, such as the Riley-Smith and Tyerman books. These are also fairly general topics. If you want, I can do a second list with the really specialist stuff, covering deeply nitpicky things like the legal evolution of the Latin term “cruce signatus” post-1187, but I’m going to guess you don’t need that at this point. (If you do, hey, hmu.)

These are almost entirely secondary sources, though there are one or two collections of printed primary sources in there, which might help if you’re focusing on the development of the crusade ideal in the Middle Ages as viewed by their contemporaries and not only modern scholarship. The material spans from the official “end” of the crusades (usually given as 1291, though arguably as late as 1456) until the modern day, and mostly deals with their political, social, and cultural ramifications in Europe, the Arab world, and America.

Tal Dingott Alkopher, 'The Social (And Religious) Meanings That Constitute War: The Crusades as Realpolitik vs. Socialpolitik,’ International Studies Quarterly 49 (2005), 725–37

Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (New York: Anchor Books, 2001)

Akil Awan and A. Warren Dockter, ‘ISIS and the Abuse of History’, History Today, 66 (2016) [http://www.historytoday.com/akil-n-awan-and-warren-dockter/isis-and-abuse-history]

David C. Barker, Jon Hurwitz, and Traci L. Nelson, ‘Of Crusades and Culture Wars: ‘Messianic’ Militarism and Political Conflict in the United States,’ Journal of Politics 70 (2008), 307–22

Jessalyn Bird, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, eds., Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

Karl Borchardt, ‘Casting Out Demons by Beelzebul: Did the Papal Preaching against the Albigensians Ruin the Crusades?’, in La Papauté et les Croisades/The Papacy and the Crusades, ed. Michel Balard (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 77–90

James Brundage, ed. and trans., The Crusades: A Documentary Survey (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962)

Carl Erdmann, The Origins of the Idea of Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)

Matthew Gabriele, ‘Debating the ‘Crusade’ in Contemporary America,’ The Mediaeval Journal 6 (2016), 73–92

Nickolas Haydock and E.L. Risden, eds., Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008)

Geraldine Heng, ‘Holy War Redux: The Crusades, Futures of the Past, and Strategic Logic in the ‘Clash’ of Religions,’ PMLA 126 (2011), 422–31

Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2007)

Adam Knobler, ‘Holy Wars, Empires, and the Portability of the Past: The Modern Uses of Medieval Crusades,’ Society for Comparative Studies of Religion and History 48 (2006), 293–325

Anouar Majid, Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2004).

Tomasz Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, The Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)

Jonathan Phillips, ‘The Call of the Crusades,' History Today 59 (2009) [http://www.historytoday.com/jonathan-phillips/call-crusades]

Emran Qureshi and Michael Sells, eds. The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)

Jonathan and Louise Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981)

Omar Sayfo, ‘From Kurdish Sultan to Pan-Arab Champion and Muslim Hero: The Evolution of the Saladin Myth in Popular Arab Culture,’ The Journal of Popular Culture 50 (2017), pp. 65–85.

Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading: 1095-1274 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)

Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusaders in the 19th And Early 20th Centuries. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000)

Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades 1099-2010 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; 1998)

Hopefully you will be able to get your hands on at least some of those, and they will be useful to you. As noted, send me a DM if you’d like a PDF copy of my book chapter (it deals with the function of crusading rhetoric in the post-9/11 world, which might be a little too chronologically late for your project, but the option is there).

Happy researching!

#history #medieval history #history of warfare #kat2107 #ask

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lupine-publishers-sjpbs · 4 years

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Lupine Publishers | The Concept of Science in Islamic Civilization the Case Psychology and Behavior Sciences

Lupine Publishers | Scholarly Journal Of Psychology And Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

Islamic civilization formed in context of behavioral changing and explaining human behavior in many medieval teachings led to emergence of behavioral science and psychology. Present study proved scientific approach of Islamic civilization to human behavioral research that it has illustrated concept of science in Islamic civilization. The capital of this change in behavior of nations is emergence of human phenomena called Prophet’s everyday life. Writing daily life has been common issue of world civilizations since ancient times. This religious phenomenon of Prophetic usage effected on attitude, hygiene which explained in various schools of religious psychology and social psychology, including Gestalt school. The writing of life style of Prophet led to establishment science in Islamic civilization entitled Knowledge of everyday life of Prophet because general phenomenon of character of Mohammad’s daily life is like a symphony that has organized behavior of Islamic societies for centuries. The subject of this science is perfect human behavior, which is intuitively understandable to human societies. And it can be considered starting point of knowledge of Islamic behaviorism in Middle Ages. Because this generality exists alongside any partial behavior of Prophet. Within framework of Aristotle’s book on the soul Philosophers produced theoretical foundations of Islamic psychology and behaviorism. Alpharabius, Avicenna on soul and its belonging to body and neuroscience of these communications and his research on human sensory perceptions and physical connection of soul and essential place of prophecy in its completion. Islamic behavioral sciences refer to initiatives of Islamic societies.

