All posts by tabsir

Bryan Turner at Hofstra

Anthropology/Sociology, Conferences and Talks, Gender and Sexuality, Scholars

On Tuesday, Feb. 9 and Wednesday, Feb. 10, internationally known sociologist Bryan Turner will be delivering two guest lectures at Hofstra, and also will be available for smaller meetings with interested students and faculty. Dr. Turner, currently a visiting professor at Wellesley College, was a sociology professor at National University in Singapore and the University of Cambridge. He will become a ‘presidential professor’ at CUNY in September. He has edited or written more than 60 books on a wide range of topics, and his research interests include globalization and religion, concentrating on issues such as religious conflict and the modern state, religious authority and electronic information, religious consumerism and youth cultures, human rights and religion, and religious cosmologies. Turner’s visit is sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Religion, and Sociology, Honors College, and the Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies Program.

Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2:20-3:45 (Breslin 100)
Bodies as Culture/Bodies as Practice. In the last decade and across a wide range of disciplines, the human body has become a key issue in research. However, the dominant approach denies the materiality of the body, treating it as culture or text. The body is always a sign of something else. The result is that we lose any understanding of practice and embodiment. In my own work and in this talk, I look at a number of examples – dance, old age and disease – where practical embodiment cannot be avoided. This denial of materiality and practice has wider ramifications for sociology and anthropology in terms of the equally problematic status of ‘Culture’.

Wednesday, Feb. 10, 11:15-12:45 (Breslin 100)

PROGRAM CANCELLED DUE TO SNOW
Globalization and Cosmopolitanism : the religious and the secular’? Religion was systematically ignored by the major social science thinkers of the 20th century who embraced the idea of inevitable secularization (Althusser, Elias, Dahrendorf, Harvey, Boltanski, Giddens). At the beginning of this century, the academic scene has changed radically with major figures (Berger, Habermas, Vattimo, Rorty) either discovering or rediscovering religion. One curious absence, however, in the current fashion for work on globalization in the social sciences is yet another absence of religion. This is curious since one could argue that the evangelical religions were global all along – only Roland Robertson has perused this idea with some determination. The absence is even more curious when we come to the current study of global cosmopolitanism in which once more the major figures (Appiah, Beck, Giddens, Sassen) do not see the connection. In this paper I examine Alain Badiou’s contention that Saint Paul is our contemporary (Gal.3:28). Following my own work on Vulnerability and Human Rights (2006) I consider, with an intersection of theology and sociology, the idea of cosmopolitan virtue and hospitality. I finish with the provocative question: can Muslims be cosmopolitans?

In addition, Dr. Turner will be available from 4:15 p.m. -5:15 p.m. on Feb. 9 in the Anthropology Department office, Davison, Room 200; and from 9 a.m.-10 a.m. on Feb. 10 in Davison, Room 206.

For more information, contact Dr. Daniel Varisco at daniel.m.varisco@hofstra.edu

Reforming the Arab League

Yemen

Yemen proposal to reform Arab League
SABA, Yemen News Agency, February 6, 2010

CAIRO. Feb. 06 (Saba) – Yemen has put forward a proposal for the establishment of an Arab Union as a replacement for the Arab League that would be discussed by Arab Foreign Ministers in an early March meeting as a prelude to sending it to the Arab Leaders’ Summit in late March.

The proposal was drafted in an initiative form to reform the Arab League.

In the initiative, Yemen suggested a draft constitution for the union that should contain 37 articles based on principles such as respecting sovereignty and regional borders of countries, respecting the unity of a member state’s national soil, the right of a country to choose its ruling system, dis-recognizing taking office through
force, and establishing an Arab security system to protect the member states and contribute to boosting international peace and security, the Egyptian Al-Shorouk newspaper quoted an official at the Arab League as saying. Continue reading Reforming the Arab League →

More Travels with Kitto

Bible and Holy Land, Lithographs, Orientalism

Following up on an earlier post, here is another illustration from John Kitto’s An Illustrated History of the Holy Bible (Social Circle, Georgia: E. Nebhut, 1871). The illustration above of a contemporary Arab scene illustrates the discussion of the patriarch Isaac receiving King Abimelech, “whom, with his attendants, he entertained with great liberality. The articles for a treaty of friendship were agreed on that same evening, and the next morning confirmed by a solemn and mutual oath; after which Abimelech took his leave, and returned home (pp. 118-119).

Now, if only Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu could remake this scene with all its fanfare, the world would be a better place.

Know Your Customers First

Food and Drink, Humor and Satire

A disappointed salesman of Coca Cola returns from his Middle East assignment. A friend asks him: “Why weren’t you successful in Saudi Arabia? The salesman explained, with a sigh: “When I got posted in the Middle East, I was very confident that I would make a good sales pitch as our cola is virtually unknown there. But, I had a problem. I didn’t know how to speak Arabic. So, I planned to convey the message through three posters, like this:

Continue reading Know Your Customers First →

Why does this land make me quiver?

