Religious Idioms Research Articles

Communism and ‘democracy’: Punjab radicals and representative politics in the 1930s

In the late 1920s, the organized Left, under the aegis of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the Communist Party and the Kirti Kisan movement, had a very clear and definite vision of democracy. ‘Real’ democracy was not to be based on the Westminster model. Nor was it simply to be a replica of the Soviet system. Actually, the New World, quite as much as Russia, influenced and inspired many of these young radical socialists. Some young Punjabis had made America their home, and they had been influenced by living in a country where liberty, rights and freedom were written into the constitution. Speeches by the radicals warned the people of the Punjab of nationalist politicians who claimed to speak for the people. Their emphasis was on the emancipation of the masses. Calling upon Punjab to question accepted notions of deference and representation, they questioned the standing of nationalist leaders and instead urged a variant of communism tailored to the needs of the Punjabi peasantry, which eschewed communal politics, got rid of caste inequalities and above all would win India freedom from colonial oppression. By the late 1930s, these very same people were appealing to different religious communities in a very specific religious idiom, comprehensively aligned with the Indian National Congress and fully participating in the legislative proceedings imposed by the British Raj. So how do we explain this? This article will try and understand the constant u-turns and flip-flops that characterize communist politics in India by considering the constraints and opportunities through which they operated and how their choices then determined local understandings of communism and, in this case, democratic practice.

Islamism and Education: The Nature and Aims of Islamic Schools in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Schools run by Islamic charities in the Arab world mostly are viewed as simply extensions of local Islamist organizations, their main purpose being to mobilize for the organization and to spread its political doctrines. However, in the case of Hamas and the Islamic schools in the occupied Palestinian Territories, a formal affiliation exists only to a limited degree. Even more important, the political concepts that are important in Hamas are largely irrelevant in the Islamic schools. Instead, teachers and parents alike focus on educational and cultural issues: educational quality, discipline, conservative morals and knowledge of Islamic culture. Consequently, instead of being linked to political organizations, the Islamic schools may be interpreted as putting Islam to work for social and developmental purposes. A comparison with Islamic school movements in Turkey and Mali strengthens the hypothesis that Islamic schooling is a significant movement in its own right, and largely independent of political Islamic organizations. Its function is to contribute to local development using a religious idiom that is socially conservative and appeals to large parts of the population in a number of Muslim-majority countries.

Temple as the Site of Struggle: Social Reform, Religious Symbols and the Politics of Nationalism in Kerala

The temple entry movement of the 1920s and ’30s in Kerala, South India, has become a landmark in the history of social reform and nationalist movements for its uniqueness and sweeping success. Popular history has presented the episode as an integral part of the Nationalist Movement and the Gandhian Constructive Programme mainly because the temple-entry issue was endorsed by the Kerala State Congress Committee and the agitation was concluded under its auspices. But this popular and idealist impression of the movement has been challenged from various quarters. It is pointed out that there have been very little attempts at linking the event with the advancing civic rights movement led by the lower caste people for freedom of worship and social equality which was gaining a radical turn by the 20s and 30s; the pressure exerted by the untouchables to achieve civic freedom even at the cost of renouncing Hinduism had created an alarming situation which no caste-Hindu could ignore. Even more surprising is the absence of academic attempts to link the agitation with the Malabar Rebellion of 1921; in fact the Rebellion had challenged the very survival of the Congress organization in Kerala; this factor forced them to retreat from the earlier secular plane to a religious idiom of politics for which the question of temple-entry served their purpose. The Temple entry movement, therefore, has to be studied in the light of the antipathy shown by the Congress towards popular and radical agitations and in the context of its growing tendency to incline towards Hindu symbols in politics as a means to escape addressing vital and burning social issues.