Keywords: Psychology; Avicenna; Alpharabius; Lifestyle; Soul; Prophetic usage

Historical and Theoretical Introduction

The concept of science in civilization from Greek civilization to Islamic civilization Inductive study of the teachings is Aristotle’s initiative in the history of science. The way of thinking in Islamic civilization has been formed with a tendency towards Aristotle. The concept of science in Islamic civilization is the same as the concept of science in Greek civilization. It is on this basis that Aristotle was called the first human teacher in the history of science in ancient times due to his special tendency in the inductive division of sciences and knowledge. And Aristotelian philosophy has remained an active force in the method and concept of science to this day. Alpharabius was named the second teacher of science for sharing Aristotle’s method. His classification of sciences is based on Aristotle’s Book of Soul, which is first classic book on human behavior and it is theoretical basis of behavioral science in history of science.

Psychology and behavioral sciences in Islamic civilization

Behavioral Sciences, which deals with the nature of human individual and social behavior, began with Aristotle’s book of soul and Plato’s teachings about the soul and individual and social behavior of the citizen in the city. The classical form of defining the science of behavior and its place in the history of science is the product of Islamic civilization and was presented by Farabi’s second teacher [1-5]. By combining Aristotle’s and Plato’s views on the soul, he has divided science into five categories. and fifth branch is science of behavior, which Farabi referred to as civil science. Explaining this branch of science, Farabi has spoken about the word soul, behavior, personality, society, the nature of behavior, and the end and purpose of behavior. In beginning of Islamic civilization, Razes and Avicenna wrote book in phycology with title spiritual medicine and Psychosomatics.

Following perfect man in Islam and Christianity in medieval

The most Common denominator of Islam and Christianity in medieval is the need to follow perfect man to achieve happiness. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, St. Augustine wrote a book on the city of God in the context of Plato’s philosophy of soul, criticizing the individual and social behavior of Roman societies towards the behavior of the perfect man. In middle of medieval, Farabi examined perfect and imperfect behavior of man and society. And in late Middle Ages, Averroes criticized the individual and civil behavior of man in the context of Aristotle’s philosophy. He explained science of Islamic behavior on the basis of Aristotelian rationalism. At the same time, Emperor of Germany Frederick II called on Christian, Islamic, and Jewish scholars in the Mediterranean to test the nature of the human soul on the basis of Ibn Sina’s knowledge of the soul, and to ask scientists about the nature of the human soul. What is the reason for this emperor’s scientific actions, which was his apparent behavior in clothing and food and many other customs in accordance with the culture and behavior of Muslims and had several Islamic teachers and counselors, about soul -knowledge?

Anthropology, ethnology in Islamic civilization, behavior people of capitals

One of the most important branches of behavioral science is anthropology, which has been left and produced in classical texts of the Middle Ages. An anthropological leader in the Middle Ages, he traveled to India to learn about behavior and anthropology. According to historians, science is a pioneer in behaviorism of Indian people (Sarton, In medieval literature and history there are texts that are the written legacy of Islamic civilization on the behaviors of individuals and nations. At the forefront is the travelogue of Shiite scholar [6]. He traveled to India in the tenth century to report on the behavior of the India people, An external book on the behavior of the Indian people in 1910 was translated into English by Zakhao with title: Albiruni’s India and Al-Biruni’s encyclopedic work on India [7-10]. Several Islamic travelogues have described the behavior of European peoples and societies in the Middle Ages .as Reporting and Ibn Khaldun, whom European orientalists have called him Montesquieu the Arab. he is the founder of the science of historical sociology. he has examined the socialpolitical behavior of heads of state and communities. His study is a kind of social psychology and is based on understanding human emotions .he has considered the kind of human feeling that can be studied simultaneously in the sciences of behavior, political science, ethics, and history as the driving force behind individual behaviors and community behaviors. he has written articles on sciences of soul and Islamic psychology, his theories on social dilemma and human behavioral education have been compared to those of contemporary psychologists, He has explored human thought and learned from the empirical reason for acquiring knowledge. his views of man are similar to Martin E. P. “Marty” Seligman in Positive Psychology.

Historical value and content accuracy of teachings known as Islamic medicine

Titles as Islamic medicine, health, psychology, means set of teachings that Islamic societies have prepared and attributed to some of the great men of Islam. Including Imam Sadegh’s medicine, Imam Reza’s medicine, the Prophet’s medicine, this attribution may be correct and may be rejected by experts in Islamic history and civilization, This issue is very similar in Islamic civilization and has been disputed for several centuries, and in the history of science and civilization of Christian and Jewish communities, the situation is similar. Is it possible to say that Islamic mathematics and medicine and psychology is opposite to Christian, Jewish and Jewish mathematics? Or that there is only mathematics in Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and Iranian societies.

In the present article, Islamic Health and Islamic Psychology refers to the collection of traditions and teachings and psychology courses that Islamic societies and Muslim people have researched, and the collection of innovative and physical services of Islamic societies to the history of health and behaviors sciences and psychology . And using title of Islamic behavior science and Islamic Psychology is a virtual application. As Ibn Khaldun, an expert on Islamic civilization in ninth century of AH and fourteenth century of AD, has denied existence of Islamic medicine in a critical statement. He said the prophet has no mission as health and medical orders but His mission has been to communicate jurisprudence, sharia, and the laws of religion. Therefore, reader of these studies and similar cases should always realize that he is researching in the context of historical knowledge.

