The Role of Language in the Constitution of a Community and Its Limits (XIII–XIV Centuries)

In the late 1930s, Kemalist Turkey exploited anxiety over the growth of fascism in Europe to coerce France into ceding the Sanjak (district) of Alexandretta,1 a tiny piece of territory it held under mandatory control in the northwestern corner of Syria. Various historians have dutifully chronicled the story of Ankara's irredentism and Paris' appeasement, detailing the sundry diplomatic ploys, subterfuges and deceptions each employed in an attempt to legitimize an illegitimate act.2 Virtually all commentators have vilified (correctly, I may add) the cession of the Sanjak as an unconscionable and an illegal deal struck between two governments who showed little concern for the integrity of international law or the wishes of the local residents. At the same time, though, these historians base their analyses of the Sanjak affair upon a subtle but powerful perception of the paramount role of ethnicity in Middle Eastern politics. For most, Alexandretta is a code word for Arab-Turk animosity. Because of its collage of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities, the 'inevitability'3 of conflict there is assumed without question. As a result, historians present the Franco-Turco-Syrian struggle of the late 1930s as a large-scale version of the domestic conflict understood to have plagued the Sanjak for decades. A thoughtful inquiry into the pre-1936 history of that region reveals the error of that assumption. High diplomacy comprises only half the history of Alexandretta during the 1920s and 1930s, the far less significant and explosive half. Inside the Sanjak, more than 200,000 people, representing at least 21 linguistic and religious communities, participated in a novel and successful experiment at communal compromise and co-operation. For 15 years, from 1921 to 1936, 'traditional rivals' like Turks and Armenians fashioned a thriving and workable relationship within an artificial administrative framework thrust upon them by foreign powers. The essential feature of this relationship, it will be argued, was the trade-off between the maintenance of traditional political power in exchange for across-the-board economic prosperity. Residents of the Sanjak created patterns of economic interdependence that simply would not function in an atmosphere of widespread ethnic hatred and mistrust. Years seemed to pass so uneventfully in this period that Arnold Toynbee could assert that 'the Sanjak had been happy in having scarcely any history.'4 During those years, of course, the Sanjak did have a history, a history marked by the evolutionary disintegration of the inter-ethnic coalition. But even then, the coalition did not fracture along ethnic lines but along economic divisions within ethnic groups. Prosperity fostered the growth of new classes of financially secure artisans and modern-educated youth dissatisifed with the apportionment of political power. At first, the established

Until recently, the religious and socio-cultural experiences and expressions of new African immigrants in the United States seem to have drawn media gaze rather than the attention of migration and diaspora scholars. Besides few works, such as by Paul Stoller, Rogaia Abusharaf, and JoAnn D'Alisera, the burgeoning literature on contemporary immigrant religions in the United States largely undermines the rich dynamic of African immigrant religiosity that contributes to the diversification of American religio-cultural mosaic. As editor Jacob K. Olupona reiterates, “It has frequently been assumed, at least in the literature, if not in the subconscious of Euro-Americans, that, since the ‘cessation’ of slavery in America, there has been no African immigration to the United States” (27). The conference from which these book chapters were drawn marked the apogee of a Ford Foundation funded project “African Immigrant Religious Communities: Identity Formation in America's Pluralistic Society” anchored by Jacob Olupona to explore the scope, nature, and significance of African religious communities within the context of the American religious scene and cultural pluralism. It was aimed at “determining the multifaceted nature of the interrelationships among religion, immigration, and social integration as experienced by African people; identifying the resources and expertise available to African immigrant religious communities; engaging in critical discourse on the construction of cultural meaning and identity formation among new African religious and ethnic immigrant communities; and contributing important theoretical and conceptual perspectives to the emerging field of religious pluralism and the dynamics of the immigration process” (27).

Although recent research reveals a rise in emerging adults who report no affiliation with a specific religious tradition, religious communities still remain important to many emerging adults. This chapter examines trends in emerging adults’ involvement with both formal religious congregations and informal religious communities, and discusses how these communities are an important resource for some in making meaning, discovering a sense of purpose, and identity exploration. Attention will be given to how identity formation and religious development occur within these congregations and communities, while positing that religious congregations and communities are complex ecological systems that provide opportunities for meaning-making through various ideological, social, and transcendent contexts.

