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

Medicalization is a powerful social, cultural, economic and clinical force that has been studied in many contexts around the world. This paper focuses upon medicalization in Arab/Middle Eastern culture, looking specifically at the increased application of biomedical thinking and medical care within Arab nations. Two examples of medicalization are discussed. The first is consanguineous marriage, which is widely practised in Arab societies. It serves to illustrate how marriage systems and reproductive choices can change when information concerning the risk of birth defects is introduced. The second example is infantile diarrhoea, a major cause of infant mortality in developing countries. It shows that popular methods of healing may be called into question with the introduction of newer medical knowledge and progressive standards of medical practice. These two examples indicate how medicalization can change personal identities and call into question traditional values concerning marriage, reproduction and healing. Also discussed are modernization and the concept of health care as a vehicle for social justice. The WHO’s 1978 ‘Health for All’ initiative is also explored in the context of health disparities and health as a human right.‬

Current cases of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) worldwide are estimated to be in the tens of millions. If this estimate is valid, PTSD is the world’s second most common mental disorder. PTSD is associated with severe distress, high levels of chronicity, co-morbidity and disability, and significant economic (productivity) consequences. Very high prevalence rates of PTSD are reported for post-conflict countries for example, 37% for Algeria’s general population and 28% in Cambodia. Still higher rates of PTSD are reported in Western Europe, North America and Australia for people claiming refugee status. These epidemiological findings are recent developments, for PTSD only entered the psychiatric nosology in 1980. Since then, the character of PTSD has been further defined to include subvarieties, notably, ‘partial PTSD’, ‘vicarious PTSD’ and ‘collective trauma’. PTSD has also attracted the attention of several critics, who have questioned its underlying epistemology and actual clinical significance. In this paper, I review these various claims and critiques. I approach PTSD from three perspectives: human memory (the ‘motor’ that is said to drive The PTSD syndrome), social relations (PTSD comprises a language of entitlement as well as a disorder) and history (not only the history of PTSD, but PTSD as a medium for composing history).‬

The discourses on mental health in post-conflict societies that have been promoted by many Western governmental and non-governmental organizations in Kosova, as elsewhere, have tended to revolve around the relief of traumatization and the protection of human rights. These are necessary concerns, but these discourses give insufficient attention to the social, economic, cultural and political conditions related to Kosova as a ‘weak state’; they do not contribute to a public mental health response to catastrophes caused by social injustice; nor do they encourage more active participation by local professionals and families. Moreover, these discourses may converge with the historical consequences of state-sponsored violence and oppression in unintended and unproductive ways, as illustrated by the Shtime crisis. Yet, in Kosova, alternative means of representing the public mental health crisis following social injustice can be found among local policy-makers, professionals and families. They emphasize the building of state structures that can protect and support families and communities. Ameliorating mental illness and social suffering in post-conflict societies requires a rhetorical re-mapping of the public mental health crisis to one based more upon local understandings of local needs and strengths.‬

Disasters like wars, earthquakes, floods, cyclones, landslides, technological accidents and urban fires occur in all parts of the world. Armed conflicts alone have produced about 12 million refugees and 25 million internally displaced people. Many of these refugees, internally displaced people and other victims of conflict have suffered, and continue to suffer, the effects of traumatic stress. The ratio of disaster victims in developing countries to disaster victims in developed countries is 166:1. The ratio of morbidity and mortality following disasters in developing countries to developed countries is 10:1. Psychological problems tend to affect some 30-40% of the disaster population within the first year. According to the World Bank and the WHO, almost half of the estimated total burden of disease worldwide can be attributed to mental and behavioural problems. This paper focuses upon three aspects of providing mental health and psychosocial care in (post-)conflict emergency situations, as well as during the subsequent phases of rehabilitation and reconstruction. First, it explains why it is important to go beyond a dyadic helper-patient relation in contexts in which few mental health professionals are available. Next, it considers the selection of priorities for intervention and training in situations of massive traumatic stress. Finally, it presents a preventative and curative intervention model that can be used in an eclectic way in post-conflict or disaster situations and that can be tailored to specific local socio-cultural contexts.‬

This paper explores the problem of the moral recognition of human suffering after mass violence. In post-conflict societies, truth commissions and trials have been used to address the legacy of violence and to form the basis for national reconstruction through truth-seeking, justice and reconciliation. However, in those countries that held trials and truth commissions more than 15 years ago, these rituals of political transition have not closed the door upon past atrocities. In South America and elsewhere, movements for the ‘disappeared’ continue to motivate human rights movements and individual victims to know the truth—even if justice itself must be suspended—producing transnational human rights alliances and prosecutions designed to challenge the impunity of perpetrators. This paper looks at the way in which truth commissions and trials have shaped post-transition politics of identity and national reconciliation by drawing upon material from Uruguay, Argentina, Bosnia, Rwanda and South Africa. It further considers the social and political consequences of the official framing of conflict through human rights hearings and legal cases—for example, in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) construction of the Bosnian wars as an ethnic conflict—for broader movements for justice. Of particular interest is the role of the legal and healing professions, which seek to translate individual suffering as a legacy of violence into claims of the right to challenge impunity. The paper argues that these ongoing movements for the moral recovery of victims are essential for anchoring justice and reconciliation in a more reflective public morality about the past and the present. Moreover, they point to fundamental cultural processes at the core of law-making: the role of the suffering victim as a primary source for institutionalization.