Materials and Methods, Heritage Of Islamic Dating Material in Medieval

It was mentioned in introduction there is great legacy of Oriental and Western writings on behavior and character and lifestyle of Muhammad and his psychological saying , which are in Arabic, Persian, Latin, English , French , Indian , Chinese, and there are big flow of knowledge of Muhammad has become one of sources of science in world and Christian West begun extensive studies of knowledge of Muhammad five hundred years ago in eleventh century of Spain from Toledo but in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it culminated [11], Italian prince wrote a book in forty volumes that examines evidence for forty years of Prophet’s behavior, The Biography of Muhammad: the Issue of the Sources, It is noteworthy that these historical materials related to Muhammad’s lifestyle came at the time were compiled that until the fourth century AH, the world witnessed a great urban movement based on the Prophet’s behavior in the urban development of Medina. Medina is the birthplace of the most civilized people in the Islamic world who have the behavior of an Islamic human being against the behavior of an ignorant human being .And the Prophet rejected ignorant behavior and replaced it with Islamic behavior [12-16].

Result, analyzing prophet’s behavior, observation in Mohammad style life

Behavioral science and psychology in Islamic philosophy One of the sciences that emerged in Islamic civilization is the science of psychology that scientifically examines the behavior, actions, and reactions of the human soul. the volume of Islamic teachings about the human soul and its behavior is modest that the Islamic civilization then became the most productive In Psychology and Ethics and Human Behavior that heretofore have been seen in the world. In this civilization it had been created unique results such as Avicenna an unparalleled man who co-founded the topic of sensory perception, which is a common theme of the behavioral sciences and cognitive sciences , In an empirical experiment, he proved the human soul, and several centuries after that, German Emperor Frederick II posed questions to his contemporary philosophers and sought to replicate and execute Avicenna’s experiment on the soul in Sicily al-Farabi who first examined the behavior of human societies. he separated individual behavior from social behavior and divided the types of behaviors into virtual cities and non-virtual societies. he is indeed a philosopher of societal behavior, he divided societies on the basis of human behavior to Ignorant cities and misguided communities.

One of the behaviors of misguided and ignorant societies is the struggle for survival over water, food, housing, clothing, and material necessities. Farabi has returned the root of society’s behavior to the innate, inherent of human being. This theory on the behavior of societies was repeated by seven centuries later [17]. he has identified the material cause of the struggle for survival with the inherent selfishness of man [18], the historical induction into the minds of philosophers before Farabi and after Hobbes and philosophers between the two, the analysis and explanation of the behavior of societies depends on a psychological theory of human nature, and the behavior of societies is subject to the self and psyche of human individuals. Societal behavior is a function of one’s self and psyche [19].

Monopoly of writing daily life to Muhammad, prophet of Islam by orientalis

The possibility of historiography of Muhammad’s complete lifestyle is a fact in field of orientalism and many orientalist have concluded that it is only possible to trace the Prophet’s daily lifestyle because only his body and grave are known, and there is a rich legacy of teachings on his behavior, interests, and tastes about food. , Clothing, socializingetc. There studied in his book behavior of Arab in two societies with two different life styles. “Muhammad in Mecca, Muhammad in Medina” examined Muhammad’s influence on behavior of two different societies and his change in behavior and attitudes has determined them. After Qur’an, which describes behavior man’s first book that wrote was book of Prophet’s behavior. The Prophet’s behavior writing is still prevalent among Islamic and non-Islamic scholars as in her book ,those are in his book La vie in his book Muhammad, His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, and watt in Mohammad in Meca and medina, F. E. Peters,in his book The Quest for Historical Muhammad, at the top of the teachings of Mohammad is a behavioral doctrine that is the main reason for his being a prophet.

The tradition of writing the Prophet’s behavior in Islamic civilization

In medieval literature and history there are texts that are the written legacy of Islamic civilization on the behaviors of individuals and nations. At the forefront is the travelogue of Shiite scholar. he traveled to India in the tenth century to report on the behavior of the India people, Several Islamic travelogues have described the behavior of European peoples and societies in the Middle Ages. as Reporting of They talked about the difference between the morals and the behavior of the people of the capital and the behavior of the people of the cities (Ibn Jubayr, Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun, whom European orientalists have called him Montesquieu the Arab. he is the founder of the science of historical sociology.

He has examined the social-political behavior of heads of state and communities. His study is a kind of social psychology and is based on understanding human emotions .he has considered the kind of human feeling that can be studied simultaneously in the sciences of behavior, political science, ethics, and history as the driving force behind individual behaviors and community behaviors. he has written articles on sciences of soul and Islamic psychology, his theories on social dilemma and human behavioral education have been compared to those of contemporary psychologists, He has explored human thought and learned from the empirical reason for acquiring knowledge. his views of man are similar to Martin E. P. “Marty” Seligman in Positive Psychology.

