The sociocultural evolution of jurisprudence: Purification and maintenance of clothing in medieval Islam – Pollution with no danger

Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World JAMES E. LINDSAY, 2005 Westport, CN/London: Greenwood xxii + 299 pp., ill., maps US$51.95/£35.95 (hardback) ISBN 13: 9780313322709 US$14.95/£10.95 (paperbac...

From the time of its birth in Mecca in the 7th century C.E., Islam and the Islamic world rapidly expanded outward, extending to Spain and West Africa in the west, and to Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent in the east. An examination of the daily life in these Islamic regions provides insight into a civilized, powerful, and economically stable culture, where large metropolitan centers such as Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo thrived in many areas, including intellectual and scientific inquiry. In contrast with medieval Europe, there is little common knowledge in the West of the culture and history of this vibrant world, as different from our own in terms of the political, religious, and social values it possessed, as it is similar in terms of the underlying human situation that supports such values. This book provides an intimate look into the daily life of the medieval Islamic world, and is thus an invaluable resource for students and general readers alike interested in understanding this world, so different, and yet so connected, to our own. Chapters include discussions of: the major themes of medieval Islamic history; Arabia, the world of Islamic origins; warfare and politics; the major cities of Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo; religious rituals and worship; and a section on curious and entertaining information. Author James E. Lindsay further provides a focused look at the daily lives of urban Muslims during this time period, and of their interactions with Jews, Christians and other Muslims. Timelines, tables (including a calendar conversion to align the Islamic lunar and the Christian solar dates, and a dynastic table highlighting the major genealogies of the ancient ruling families), a bibliography, and a glossary of important dates and technical terms are also provided to assist the reader.

Reconstructing the Social History of Rabbinic Ideas David M. Freidenreich Marina Rustow. Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate. Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. xxxv + 435. Uriel I. Simonsohn. A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews under Early Islam. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 306. How should Historians study the social context and the social impact of rabbinic ideas? This question poses a serious challenge precisely because rabbinic literature itself is so often aspirational rather than descriptive. The challenge is especially acute for those who seek not merely to trace the social history of rabbinic Jews but more specifically the social history of rabbinic ideas. Many scholars, including the present writer, seek to avoid this dilemma entirely by studying rabbinic literature with an eye toward intellectual history, tracing the evolution of rabbinic thought without making any claims about the relationship between elite exhortations and the Jewish masses. This simple solution, however, comes at the price of dismissing important aspects of Jewish history as unknowable. Marina Rustow and Uriel I. Simonsohn, in contrast, confront head on the complex challenges of writing social history about two fundamental rabbinic ideas, namely the notion that Qaraites 1are heretics and the principle that Jews should not take recourse to gentile courts. Their recent books make significant contributions to our understanding of relations [End Page 581]between Rabbanites and non-Rabbanites in the medieval Islamic world. This essay focuses particular attention on their equally valuable contributions to the field of rabbinic historiography, namely, their distinct yet complementary approaches to contextualizing rabbinic thought. Heresy and the Politics of Communitythoroughly disproves the once-prevalent presumption among historians of Rabbanite Judaism that the anti-Qaraite polemics of Sa‘adya Gaon effectively severed ties between Rabbanites and Qaraites, rendering the latter a marginalized, heretical sect. Rustow accomplishes this task by marginalizing the polemical literature of the Rabbanites, once central to historiography of Rabbanite-Qaraite relations, in favor of documentation from the Cairo Geniza. The questions Rustow poses to these documents are no less influential in shaping her revisionist history: they orient her work toward social dynamics instead of the issues of orthodoxy and orthopraxy that animate polemical literature. “Rather than asking only what those accused of heresy believed that made them vulnerable to the charge, I have asked here about the causes and consequences of the accusations—if there were any consequences at all” (p. xviii). Many of Rustow’s questions are profoundly political: who stood to gain from accusations of heresy, what power did Rabbanites have to make those accusations stick, and what power did Qaraites have to thwart such efforts? Rustow finds evidence in the Geniza for only four instances in which Rabbanites in the Fatimid empire purportedly accused Qaraites of heresy during the eleventh century. In each case, the accusers sought political objectives unrelated to Qaraite doctrines. The failure of these accusations to affect Rabbanite-Qaraite relations, Rustow demonstrates, reflects the degree to which Qaraites played key roles in Jewish communal politics, including those of Rabbanite institutions. “The history of heresy,” Rustow concludes, “encompasses not merely the ideas or practices ascribed to heretics, but the set of human circumstances that cause the label to be attached to them” (p. 348). Rustow’s rich depictions of Rabbanite-Qaraite relations, woven from various genres of textual evidence and enlivened with especially effective case studies, demonstrate that even Rabbanite officials did not act on the anti-Qaraite polemic of such figures as Sa‘adya. Rustow documents the heavy reliance of geonim and other officials of the Rabbanite yeshivahs on Qaraite merchants and courtiers in their efforts to obtain, preserve, and extend their authority. She highlights wedding contracts drawn up in Rabbanite courts that preserve the rights of Qaraite spouses to follow their own ancestral customs, and she draws particular attention to Rabbanite use of Qaraite ketubba formularies as exemplary of Rabbanite [End Page 582]respect for Qaraite norms. In one of her many case studies, Rustow shows how a Rabbanite from Toledo sought to help landsmen who had converted to...

Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World traces the history of musk from ancient Asia to the early medieval Islamic world and examines the important role musk played in perfumery and medicine in this new context.

The period spanning from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, often referred to as the Islamic Golden Age, was marked by significant advancements in human knowledge attributed to Muslim scholars. The influence of this era is still evident today through various aspects of our daily lives, including the numeral system we use, terms such as algebra, algorithm, and almanac, as well as the nomenclature of celestial bodies. Unfortunately, much of this historical significance remains overlooked, as contemporary views of the Islamic world have largely diminished appreciation for its rich intellectual heritage. In contrast, this article aims to present an alternative viewpoint that diverges from the narratives commonly portrayed in 24-hour news cycles and online platforms. It is crucial to acknowledge the enduring legacy of Muslim contributions to intellectual progress, which have been recognized within Western society.

Background & Objectives Anthropologist describe Asylum in various societies across space and time. My approach to evaluate Asylum in the medieval Islamic World takes advantage of this “universalim of protection”. The proposed presentation will take its starting point with an evaluation of protection in late antiquity and the period of the Early Middle Ages to discuss the preconditions of the cultural and religious encounter during Islamization in these areas. Moving onwards to the period of Islamic expansion and finally to the imperial period of the Caliphates, the problem of protection for refugees is related to political power and the acceptance of authority, to the role and function of various institutions and processes of institutionalization, to coexisting spaces, competing values and norms, and to a variety of legal exemplifications accompanied by a spectrum of local traditions and life habits, and finally to histories of single actors, whether mediators, refugees or persecutors. The presentation will outline the variety of forms of protection for refugees in the medieval Islamic world with a special focus on the medieval Gulf region and Northern Africa. Methodology Comparative research on Protection for refugees carries the risk of a monolithic understanding of “religion” and “culture”, the essentialistic description of separate cultural spheres and the improvident use of western concepts for labeling “the other”. My reseach takes as its starting point the understanding of an entangled history. Asylum is a problam on a “global” scale; thus it is always related to aspects of cultural transfer and exchange of ideas. Refugees are people “on the move”. In fact, refugees covered far distances to reach a safe place, carrying with them not only their material goods but also their traditions, experience, ideas and knowledge. The main methodological focus is therefore anchored within transcultural history but combines a macro- and micro-historical approach. Methodologically I follow Natalie Zemon Davis in connecting research on Alltagsgeschichte with the use of relevant theoretical modells which seems to be especially fruitful for the study of transcultural dynamics (Zemon Davis 1975), learn from the anthropological “thick description” (Geertz 2007) and Carlo Ginzburg's famous approach on Alltagsgeschichte (1979), that is a precise description of daily life cases. Conclusions Asylum is a seismograph how societies deal with conflicts, violence and deviance. Asylum has the potential to transform physical violence into communication and mediation. It indicates processes of transgression and demarcation, adoption and rejection as well as the various ways in-between. Preassumably Asylum mirrors the chances and conflicts of entangled societies. To study Asylum in the medieval world means: to focus on the actors who are involved in conflicts. It means to concentrate on “daily life cases” of refugees, criminals and on different perception of their deeds and on the other hand to contribute to a history of conflicts and conflict solutions, mediation, on the role of protected spaces. Finally: A study on Asylum sheds light not only on dynamics of transcultural interaction but Asylum itself is a catalyst of dynamical processes in entangled societies.

