Pious Citizens
Pious Citizens

Author: Monica M. Ringer

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2011-12-13

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0815650604

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In Pious Citizens, Ringer tells the story of a major intellectual revolution in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India and Iran, one that radically transformed the role of religion in society. At this time, key theological debates revolved around Zoroastrianism’s capacity to generate “progress” and “civilization.” Armed with both the destructive and creative capacities of historicism, reformers reevaluated their own religious tradition, molding Zoroastrian belief and practice according to contemporary ideas of rational religion and its potential to create pious citizens. Ringer demonstrates how rational and enlightened religion, characterized by social responsibility and the interiorization of piety, was understood as essential for the development of modern individuals, citizens, new public space, national identity, and secularism. She argues persuasively that reformers believed not only that social reform must be accompanied by religious reform but that it was in fact a product of religious reform. Pious Citizens offers new insights into the theological premises behind the promotion of secularism, the privatization of religion, and the development of new national identities. Ringer’s work also explores growing connections between the Iranian and Indian Zoroastrian communities and the revival of the ancient Persian past.

Pious Fashion
Pious Fashion

Author: Elizabeth M. Bucar

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-09-04

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0674976169

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Who says you can’t be pious and fashionable? Throughout the Muslim world, women have found creative ways of expressing their personality through the way they dress. Headscarves can be modest or bold, while brand-name clothing and accessories are part of a multimillion-dollar ready-to-wear industry that caters to pious fashion from head to toe. In this lively snapshot, Liz Bucar takes us to Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia and finds a dynamic world of fashion, faith, and style. “Brings out both the sensuality and pleasure of sartorial experimentation.” —Times Literary Supplement “I defy anyone not to be beguiled by [Bucar’s] generous-hearted yet penetrating observation of pious fashion in Indonesia, Turkey and Iran... Bucar uses interviews with consumers, designers, retailers and journalists...to examine the presumptions that modest dressing can’t be fashionable, and fashion can’t be faithful.” —Times Higher Education “Bucar disabuses readers of any preconceived ideas that women who adhere to an aesthetic of modesty are unfashionable or frumpy.” —Robin Givhan, Washington Post “A smart, eye-opening guide to the creative sartorial practices of young Muslim women... Bucar’s lively narrative illuminates fashion choices, moral aspirations, and social struggles that will unsettle those who prefer to stereotype than inform themselves about women’s everyday lives in the fast-changing, diverse societies that constitute the Muslim world.” —Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Private Citizens
Private Citizens

Author: Tony Tulathimutte

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2016-02-09

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 006239911X

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“Scathing, upsetting and generous all at once, this novel, about millennial friends in pre-2008-crash San Francisco, thrums with Tulathimutte’s sly intelligence and unerring comic timing. . . . The warm flashes make the satire cut deeper.” —The New York Times, “The Funniest Novels Since Catch-22” "One of the really phenomenal novels I've read in the last decade." —Jonathan Franzen From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut—This Side of Paradise for a new era. Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again. A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.

The Practice of Citizenship
The Practice of Citizenship

Author: Derrick R. Spires

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-03-08

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 081225080X

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In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass. Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.

Pious Practice and Secular Constraints
Pious Practice and Secular Constraints

Author: Jeanette S Jouili

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-05-13

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0804794898

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This chronicle of observant Muslim women’s daily challenges in secular settings is “a welcome contribution [that] can be useful in many disciplines” (Journal of Church and State). The visible increase in religious practice among young European-born Muslims has provoked public anxiety. Now, government regulations seek not only to restrict Islamic practices within the public sphere, but also to shape Muslims’—and especially women’s—personal conduct. Pious Practice and Secular Constraints chronicles the everyday ethical struggles of women active in orthodox and socially conservative Islamic revival circles as they are torn between their quest for a pious lifestyle and their aspirations to counter negative representations of Muslims within the mainstream society. Jeanette S. Jouili conducted fieldwork in France and Germany to investigate how pious Muslim women grapple with religious expression: for example, when to wear a headscarf, where to pray throughout the day, and how to maintain modest interactions between men and women. Her analysis stresses the various ethical dilemmas the women confronted in negotiating these religious duties within a secular public sphere. In conversation with Islamic and Western thinkers, Jouili teases out the important ethical-political implications of these struggles, ultimately arguing that Muslim moral agency, surprisingly reinvigorated rather than hampered by the increasingly hostile climate in Europe, encourages us to think about the contribution of non-secular civic virtues for shaping a pluralist society. “Jeanette Jouili’s book will be of great interest to scholars working on theories of modernity, orthodoxy, citizenship, gender, space, and ethics. It will be a superlative teaching aid for classes in anthropology, sociology, women's and gender studies, urban studies, philosophy, comparative religion, and more.” —American Ethnologist

Religious Otherness and National Identity in Scandinavia, c. 1790–1960
Religious Otherness and National Identity in Scandinavia, c. 1790–1960

