Recent Issues – Page 7 – Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

Islamic scholarship records a large number of accounts featuring sayings by Christian monks (both monastics and ascetics) and their encounters with Muslim ascetics and mystics. On one level, these accounts attest to the fact that the perception of Christian monks as holy figures in the Near East survived into the early Islamic period and that they were still acknowledged for their spiritual authority and aura in Muslim circles well into the fifth/eleventh century. The continuity of this recognition indicates the degree of its diffusion among Muslim scholars. On another level, these accounts reinforce the conclusion that encounters between Christian monks and Muslim ascetics and early mystics must have played a role in the emergence of particular attitudes, views and practices within Islamic ascetical and mystical traditions.

This article examines the chain of events that facilitated an Islamic revivalamong second-generation Arab-American Muslims. Based upon research inmetropolitan Chicago, it argues against trends in the literature that describeWestern-born Muslims as foreigners, immigrants or, worse, anti-Western.Similarly, it argues against setting their religious experiences solely in a domes-tic context. The article begins by documenting the lack of religious institutionsand practices among immigrant Arab Muslims before the 1990s and the limitedreligious socialization of their American-born children. These conditionsemerged in part from secular trends in the immigrants’ homelands. By the1990s, a period of global Islamic revival, both immigrant and second-generation Arab Muslims found practiced Islam attractive, particularly its capacity to provide meaning and resilience for their own experiences in America. Individual decisions to embrace Islam as more than a fact of birth were facilitated by developments resulting from globalization and the creation of American Islamic institutions, yet were, at the same time, intensely personal choices rooted in local experiences. Although Islamic revival is global, its conduits should not be viewed as causal. The article engages findings by Yang and Ebaugh (2001) and Hirschman (2003), arguing that analyses of religiosity in the United States must take into account historical contexts. Religiosity is an intensely personal experience that must be explained at the intersection of the individual, the local and the global.

This paper takes as its starting point the identification of the element of risk as a structural condition of advanced industrialization. The concern here is less with the ‘systematically produced hazards’ of ‘risk society’ (those matters which are, at least to some degree, open to political, scientific and ethical deliberation), than with something more fundamental–what is termed the complex interaction of human and natural systems. The argument is that the human condition-and, by extension, the range of possible social futures- is coming to be conditioned by global dynamics that fall outside of the calculation of risk and, indeed, sometimes outside of timely human comprehension. Even as the range and power of actors with global reach or potential impact has increased, there has also been a proliferation of new centres of power, competence, authority and allegiance, reflected in the burgeoning literature on global governance. Whether the new modes of regulation and control suggested in much of the global governance literature are likely to be equal to the task of sustaining the globalized and globalizing world we have made for ourselves comprises the second half of the paper.‬

“Recent events in world politics have heightened public attention to the concept of risk in social life. In a world where danger and violence have become media commodities, it seems that risks to health and well-being have never been greater. However, because attitudes toward risk are learned cultural behaviour, ‘perception of risk’ has become more essential as a predictor of political and social behaviour than actual tangible risk. In this paper, I discuss contrasts between notions of personal and public risk from the standpoint of the societies of the United States, the Islamic Middle East and the Buddhist Far East. Though broad generalizations may be dangerous, the cultural styles in each of the three regions allow individuals and larger social groupings, such as corporations and governments, to engage in decision-making which seems rational in terms of the broad attitudinal frameworks dominant in these regions, but which may contrast sharply with the rational actions of individuals and groups in other regions. As the world becomes more integrated globally, knowledge of the differences in these perceptions and their concomitant implications for the actions taken by decision-makers will become increasingly essential to international understanding. As a case-study for this discussion, I focus upon the war in Iraq, highlighting reactions and attitudes in the United States, where risk is in proportion to fear; among Irag’s Islamic Middle Eastern neighbours, where risk is really ‘no risk; and among the nations of East Asia, particularly Japan, where risk is normative and drives the course of history.”

Despite the best efforts of many scholars, contemporary Middle Eastern politics is often understood as a battle between individuality, rationality and modernity, on the one hand, and group identities, religion and tradition, on the Other. Such images are current not only among external observers, but also among many of the participants in regional political activities. The perception of such a clash has real costs since it directs attention away from emerging syncretic approaches. In this paper, I examine two areas in which these two oft-claimed incompatible approaches have operated—constitutionalism and civic education. I seek to Show not only that syncretic approaches are possible, but that they have emerged and promise new possibilities for regional politics.

The first purpose of this paper is to Show how constructed knowledge always overcomes knowledge based upon observed science. The second is to Show how societies in neo-liberal industrial economies have, in late modernity, become very risk-aware. This high risk-awareness is a result of the campaigning of environmental and Other activists and the unprecedented ability to Share bad news rapidly through globalized information technology and the media. The resulting hyper-risk-aware societies are troubled as much by constructed risks as by real ones and there is confusion because risk can be more easily foregrounded and backgrounded by political imperatives than science-based arguments. These societies have also learned to be aware of the risks ‘manufactured’ by the processes associated With advancing modernity without being able to deal rationally With their causes. The Study uses cases from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) water sector to illustrate the consequences of these phenomena for water policy-making in the region.