‘Transparent sexualities’: sexual openness, HIV disclosure and the governmentality of sexuality in South Africa

In South Africa, as elsewhere in the world, responses to HIV and AIDS have been accompanied by calls to ‘break the silence’ and to openly talk about aspects of intimate life, otherwise considered private. These calls have been followed by the production of new bodies of knowledge about sex, and projections of transparent sexualities. In this context, the concept of counselling has taken on particular significance in terms of re-conceptualising diverse institutional sites as places of education, advice giving and moral inculcation with a view toward behavioural change. In this paper, I trace a series of processes and practices of negotiation whereby in a big church in the city of Cape Town sexuality has been rendered an object of knowledgeability and inquiry. The same processes work as conditions of possibility for the emergence of counselling practices by facilitating the circulation of concepts such as ‘responsible relationships’, ‘responsible choices’ and so on through the sites of faith-based health activism. Adopted from public health discourse, but inflected by religious idioms, these concepts allowed for the dissemination of new vocabularies of sex in which counselling is construed as a key mechanism.

Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity Michael Nath Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity. Andrzej G.asiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell, eds. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiii + 265. $99.95 (cloth). A dozen essays (some of them worked up from conference proceedings) appear in this volume. Its aim, in the words of the editors, is to focus on "contexts, relationships and writings that are not well known in order to extend our understanding of Lewis's work and his engagement with the modernity he analysed and attacked in equal measure" (3). Part one ("Friends and Enemies") discusses Lewis's use of quotation; his relationships with David Bomberg and William Roberts, Rebecca West and Naomi Mitchison, and John Rodker; and the reception of Blast. Part two ("Media and Mass Society") deals with music, cinema, patronage, and Evelyn Waugh. In part three ("Culture and Modernity"), we have essays on anthropology, the 1930s, and shellshock. This is a broad and enterprising collection, and is justified both by the variety of Lewis's creative and critical activity and of his associations. Furthermore, while it is hard on the prejudices [End Page 619] (as in Ian Patterson's essay on Lewis and Rodker), and large errors of judgement (as in Andrzej Gasiorek's on Lewis and commitment in the 1930s), it is free of the pantomime disapproval that regularly accompanies responses to Lewis. These essays will be of benefit to the growing number of undergraduates and postgraduates who are electing to work on Lewis; they also have much that is new to offer both the browsing generalist and the Lewis scholar. I myself learned, for instance, from Alan Munton's essay on quotation, Alexander Ruch's on patronage, Jodie Pearson's on Blast, and Victor Barac's on anthropology. The first provides the best examples of close reading in this volume. The second deals with the question that had occupied Lewis since his rift with middle-brow Bloomsbury in 1912, namely, who pays for modernism? To which it provides the surprising answer, the BBC. It was this institution that, late in Lewis's career, paid him to complete the Human Age trilogy. The rift itself is illuminated in Pearson's account of contemporary responses to vorticism, led by John Squire (81-84). Barac compares Lewis and Eliot as ethnographers, and suggests that Lewis's contribution to anthropology, notably in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), is not only superior in kind to Eliot's cultural criticism, but important in its own right (e.g., in its conception of gender determination and bipedalism). The superiority supposedly consists in the fact that Eliot could not sever the idea of culture from religion, whereas Lewis's critical methods were historical and scientific (199-200). The last claim has a bright sound to it, though it may need to be considered alongside the fact that Lewis's imaginative practice was at home with the supernatural, The Human Age being modernism's most substantial encounter of this kind (the trilogy takes place in an afterlife and the satire, if we can still use that word, is aimed at the Devil's party). But Lewis's critical observations were not alien to the supernatural anyway: "If you say that creative art is a spell, a talisman, an incantation—that it is magic, in short, there, too, I believe you would be correctly describing it. That the artist uses and manipulates a supernatural power seems very likely."1 This statement, from Time and Western Man (1927), exemplifies the difficulty of defining what Lewis was actually up to, when he wasn't being an artist. The introduction to this volume presents him as a "philosopher-critic" (3), so, as well as rational anthropologist, Lewis appears as opponent of Bergson in James Mansell's essay on music and modernism, as sociologist in Nathan Waddell and Alice Reeve-Tucker's essay on Lewis, Waugh, and the "Child-Cult," and as critical theorist in the manner of Adorno and Marcuse in Gasiorek's essay. Waddell and Reeve-Tucker notice "how far Lewis's account of satire intersects with religious idioms" (170), though Gasiorek reckons that Lewis's conception of...