Hygiene from prophet to averroes

There are in history of Islamic civilization in medieval The Prophet’s teachings on mental health and body and social behaviors culminated in five centuries by Ibn Rushd in his book in medicine “general in medicine“, (al-Koliyaat fi tab) “that is final version of Islamic medicine in medieval and and it was Ibn Rushd’s medical encyclopedia of medicine that studied in Europe until nineteenth century in Europe, which was called Colgate( Hunkke,….). It is dedicated to the evolution of the teachings of the Prophet. More than a hundred treatises on health and hygiene were written from the time of the Prophet to Ibn Rushd. These works begun with work of Prophet’s close successors such as who compiled in his book Islamic health education in the framework of the science of nutrition and medicine [20-24].

Divisions and Types of Hygiene in Prophet’s Hygiene and Health

The Prophet’s medical heritage shows that he drew the right pattern for a social and individual hygiene and person’s health behavior. The focus of his teachings is cleanliness and hygiene. In his teachings, he has introduced faith as a direct and dependent function of health and cleanliness. The Prophet’s instructions and rites in hygiene have been researched a lot so far. Among them is the book The First University and the Last Prophet in various issue of hygiene , behavior sciences , psychology in Islamic texts of medieval in forty volumes in the twentieth century, [11,25,26] The Prophet’s instructions for the protection of the body and the soul were collected after that, and so far it has been the main subject of research, and some, such as Ibn Khaldun, have looked at it critically and has discussed whether Prophet is obliged and present Shari’a and religion or whether he has issued health orders medical heritage left by the Prophet includes to heritage of body , soul, society , animals, trees, waters, clothes.

Some of these commands are as follows

a. Mental health: that the Prophet has many instructions about choosing the right color for belt shoes and all kinds of clothing. b. Hygiene of the body. c. The Prophet’s instructions on skin hygiene by choosing the right types of cotton yarn and the quality of clothing in terms of volume and materials. d. Prophet’s instructions about dairy products. e. 4-The Prophet’s instructions regarding food - in some cases, for example, he has mentioned sheep members for better quality nutrition. f. 6- The Prophet’s advice on the quality of drinking and eating etiquette. g. 7- Prophet’s instructions on walking etiquette h. 8- Prophet’s instructions about the properties of fruits i. 9- Prophet’s instructions on speaking etiquette. j. 10- Prophet’s instructions on marriage. k. 11-The instructions of the Prophet during the occurrence of diseases and epidemics such as cholera and plague

Discussion in Aristotelian Roots of Islamic Civilization in Behavioral Sciences

Islamic Paradigm of Aristotle’s Book on the Soul Aristotle is Funder of psychology by his book on the soul and many scholars introduced this book as a book on psychology but this book reached Europe through Arabic literature and Islamic and Iranian teachings, and it is an Islamic paradigm. Therefore the most important aspect of this research paper is originality of psychology in Islam civilization [27-30]. Because in appearance, main capital of Islamic civilization in production of Islamic psychology is Aristotle’s book on soul but in historical reality, Aristotle’s book on the soul has been critiqued and analyzed by Muslim scholars for about seven centuries, and new scientific perspectives on soul have been presented. After Aristotle’s book on soul, writing essays in soul based this book is one of the initiatives and achievements of behavioral sciences in Islamic civilization. Aristotle’s Treatise on the Soul was translated into Arabic in second half of the eighth century A D, A later Arabic translation of Aristotle book on soul into Arabic by Ishaq ibn made a translation into Arabic from Syriac. The Arabic versions show a complicated history of mutual influence. Avicenna and al-Farabi wrote independent writings on nature of human soul, study of soul in works of, then Ibn Rushd analyze process of soul and natural and perfect behavior of man in relation to behavior of perfect man. The Aristotelian paradigm of the soul is an Islamic paradigm that was formed by Muslims, led by Ibn Sina in the Middle Ages, and entered the field of Christian philosophy and Christian theology through Islamic theology. Encouragement of Frederick II the study of Islamic sciences including Aristotelian psychology, had been developed. This is one of obvious issues in the history of philosophy and humanity and literature of medieval [30-34].

Perfect man behavior, capital of psychology, attitude, behavior, emotion

Jesus and Muhammad are perfect man in systematic theology of Christian and Islam in medieval. Common denominator of selfstudy analyzed, explained, and accepted and understandable in psychology school of Gestalt and within framework of intuitive theories about social behavior. Our intuitive efforts to make scientific arguments about everyday life are fruitful, if intuitive understanding of behavior was validated by humans, and if intuitive theories about human behavior were not valid, our social interactions would be severely impaired.

Conclusion

The Prophet’s tradition is capital of human and social attitudes, and social psychologists consider attitude to be the symbol of three components: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral function. Attitudes help us to understand our surroundings and to express our values through function (and the function of self-defense. No on e has ever been able to find a better alternative to Muhammad’s lifestyle to determine human behavior, and all efforts have been in vain because one of essential purposes of Prophet’s behaviors and traditions is to provide a solid foundation for good human behavior. For centuries, some philosophers have tried, like, to find new ethics based on biology and other sciences.

