The South of the Hometown and the Problem of Immigration

This paper delves into the role that theologians and philosophers of the late Middle Ages (13th–14th centuries) attribute to language in shaping religious, social, and political communities. Beginning with the religious community, I highlight the sacrament’s function as a cohesive force and underscore the significance of linguistic knowledge in disseminating the Christian message. Subsequently, I explore texts of political philosophy where established languages contribute to social cohesion and the formation of communal identity within linguistic and ethnic communities. Lastly, I explore how language, in the commentaries on Nicomachean Ethics, while facilitating education and persuasion, falls short in fostering political stability and order, revealing its limitations in constructing and maintaining a political community.

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 research aims to reveal and provide an interpretation of the results of research on the inculcation of the value of religious moderation by the Miftahul Qulub Islamic boarding school in multi-ethnic and religious communities. This research method uses a qualitative approach because the data produced is in the form of words, while the type of research is a case study because it wants to reveal the process of instilling the value of religious moderation by Islamic boarding schools in the formation of an inclusive, friendly community that is able to live side by side with ethnic and religious differences. Data were obtained through observation, interviews, and the study of documents related to the research theme. The research data were then analyzed through an interactive analysis model, namely through data collection, data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The results of the study show that the process of cultivating religious moderation values carried out by Islamic boarding schools in their efforts to form a multi-ethnic and religious society that is harmonious, friendly, tolerant, and coexisting in differences in both ethnicity and religious belief is through a habituation process, an integration process, a reflective process, and the process of transinternalization and social assimilation based on social community and socio-religious in the village of Polagan Galis Pemakasan.

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.

This article applies collective trauma theory to biblical interpretation in order to respond to a 21st-century humanitarian crisis. Utilizing recent advances in social-scientific theory, the article examines how the books of Judges and the Acts of the Apostles can function in distinct and complementary fashions as “collective trauma narratives.” Judges 19-21 is interpreted as narrating the Levite’s “polarizing” trauma narrative and subverting it with a reconciling narrative. Acts 6-8 and 12 are also examined as trauma narratives speaking to the loss of early Christian leaders, promoting a vision of forgiveness and hope of divine justice. The article applies trauma theory to biblical interpretation for the purpose of addressing the armed conflict in Colombia. We propose that the theological visions of the trauma narratives of Judges and Acts (regarding forgiveness, resistance, flight, and reconciliation) are poignant for Colombian religious communities seeking peace and healing in the wake of violence and displacement.

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

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).

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

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

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.

For a clear and precise discussion of the current social and economic situation of Lebanese Christians, it is essential to remember what a ‘religious community’ in Lebanon is and what its specific characteristics are.The religious communities in Lebanon are social groups originally linked by the same faith and the same religious rites. These communities, which have formed during the course of history, have their own religious apparatus which is structured in various ways and is different from one community to another. They have different roles, apart from the strictly religious one: they often control the communities’ school networks and their universities. They also have partial control over the numerous com¬ munity associations, social or charity work, healthcare networks, cultural groups, youth clubs and movements, as well as associations with purely religious purposes. Most of the communities possess property/funds which represent sources of income for their apparatus and their institutions.

Throughout modern history, much of Indian society was and remains staunchly patriarchal—a society in which men control access to power, property, and resources. Coming of age in India, most cisgender men grow up being told that they are stronger, more capable, and more powerful than women and minority genders. Aside from some regional variations in descent and residence patterns, most Indian societies are also patrilineal and patrilocal. Family and kinship play a crucial role in shaping the lives and life choices of most Indians. While daughters are expected to leave behind their natal homes to join their affinal kin and become part of their in-laws’ household after marriage, in most Indian families, sons inherit family property and assets almost exclusively. Women are further disempowered in workplace and in public, where they confront persistent sexism, misogyny, discrimination, harassment, and gendered violence. Patriarchy remains enshrined within the very fabric of social life in India, empowering men economically, politically, and socially. Indian manhood is defined through this assumed and often unquestioned supremacy of men over women and minority genders. Yet the power and privileged status that Indian men enjoy accompanies with it a whole set of responsibilities and limitations. Patriarchy restricts their gender identity, expressions, and desires. Despite being in positions of power, Indian men have a lot less control over whom they can love or marry, what kinds of families they are allowed to have, and the kind of educational and professional opportunities they are allowed to pursue. Their choices are limited by their parents, their extended families, and their caste and ethnic communities. In this way, Indian society can be characterized as “Macholand,” as a society defined by male supremacy and patriarchy in which men relish in the privileges that accompany being a man while simultaneously resenting the limitations that patriarchal family structures place upon their individual aspirations and personal lives. Indian men’s lives and the very definition of masculinity and sexuality in India are constituted through endogamous marriage, heteronormative family, and patriarchal kinship. Irrespective of the various coming-of-age ceremonies and initiation rituals boys undergo as they transition into manhood within different ethnic and religious communities across India, marriage and fatherhood remain the two most important rites that all men must undertake to become men. This article surveys the current body of scholarship exploring regional variations and nuances in how masculinities are developed, embodied, and performed in different regions of India, among different caste and ethnic communities, and within the Indian diaspora. Also included are accounts of men who challenge hegemonic or dominant constructions of Indian masculinities by refusing heteronormative marriage and refashioning family and kinship through queer frameworks of belonging.