Section 5.1 argues that religious traditions are best understood as fallible inhabited experiments and embodied hypotheses. The social and existential security religious communities’ promise is only ever provisional, but they offer a wealth of resources for pursuing further avenues of inquiry within their boundaries and a rich store of semiotic resources for deeply engaging the world. Section 5.2 addresses the efficiency of inquiry and expands upon Peirce ’s treatment of sentiment, commonsense, and instinct. The argument is applicable both to religious and non-religious communities but is particularly relevant when inquiry involves matters of vital importance. Section 5.3 examines religious communities of inquiry, especially enduring, traditional, large-scale religious communities. Venerable religious traditions of inquiry are best understood as deeply invested experimental explorations of the value of engaging the world with a suite of culturally mediated habits and signs. These traditions cultivate and conserve a variety of vague signs, rituals, myths, and habits for engaging the world. The vagueness of the signs, it argues, enables relatively rich inquiry and flexible engagement within a multitude of contexts. Section 5.4 argues that religious traditions also become venerable through developing interpretive habits and signs that encourage correction and reform through disciplines of self-control.

This article proceeds from a critical reading of the role of religion for nation-building in India. In particular, the authors discuss how the Indian notion of secularism relies upon a number of religious legacies manifest in a Gandhian notion of what constitutes religious and political communities. Proceeding from this general picture, the authors examine how Hindu nationalists have used such legacies to enforce exclusionary practices by establishing certain hegemonic structures of rigid religious boundaries and practices with the aim of maintaining antagonistic movements within the Hindu fold. This, the authors argue, has been the case both among Hindu nationalists in India and among the widespread diaspora in Europe, Canada and the United States. Here, the authors critically evaluate a number of attempts to challenge these hegemonic structures in terms of secular and religious forces as well in terms of legalistic understandings of citizenship rights. It is argued that religion can and has played a positive role in Indian nation-building, but that Hindu nationalism has continuously reproduced exclusionary practices against other religious communities and worked against any forms of assimilatory processes.

Research background: the concept of “identity” is defined as a property of the human psyche to express in a concentrated form how one perceives his/her affiliation to various social, economic, national, professional, linguistic, political, religious, racial and other groups or other communities, or a person’s acceptance of the properties inherent in these groups or communities. The life-purpose identity is a fundamental parameter for defining one’s place in life, one’s value orientations and, above all, for affiliating oneself with the major social values of the modern society. Purpose of the research: theoretical justification, experimental representation and technological support of the process of life-purpose identity formation in adolescent and junior age. Methods: theoretical analysis and study of psychological literature on the problem under discussion, which included generalisation, comparison and systematisation of the obtained data. Empirical data collecting methods (testing). Methods of mathematical statistics (λ-Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Student t-test, Pearson linear correlation r-coefficient), Leontyev’s life-purpose orientation test, Karpov’s methods for determining the individual measure of reflexivity, Stolin’s and Pantileev’s self-attitude method, Sharov’s ontology of personal myth of life. Results and novelty: the article makes an attempt to delineate the problem-plagued field of one’s life-purpose identity; gives a representation of diagnostic results, substantiates and develops the technological support for the formation of life-purpose identity in adolescent and junior age. The technology of commemorative practices is used as a framework (reading of authentic texts; practice of commemorative speeches; family saga; legendisation of hero’s image; “School is my home”; “Time machine”; “Memory dialogue”; “Planets of childhood”; background commemorative practices; calendar-specific commemorative practices and others).

Though considerable progress has been made toward a human rights regime to protect ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities, it only scratches the surface of challenges relating to diversity and inclusion for these minority groups. This is apparent from populist pushback against the human rights agenda, especially as hysteria rises in the public sphere over questions of identity. This chapter presents an overview of progress recognizing and empowering minority communities and argues that further advancement must focus on more than solely rights and protections. It necessitates reframing discourse to account for communities far from sites of power that face histories of oppression and exclusion. The chapter validates diversity as a historical facet, and yet charts the historical destruction of such diversity. It argues that re-visioning is imperative to redressing deep-seated structural discrimination, which can fuel conflict and underdevelopment in society.