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Books You Should Read, Israel, Journalism and Media, Palestine, Photography

[Webshaykh’s note: Carol Spencer Miller (1954-2004) worked as a photojournalist in the Middle East, covering the crises there for some of the major American and european journals and newspapers. She had access to the elites, including King Hussein and Yassir Arafat, as well as ordinary people. Although she died before publishing her reflections on this experience, her book has been edited by her sister as Danger Pay: Memoir of a Photojournalist in the Middle East, 1984-1994 and is now available as an intriguing first-person memoir of events that seem to recycle more than disappear from the news cycle. I provide here an excerpt about her feeling of disorientation reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian issue.]

It grows increasingly unclear to me why people call this a “Westernized” country. the phones don’t work, the press is censored, there are guns everywhere. I am perpetually uneasy. How, I wonder, can anyone relax when wherever you look, there is someone toting or pointing a machine gun? they casually rest across shoulders, carried by anybody who wants to. Will I get used to the sight of civilians wearing sandals, shorts, T-shirts, and Uzis. in movie theaters, at the supermarket, at shopping malls, and at bars? They aren’t frightening as much as disconcerting.

This is a difficult country to get accustomed to. There are bomb shelters in homes and children’s playgrounds, security at every store, the ever-present notion of “security reasons,” the way people dress, as if they don’t give two hoots about appearance (they don’t). Restaurants and movies open on Fridays are stoned by the ultra-Orthodox Haredim. Continue reading Why does this land make me quiver? →

Following Seward’s Folly: #4 The Dome of the Rock

Archaeology and Antiquities, Bible and Holy Land, Lithographs, Palestine, Travel


Illustration of Cairo from Seward’s Travels (1873)

William H. Seward, the American Secretary of State who is forever linked with the “folly” of acquiring Alaska from the Russians, spent a year traveling around the world near the end of his life. In three previous posts I posted the comments he and his daughter made about India and Aden, and Egypt. The journey continued to Palestine and the city of Jerusalem:

Yussef Effendi, with the brother and secretary of the pacha, attended us to the Mosque of Omar. It is only within the last five years that this mosque, scarcely less sacred in the eyes of Mussulmans than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in ours, has been opened to Christian travelers. Even now a careful, though somewhat disguised surveillance, is practiced over them. The mosque stands in an area enclosed with a high, parapeted wall, overlooking the vally of Jehoshaphat, and confronting the Mount of Olives. This occupies one-sixth of the land of the entire city. On the eastern side of this wall is a gate-way, built of marble, called by the Mussulmans the “Golden Gate,” which they are fond of representing as the “gate of the temple called Beautiful,” but its modern architecture does not support that claim. It is only interesting from the tradition that it was closed with the Roman conquest, and has never been reopened. The so-called Mosque of Omar is not single. It consists of two distinct mosques, placed at some distance from each other – the one here named Kubbet-es-Sukhrah, or “the Dome of the Rock,” commonly called the Mosque of Omar, and the Mosque-el-Aqsa. Though differing entirely from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Mosque of Omar is not less unique and peculiar in its sacred antiquities. Twelve hundred years ago, on the surrender of the Greek Patriach, the Caliph Omar demanded to be shownt he site of the Jewish temple. He was taken to the sacred rock, he knelt and prayed over it, and he built over it a mosque, which, with subsequent repairs, is the present “Dome of the Rock,” or Mosque of Omar. In architectural design and execution it rivals the finest in Cairo and Constantinople. Continue reading Following Seward’s Folly: #4 The Dome of the Rock →

Eurabian Follies

Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101, Terrorism Issue

Eurabian Follies
The shoddy and just plain wrong genre that refuses to die

by Justin Vaïsse, Foreign Policy, January/February, 2010

By 2050, Europe will be unrecognizable. Instead of romantic cafes, Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Germain will be lined with halal butcheries and hookah bars; the street signs in Berlin will be written in Turkish. School-children from Oslo to Naples will read Quranic verses in class, and women will be veiled.

At least, that’s what the authors of the strange new genre of “Eurabia” literature want you to believe. Not all books of this alarmist Europe-is-dying category, which received its most intellectually hefty treatment yet with the recent release of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, offer such dire and colorful predictions. But they all make the case that low fertility rates among natives, massive immigration from Muslim countries, and the fateful encounter between an assertive Islamic culture and a self-effacing European one will lead to a Europe devoid of all Western identity.

For the rest of this much longer article, click here.


Justin Vaïsse is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe and co-author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France.