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Europe is a broad and multifaceted construct, variously understood as a geographical, political, legal, institutional, social, or cultural formation. It is characterized by numerous conflicts and processes of negotiation that have accompanied or sustained the development of normative orders and divergent conceptions of law, both in relation to individual states and to Europe as a whole. The same applies to the field of literature, language, and aesthetics; numerous myths and ideologies have shaped today’s understanding of Europe and still support it today. This volume examines how such processes were legally structured, and literarily addressed, criticized, and complemented. Its interdisci...
In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing ...
Current debates on the transnational impact of world views (interpretive frameworks) often refer to the concepts of 'globalization' or 'travelling models, ' with an emphasis on domination or on a process of translation. This volume highlights situations where different world views are confronted with each other within Africa, and the question of how the actors mediate between the two. The conceptual chapters foster a critical view on the normative implications of agency itself, as well as how they reflect on the claim of interpretive hegemonony of human rights, concepts of law, democracy, or neoliberalism. In addition, the book examines the confrontation of world views in particular cases. Essays examine distinct empirical grounds, such as law (e.g. Islamic law, children's rights, law and development, political ideology), and analyze the role of transcendental powers. (Series: Contributions to Research on Africa / Beitrage zur Afrikaforschung - Vol. 40) [Subject: African Studies, Politics, Human Rights, Law
On Theocratic Criminal Law explores the roots and structures of the criminal law system of the world's most prominent constitutional theocracy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. While discussing the processes of forced de-westernization and de-modernization which occurred in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, this work examines how the Islamic conception of civil order and polity has been established within the legal and theological framework of the Iranian Constitution. The book engages in a process of 'rational reconstruction' of Iranian theocratic criminal law and offers a critical analysis of the way criminal law functions as the centrepiece of this mode of political domination. It illumina...
The contributions of this volume discuss the broad field of transformation processes in Muslim societies from different perspectives with various disciplinary approaches. Apart from methodological questions the authors investigate religious and social developments in Africa and the Near and Middle East while focusing e.g. on the production of meaning, negotiation of religious values and spaces, gendered agency, and debates of identity.
This is a study of a 20th-century Sufi revival in West Africa. Seesemann's work evolves around the emergence and spread of the 'Community of the Divine Flood,' established in 1929 by Ibrahim Niasse, a leader of the Tijaniyya Sufi order from Senegal.
The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama offers a fresh and innovative reading of the contemporary experimental American theater scene and navigates through the contested and contentious relationship between postmodernism and contemporary drama. This book addresses gender and class as well as racial issues in the context of a theoretical discussion of dramatic texts, textuality, and performance. Transformation is contemporary drama's answer to the questions of postmodernism and a major technique in the development of a postmodern language for the stage. In order to demonstrate the multi-faceted nature of the postmodern theater of transformation, this study draws on a wi...
This book shows how political and administrative forces shaped the way justice was applied in medieval Egypt. It introduces the model that evolved during the 7th to the 9th centuries, which involved four judicial institutions: the cadi, the court of complaint (mazalim), the police/shurta (responsible for criminal justice) and the Islamized market law (hisba) administrated by the market supervisor/muhtasib. Literary and non-literary sources are used to highlight how these institutions worked in real-time situations such as the famine of 1024-1025, which posed tremendous challenges to the market supervisors in Cairo. The inner workings of the court of complaint during the 11th-12th century Fat...