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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‘Cancel Culture’ Is as Old as Religion, And It’s Only a Thing Because of Who’s Doing the Cancelling | Religion Dispatches

I don’t understand “cancel culture.” I mean, I understand what people mean, but I don’t quite understand why those decrying it claim that it’s something new.

I’ve often thought the term itself is born from social media which portends to inaugurate the democratization of knowledge but really functions to introduce the democratization of opinion. In some way, of course, opinion was always democratized; free speech enables me to say whatever I want (given certain caveats) but it doesn’t, nor did it ever, give me the right to say it wherever I want.

In some way, cancel culture has always existed, mostly in the hands of editors of opinion pages and letters to the editor; university committees who decide who’s invited to speak and who isn’t; people who evaluate material for publication, etc. That is, there was always a process of vetting, and that vetting was not always pure and without ulterior motives.

The lines of communication between what I happen to think and your ear have never been unmediated unless you happened to pass by my front lawn as I stood there and expounded on the ills of the world. Before this present moment, for example, would anyone think of accusing a newspaper of “cancel culture” because they rejected one’s letter to the editor (if so, I would have been the victim of cancel culture many times over).

But something has changed. Let me cite a few examples. When I was a young assistant professor at The Jewish Theological Seminary I received many invitations from Conservative synagogues to speak about my research, or on topical matters. I enjoyed such opportunities. Once I began publishing essays criticizing Israel’s occupation, the invitations stopped. Pretty abruptly. As I told a friend at the time, I could close my eyes and envision my name being summarily plucked from the Rolodexes in synagogue offices. Did that disturb me? Not really. While I certainly missed the extra income, I knew that was the price I paid for making my views public on a contentious matter. At no point did I think I was being cancelled. In fact, I was happy that at least they were reading my essays.

A second example happened more recently. I read an essay in an online journal on a topic I know something about that I felt was very problematic, not because I disagreed with the views expressed therein (although I did), but because the essay contained errors, inaccuracies, leaps of logic, and was poorly argued. I wrote to the editors of the journal to express my dissatisfaction. In response I received a very mean-spirited response from one editor accusing me of “bullying a young writer” (the editor called him “a kid”) and claiming he was just “living his truth” (he was an American who had immigrated to Israel).

First, I had assumed he was closer to my age. But if readers were meant to account for the writer’s age shouldn’t his work have been presented in a way that reflected this? Second, I had no idea, nor did I care, where he lived. And third, I didn’t quite understand being accused of “bullying” since I never wrote to the author and never made my views of the essay public. To this day, the unnamed author still has no idea how I felt about his essay. I simply wrote privately to the editors. While I wasn’t quite accused of “cancel culture,” that seemed to be the underlying message of the editor’s remarks. In this editor’s view I was, in some way, questioning, by privately discrediting, the right for this author to state his views.

Finally, when someone crosses a line on my Facebook thread I often block them. Before doing so, I write to them to tell them I’m blocking them, and that they have the right to say whatever they want in this world, but they don’t have the right to say whatever they want on my Facebook page. While my page is public, it’s still mine and I have the right to curate it as I see fit. I offer them the opportunity to apologize or retract their remarks and if they choose not to, I block them. I’ve been accused in this instance of “cancel culture”; that is, of preventing him or her from expressing their views and censoring them. The elision of whatever and wherever seems to have grown roots in our psyche.

So in these three moments—one where I’m not invited to speak at venues because of my views (perfectly legitimate), one where an editor accuses me of preventing someone from “living their truth” by privately criticizing their essay (illegitimate), and one where I am accused of ‘cancelling’ someone for saying whatever racist or misogynist nonsense on my Facebook page (necessary, in my view)—we find ourselves in a state of confusion where the right to say whatever we want has morphed into the right to say it wherever we want. Where public space and the democratization of opinion now enables us to confuse whatever and wherever.

People can be, and continue to be, excluded (cancelled) for all kinds of reasons; race, religion, creed, sexual orientation. We now have legal structures in place to try to alleviate or minimize that kind of illegitimate discrimination. We’ve decided that those criteria for exclusion are unacceptable in our society.

What it seems “cancel culture” is introducing is another layer; political or ideological discrimination. And in doing that, weaponizing something that’s existed for a long time: exclusion for other reasons. Kind of like how white people who oppose affirmative action do so because suddenly they are disadvantaged, though they had no problem for centuries when it was reversed. But is political discrimination valid? If I edit a journal and reject an essay because I find its political or ideological foundations unacceptable, is that discriminatory? Should it be? The expansion of discriminatory practice to include political or ideological differences in regard to who gets to say what, where, is perhaps the place to get a deeper sense of what’s going on.

Yes, even the Talmud

Recently, Will Berkovitz, a rabbi and CEO of Jewish Family Service in Washington State published an opinion piece arguing that, as the headline states, “The Talmud has a lesson for our cancel-culture world.” In it, he argues that the Talmud, a product of a small cadre of Jewish sages in Babylonia from the third to sixth centuries CE, can be a model for the tolerance and diversity of opinions that our present moment needs. That it can teach us a lesson about cancel culture.