Children's religious agency: conceptualising Islamic idioms of resistance

This paper seeks to examine how Palestinian children's agency integrates Islamic religious idioms in daily life to combat Israeli oppression. While children are often seen as objects that are merely subjected to political and cultural processes, this research shows that children have agency and use their religious expression as a way to further their own political freedom and resist the imposing geopolitical agenda of colonialism. Since the inception of the war on terror that highlighted increased scrutiny and backlash against Islam in Western discourse, resistance through religion has become an integral part of Palestinian children's agency. The narratives of 28 Palestinian children demonstrate the claim that the children have agency in using the expression of Islamic idioms as resistance against Western perceptions and Israeli oppression.

The Work of Discovery: Interreligious Dialogue as Life-Long Learning

ly defined, religion and education collide. But placed in relation to the idea of development, the educational and the religious achieve a working relationship. Education needs a religious impulse, or else its concern to put things in order closes off further development and thereby undoes the meaning of education. Religion needs educational restraint and challenge so that its impulse to transcend the world does not lose touch with the world to be transcended. Otherwise, religious activities are not a going beyond but a gone beyond, leaving us with a sphere called religion which no longer transforms our lives together.17 In Moran’s terms, religion is not an object of study, not even a source of “spiritual values,” but a catalyst for learning. When the personal pursuit of values and truth comes up against other persons’ analogous pursuits, the field of endeavour subtly changes. As persons of faith we may speak in different religious idioms and exhibit very different assumptions about what makes for ultimate significance, but, at the interpersonal level, we work at a task which is shared: to bring a wealth of inherited wisdom to bear upon this encounter. The question is: how this challenge of “sharing in difference” may not just be pursued with integrity but also enhance rather than undermine the sense of self, or—to put it another way—how an encounter with the other can build up faith rather than destroy it. Four important principles emerged from the Faiths Together project. Firstly, and most obviously, inter-religious learning does not come about through

Why Liberal Capitalism Has Failed to Stimulate a Democratic Culture in Africa

Using a critical review of selected works on Africa by prominent African intellectuals, this interdisciplinary study concludes that, contrary to Amartya Sen’s theory about the “real freedoms” that people enjoy in democratic states, these freedoms cannot be realized in Africa, because the continent’s mode of capitalism is dependent upon international finance. This system cannot function as an autonomous structure and has engendered major political contradictions in the continent’s nation-states. The capitalist ruling elites have hindered the expansion of full democratic rights in Africa by encouraging and exploiting the politics of class division. The African experience with liberal democracy indicates that Sen’s theory of development and “real freedoms” fails to take into account these contradictions as well as the religious and cultural idioms in Africa that run counter to liberal conceptions of emancipation. Achieving democracy and freedom in Africa is not merely a question of capacity building, it involves resolving difficult issues of power – particularly, in class and gender relations. The essay concludes by suggesting that there needs to be a shift away from conceptualizing development in terms of only economic factors to a new approach which combines more enlightened neoliberal capitalism with new indigenous strategies of development.

Political Instrumentalization of Islam and the Risk of Obscurantist Deadlock

Summary The empirical literature has established a strong link between being a Muslim country and indicators of political performance and democracy. The idea of the “clash of civilizations” put forward by Samuel Huntington and applied to Islam by Bernard Lewis and others points to unique aspects of the Islamic religion and culture that make the advent of democracy especially difficult. In this paper, I show that there is a systematic misconception about the true nature of the relationship between Islam and politics: far from being fused into the religious realm, politics tends to dominate religion. Because of some characteristics, namely the lack of a centralized religious authority structure and the great variability of interpretations of the Islamic law, there is a risk of an “obscurantist deadlock” in the form of a vicious process whereby both the ruler and his political opponents try to outbid each other by using the religious idiom. This risk looms particularly large in crisis situations accentuated by international factors such as witnessed during the second half of the 20th century. From a short comparative analysis, it is however hard to conclude that unique aspects of the Islamic faith are ultimately responsible for the persistent autocratic feature of Muslim polities.

