Jews in Kuwait

Kuwait in the last decades of the nineteenth century had become a dynamic place for its time. There was a building boom in both houses and ships, and business opportunities abounded. The country was peaceful and stable. The combination of services available and economic prospects drew people from surrounding countries searching for a better life. This article deals with the little-known Jewish community that began to come to Kuwait during that time. It also discusses the possible reasons why they left. These Jews belonged to the ‘Babylonian’ Jews who had lived in Mesopotamia for millennia. Their language was Arabic, and they had traded between Baghdad and India for centuries. The majority were involved in textiles, and they had their own market where people of all origins came to buy the cloth they imported. They usually educated their children in their synagogue. It was a community in flux, with constant comings and goings, rather than a stable group who arrived together and left together, and it was made up of diverse individuals.     

Social Psychology and Multiculturalism

Questions of multiculturalism give rise to lively and important debates in many countries and in many spheres of life. Diversity is considered desirable and necessary for the development of secure ethnic identities and positive intergroup relations, but is also challenged for being inequitable and a threat to social cohesion. After considering conceptions of multiculturalism and relevant country differences, the paper discusses social psychological research on multicultural attitudes and the effect of multiculturalism on intergroup relations. Subsequently, three issues are addressed that are central in debates about multiculturalism and that present additional topics for social psychological research. The first concerns the importance of intragroup processes, the second the nature of religious identity and Islam in particular, and the third issue relates to tolerance and civil liberties.     

Multiculturalism And Religio-ethnic Plurality

Malaysia is regarded one of the most plural countries in Southeast Asia. The plurality and the diversified nature of the society and the ability to live in relative peace and harmony make it possible to speak about Malaysia's experience of multiculturalism and co-existence. Upon independence in 1957 and the formation of Malaysia in 1963, the various religious and ethnic groups have practically demonstrated a remarkable sense of tolerance and reciprocity when they agreed to uphold the proposed Federal Constitution, which among other things granted citizenship to the immigrants (by the principle of jus soli), the recognition of Islam and the special Malay and Bumiputra rights. This paper seeks to depict the experience and the state of multiculturalism and the pattern of reciprocity and tolerance rooted and accustomed in the Malaysian society. It also traces some of the possible factors that are helping to shape the present generation's outlook towards multiculturalism.     

Multiculturalism and white paranoia in Australia

This paper examines the historical emergence of the debates on multiculturanism in Australia by seeing them as part of the evolution of what it defines as Australia’s colonial white paranoia. It examines the way white paranoia has shaped Australian society until its marginalisation in the early seventies. The paper argues that Australia’s multicultural debates are grounded in the economic, social and historical circumstances which made dominant sections of the political class and the media willing from the mid-eighties onward to exploit white colonial paranoia and bring it to the fore as a potent politcal force once again.     

The Challenges of Multiculturalism

Although the term multiculturalism is often understood on the public level as an ideology or as a social programme (to be ‘for’ or ‘against’), I argue in this paper that the term should also be understood to refer to the complex range of issues associated with cultural and religious diversity in society, and the social management of the challenges and opportunities such diversity offers. Understood in this sense, multiculturalism is not an optional extra, it is not something that a society can choose to have or avoid. For any country without closed borders then multiculturalism is a fact of today—it is present within the society. What is important are the social and political responses to the cultural and religious diversity that results from transnational flows and settlement of people. This introduction to the collection of papers highlights the need to understand multiculturalism as a process which is always contextual, and the role that state management of difference in the successful development of diversity plays.     

The Moralism of Multiculturalism

abstract Moralism is a frequent charge in politics, and especially in relation to the ‘politics of recognition’. In this essay, I identify three types of moralism — undue abstraction, unjustified moralism and impotent moralism — and then discuss each in relation to recent debates over multiculturalism in liberal political theory. Each of these forms of moralism has featured in interesting ways in recent criticisms of the political theory and public policy of multiculturalism. By ‘multiculturalism’ I mean, broadly speaking, the pursuit of group‐differentiated public policies that move beyond the protection of basic individual civil and political rights. Here the charge is not so much that moral judgments have no application in relation to the treatment of cultural and associational minorities, but that the moral claims of defenders of multiculturalism are: (a) appealed to without any sense of the practical realities on the ground (the undue abstraction charge); (b) asserted as if they were self‐evidently true (the unjustified moralism charge); which often results in (c) a stifling of reasoned criticism of the orthodoxy surrounding multiculturalism (thus engendering impotent moralism). I assess these charges in the course of defending the democratic character of the most plausible forms of multicultural accommodation in liberal democratic societies.     

关于西方心理学中的多元文化论思潮

多元文化论强调文化的多样性。心理学中的多元文化论思潮试图摆脱传统心理学对西方主流文化的依赖性,把心理学建立在多元文化的基础。本文在分析西方心理学中的多元文化论思潮产生原因的基础上阐述了其基本主张,并对这种思潮的意义及未来发展进行了预测。认为它是继行为主义、精神分析和人本主义心理学之后心理学的第四力量。     

The Politics and Poetry of Multiculturalism

This article discusses the usefulness of poetry in multicultural education and counseling training. Various exercises and techniques are presented that are applicable in training graduate level counseling students in multicultural issues.     

The Relevance of Multiculturalism for Aging

Though multiculturalists focus on race and minority status, issues of central importance to the aged, multiculturalism has not infiltrated the gerontology literature. However, since the so-called natural stages of life are cultural formations, each one a valuable creation, the topic of aging would certainly benefit from a connection to multiculturalism and its critique of the demands of assimilation.     

Multiculturalism in Britain and the Political Identity of Europe

The United Kingdom has traditionally been united by culture not ethnicity. Immigration has started to threaten this identity because of racism, lack of forethought and ill-conceived multiculturalism. The storm over Archbishop Rowan Williams' Sharia speech revealed how Islam in particular poses a problem. Williams is right to advocate more political pluralism in the face of variegated religious identities which exercise strong social influence but this needs to be an ‘organicist’ rather than ‘liberal’ pluralism, if Britain's political and religious inheritance is not to be threatened. The Christian character of Britain actually protects a certain pluralist variety and the role of other faiths, because of the peculiar character of Christianity.     

Multiculturalism as a Generic Approach to Counseling

According to a broad definition of culture, the multicultural perspective applies to all counseling relationships. According to this broad definition, multiculturalism may be described as a “fourth force” in counseling from its own theoretical perspective. The broad definition of culture is discussed and applied to the field of counseling. The advantages of defining culture broadly and of understanding multiculturalism as a generic approach to counseling are discussed and supported along with the consequences of alternative perspectives. La perspectiva multicultural se aplica a todas las relaciones consejeriales según una definición amplia de cultura. De esta manera el multi-culturalismo, desde su propia perspectiva, se puede describir coma “la cuarta fuerza” en la consejería. Se trata de la definición amplia de cultura y se aplica esta definición al campo deconsejería. Se discuten las ventajas de definir cultura de esa manera y de entender el multiculturalismo como una vía genérica a la consejería junto con las consecuencias de perspectivas alternativas.