This paper addresses notions of ‘risk’ in the context of HIV and AIDS. It looks at how ‘risk’ is understood from the position of researchers, including sociologists and epidemiologists, and from the position of persons at risk and it describes how these understandings are related to the ways in which rights and responsibilities are also understood. In its examination of these perspectives, the paper distinguishes between ‘traditional,’ ‘modern’ and ‘social’ public healths and the ideological or moral perspectives that underpin them. It also touches upon the ways in which globalization plays into this complex field and raises questions about patents and access to treatments. My argument is that, within the ‘modern’ public health, risk is understood as relating to the individual and that this construction or ‘selected form’ is one of the reasons for the failure of public health to control HIV.‬

Behind the risks normally associated with war and political violence–the wounds to bodies and the body politic- -are a much less visible series of actions with risks that are seldom assessed, actions capable of shaping global economic and political grids. Wars and, indeed, most politics and economics, rest upon a foundation made up of both legal and extra-legal activities. Hundreds of billions of dollars are made on unrecorded (extra-legal) weapons sales and hundreds of billions more are earned through the sale of resources to gain the hard currency needed to buy those weapons and to purchase all of the other supplies that a country at war requires, from medicines and food to industrial equipment and communications technology. If we were simply addressing illegal arms sales, assessing risk would be relatively straightforward. But the fact that countries at war depend upon the extra-legal as well as the legal to acquire the basic developmental infrastructure essential to their populations’ survival means that exploring the qualities and dangers of risk is much more complex and multifaceted: for example, how do we calculate the stakes of wide-scale profiteering from selling extra-legal pharmaceuticals to war-afflicted populations that do not have access to legal medicines? The sheer magnitude of the power and profits that accrue to the extra-legal (and the fact that analytical attention generally focuses upon illegal arms and drugs sales, while common commodities make up the bulk of the extra-legal—and represent unrecorded profits for legal enterprises) suggests that the systematic investigative invisibility surrounding these topics is purposeful–a form of political and economic prestidigitation or sleight of hand. This article investigates the dynamics of the extra-legal as it shapes political and economic processes in the world today.

As tension mounts during the build-up to the Orange marching season, which occurs each summer in Northern Ireland, the streets of many cities and towns are festooned with flags. The proliferation of Union Jacks, Irish Tricolours, Ulster flags and paramilitary banners adorning the streets symbolize loyalty and serve as sectarian markers of territory. In July 2002, however, something unusual happened: republicans started hoisting the Palestinian flag alongside their Irish Tricolours while, in neighbouring loyalist areas, the Israeli flag fluttered alongside the Union Jack and paramilitary banners. This paper suggests some reasons for this by focusing upon the concept of ‘fear’ in the context of the peace processes in Northern Ireland and South Africa. It begins by offering some thoughts on the phenomenon of Israeli flags flying in Belfast before moving on to consider briefly how the psychological and sociological literature generally treat the concept of fear (and risk). This leads to the argument that fear and the use of fear are unrecognized variables in popular discourses surrounding political negotiations and processes such as truth commissions. The paper analyzes the role of fear in the political transition process, a subject seldom dealt with in the academic literature, and examines the way that the concept of fear–like the suffering of victims of political violence–is politicized and depoliticized. The paper then concludes by trying to apply some of the ideas that it presents to the South Africa and Northern Ireland contexts and, particularly, to approaches to political risk-taking.

The “war on terrorism’ in the name of national security and anxiety extends a discourse on risk that is already prevalent as an organizing principle in our globalizing world. In sociology, “”risk society’ refers to the social precariousness of contemporary institutionalized patterns of existence, in which future possibilities, rather than past lessons, increasingly determine decision-making. The ‘war on terrorism’ has used the idea of risk not merely as a strategy to defend values and institutions, but to bring about social and political transformation. Pre-emptive wars have been launched against failed states or collaborators with terrorists abroad and anti-terrorist legislation has been introduced to acquire emergency powers at home. Michael Ignatieff calls the project of fixing failed states through military intervention “Empire lite,” commenting that “to the extent that human rights justify the humanitarian use of military force, the new empire can claim that it serves the cause of moral universalism” (Ignatieff 2003, 110). In reality, human rights and democracy are being offered under a form of imperial dependency in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq through ‘nationalist nation-building projects’ that are unlikely to succeed. Democracy entails self-rule and not just getting the right to vote. This paper argues that both the war on terrorism and humanitarian military intervention are shaped by risk, rather than justice, and are, therefore, more about containment than about realizing the aspirations of a moral universalism based upon rights and political participation.