The South African Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities is one of the key institutions established by the Constitution of the country to strengthen its constitutional democracy. The Commission conducted investigations and released a report in 2017 related to suspicions that there are abuses of beliefs taking place in religious communities. The report was subjected to a number of challenges from academia, especially with regards to the constitutionality of some of the findings and recommendations of the Commission. In this article, it is argued that one of the contributing factors to the main shortcomings of the report emanates from a lack of nuance in the approach of the Commission. Considering the complex nature of religious beliefs, it is argued that the investigations by the CRL Rights Commission would have offered an opportunity for better conversation if the Commission had taken a human rights approach. In the main it is argued that a clear differentiation between the right to freedom of religion which vests on individuals, and the right of freedom of religious practice which vests on individuals in their capacity as members of religious communities, would have created a discourse that would better grapple with the complexity of ensuring maximum freedom of religion while creating safety for communal interests beyond specific beliefs.

The question of how to manage diverse religious communities within a single political community for social peace is a recurring one. If one accepts that religious differences are permanent features of societies, and could not and should not be eliminated by force (expulsion or genocide) or overcome by coercion (forced conversion), formulating systems of governance to manage different religious communities within the nation-state becomes imperative. Historically, several systems of religious governance of multicultural polities have been practiced. The Ottoman millet system is one such system, whereby recognized religious communities were granted jurisdictional autonomy over a limited area of personal law. The millet system is still practiced in some form in certain former Ottoman territories. In contrast, within the Anglo-European context, secular governance (either in emphasizing separation or in emphasizing even-handedness among different religious groups) became the dominant approach to address religious difference. Secular governance posits that peaceful coexistence could be established if states develop a unified form of political authority that was differentiated and furthermore neutral as among rival religious communities. In this chapter, I argue that the primary organizing factor in the state’s structure of governance of religious communities is whether they are regarded as private or public subjects of regulation. The consideration of whether religious communities are conceptualized as private actors or public actors is integral for the purposes of organizing structural approaches to the regulation of religious communities in multicultural polities. This itself reflects whether the state conceptualizes society as being a community of individuals or of ‘nations’. Where religious communities are private actors, they are treated like associations and their members interact with the state primarily as individuals. Where religious communities are treated as public actors, the communal aspect of those communities tends to be emphasized, often over the individual interests within the community. Consequently, the primary regulatory approach towards private religion tends to be one of self-regulation, in addition to general statutory regulation. In comparison, where religious communities are treated as public actors, the state relies on a broader range of regulatory approaches, namely religion-specific statutory regulation, co-regulation, in addition to self-regulation. This article therefore examines the particular challenge of multicultural polities, introduces the modes and dimensions of regulation, dominant approaches to regulating religious communities as public or private subjects, and lastly, the ideological postures that determines the regulatory reach of the state.

Rosa Yasin Hasan's novel Guardians of the Air (2009) offers a glimpse into Syrian society prior to the revolution and civil war that devastated the country for over a decade. The novel's central character, Anat, works as a translator at the Canadian embassy in Damascus, allowing her to navigate the interfaith divisions among different religious communities. Acknowledging literature's distinctive ability to mirror reality (Orlando 2007), this article employs a social psychology lens to analyse the novel. Through this perspective, the social and psychological dynamics among the characters are explored. The story revolves around characters who confront the challenges of a tightly compartmentalised society, resembling that of Syria under the Asad regime, where crossing the borders between religious and ethnic communities can be perilous.

This article examines the protective measures and rites of blessing that residents of Diégo Suarez use to keep their babies safe from harm and incorporate them into their respective religious and ethnic communities. I argue that new mothers, and their ‘water babies,’ are ‘acquiring bones’ (establishing themselves within the community) in ways that challenge the widely held perception that Malagasy practices around ancestors are primarily remembrance-oriented. By shifting our gaze away from death, and towards the family-specific ancestral practices around pregnancy and birth, we see that the process of ‘acquiring bones’ is as aspirational as it is retrospective. Moreover, securing one’s worth in society is not exclusively tied to adulthood activities or paternal ancestral lineages; instead it is a flexible process that begins in childhood when parents first instill in their children a sense of what it means to be a member of a particular family or religious community.