This research aims to measure and analyze intercultural dimensions in the context of creating effective relationships among religious communities and to formulate effective strategies and approaches to mitigate potential conflicts and create harmonious relationships amidst a society with diverse cultures and religions. This research was conducted in the city of Mataram. This research uses a qualitative approach with a phenomenological method to collect data from various religious and cultural groups in different areas of Mataram. The research instruments include in-depth interviews and non-participatory observations; this step was chosen because issues of ethnicity, religion, race, and inter-group relations (SARA) are sensitive topics to discuss. The data collected was then analyzed using a qualitative approach such as content analysis to identify patterns of relationships between religious and cultural groups. The research results show several factors influencing interactions between religious communities, namely the level of education, knowledge about the cultures and religions of each group, and intensive communication. Additionally, it was found that an effective form of interaction is one filled with open dialogue between groups and individual openness to differences in each intercultural interaction session. The findings of this research can serve as a basis for developing policies that support cultural and religious diversity in society and promote understanding and cooperation among religious groups to achieve more harmonious relationships.

Reviewed by: Situating the Bosnian Paradigm: The Bosnian Experience of Multicultural Relations Adnan Aslan Situating the Bosnian Paradigm: The Bosnian Experience of Multicultural Relations. By Nevad Kahteran. New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008. Pp. xxxiv + 195. Situating the Bosnian Paradigm: The Bosnian Experience of Multicultural Relations, by Nevad Kahteran and introduced by Enes Karic, prefaced by Adnan Aslan, and with afterword by Oliver Leaman, consists of several collections of essays written on different occasions. Its central theme is the relevance of perennial philosophy to the Bosnian problem. Late twentieth-century Bosnia witnessed the failure of modern [End Page 125] humanistic philosophy as it appeared in the arena of international relations and has been practiced by the countries of the West, in which sense it could be said that Bosnia has been a minor testing ground for the global world system. In this book, Nevad Kahteran offers a plausible solution to the problem of ethnic-religious violence through the multicultural and multireligious vision of traditional thinkers such as René Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Such a brave attempt in itself deserves our appreciation. But the success of this attempt based on its acceptance by the adherents of other parties or religions is another issue. Since in essence modernity is something alien to the religious worldview, I agree with the author that issues like pluralism, tolerance, and multi-ethnic and multi-religious coexistence cannot be fully resolved within the framework of modern concepts. As the author realizes, this problem can only be overcome through a metaphysical perspective that is able to transform ethnic and religious diversity into meaningful coexistence. Historically, Islam was able to achieve this, and the Ottoman millet system was one example of the application of such metaphysical principles. In today’s modern world, perennial philosophy no doubt offers a metaphysical perspective of this kind. But can this philosophy actually be given serious consideration? There are certainly many reasons it cannot. To begin with, the traditional perspective appears awkward to modern humanity, to the extent that perennial philosophy, in essence, presupposes the negation of modernity. Second, such a metaphysics is deeply rooted in Islamic metaphysics, something neither the modern world nor the ethnic and religious communities involved in such problems are as yet ready to appreciate. Third, speaking and writing about philosophical principles is one thing, while applying these principles to the circumstances of a particular community is another. Solving a social problem through the implementation of metaphysical principles assumes power. Lamentably, however, the current Western powerhouses are far from attaining a sufficient understanding of the significance of applying such metaphysical principles, let alone capable of applying them. Thus, hypothetically, only Islam as an international power is able to make use of such metaphysical principles for the solution of social problems; however, this does not appear to be on the horizon for the foreseeable future. As for the Bosnian situation, one might say that since it was the Western powers that allowed the country to be dismembered along religious and ethnic lines in the first place, only another outside global power could unite Bosnia and integrate her ethnic and religious communities. Another possibility would be that if the traditional approach were to become state policy—if, for instance, the Bosnian state were to be reestablished with all her institutions formed according to the main paradigm of perennial philosophy—then one might be able to speak of meaningful ethnic and religious coexistence. But this could only be achieved provided that other ethnic and religious communities also give their approval to the perennial approach. Another important point emphasized in this book is that this particular traditional perspective is ample enough to embrace the Western, Eastern, and Islamic philosophical traditions—though convincing everyone of this capability, as far as I can see, is easier said than done. Kahteran believes that through the traditional perspective [End Page 126] one can easily put Descartes, Mullah Sadra, the Buddha, and Confucius in the same box. In principle, I do not want to deny such a possibility. Yet one cannot help but think that if it were possible to integrate all these worldviews into one perspective, this would also have to be agreed upon by...