This collection of papers, presented at a Princeton University conference heldin May 2008, opens with an extensive bibliography of Abraham L. Udovitch’sworks and a preface detailing his scholarship on the medieval Islamic world’seconomic institutions, social structure, legal theory, and practices. The prefacealso highlights Udovitch’s role and scholarly contributions, prolific publicationsand international academic collaboration, his respect for interdisciplinaryexamination and combination of various methods, as well as the diversity ofhis intellectual pursuits and teachings. The editors praise his visionary approachof focusing on seemingly unconnected texts to uncover the past, suchas combining normative legal texts with narratives from diverse sources andgenres. His students, as demonstrated in this volume, have adopted these methods.Udovitch’s role in changing the writing of medieval Islamic history islauded, as is his encouragement to explore new techniques and methodologiesas well as his attention to the human experience within history.Mark Cohen, whose introduction examines Udovitch’s many roles (viz.,scholar, leading historian, activist, and teacher) provides a biography focusedon the professor’s life and projects. The nine essays, loosely grouped into fourunmarked categories, discuss the main areas of Udovitch’s interests: (1) “EconomicHistory” highlights the intersections between the legal theory of commerceand the commercial practices of institutions. It includes contributionsby Petra Sijpesteijn and Michael Bonner; (2) “Social History” relates economicand social actions, underlines their thematic and methodological commonalities,and comprises essays by Adam Sabra and Jonathan Berkey; (3)“Mediterranean and Indian Ocean” deals with “Middle Eastern History in itsGeographic contexts” and coalesces around what has been termed Udovitch’s“Mediterraneanist” concerns, namely, interdenominational relations and negotiationsbridging the gap between “rigid principles and supple accommodation.”This includes contributions by Olivia Remie Constable, YossefRapaport, and Hassan Khalilieh; and (4) “Urbanism,” the study of cities assites of economic exchanges and interactions between individuals and groups,combining legal, political, ideological, and intellectual dimensions to formthe realities of daily life. This includes two contributions by Boaz Shoshanand Roxani Margariti ...

Contents: N. Noddings, Foreword. Preface. B.C. Rubin, J.M. Giarelli, Introduction: Civics and Citizenship in Students' Daily Lives: Toward a Sociocultural Understanding of Civic Knowledge and Engagement. Part I: Rethinking Civics and Citizenship in a Diverse Democracy. M.S. Crocco, Reimagining Citizenship Education: Gender, Sexuality, and the Social Studies. B. Chi, T. Howeth, Service-Learning as a Strategy to Promote Citizenship Education and Civic Engagement in an Urban Elementary Charter School. C.L. Hahn, Gender and Civic Education in the United States. Part II: Rethinking Civics and Citizenship in a Global Context. W.K. Richardson, J. Torney-Purta, Connections Between Concepts of Democracy, Citizen Engagement, and Schooling for 14-Year-Olds Across Countries. W. Cahill, A Primer on Democracy and Education in the Era of Globalization. E. Davis, Global Citizenship: Theoretical and Pedagogical Perspectives. Part III: New Approaches to Civic Research and Practice. J.R. Hibbing, A. Rosenthal, Teaching Democracy Appreciation. J. Westheimer, J. Kahne, The Limits of Efficacy: Educating Citizens for a Democratic Society. B.C. Rubin, Civics and Citizenship in Kids' Daily Lives: Broadening Approaches to Civic Learning, Knowledge, and Engagement. Part IV: Civic Education in a Changing World. H. Giroux, Public Time Versus Emergency Time After September 11th: Democracy, Schooling, and the Culture of Fear. B. Justice, Looking Back to See Ahead: Some Thoughts on the History of Civic Education in the United States.