Others have made similar arguments that the Talmud is a lesson in pluralism as its pages contain legal discussions that include minority and rejected opinions. In fact, one of its tractates called Ediyot (‘Testimonies’) even discusses why minority opinions remain inside as opposed to being relegated to the dustbin of history. This of course, is not unique. U.S. Supreme Court decisions contain dissenting views that are continually analyzed by legal scholars.

On the Talmud, Berkovitz concludes:

“As our ancient rabbis understood, debate—and the people who engage in it—is vital to advancing society; it doesn’t degrade it. We gain nothing by turning debates on ideas into attacks on people. Both are part of the arc of the human story, but only one will elevate our community.”

How can one argue with that?!

And yet, the example of the Talmud fails to support Berkovitz’s claim. Jews, Christians, and Muslims may have entertained a variety of opinions on matters of great urgency. But not all. In fact, maybe not even most. They had their own “cancel culture.” It’s called heresy. Heresy constructed the limits of legitimate debate. In a sense heresy constructed Orthodoxy.

So who formulated heresy? That’s a complex historical question beyond the scope of this essay. But typically it was ecclesiastical authorities, or sometimes regional leadership. And what constituted heresy? Also beyond the limits here, but suffice it to say that these were largely theological or ideological determinations that extended beyond simple “errors” of belief, but required pertinacity, which is a willful or deliberate act of deviance, even after being warned.

In Christianity it often applied to the rejection of Church doctrine or dogma, while in Judaism it often consisted of either a rejection of rabbinic authority, or its construction of monotheism or claims of the divine origin of the Torah. One guilty of any of those “fallacies” was excluded from the debate; that is, they were canceled.

While the Talmud indeed includes multiple voices, it’s the product of a fairly small and exclusive fraternity of sages, each of whom passed the requisite initiation to be included. Of course, Babylonian Jewry was much more diverse than the included views would suggest. The Talmud doesn’t include those other voices, not necessarily because they thought they were heretics, but because they weren’t part of the club and thus their views had little if any authority. If all we had was the Babylonian Talmud we’d know very little about Babylonian Jewry in this period. All we’d have is the record of a thin slice of the society in a small number of academies.

Today, Talmudic scholars are exploring the wider vistas of the context of the Talmud, not only to show how it may have been influenced by its surroundings, but also in some cases to examine those the Talmud “cancelled”; those who engaged in magic bowl incantations, perhaps Zoroastrian fire worship, and other manner of religious practices that didn’t find favor in the sages of the Talmud. Were the sages being discriminatory by excluding these people and ejecting heretics from their midst?

One could say, and many have, that heresy is an old idea that’s no longer relevant. That modernity has thankfully moved us beyond heresy toward a more pluralistic world. French sociologist Emil Durkheim didn’t think so. Author of many works, including the influential The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim held that categories like heresy do translate into secular societies. In an essay “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena,” Durkheim writes:

It is a fact that there are general beliefs of all kinds which appear to be relevant to secular objects, things like the flag, one’s country, some form of political organization, some hero, some historical event or other…They are obligatory in a certain sense, because of the very fact of their being in common…they are to some extent indistinguishable from religious beliefs proper.

Durkeim is talking about things common in a society but the same would apply if we diversify it to apply to venues, universities, churches, synagogues, and mosques, social communities, even Facebook threads. To take an example straight from Durkheim, a 2017 poll found that 60% of Americans believe that professional athletes should be required to stand during the playing of the national anthem. Groups are able to hold deep-seated convictions like this one, the rejection of which is a kind of secular heresy meaning they are excluded from their discourse. Protesting that norm is an act of “heresy” to counter a norm. If successful it can change the norm. But it can do so only by acting outside it.

This doesn’t deny that a group can hold a diversity of views on a particular issue, just as the Talmud records some of the views it ultimately rejects, but the Talmud in its diversity is also exercising cancellation (those outside the academy or those deemed to hold heretical views). Free speech enables us to say anything we want, but it doesn’t give us the right to say it anywhere we want. The Jewish heretic in late antique Babylonia could espouse any theological view he or she wanted, but if it didn’t find favor with the rabbis it wasn’t recorded in the Talmud. And thus, for all intents and purposes, it was cancelled.

Anything, but not anywhere

In light of the Harper’s Magazine letter, I find it curious that many now decrying cancel culture are the very beneficiaries of precisely that culture before it was named. That is, beneficiaries of all kinds of other people being excluded from the public sphere because of their religion, race, sexual orientation, or political views (communists, for example).

Thankfully our society is slowly rectifying those sins. But now to raise the issue of ideological discrimination as if to say, you cannot prevent me from saying that I want to say in your newspaper, or at your university, in your church, or even on your Facebook page, seems like protesting too much. That kind of freedom was never given, nor should it be foisted on, any community, publication, or platform.

In addition, the “cancel culture” police seem to be playing both sides of the wager. That is, they decry being “cancelled” but maintain their state of privilege and thus use their “cancellation” as proof they’re saying something important.