Author: Frode Ulvund

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-12-16

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 3110654423

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The author discusses how religious groups, especially Jews, Mormons and Jesuits, were labeled as foreign and constructed as political, moral and national threats in Scandinavia in different periods between c. 1790 and 1960. Key questions are who articulated such opinions, how was the threat depicted, and to what extent did it influence state policies towards these groups. A special focus is given to Norway, because the Constitution of 1814 included a ban against Jews (repelled in 1851) and Jesuits (repelled in 1956), and because Mormons were denied the status of a legal religion until freedom of religion was codified in the Constitution in 1964. The author emphasizes how the construction of religious minorities as perils of society influenced the definition of national identities in all Scandinavia, from the late 18th Century until well after WWII. The argument is that Jews, Mormons and Jesuits all were constructed as "anti-citizens", as opposites of what it meant to be "good" citizens of the nation. The discourse that framed the need for national protection against foreign religious groups was transboundary. Consequently, transnational stereotypes contributed significantly in defining national identities.

Aristotle's Discovery of the Human
Aristotle's Discovery of the Human

Author: Mary P. Nichols

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2023-07-15

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0268205442

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Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human offers a fresh, illuminating, and accessible analysis of one of the Western philosophical tradition’s most important texts. In Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human, noted political theorist Mary P. Nichols explores the ways in which Aristotle brings the gods and the divine into his “philosophizing about human affairs” in his Nicomachean Ethics. Her analysis shows that, for Aristotle, both piety and politics are central to a flourishing human life. Aristotle argues that piety provides us not only an awareness of our kinship to the divine, and hence elevates human life, but also an awareness of a divinity that we cannot entirely assimilate or fathom. Piety therefore supports a politics that strives for excellence at the same time that it checks excess through a recognition of human limitation. Proceeding through each of the ten books of the Ethics, Nichols shows that this prequel to Aristotle’s Politics is as theoretical as it is practical. Its goal of improving political life and educating citizens and statesmen is inseparable from its pursuit of the truth about human beings and their relation to the divine. In the final chapter, which turns to contemporary political debate, Nichols’s suggestion of the possibility of supplementing and deepening liberalism on Aristotelian grounds is supported by the account of human nature, virtue, friendship, and community developed throughout her study of the Ethics.

Revolution and its Discontents
Revolution and its Discontents

Author: Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1108630774

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The death of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Khomeini, the bitter denouement of the Iran-Iraq War, and the marginalisation of leading factions within the political elite, in tandem with the end of the Cold War, harboured immense intellectual and political repercussions for the Iranian state and society. It was these events which created the conditions for the emergence of Iran's post-revolutionary reform movement, as its intellectuals and political leaders sought to re-evaluate the foundations of the Islamic state's political legitimacy and religious authority. In this monograph, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, examines the rise and evolution of reformist political thought in Iran and analyses the complex network of publications, study circles, and think-tanks that encompassed a range of prominent politicians and intellectuals in the 1990s. In his meticulous account of the relationships between the post-revolutionary political class and intelligentsia, he explores a panoply of political and ideological issues still vital to understanding Iran's revolutionary state, such as the ruling political theology of the 'Guardianship of the Jurist', the political elite's engagement with questions of Islamic statehood, democracy and constitutionalism, and their critiques of revolutionary agency and social transformation.

Basel in the Age of Burckhardt
Basel in the Age of Burckhardt

Author: Lionel Gossman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2002-04-15

Total Pages: 630

ISBN-13: 9780226305004

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This remarkable history tells the story of the independent city-republic of Basel in the nineteenth century, and of four major thinkers who shaped its intellectual history: the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philologist and anthropologist Johann Jacob Bachofen, the theologian Franz Overbeck, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. "Remarkable and exceptionally readable . . . There is wit, wisdom and an immense erudition on every page."—Jonathan Steinberg, Times Literary Supplement "Gossman's book, a product of many years of active contemplation, is a tour de force. It is at once an intellectual history, a cultural history of Basel and Europe, and an important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century historiography. Written with a grace and elegance that many aspire to, few seldom achieve, this is model scholarship."—John R. Hinde, American Historical Review

States of Subsistence
States of Subsistence

Author: José Ciro Martínez

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-04-12

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1503631338

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On any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz 'arabi—the slightly leavened flatbread known to many as pita. Some rely on this bread to avoid starvation; for others it is a customary pleasure. Yet despite its ubiquity in accounts of Middle East politics and society, rarely do we consider how bread is prepared, consumed, discussed, and circulated—and what this all represents. With this book, José Ciro Martínez examines khubz 'arabi to unpack the effects of the welfare program that ensures its widespread availability. Drawing on more than a year working as a baker in Amman, Martínez probes the practices that underpin subsidized bread. Following bakers and bureaucrats, he offers an immersive examination of social welfare provision. Martínez argues that the state is best understood as the product of routine practices and actions, through which it becomes a stable truth in the lives of citizens. States of Subsistence not only describes logics of rule in contemporary Jordan—and the place of bread within them—but also unpacks how the state endures through forms, sensations, and practices amid the seemingly unglamorous and unspectacular day-to-day.