The article discusses the results of a technical study of a collection of medieval sword and dagger pommels owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with particular focus given to the probable use of the lost-wax technique to create them and the conclusion that they were most likely created in Europe due to the presence of Champleve enameling. A brief overview of medieval metalwork is presented, and the pommels and their creation are described in detail. The association of the pommels with the crusades is also commented on.

Civics and citizenship in students’ daily lives: Towards a sociocultural understanding of civic knowledge and engagement

Objective: The aim of the present study was to compare the effects of different ways of responding to thoughts about body image after exposure to images of the sociocultural ideal body type. Method: One hundred nineteen women with high and low body dissatisfaction were randomly assigned to rumination, acceptance, and control conditions which gave them instructions on how to handle thoughts they had in response to viewing images of the sociocultural ideal body type. Participants completed questionnaires assessing body image, mood, and self-esteem before and after the experimental manipulation. They also participated in word recall and word recognition tasks in order to assess memory bias to shape and appearance words as well as a taste test to evaluate differences in food intake. Results: Rumination increased negative mood in participants with high body dissatisfaction. Training in acceptance had beneficial effects on body image, mood, and self-esteem in comparison to the rumination and control conditions among participants with high body dissatisfaction. As expected, the experimental condition did not affect individuals with low body dissatisfaction. Rumination and acceptance did not affect memory biases toward shape and appearance words or the amount of food consumed during the taste test. Conclusion: These findings suggested that training in acceptance helps protect body image, mood, and self-esteem in women with high body dissatisfaction in response to a body image stressor they experience frequently in their daily lives. These results suggest that acceptance-based treatments for body image might facilitate improvements in body image, mood, and self-esteem in this population.%%%%

Together with capitalism’s transformation from a production-based structure to a consumption-based structure, as a result of the social and cultural developments in the 1970s, the themes of reproduction, performance and entertainment also entered into circulation in the social field. As part of the basic existential activity in the cultural field, performance has an ideological function, especially in the semantic area created by mass media. While daily life has been planned according to capitalist motives in consumer society with the support of the neoliberal market economy, the type of human that is required for the system’s continuation is produced within the knowledge of expertise television provides. Food culture has also changed its shape and diverged from the ways it used to meet the physiological needs required for humans’ survival in consumer society; the gastronomic culture structured according to the requirements of the postmodern world has turned food culture into a functional tool for mainting the daily life of the postmodern world. The field of gastronomy is sometimes presented in this social and cultural structure through television shows as part of show business under the themes of performance and entertainment, or as a new and lucrative income channel in the neoliberal market economy. Reality game shows, as a program format that has entered into circulation in the international arena in particular, have an ideological function in this sense. While these programs, on the one hand, allow daily lives to be organized and a new type of person to be constructed within the consumption economy, functioning at the global level, these programs on the other hand circulate an eclectic, postmodern gastronomic culture. This study, has formed a purposeful sample by taking into consideration the sub-types of reality programs within national television channels, and examines the relations the programs identified in this way have with consumer society as well as the ideological function of these programs’ performances using a field-theory framework.