That’s because, ironically, the mere fact that they can say they’re being cancelled means, in part, that they’re not. They just take the position of privileged opposition and wear it as a badge of honor. If they were really cancelled, we wouldn’t hear their voices at all.

If you want to see real “cancel culture,” look at the myriad women, Black, gay, and other writers who lived their life in obscurity because they couldn’t get published and thus had no voice. For every Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, or Toni Morrison there are hundreds, maybe thousands, whose names we will never know.

In a free society, I may have to tolerate your views, but I’m under no obligation to publicize them, nor to let them pass without criticism. My right to criticize you publicly is no less important than your right to pontificate publicly. As Durkheim said, secular societies and subgroups, like religious ones, get to choose what is sacred and what is heretical. The former is included, the latter excluded. There may be no better example of that very limited diversity, and equally strong exercise of exclusion, than the Talmud.

Shaul Magid is a Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and Contributing Editor to Tablet magazine. His forthcoming book Meir Kahane: An American Jewish Radical will be published by Princeton University Press.

This content was originally published here.

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objects-of-desire-astrolabe · 4 years

Text

#7 Research Proposal

Objects of Desire Research Proposal

My object of desire is the Replica Islamic Astrolabe, accession number: DUROM.2017.323

Initial Description of Object

It is a replica Astrolabe created by ‘Hemisferium’, a specialist manufacturer in antique scientific instruments. It is based on an original piece by Diya’al Din Muhammad, who was part of a predominant family of astronomical instrument makers from Lahore.[1] The original piece was created in Lahore, Pakistan in 1647 whilst the replica was made in Madrid, Spain around 2016/17. The replica astrolabe is 180 mm (height) X 6mm (depth) X 120mm (width).

The astrolabe is an astronomical instrument made from cast metal which was originally used to measure angles, the altitude from the horizon to the celestial space, and for navigation purposes by helping to identify constellations to determine your location and the direction you were heading. Although, some Astrolabe specialists argue it has hundreds of uses.

Context

This concept was integrated into the Islamic faith when they inherited texts and technology from the Greeks, as they were going to be destroyed by the Christians who saw the technology as heathen. The navigational concept of astrolabes was adopted into the Islamic faith to help Muslims find the Qibla, the direction of Mecca, especially whilst they were travelling.

This piece isn’t simply a scientific instrument, but also a masterpiece of art and design with intricate carvings on the ‘rete’, the decorative netting overlay, which is designed with Arabic and Latin script and numbers which encapsulates the Greek and Islamic cultures its evolved from.

Rationale for Choice

I wanted to choose an object which stood out to me, or ‘spoke’ to me in a way. I have always had a fascination with celestial space – galaxies, nebulas, the solar system. One of my Art & Design A Level projects centred on this topic and I have always been curious of how outer space has been used for scientific purposes through the decades and in different cultures. As an English Literature student, I have not had the opportunity to learn about such scientific objects and their historical importance, and I thought this project would be a great opportunity to explore that intrigue. Equally, the Islamic culture and region of the Islamic Republic, where the original Astrolabe originates from, is an area I have not investigated in great depth and I feel this project will help open up a dominate area of worldly culture which is missing from my knowledge.

Contact with the Oriental Museum & Review of Existing Information:

I contacted Gillian Ramsay following our trip to the Oriental museum as she was the curator who originally purchased the replica astrolabe for the collection. We met in mid November and she was very helpful in sharing her knowledge of the object and subject area. She provided me with the museum’s material on the specific object which consisted of the dimensions, a brief description of the piece, details of its production, and materials used and how much it cost. As it is a replica it does not have a large paper trail of former owners or donors, but I believe it provides a unique opportunity to explore how and why it has remained an ‘object of desire’ for so many centuries and why are replicas still being produced.

The lack of direct material on the object I feel opens up a world of opportunity to explore the development of the astrolabe from its original concept in the Greek world and then to its use in the Islamic world. I also feel there is a great area for exploration amongst the original craftsman, Diya’al Din Muhammad, and his family and the seminal pieces they created that are still being replicated.

Research Questions:

I feel a central debate for my project is whether a replica can still hold the same value as an object of desire compared to an original piece?

Equally, whether the astrolabe has lost value when it is now being mostly used as an aesthetic piece rather than one of a functional purpose as a scientific instrument?

Questions surrounding the Astrolabe as a reference piece into the ancient Greek world, where it was first created, and whether it can shine light on to this culture and the importance they place on exploring the universe?

Exploration into how the Islamic culture utilised scientific objects to support their religion when Christian based religions rejected them.

Questions surrounding the evolution of pieces due to transferring cultures could be posed. The astrolabe was originally a scientific instrument developed by the Greeks and was adopted by the Islamic world who expanded its potential use through further scientific research. I feel it would be insightful to explore into this adoption of objects into other cultures and what implications does this have for the development of the object and the cultures?

Reflective Analysis

I think the first natural obstacle is that it is a replica, not an original piece. This means it does not have a personal story attached to it or a donor. I hope to counter this issue by contacting the replica manufacturer ‘Hemisferium’ to understand why they feel there is a demand for replicas of these pieces and to explore the questions of replica vs original and whether they hold equal value.

