Act Of Adultery Research Articles

Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges (review)

Reviewed by Kaveh Hemmat Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges edited by Nahla Abdoand Shahrzad Mojab. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2004, 261 pp., $15.00 paper. Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges is the result of a symposium of scholars and other professionals that met in Istanbul in 2003 to discuss the phenomenon of honor-related violence in Muslim communities, mainly focusing on western and northern Europe and Turkey. The introduction sets up the framework of theoretical positions and questions informing the symposium. The articles range from those offering theoretical and analytical approaches to more descriptive [End Page 216] case studies of honor crimes, as well as assessments of government policies, the effects of war and occupation (specifically on Palestinian women), and intervention programs for women threatened with such violence. Taken together, the contributions to this volume provide a broad overview of honor-related violence, incorporating many different perspectives but do not explore any one local or theoretical perspective in great detail. They provide a variety of voices and perspectives that agree on the broad outlines of the phenomenon of honor-related violence and its significance but also seem to diverge at certain points. Many of the questions that are raised are left without answers—even tentative ones—that one would expect to find in a monograph with similar aims. Readers are left to draw their own conclusions from the rich details and insights provided by the contributors. The introduction identifies honor-related violence as part of a larger phenomenon, namely, gendered or patriarchal violence, which is a global phenomenon, and its occurrence in Middle-Eastern and South-Asian communities is not exceptional. One of the major concerns of the authors is that honor-related violence is often given legal sanction (such as lighter sentences or even complete leniency) not only in states where it is a native phenomenon but also in European countries whose constitutions, and public opinion, generally repudiate sexism. However, while it is clear that similar notions of gender inform and encourage such violence wherever it occurs, and while parallels exist even in the legal sphere between the treatment of honor crimes (the subject of this volume) and crimes of passion (such as the murder of a spouse caught in the act of adultery), there are also great differences. The most notable of these is that honor crimes are not only highly premeditated (which, the notion of crimes of passion notwithstanding, is also often the case in the murder of a spouse) but also highly cooperative—they are perpetrated by one or more family members (rather than by a current or former partner acting alone), often after considerable consultation and planning by many members of the family. In spite of the evidence of premeditation, their perpetrators have taken advantage of lighter sentences given in some legal systems to those who commit crimes of passion. The very interesting question of the extent to which communal honor-related violence and individual domestic violence such as occurs in Europe and the United States are indeed similar phenomena is not thoroughly or systematically answered; however, there are a number of valuable insights and details, which together provide a useful point of departure. Other chapters discuss the role of culture in perpetuating and encouraging honor-related violence. The introduction takes the stand that such violence must not be considered an especially Islamic cultural or religious phenomenon, even though Islamic cultural norms are invoked in its defense. However, it emphasizes that the role of religion and culture [End Page 217] cannot be discounted in any consideration of honor-related violence. In this regard, one of the later chapters discusses the notion of patriarchy as a global phenomenon and identifies it as being at work in all gendered violence. It is also suggested that the differences in or greater importance of family relationships in societies where these coordinated honor killings occur account for the more communal, coordinated nature of this violence, as...

Gen 24:14 and Marital Law in 4Q271 3: Exegetical Aspects and Implications

The regulations concerning matrimony and divorce at Qumran have been the subject of much scholarly debate. In a recent study of 4Q271 3, A. Shemesh has argued that the Qumran community viewed the marital bond in ontological terms; hence, sexual congress alone suffices in effecting marriage, a position also attested in rabbinic literature and, possibly, New Testament sources.) On this view, so it is argued, the sect interpreted the anomalous passage at Deut 22:13-21,2 which prescribes execution for a newly-wed wife found to have engaged in pre-marital sex, as reflecting the fact that the maiden's present marriage is, by definition, an act of adultery toward her previous

La procreazione assistita nelle società islamiche: bioetica, diritto, costume e religione

