Recent Issues – Page 6 – Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

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

The concept of umma is an important element of historical, as well as contemporary, discourse on Islam. This paper provides an overview of the development and evolution of the concept of umma and its usage in Islamic discourse to explain the current social, political and economic conditions of the Muslim world. It reports findings about umma consciousness among Muslims in Southeast Asia, South and Central Asia and the Middle East, examining the impact of globalization on the Islamic umma and how it is shaping the emerging struggle between ‘hybridity’ and ‘authenticity’ among Muslims and Islamic movements. The paper concludes with some observations on the risks and challenges of this struggle and its sociological implications for the future of the Islamic umma and the world.‬

Primer párrafo: La reforma de la moral de la vecindad es una reforma de la moralidad de toda la sociedad y un fortalecimiento de la estructura social y de su diversidad. Las sociedades que padecen debilidad de la moral de la vecindad, no son conscientes del valor de la diversidad. “La religión en sí misma es moral. Quien te supera en moralidad, te ha superado en fe”¹, Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah. El valor de la moral reside en el concepto de la dignidad humana, compartida por todos, y en base a la cual todos somos iguales. La persona es respetada por sí misma, en primer lugar, y en la vastedad del respeto, crecen las obras virtuosas y se establece la moralidad de la vecindad en un entorno humano y natural. Si reflexionáramos sobre el origen del lenguaje en el que se basa el conocimiento humano, que involucra también las ideas y las culturas, nos daríamos cuenta de que representa un progreso común de la humanidad, fundado en la convivencia y la vecindad.

The spread of the COVID-19 virus affected countries all over the world and led them to impose different measures to combat the pandemic. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was one of the countries affected by the virus; hence, the Government of Jordan imposed strict curfew measures to fight the pandemic. Accordingly, this article intends to examine how much public support the Jordanian government’s decisions and policies, particularly concerning the imposition or the suggestion of imposing strict curfew measures gained from the Jordanian citizens via invoking content analysis to examine citizens’ comments extracted from an official Jordanian media channel. The results showed that at the beginning of the crisis, the majority of citizens demonstrated support for the government’s strict curfew. However, this changed a year after, mainly for economic reasons.

Al reflexionar sobre el Covid-19 y la pandemia asociada aparecen diversos fenómenos, los cuales poseen una dimensión objetiva y otra subjetiva. En este ensayo se analizará brevemente la dimensión objetiva del covid-19 y la pandemia Asociada. Asimismo, nos detendremos más latamente sobre la dimensión subjetiva: la forma en que estos fenómenos objetivos llegan a nuestra subjetividad y gatillan fenómenos asociados como son la incertidumbre, la recuperación del tiempo presente y la interdependencia. En este sentido, proponemos que la incertidumbre, lejos de ser extraña a la persona humana corresponde a una forma habitual de habitar el mundo y que con el presente y la interdependencia pasa algo similar, dejándonos a las puertas de investigar el fenómeno de la solidaridad en esta época tan inusual.‬

Con el objetivo de contener la propagación del COVID-19, el gobierno jordano, a mediadas de marzo, emitió la Orden de Defensa No. 13, que implicaba la suspensión de las actividades económicas consideradas no esenciales, dejando a miles de trabajadores ante un estado de incertidumbre que ha dado lugar por parte de algunos de los empresarios a explotar la vulnerabilidad de los trabajadores. El impacto resultante de las medidas preventivas fue desproporcionado entre los empleados. El objetivo del presente artículo es examinar la respuesta gubernamental a la crisis económica tras la expansión de COVID-19. Por un lado, se resaltan las medidas excepcionales que han sido implementadas a fin de proteger los derechos de los trabajadores, y, por otro, cómo algunas empresas e instituciones lograron eludir la ley o aprovecharla a su favor. También se examina la eficacia de dichas medidas para los que carecen de protección social. El autor se concentra en los meses de marzo, abril, y mayo, ya que las medidas fueron gradualmente suspendidas a finales de junio.‬

Religion is often perceived as a system of answers to environmental phenomena. When it comes to crises, religious communities tend to behave according to their beliefs and inherited values. Religions and religious actors are expected to comfort believers by giving them answers to painful events, as well as providing them with different variations of support. Therefore, the current Coronavirus pandemic challenges the two largest religions in the world, Christianity and Islam, in primarily two different ways. The following essay intends to compare past and present Christian and Muslim reactions to pandemics; the first part will illustrate the contemporary interventions of the COVID-19 virus; the second half will discuss past pandemics (e.g., Bubonic Plague).‬

Cet article tente d’observer de près l’accélération du développement et du déploiement des nouvelles technologies suite à la pandémie de Covid-19. Le virus a eu un impact dont aucun pays n’a pas été épargné. Les réponses des pays et des gouvernements à la pandémie se croisent dans le recours aux nouvelles technologies, et à l’intelligence artificielle en tant qu’outils efficaces pour gérer la crise et le temps d’après. La crise sanitaire a affecté tous les secteurs, mais l’article expose son effet sur ceux de la santé, de l’économie et de l’éducation. Le passage relatant de la problématique du respect de la vie privé à l’ère de la Covid-19 était indispensable, même de façon rapide. ‬

This essay tries to answer the question “who is the person behind the mask?” by analyzing the most relevant cultural, political and religious aspects of mask-usage from a Christian perspective in preparation for the post-pandemic reality. The short review of the Greek and Christian cultural heritage concerning masks is followed by a critical phenomenological analysis on some effects of the current pandemic that accelerated the social and cultural processes already lurking underneath the surface. I will discuss six dimensions in which obligatory mask usage has transformed social relations: the notion of health based on separation, the body as a suspicious entity, the new division between private and public, the virtualisation of relationships, other-perception and finally, mask usage as a symbol of solidarity. Pleading for the use of charitable imagination in order to rediscover the person behind the mask, I argue for a tradition-based resistance against impersonal, virtualized and disembodied relations in the Covid-era.‬

This article analyzes colonial medical practices as secular theodicies that helped Shape social injustice in South Africa and suggests that European delineations of disease were integral to the country’s colonization. It starts by demarcating conceptions of Africa as the ‘diseased continent,’ arguing that this trope was informed by a dominant medical paradigm that localized threats to European health in Africa’s climate and topography. In the second section, I argue that the birth of bacteriology in the 1880s created new public health concerns that situated disease in extra-corporal spaces. In the race-conscious colonies, these public health spaces were inserted between European and African social bodies, presenting African pathology as a dominant threat to public health. In the final section, I argue that medical discourse in the interwar era increasingly focused upon African culture as the source of disease and enveloped Africans in medical discourses on the peculiarities of the African mind. The European medical cartography ofAfrica and Africans thus emerges as a strategy of distinction, which provided a precedent for racial segregation.‬

This paper attempts to identify some of the many aspects of poverty in Lebanon and the structural conditions that underlie them. It presents relevant findings from two ethnographic research projects led by the author in rural and urban areas of the country. Data collected using qualitative methods, such as interviews and observations of groups and individuals, has been subjected to thematic analysis, which reveals the presence of two major poverty-related themes in both of the communities studied: economic hardship and the inadequate marketing of local agricultural produce; and poor access to the health services and education available to more affluent sectors of the population. The paper indicates that the root causes of poverty and its manifestations in Lebanon are structural in nature and are the consequences of an interplay of factors at many levels. At the national level, the lack of a development policy and of appropriate regulation of foreign labour, in addition to regional political and economic conditions have exacerbated social inequality in Lebanon’s low-income and war-affected areas.