This thesis seeks to explore the spatial politics of home in Irish playwright Brian Friel’s plays: Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966). I would like to draw upon the theory of social construction of scale, feminist geography on home and other relevant theorizations on home, such as the unhomely, or uncanny, in order to explore the contested relationships between home and Irish women after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Set in Ballybeg, Friel’s favorite but fictitious setting in County Donegal of the north-western Ireland, Dancing at Lughnasa portrays the political, economic and socio-cultural predicaments of five sisters, further uncovering and destabilizing the normative imaginary of Irish women, home and nation-building in the 1930s. The Loves of Cass McGuire delineates the return of an Irish diasporic woman, Cass, from New York, and her incompatibility with the Irish middle-class home, represented by her brother Harry and his household in the 1960s. Many of Friel’s plays are primarily set within the domestic places of home, including kitchen, living room, breakfast room, study, garden, and so forth in plays such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Living Quarters (1977), Aristocrats (1979), Translations (1980), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) and The Home Place (2005). However, the home delineated by Friel is far from a private, intimate place for rest and recuperation; rather, it is always a problematic and contested place for the characters, who, either live in it or only come to visit, have to struggle with the normative social roles and ideologies embodied in the home of the past or the present. In other words, home depicted by Friel in his plays is never merely a setting or background in which the actions of the plays take place; instead, Friel’s plays implicitly reveal that home is not only a material house but also a social sphere constituted by multifarious, and even contradictory, social processes and relations within specifically historical and geographical contexts. More often than not, the homes in Friel’s plays are either broken or on the verge of breakdown, for they are always already permeated by the political, economic, and socio-cultural transformations beyond the scale of home, despite the desperate endeavors by some characters to create or maintain a bounded, stable home. In this thesis I will argue that The Loves of Cass McGuire and Dancing at Lughnasa represent the gendered politics of home in the newly established Ireland after political de-colonization. Moreover, they both stage the contested struggles with the normative gendered mechanism imposed on Irish women’s mobility, identity, gender and sexuality within the scale of home. The social imaginary of an Irish homely home, with its material embodiments respectively in the 1930s and 1960s, is mutually constituted with the gendered identities and relations of the household. Home in both plays means differently for different characters either within the scale of home or in the process of diaspora. Home is a site of feminized domesticity, national order, Catholic virtue and Gaelic traditions, but it is also a conflicting site of power struggles and identity contestation, especially for certain defiant women characters. On the other hand, for those eagerly to sustain a homely home in the normative vision, they also suffer the unhomely, or uncanny, sentiment, as they are compelled to recognize the recurrence of the once familiar but concealed existences and facts, embodied by certain household members, in their daily life. Furthermore, they are also pressed to confront the reality that their supposedly private home is always an open, public place perpetually reconfigured by myriad social processes and relations beyond the scale of home. In the process of representing the domestic sphere of home in both plays, Friel not only delineates the various aspects of home constituted by diverse structural forces in different contexts, but also addresses to the conflictory and fluid meanings and feelings of home for varied subjects in their individual struggles to create a place that can be called home for themselves; namely, a sense of belongingness to a certain place. Accordingly, the home depicted in Friel’s plays is always an open, intersecting sphere constituted by perpetual processes of flux of socio-spatial dynamics at multiple scales.