The Pious Self is a Jewel in Itself

This article historically situates Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s Bahishti Zewar ( Heavenly Ornaments) as a manual for the production of pious dispositions. Written in 1905 for Muslim women in north India, this Urdu text teaches women how to train themselves to be pious and provides an ideal picture of the well-formed woman, self-reflective of how her actions correspond to the Divine will. Brought up as a Muslim, she has already been socialised into subordination to this will. Becoming self-reflective, linked to a critical rite of passage of an individual’s life, involves more regulated, arduous and deliberate reiterative work on the self. Without advocating that women should be managed through religious idiom, the analysis presented here challenges euro-centric perceptions of modernity and tradition and proposes that we need to think through more carefully what kind of agency is actually involved in consolidating the Muslim subject who submits to Divine will in a framework of ‘ shariatic modernity’. This discussion carries immense relevance for current debates about how Muslim women may address the challenges of living in the West.

Nawiedzanie słów, turbulencja i sekret edukacji. Czytając Adolphe’a Gesche’a

The Belgian theologian, the philosopher and the specialist in literature Adolphe Gesche (1928–2003) writes that it is necessary to frequent old words. He interprets traditional terms of the Christian message (e.g. the salvation, the eternity, the resurrection) and tries to wake them up, to make them clear, accessible to the contemporary sensitivity. One isn’t allowed to close the Christian address in the exclusive range of the confessio, it is an essential part of the contemporary culture. Adolphe Gesche is leading out the category of salvation from the more and more poorly understood religious idiom to wide waters of the humanistic discourse. A question about the salvation is one of the crucial human questions, and it is arising from longing for the secret of living above all, rather than from the fear and feeling the fault only. The revival of meanings in the Adolphe Gesche’s work shows the Christianity vital, dynamic, feeding on the affirmation of the freedom and the life, but not on resentment to the present time. Gesche doesn’t prove the existence of God and the eternal life. He is only persuading not to leave former questions and old replies rashly. Theology is a turbulence in the science. The faith is a means of conveying the powerful, peculiar discourse upon the man. It is setting the anthropological reflection in motion. In the theological perspective the man is a riddle, something elusive and incomprehensible stays inside him. The education has the important task: to help the man to raise his oddness, mystery, non-transparency, strangeness, without escaping into a simple and a seeming answers. Gesche’s achievements is an example of the opened, modern recognition which doesn’t fear the meetings – but it is drawing the power from the joints and tensions. Paedagogia_

Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998 (review)

Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998 (review)

What is the ‘force’ of moral law in Kant's practical philosophy?

Kant's moral philosophy understands the experience of moral law in two somewhat divergent ways.1 In the preface to his Critique of Practical Reason Kant defines moral law as a mere ‘fact’ of moral ...

The Tablighi Jama‘at in Southwestern Ontario: making Muslim identities and networks in Canadian urban spaces

This ethnographic paper builds on previous research on the Tablighi Jama‘at by delving deeper into the ways in which the movement creates identity and community among Muslims living in modern/post-modern urban spaces. The paper is grounded in the theoretical framework provided by Robert Orsi in his introduction to Gods of the City (1999). In his lengthy introduction, Orsi describes contemporary urban cultural theory. This theory posits metropolitan regions as comprising “complex networks of “pathways” that city people travel in” (51). Along these “pathways” city dwellers create networks of association that in turn become ways of life and communities. Orsi notes that, “urban religious idioms have responded to the spatial dilemmas created by the circumstances of diaspora and dislocation” (51). These urban religious idioms often involve intra-communal outreach that seeks to inculcate community members with a cognitive “map” of the surrounding urban spaces, marking off both desirable and forbidden places. I argue that this is precisely what the Tablighi Jama‘at seeks to engender in urban spaces such as Southwestern Ontario, and this study is undertaken to better understand this process of identity construction and community creation.

Book Review: Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1953–1998

Book Review: Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1953–1998

Islamic ‘reform’, the nation-state and the liberal subject

This article argues that transnational Islamic movements provide discursive fields within which Muslim women in Kachchh, Gujarat, are able to contest prescriptive notions of work, the body, honour and piety. It reflects on the articulation of collective identity and its gendered dimensions, as manifested in a conjuncture of global discourses—Islamic reform as well as NGO-led political–economic emancipation. While neo-liberal development discourse is rooted in the philosophy of the liberal, autonomous, modern subject, movements of religious revival are often thought of as epitomising the non-liberal, ‘traditional’ subject. I suggest that the dichotomies of modernity/tradition or liberal/non-liberal are productively disrupted when one examines how these discourses become entangled with one another to produce subjectivities that are somehow indebted to both, as a new space opens up for women to selectively redefine choices that are responsive to both local and global conditions. The article also uses this ethnography to ask how we might reconcile global, transnational religious idioms with a more secular–liberal market discourse which, in turn, generates beliefs and practices that seek to manipulate identities in the public sphere. The article concludes by questioning the modular nature of the liberal public sphere, by reflecting on the role played by religious movements in constituting such a sphere.

Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998

In this study of novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Leon Forrest, Ernest Gaines, Randall Kenan, John Edgar Wideman, Gayl Jones, and Octavia E. Butler, Tuire Valkeakari examines the creative re-visioning and reshaping of Judeo-Christian idiom and imagery by African American novelists - specifically their use of sacred language for secular meaning. She shows that in writing about the complexities of American selfhood and nationhood, these authors neither abandon religious idiom nor evangelize. Rather, they delight in reshaping their chosen raw material for their own purposes, which often have little to do with the material's original context or function. Their use of biblically derived idiom is marked by innovative secular subversion and by stories of spiritual quest that defy conventional dogmatic definitions. These authors evoke religious rhetoric to study and revisit Martin Luther King Jr.'s concept of the beloved community and to express their yearning for an inclusive love ethic that could transcend any boundaries drawn in the name of race, class, gender, or religion. Beginning with the functions of Christian idiom in African American letters from the 1770s to the 1920s Harlem Renaissance and its aftermath, followed by an analysis of post-1950 novels, Valkeakari shows how, generation after generation, African American writers have evoked Christian rhetoric to advocate civil rights and democracy. Their treatment of this legacy reached a new level of creativity in the latter half of the 20th century, becoming a more pervasive characteristic of the African American novel than ever before.

The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Inquiry. By Omid Safi

The title of this book by Omid Safi does a thorough job of obscuring its actual subject and contents; the work in fact addresses important aspects of the political, social, religious, and intellectual history of the Saljūqs from their arrival in Baghdād down to the reign of Sanjar (i.e., from the mid-eleventh to the mid-twelfth century CE). It explores the interrelatedness of Saljūq historiography, Saljūq state institutions, and the administrators, scholars, and holy men who served to implement and/or legitimize the rule of the Saljūq sulṭāns, and in the process it seeks to undermine a number of assumptions and stock narratives about Saljūq history that Safi regards as erroneous, unwarranted, or simply in need of problematization and investigation. Religious issues are front and center in the work, much of which examines, from multiple perspectives, the carefully—and, according to Safi, mendaciously—cultivated image of the Saljūqs as upholders of an “orthodox” Islam; more specifically, it considers the use of this image to legitimize the Saljūqs, the religious underpinnings of the ideological systematization of Saljūq rule (as articulated by such seminal figures in Islamic history as the vizier Niẓām al–Mulk and al–Ghazālī;), the role of holy men in sanctioning the founders or leaders of the Saljūq state, and the religious idiom of opposition to Saljūq rule. The book thus is not by any means a straightforward political or social history; rather, it seeks to understand, most broadly (and here the title begins to make sense), how Saljūq political culture shaped the framework of intellectual and religious life, and how elements of that intellectual and religious expression were in turn used to articulate a legitimizing ideology that sanctioned Saljūq rule (xxiv).

Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998

Reviewed by: Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998 Qiana J. Whitted (bio) Valkeakari, Tuire. Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007. Much of the figurative language that distinguishes African-American creative writing has been—and continues to be—shaped by black religious traditions. Since the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s verses in the eighteenth century, African-American literary tropes of sacrifice, communal deliverance, and the quest for ultimate truths resonate, explicitly and implicitly, with the evolving syncretism of Afro-Christian faith. Studies such as Katherine [End Page 961] Clay Bassard’s Spiritual Interrogations have made thorough and persuasive arguments for Wheatley’s allegorical profundity; the complex spiritual discourses of nineteenth-century fugitive slaves and evangelists have been fundamental to the study of African-American cultural formations.1 Nevertheless, critical literary scholarship has been much slower to recognize what James Weldon Johnson observed in the preface to his 1927 poetry collection, God’s Trombones—that the remarkable inventiveness of the modern black literary imagination continues to be bound inextricably with the religious rhetoric and scriptural wisdom of Sunday Service. Tuire Valkeakari examines key aspects of this discourse through a comprehensive study of religious symbols and characterizations in black fiction from twentieth-century in her book, Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998. It is the title’s emphasis on “idiom” that distinguishes Valkeakari’s contribution to the field, as her analysis forges constructive intertextual associations between tropological networks and evaluates the literary coherence of biblical allusions. Her study considers religious discourse as a social and cultural product—not unlike folklore or myth—without endorsing a “religious agenda” (200) or arguing specific theological interpretations. Importantly, Valkeakari marks Ellison’s Invisible Man as a turning point in the secular use of religious idiom, particularly as it is manifested through “the social commentary and artistic innovation” (56) of late twentieth-century Christological messianic and scapegoating imagery, sacred orature, and gendered articulations and authorizations of the Word. To make her case, Valkeakari draws on well-known texts by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Octavia Butler, while shedding new light on works by Leon Forrest and Gayl Jones that have received far less critical attention. Valkeakari puts forth an overview of how Christianity and Judeo-Christian rhetoric has been utilized by earlier writers in her first chapter. Her discussion of William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter and the early poetry of Francis E. W. Harper and Paul Laurence Dunbar underscore the use of religion in anti-slavery rhetoric through biblical allusions to Moses and the Book of Esther’s Queen Vashti. Following an analysis of W.E.B. DuBois’s “biblically derived intertextuality,” (31) she engages writers of the New Negro Renaissance such as James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, and Nella Larsen. Still, her argument begins in earnest with Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel. Invisible Man diverges from its predecessors, Valkeakari asserts, through a “highly ironic, subversive, and hilarious manipulation of Judeo-Christian tropes” (52) that differs thematically from the folk religion preserved in Hurston’s narratives, and stylistically from Richard Wright’s abrasive naturalist fiction. Specifically, the second chapter on Invisible Man catalogues the persistent failings of the story’s false messiahs, whether parodied through the Founder and Norton, exposed through the opportunism of Ras and Rinehart, or undercut through the tragic death of Tod Clifton. The analysis also draws a provocative connection between ancient Hebrew scapegoating rituals and the black sharecropper, Jim Trueblood. As both an outcast and a “blues priest” (61), Trueblood foreshadows the social realities and depraved contradictions of racial performance that will ultimately drive the unnamed narrator underground. Likewise, Ellison’s narrator—whose cyclical journeys Valkeakari frames in terms of the Edenic expulsion and Christian resurrection—resists the temptation to assume his own “mock-messianic” role as a public speaker in favor of the more reflective, historically resonant posture of hibernation (73). [End Page 962] It is, perhaps, because of Ellison’s too subtle insinuation of religious discourse in a novel already rife with allusion that Valkeakari refers frequently to his “secularization” of religious idiom...

Introduction: Why Islam, Health and the Body?

This special issue of Body & Society was initiated to: (1) provide a deeper understanding of how medical technologies health and the body are navigated in Muslim settings (2) stimulate discussion among Muslim scholars social scientists bioethicists public health and medical professionals about how technologies are negotiated and incorporated in the Muslim world and (3) examine how social science literature on the body can provide a theoretical framework from which to examine health healing and technological innovations from Islamic perspectives - to explore Islamic systems of logic and how these operate in the corporeal world. Here we emphasize the plurality of Muslim perspectives rather than an overarching singular Muslim viewpoint. This issue broadly focuses on topics related to health and the body in Muslim countries exploring the relationship between Islamic discourse and metaphors surrounding the body perceptions and practices of the body and the challenges of medicine and modernity. Differences and similarities in Sunni and Shia responses - including adaptations in medical law and Islamic bioethics - are discussed. Cultural and religious idioms surrounding the body are also significant in contextualizing current perceptions of body and health. Ultimately this volume addresses how the dynamics between Islamic perceptions and practices surrounding health illness and the body are negotiated in the face of advancing medical technologies. (excerpt)