L’assenza di un’autorità giuridico-religiosa suprema e di un magistero sono i principali fattori della quantità di interpretazioni e opinioni differenti presenti sui temi bioetici nel mondo musulmano.
 Uno dei temi apparentemente meno contrastati è quello della procreazione medica assistita in cui prevale, tra i giurisperiti islamici aggiornati sul tema, una sostanziale tolleranza verso le tecniche omologhe e un rifiuto di quelle eterologhe equiparate ad un atto di fornicazione-adulterio vietato dalla Shari’a. Anche l’adozione legale rimane vietata. Le legislazioni degli Stati contemporanei rispettano queste due impostazioni di fondo, entrambe derivate dal diritto di famiglia di impronta sharaitica. Vengono analizzate numerose fatwa di autorità religiose sul tema della procreazione assistita evidenziandone le convergenze e le divergenze. Una riflessione a parte è dedicata alle riflessioni di alcuni giurisperiti shi’iti che appaiono più originali sull’argomento.
 In generale si evidenzia che, in un dibattito molto ricco, cominciano a emergere opinioni favorevoli persino verso alcuni aspetti delle pratiche eterologhe. Il caso egiziano è emblematico per analizzare la mentalità della popolazione nel valutare le nuove tecniche procreative occidentali, una mentalità che incide fortemente sulla disponibilità (o meno) ad un loro utilizzo.

Dissenting from Reality: The Denials of Evil

Dissenting from Reality:The Denials of Evil John F. Owens S.M. (bio) I How is it possible to perform an action that rebels against the very order by which anything exists at all, including actions? Admittedly, no action can rebel against the whole of such an order at once because this would remove the possibility of its existing at all, as Aquinas and Augustine point out.1 It remains a mystery however, that it can rebel against any of it. Puzzling though it is, this view of the morally evil action—that it is a kind of rebellion against reality itself—dominated the old Western tradition. Paradoxically, it made evil into a bigger affair than if the concept filled a more normal ontological category. This starkly contrasts with the view articulated in a work of the Japanese novelist Endo that compares pantheist Japan to the "swamp" that absorbs everything,2 meaning that good and evil are seen as growing up alongside one another, each having its place within a larger context. Life produces evil as well as good, and we must learn to live with the one as with the other. One of Endo's characters says (concerning an act of adultery), "There was some regret, some uneasiness, some self-contempt; but as soon as I [End Page 133] was sure that no one had ferreted out my secret, all this soon went away."3 Evil is no large mystery here. The Western tradition, by contrast, thought it was mysterious indeed, requiring nothing short of divine intervention, if we were to get over it. One of the main problems of the Western notion of evil is the question of how evil is possible at all. Reality is convertible with good, as the scholastics said,4 so that evil actions subscribe in their own way to the same order that good actions do, moved by a hope of advantage and acknowledging the created natures of things if they are to be real and effective. When Aquinas asks whether good is ultimately responsible for evil actions, he answers in the affirmative, at least in as much as such actions are actions, and part of the natural economy on which all actions rely if they are to exist at all.5 In this article, I will try to examine what the Western notion of evil implies for the desire and knowledge of the agent who does evil. I will conclude that the negative quality of evil finds its way into the action itself, so that an evil action is not only aimed at a deficiency, but is itself deficient as an action—a bizarre combination of willing and not-willing and of knowing and not-knowing. The Greeks, famously, thought that this was more or less explained once an evil action was seen as a mistake. The deed falls short of its intent, so that we finish with an outcome we did not really want or know about. Augustine realized that there is more to it than this. The incident of the pear orchard described in the Confessions suggests the evil of the action is precisely part of its attraction, known and willed in a shadowy kind of way—something that is not true of a mistake. The theological tradition related this to the notion of creation, with its sense of a necessary order that is nonetheless contingent and that therefore opens up a possibility of fundamental rebellion. The tradition view was that the first sin—that of the angels—was fundamentally a rebellion against created status. Augustine says something like this about his part in the theft in the pear orchid, seeing himself as seeking to rise above the status of a creature [End Page 134] and take on "a dim resemblance to omnipotence" in doing what was not allowed.6 The notion of a rebellion against the very order that makes it possible to achieve anything at all (even rebellion), points to strategies of some complexity. Evildoers need to outwit original healthy instincts that take them toward the good and the true and that are a condition of any human action. As we will see, an evil action is no...

Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics

Readings of Zora Neale Hurston's on the Suwanee (1948) have often focused on the text's racial and gender problems, either critiquing the text's failure to measure up to the racial consciousness and feminism evident in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) or reversing this critique by claiming that Seraph's power lies in its heavily coded championing of its protagonist, Arvay Meserve. [1] Janet St. Clair observes that Seraph on the Suwanee has been virtually ignored by all but authors of full-length studies of Hurston, and even they generally scurry across its surface in consternation (39). Among the critics' anxieties are the fact that Arvay is not a feminist heroine (or even likable), the text's complicated and problematic treatment of rape, Hurston's conscious prioritization of white characters, and the oftentimes stagnant narrative which accompanies Arvay's psychic turmoil. While this tendency on the part of critics has very recently been reversed, [2] I would suggest that Seraph's racial and gender problematics can open up the text to further critical assessment and cultural critique. Critics have long been aware of the non-conformity of Hurston as both an author and a public persona during the Harlem Renaissance. [3] Does it come as any surprise that on the Suwanee throws a wrench into the works? If messes up or, say, whitewashes what might otherwise be a rather clean record for Hurston's writing of complex, black folk characters, then perhaps it is with the notions of and wash that we should approach not only Hurston's most problematic fiction, but also her other writings. Scholars familiar with Hurston's writing know that representations of washing and cleanliness recur in her work, perhaps most significantly in Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), the brilliant (1933), and Sweat (1926). I will not offer a full analysis of these texts here, but instead mention them to establish a comparative element that can be traced throughout Hurston's writing. Jonah's Gourd Vine, for instance, begins with the image of washing on a large scale, and suggests its double meaning as it relates to domestic work and spiritual purging: 'Ole Massa gwinter scrub floors tuhday,' remarks Amy Crittenden, as she spies rain clouds and senses an impending storm (3). This observation is followed by the argument between Amy and her husband Ned, which leads to the casting out of Amy's first-born (bastard) mulatto son John (Buddy Crittenden) Pearson, around whom the novel revolves. Hurston spins a narrative of John's personal, spiritual purity (both marital and sexual) and leads us through the wa y in which John's community first welcomes, then rejects, and finally re-integrates him. Just before John's much noted (spiritually cleansing) sermon in Chapter 24, rot and purgation find poignant expression: He felt inside as if he had been taking calomel. world had suddenly turned cold. It was not new and shiny and full of laughter. Mouldy, maggoty, full of suckholes--one had to watch out for one's feet (144). Such imagery typifies the way in which Hurston delves into the combined abjection of the body, the psyche, and the world in which her characters move. Similarly, The Gilded opens with Missie May bathing herself in the galvanized washtub in the bedroom (985). In Six-Bits it is the female character who negotiates her sexual and spiritual purity and her emotional abjection after her husband Joe catches Missie May in the act of adultery with Slemmons. overlapping themes of value (both personal and economic) and cleanliness (both domestic and spiritual) again point to the way in which Hurston frames some of her best stories with the resolution of radical oppositions, and how the narrative middles dwell in the mess and tension of binary breakdowns. intertwining of race and gender with bodily and psychological impurities suggests that a turn toward psychoanalysis might assist in interpreting Hurston's work. …

Way Cooler than Manson: Natural Born Killers (1994)