Past research has indicated that teachers' attitudes, teaching-efficacy and concerns have a direct impact on their competence in the classroom and in students' achievements. Studies have identified that pre-service teacher education is the most appropriate time to prepare teachers with positive attitudes and high teaching-efficacy about inclusive education (IE). This research project aimed to understand pre-service teachers’ preparedness for IE in Bangladesh through exploring their attitudes towards, teaching-efficacy for and concerns about IE. The study was conducted in two phases. In Phase 1, a survey and semi-structured interview schedules were employed. A three-part survey questionnaire was used with 1,623 pre-service teachers that included a questionnaire for demographic information, the Sentiments, Attitudes, Concerns regarding IE (SACIE) scale for measuring attitudes and concerns and the Teacher Efficacy for Inclusive Practices (TEIP) scale for measuring teaching-efficacy of pre-service teachers. By applying a multiple regression analysis, it was found that variables such as length of training, gender, interaction with persons with disabilities, knowledge about local legislation and level of training involved had significant relationships with participants’ attitudes, teaching-efficacy and concerns. In addition, pre-service teachers’ teaching-efficacy was found to be positively correlated to their attitudes and negatively correlated with their concerns about IE. In Phase 1 of the study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 institutional heads (IHs) of higher education, pre-service teacher education institutions to explore their beliefs and opinions about IE. Thematic analysis of the interviews indicated that some IHs conceptualised IE using a ‘medical-model’ of diagnosis and normative development and believed that IE was not suitable for children with a severe disability. Challenges were identified under four themes: attitudinal beliefs, academic challenges, challenges in practicum and challenges for beginning teachers. Interviewees further identified some useful strategies to address those challenges such as curriculum reform, emphasising more practicum opportunities than theories, human resource development, resource support and more empowerment of IHs to implement inclusion. The Phase 1 survey findings of the study indicated that the relationships of three variables, i.e. level of training involved, gender and length of training, with participants’ attitudes and teaching-efficacy were in sharp contrast to previous research. For example, Bangladeshi secondary level, pre-service teachers showed more positive attitudes and higher teaching-efficacy than their primary level counterparts: Bangladeshi pre-service teachers enrolled in a 1-year program showed higher teaching-efficacy than those who were in a 4-year program. Also, female pre-service teachers in Bangladesh had more positive attitudes but lower teaching-efficacy than their male counterparts. In order to further understand those inconsistent results, the Phase 2 study was designed, employing semi-structured interviews with 6 IHs. Thematic analysis of the interviews done in Phase 2 indicated that possible reasons behind the findings that appear to be in sharp contrast with those from previous international research. The differences in these findings are possibly explained by a number of curriculum, teacher-related and contextual variables. Based on the findings of the two phases of this study, a number of recommendations are made for policy makers, teacher educators and others engaged in inclusive education reform. The study investigated how socio-cultural contexts may have impacted background variables to predict pre-service teachers’ preparedness for IE. Several curriculum reform issues were identified: one significant finding was that it was the quality of the teacher education program that contributed to teacher preparedness for IE, rather than the length of the program. The study draws attention to the need for further research to investigate socio-cultural influences on variables such as gender and grade level of teaching to understand pre-service teachers’ preparedness for IE. Further research could explore the longitudinal effects of pre-service teachers’ readiness for IE through observing their classroom practices as regular teachers. In addition, further analysis could validate the scales employed in this study for the Bangladesh context.

Several works of literature contributed to the web evaluation process in recent years to promote digital inclusion by addressing several accessibility guidelines, methods, processes, and techniques. Researchers have investigated how the web evaluation process could be facilitated by including accessibility issues to obtain an inclusive and accessible solution to improve the user experience and increase user satisfaction. Three systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have been conducted in the context of past research, considering such research focuses. This paper presents a new SLR approach concerning accessibility in the web evaluation process, considering the period from 2010 to 2021. The review of 92 primary studies showed the contribution of publications on different phases of the web evaluation process mainly by highlighting the significant studies in the framework design and testing process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study focused on the web accessibility literature reporting the engineering assets for evaluation of new accessible and inclusive web-based solutions (e.g., websites). Besides, in this study, we aim to provide a new direction to the web designers and developers with an updated view of process, methods, techniques, tools, and other crucial aspects to contribute to the accessible process enrichment, as well as depict the gaps and challenges that may be worthy to be investigated in the future. The findings of this SLR introduce a new dimension in web accessibility research on determining and mitigating the research gap of web accessibility issues for web designers, developers, and other practitioners.