The information and communications technologies (ICTs) revolution in the Arab world coincides with an era of political turbulence marked by a wave of Islamic political activism, the reinflamed Palestinian-Israeli conflict and, most dramatically, the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States and the subsequent American ‘war on terrorism.’ All of this is taking place against a background of globalization and its profound multiple effects on Arab societies. This essay begins with a sketch of ICT development in the Arab world. It contends that ICT is accelerating the erosion of the state’s ability to frame identities and loyalties and is opening the door to transnational political action. Exogenous transnational action affects Arab societies, but transnational forces arising in the Arab and Muslim worlds can have global effects, with attacks on American territory serving as an extreme example. The essay goes on to describe the changing political terrain in the Arab world and the development of networks as powerful structures for contestation, with attention being drawn to the particular successes of Islamist networks. American assertiveness after 11 September has deepened the contradictions in Arab politics and society. The essay concludes with ten propositions concerning the relationships between ICT, political identities, networks and American ‘imperial’ behaviour.‬

What follows represents the skeleton of a larger thesis and a larger study. The thesis has three integral elements. The first element is historiographic; it involves the question of the conventional boundaries separating the history of science from the history of religion. Breaching these boundaries, at least in the case of the history of Arabic alchemy, is warranted, I argue, not only because of the peculiarities of our historical data, but also because it extends the domain of our explanation and illuminates many otherwise obscure issues. The second element of the thesis is that the Jabirian theory of the ẓāhir and the bāṭin is not grounded in Greek alchemy: in a complex manner, its sources lie rather in Shīʿī metaphysics. The third and final element, which is least developed here, concerns the vicissitudes of the doctrine of the occultum and the manifestum in Latin alchemy. I suggest, tentatively, that the ẓāhir-bāṭin of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān explains the Latin doctrine much better than the ekstrophê theory of the Greek alchemists— which would mean that the roots of the occultum and the manifestum are to be found in Shīʿī metaphysics and not in the Greek alchemical tradition.‬

According to many accounts, the present day is a time of increasing borderlessness or the breaking down of boundaries. This treatment argues that it is a time when borders are being redefined and redrawn. Examining transnationalism requires a combination of long-term and holistic views. The long-term view brings into question the newness of transnationalism. The holistic view signals that increasing transnationalism in communication, production, consumption and travel is accompanied by the emergence of new borders (as in rising restrictions on migration) and new politics of risk containment (for example, in relation to conflict areas). As some boundaries fade, others emerge that are new and/or internal; moreover, the advantages that accompany the erasure of borders are not evenly distributed. With globalization comes a new dialectics of borders. This may be understood as a process of hierarchical integration, in which integration (the spread of global capitalism and its political influence and cultural radius) fosters borderlessness, while hierarchy imposes new boundaries and forms of stratification.

” This paper considers the interdependence of history, historiography, ideology and identity in modern Lebanon. It argues that historical consciousness, viewing and writing are based, to varying extents, upon (collective) memory, recovery, or invention of history, which has resulted in the construction of many historical myths. Despite the claim of some historians to have overcome the gap between socio-religious identity and supra-confessional, secular identity, most works of history are subject to the tension between confessionalism and nationalism. ‘Religious coexistence’ has not been replaced by ‘national coalescence.’ This dilemma becomes especially evident when looking at the different interpretations of the major controversial issues in Lebanese history, such as the question of Lebanon’s ‘uniqueness,’ the role of specific historical figures and so on. While books from the Mandate period revolved around either a Lebanonist or an Arabist attitude, some written after independence focused upon the necessity of confessional coexistence and, eventually, upon the deconstruction of historical myths and the cultivation of a non-confessional vision of history. Such endeavours were largely overshadowed by the civil war, when the bulk of writings once again served only to mirror and defend the confessional affiliations and political outlooks of their authors. However, some new historiographical trends have taken shape during the last twenty years, particularly since the 1990s, as a small number of scholars have begun to employ fresh approaches and sources to counteract rigid perceptions of Lebanon’s past and present.”

This paper analyzes the relationship between international and internal migration and ethnic relations in Kenya in the colonial and post-colonial periods respectively. Under colonial rule (1895-1963), white immigrant farmers alienated large chunks of land from indigenous Kenyans; while the latter were conveniently consigned to the so-called ‘African Trust Lands,’ the immigrants throve as commercial farmers in the ‘White Highlands.’ In time, existing strife between whites and Africans intensified, culminating in a series of events that included the Mau Mau rebellion. When independence finally came, in 1963, the alienated land was transferred to local Kenyans through the settlement of landless peasants and legislation permitting land purchases on the basis of ‘ willing buyer-willing seller.’ In this way, the Rift Valley, the heartland of white settlement, attracted large-scale in-migration of new farmers, mostly Kikuyu from Central province. In 1991-93, at a time when Kenya was going through a democratic transition, this development sparked off ethnic conflict between African Kenyans. Nevertheless, Kenya has managed to become a strong multi-ethnic society in which lively political manoeuvring has taken place, but without plunging the country into the turmoil that characterizes the region.