Abraham Kuyper and the right to self-determination of peoples Sphere sovereignty as a principle that regulates the mutual relationships among different social institutions originated from the philosophy of John Althusius, and this idea is found again in one form or another in the theories of various German political and legal philosophers. However, the descriptive name of this principle derives from the Dutch politician, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, who under the influence of Julius Stahl, confined the principle to church-state relationships. The special contribution of Abraham Kuyper was to extend sphere sovereignty to relationships among other social institutions. However, Kuyper did not distinguish precisely between the kinds of “circles” which in principle qualify for sphere sovereignty, and in the process he also included social communities among those with sphere sovereignty. An accurate distinction among social institutions that do qualify for sphere sovereignty and (unstructured) social communities that do not, derived from the philosophy of the cosmonomic idea of Herman Dooyeweerd. Kuyper’s perception of sphere sovereignty of social communities does correspond with the right to self-determination of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities as currently defined in international law. This right, however, does not include the right to secession from an existing state, but affords to the communities concerned the right to promote their culture, to testify to and practise their religion and to speak and apply their language without state interference.

The decision of the South African Constitutional Court in Shilubana and Others v Nwamitwa ([2008] ZACC 9 (CC), the Shilubana case) appears to herald a more sympathetic understanding of customary law, but it also reveals the fact that customary law applies exclusively to the black community in South Africa while other racial communities are imagined and protected in terms of the rights in sections 30 and 31 of the Final Constitution (FC). This paper contends that this distinction is not only wrong but of no significant difference. It is further contended that protection of all racial communities should proceed on the basis of sections 30 and 31 of the FC because the framework of these two sections appears better suited for the protection of all communities if South African courts show a more sympathetic understanding of communal norms and institutions. This comment argues that the Shilubana case is a tentative but welcome example of this trend. In the case the CC upheld a decision of the Valoyi Tribe to appoint a woman as a traditional leader. This was a development of its customary law of traditional succession that had hitherto operated on the basis of male primogeniture. In recognizing a gender neutral traditional leadership institution, the Court demonstrated that institutions established by communal norms can exist and function on the basis of equality and other rights which are the hallmarks of a liberal constitution.With reference to that decision this comment undertakes an overview of group rights in the FC. It considers the exclusive association of customary law with the ‘black’ community and questions whether this association has enhanced the group rights of the black community. It assesses the interpretation of the rights of members of cultural, linguistic and religious communities under sections 30 and 31 of the FC as interpreted in the Shilubana case and other cases to ascertain how far they advance group rights. It concludes by urging a unified interpretation of ‘communities’ and a more beneficial interpretation of ‘group rights’ that recognizes that all racial groups have their own customary laws and deserve a more sensitive recognition of their communal norms.

Conference proceedings often do not lend themselves to effective publications, but the fruit of this 2003 conference on The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on Religious, Ethnic and Cultural Diaspora Communities in the West, held in Gothenburg, Sweden, is an exception. The nine articles and preface by the editor provide a significant contribution to the rapidly growing field of studies of religion on the Internet. Acknowledging the need to collect more empirical data on Internet use patterns, Larsson notes that research needs to be conducted both online and offline (p. 9). The case studies here cover a variety of local contexts in Denmark, Egypt, Great Britain, North Africa, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Sociologist Lorne L. Dawson provides a methodological discussion on the appropriateness of labeling online social networks as ‘communities’ in the Gemeinschaft sense first proposed by Ferdinand Toennies in the 19th century. Noting that the term ‘community’ has been applied loosely to all kinds of networking groups on the Internet, Dawson argues that the definitional confusion be mitigated with ‘a plausible set of variable features of online interaction to provide us with empirical evidence of the relative presence of communal life’ (p. 43). The author’s list of eight insights drawn from recent Internet research in the field of Sociology is a valuable contribution. For example, he observes: ‘For individuals, life online must be placed in the context of life offline. Life online is largely in continuity with life offline and must be examined with that relationship in mind. Life online may have distinct features and possibilities, but its meaning is always influenced by the broader life experiences of users’ (p. 33). This is an important methodological consideration in light of earlier flirtation of some enthusiasts with the notion of humans becoming cyborgs. Morten Thomsen Hojsgaard suggests a model for studying the Internet arena of circulation of interfaith dialogue online. He Cont Islam (2009) 3:197–199 DOI 10.1007/s11562-008-0058-7

Kazakhstan's Experience in the Enhancement of the Intercultural Dialogue in a Multicultural Society