I hope to also explore the original manufacturing company from Lahore to see where the original piece is located and if it had an intended owner. Equally if the manufactures have any personal anecdotes and explore what their production line meant to their family as it remained as a generational business.

It is an intricate piece of science and I feel the first hurdle will be understanding how it works. I hope to consult scientific material and the Astrolabe specialist at the Oxford museum to understand how it actually functions.

Although, there is not a great deal of information on my specific item, there is an abundance of material on Astrolabes in general which makes the topic quite broad. I will tackle this challenge by being highly selective of what is explicitly relevant to my object of desire and the questions I want to answer, as outlined above.

Literature Review

Durham’s physical library came up short but their ‘discover’ link to online documents was highly fruitful.

- I have explored the general descriptions of Astrolabes and their evolution and purpose from: The Oxford History of Science Museum, The British Museum, The University of Hawaii’s, Institute for Astronomy, and the Smithsonian magazine, Oxford Art online.

Constanze Hampp & Stephan Schwan (2015) The Role of Authentic Objects in Museums of the History of Science and Technology: Findings from a visitor study, International Journal of Science Education, Part B, 5:2, 161-181.

Eagleton, C. (2019). What Were Portable Astronomical Instruments Used for in Late-Medieval England, and How Much Were They Actually Carried Around? In J. Nall, L. Taub, & F. Willmoth (Eds.), The Whipple Museum of the History of Science: Objects and Investigations, to Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of R. S. Whipple's Gift to the University of Cambridge (pp. 33-54). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108633628.003 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/whipple-museum-of-the-history-of-science/72EAE4248EBCB8CA20DFFA3D1264557D

F., J. The Astrolabes of the World: based upon the Series of Instruments in the Lewis Evans Collection in the Old Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, with Notes on Astrolabes in the Collections of the British Museum, Science Museum, Sir J Findlay, Mr S V Hoffman, the Mensing Collection, and in other Public and Private Collections . Nature 131 https://www.nature.com/articles/131819a0#citeas

Falk, Seb. “Sacred Astronomy? Beyond the Stars on a Whipple Astrolabe.” The Whipple Museum of the History of Science: Objects and Investigations, to Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of R. S. Whipple's Gift to the University of Cambridge, edited by Joshua Nall et al., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019, pp. 11–32.

Hoskin, Michael, ‘Astronomy in the Middle Ages’, The History of Astronomy: A Very short introduction, Oxford University Press, 2003. https://www.veryshortintroductions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780192803061.001.0001/actrade-9780192803061-chapter-3

Huggins, M. L., ‘The astrolabe. II. History’, Popular Astronomy, Vol. 2, pp.261-266 http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1895PA......2..261H/0000261.000.html

Jeffs, P. Science in culture: A culture of knowledge. Nature 439, 536 (2006) https://www-nature-com.ezphost.dur.ac.uk/articles/439536b

Latham, Marcia. “The Astrolabe.” The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 24, no. 4, 1917, pp. 162–168. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2973089.

M.R. Brett‐Crowther (2010) ‘Science & Islam: A History’, International Journal of Environmental Studies, 67:1, 111-114. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00207230903208407

Rodríguez-Arribas, Josefina, ‘Astrolabes in Medieval Encounters’, Medieval Encounters, September 2017, Vol.23(1-5) https://brill.com/view/journals/me/23/1-5/article-p1_1.xml?lang=en

Safiai, Mohd Hafiz, ‘Astrolabe As Portal To The Universe, Inventions Across Civilizations’, International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (IJCIET), Volume 8, Issue 11, November 2017, pp. 609–619 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3f06/c9eab107851daaef4f5ac6c371c807fe94b4.pdf

Sarma, Sreeramula Rajeswara, “The Lahore Family Of Astrolabists And Their Ouvrage.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 55, 1994, pp. 287–302., www.jstor.org/stable/44143367. (To investigation into the original designer, Diya’al Din Muhammad, and his family is essential as they highly regarded astrolabe makers.)

Vafea, Flora. "From the Celestial Globe to the Astrolabe Transferring Celestial Motion onto the Plane of the Astrolabe". Medieval Encounters 23.1-5: 124-148. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12342245

Ward, Rachel, “The Inscription on the Astrolabe by ʿAbd Al-Karim in the British Museum.” Muqarnas, vol. 21, 2004 - (To analyse how Astrolabes are depicted and investigated)

Further Sources:

Gillian Ramsay alerted me to the Oxford History of Science Museum collection. On investigation I found they have the ‘world’s largest collection of astrolabes’ and another astrolabe by Diya’al Din Muhammad. I also discovered that there is an incredible colossal astrolabe in the Albukhary Gallery in the British Museum. I have consulted both of their collections and online material, and I will be in contact with their curators for more in-depth questions I have on the topic such as: Why the curators feel such objects hold importance in the education of Islam and scientific development.

I also hope to visit both collections in Epiphany term if possible so I can compare their specific details to my Astrolabe as the designs, notably on the rete, are typically different on each which provides a personal and beautiful aesthetic quality to the object.

11/12/2019

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