Courtwright | Way Cooler than Manson: Natural Born Killers (1994) David T. Courtwright University of North Florida Way Cooler than Manson: Natural Born Killers (1994) "What characterizes the film is a complete lack of consistency to the point of being deliberately, totally illogical—which is fun."- Oliver Stone No bad publicity in America: mass murderer Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson) besieged by interviewers, fans, and protesters on the way to his trial. 28 I Film & History Oliver Stone as Cinematic Historian | Special In-Depth Section "I wanted to have fun," Oliver Stone told an interviewer the summer Natural Born Killers (NBK) was released. "I really wanted to do a combination of a road movie, like Bonnie and Clyde, and a prison film, like The Great Escape and Papillon." His Bonnie and Clyde turned out to be Mickey and Mallory Knox, a pair ofpsychopathic lowlifes lifted from a Quentin Tarantino script and launched into cinematic hyperspace. Stone shrewdly cast Woody Harrelson, the hulking son of a real-life killer, as Mickey and, less shrewdly, Juliette Lewis, a whitetrash specialist, as Mallory. Mal, as she is known, has a little problem—a lecherous father and idiot mother. Enter Mickey, exit problem: Dad drowns in the fish tank, Mom burns in her bed. Mickey and Mallory wed one another in a pagan ceremony, exchanging rings of intertwined snakes. They get their kicks on Route 666, a stretch of desert highway they terrorize for three weeks. They wipe out bunches ofordinary people in ordinary places— a store, a slumber party, a roadside café—always leaving one survivor to tell the tale to the slavering media. They rack up 52 victims before being subdued by a phalanx of police led by self-appointed supercop Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore). The number 52 connotes randomness, as in a deck of cards. Yet supernatural determinism is the apparent metaphysical basis of the film. The victims are fated to die. Mickey and Mallory are fated to kill. They are possessed by T.V. demons. They are possessed by real demons. Jonathan Edwards would have loved this movie—except for the ending, but more on that later. The Road to Batongaville The plot begins to turn, as in many a story oflove and violence, with an act of adultery. Mickey intimates that he wouldn't mind a little three-way action with Mallory and a terrified hostage, bound and gagged in their motel room. Mallory storms out, takes her rage for a drive. Mickey rapes the hostage—a shot deleted from the theatrical release, but restored in the director's cut on video. Mallory pulls in for gas, seduces a garage jockey on the hood of a Corvette, and then shoots him dead: "That's the worst fuckin' head I ever got in my life! Next time don't be so fuckin' eager!" Already lost in a moral desert, Mickey and Mallory soon find themselves stranded in a real one. "Right now," Mickey says, "I'd go down on a lawman for a gallon of gas." They stumble upon the hogan of an Indian shaman, played by Russell Means. Forewarned by a dream, he knows these demons have come to claim his life. Not that they mean to. The shaman dies when Mickey awakes from a nightmare about his abusive parents, gun blazing. "Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad," Mallory shouts at Mickey. "You killed life!" And they pay for it. Literally snake bit, they stumble into the Drug Zone, a surreal pharmacy lit gangrenous green, in search of an antidote. All out. The cops close in, grab Mallory. "I swear to God I'll cut her fuckin' tits off!" Scagnetti yells to Mickey, holed up in the pharmacy. He surrenders. Behind him we catch a glimpse of a sign, "Take Your Medicine ." It's administered à la Rodney King. Mickey is tasered and stomped into submission as a breathless Japanese correspondent delivers a blow-by-blow account. Violence, our most valuable export. Mickey and Mallory are convicted in a circus trial. (In one particularly gruesome scene, which Stone decided to delete, Mickey stabs awitness to deathwith a pencil.) Hero and heroine are shipped offto Batongaville Prison, where the bodies keep...

Tribal and Civic Codes of Behaviour in Lysias I

A reiteration of the main details of the case may be helpful. Euphiletus killed Eratosthenes and was prosecuted for premeditated homicide by Eratosthenes' relatives. The present speech, our sole source of information concerning the case, was written for the defendant, partially or totally, by a professional speechwriter, presumably Lysias. In this speech Euphiletus admits killing Eratosthenes. He pleads, however, that, since he killed Eratosthenes after catching him in the act of adultery with his own wife, this was a case of justified homicide. At the same time, he denies a charge of the prosecution that he had killed Eratosthenes for reasons unrelated to the adultery. The speech was delivered before a court of fifty-one judges especially set up to judge such cases, as is attested elsewhere:T1Arist. Ath. Pol. 57.3: ‘If…a person admits that he has killed someone but claims that he had a right to do so, as, for instance, when he has surprised an adulterer in the act,… then the trial takes place in the Delphinion’ (cf. Dem. 23.74).