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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.‬

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.

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).‬

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.

Beginning in 1990, Mongolia, a former Client State of what was then the Soviet Union, undertook sweeping free market reforms under terms prescribed by Western development institutions. Principal among these were reforms to Mongolia’s Soviet-style health system. This paper reports the results of a research project designed to explore the consequences of these health sector reforms from the perspective of Mongolians living in urban and rural communities. Drawing upon interviews With householders, observations, medical records and illness histories (as reported by patients), I argue that the effective implementation of health reform has been compromised by the development of a private, primary care model in which physicians are largely unable to provide appropriate treatment for even the most common of ailments. Because of laws in the national health insurance system and the uncritical development of a private sector of health care, poor Mongolians have limited access to secondary and tertiary care. I conclude by arguing that the valorization of market mechanisms by international development institutions and NGOs results in a conflation of distributional efficiency With medical and public health efficacy. This has resulted in a system of attenuated primary health care for the poor and vulnerable. Even when modified by government concerns for justice and equity, the global/ Western push for privatization in Mongolia has primarily done what it has done elsewhere: produced poor medicine for poor people.

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.‬