Islam and Human Rights: A Case of Deceptive First Appearances

It is a common belief that Islamic-based government, when serving as an ideological foundation for government, facilitates the poor protection of human rights. However, most studies of the relationship between Islam and individual rights have been at the theoretical and anecdotal levels. In this article, I test the relationship between Islam and human rights across a sample of 23 predominately Muslim countries and a control group of non-Muslim developing nations, while controlling for other factors that have been shown to affect human rights practices. I found that the influence of Islamic political culture on government has a statistically insignificant relationship with the protection of human rights.     

Islam and the Sermon on the Mount

The theme of Islam and the Sermon on the Mount belongs to a lively, controversial field of discourse, in which representatives of the major monotheistic religions conflict in their claims to truth, and it has formed a central point in their encounters. For example, representatives of the Salafiyya saw in the Sermon a barrier to the secular order. Through their criticisms, they tended even to appropriate the Sermon for the purposes of Islam. However, the ethical message of the Sermon has usually not been interrogated as such. Form-critical, symbolic, structural and intentional similarities in Muslim remarks point to this appreciation. Nevertheless, Muslims seem much more concerned with the specific contextual meaning of the Sermon and its historicity rather than considering its principle of love for enemies or its legislative nature. Thus, positive receptions of the Sermon, such as al-Ghazzālī's or the recognition discourse of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, if not forgotten, have fallen into the background. In the atmosphere of Christian missionary and colonial experience and the post-colonial aftermath, this reception history and its semantic transformations are certainly understandable. However, they first offer a fertile ground for inter-religious dialogue when the mutual understanding processes are revealed and the discursively produced internal and external allocations, so rich with meaning, are exposed.     

Vibrant memory scapes: Encountering memorials on unstable ground

This article uses walking ethnography to approach the memoryscape of Stockton, a peninsula settlement opposite the city of Newcastle, Australia. As new residents of the city, we walked the memoryscape of Stockton together and with friends and family seeking encounters with the material objects of local memory as an entry into place. Stockton's memoryscape is full of objects gravid with deeply localised meanings. In some cases, our encounters have stimulated inquiry into documented histories and stories behind the objects, however we remain primarily concerned with the prospects, and limitations, of encountering the memoryscape ‘fresh’. From these experiences we adopt a three-part argument. First, Stockton's memoryscape exhibits a shared local identity based on defiance evident in three groups of memorial objects: (i) unintentional memorials created by the unstable landscape (ii) DIY memorials made by local residents, and (iii) monuments sanctioned by local authorities. Second, Stockton's memoryscape remains powerfully rooted in place. It is vibrant, defying digitisation, defying displacement and re-placement. Stockton's memorials and monuments need to be found, encountered, shared in situ on the unstable ground of ballast and sinking sand. Third, walking ethnography restricted to a bounded area, mode of mobility (walking), theme (memorials), and epistemology (encounter with objects) generates rich ethnographic material on place, even without expert knowledge of the past. These experiments in walking and encountering objects in the vernacular memoryscape animated our imagination even with only limited detail on what to remember and how to feel about it. This offers a contribution to interdisciplinary research on the affective power of found material objects in ethnographic analysis.     

Denigrating Carl Rogers: William Coulson's Last Crusade

This article reviews William Coulson's assertions that Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and he initiated the humanistic education field, that Rogers repudiated his philosophy late in life, and that they owe the nation's parents an apology. The author argues that these charges are groundless and self-serving and provides examples and quotations from Rogers's later writings to show how Rogers remained constant to his basic person-centered beliefs until his death.     

Encountering Carl Rogers: His Views on Facilitating Groups

Carl Rogers's views on facilitating groups are presented as expressed in a telephone dialogue seminar with graduate students in the Counselor Education Division at North Texas State University.     

论伊斯兰教传统刑法

本文主要按照伊斯兰教传统刑法的特点,就其"经定刑"、"同态复仇"和"酌定刑"作了较为全面且深入的讨论。认为伊斯兰教传统刑法虽是当时社会刑事法律的主要表现形式,自有其时代的局限性。但对治理一个尚不成熟的社会来说,亦有让我们可理解之一面。随着历史的发展和社会的变革,古典刑法只在当今部分伊斯兰国家尚有保留和实施。所有这些,对我们今天较为全面地认识和理解伊斯兰教传统刑法的两面性是有所帮助的。     

Encountering the dream: Intersecting anthropological and psychoanalytical approaches

The human dream has been a central and contested therapeutic resource for the various schools of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. However, anthropology has been less concerned with human dreaming, though many anthropologists have studied indigenous peoples' dream theories as a consequence of the importance that such people gave to their dreaming. During the twentieth century there has been a fertile interaction between psychoanalytical approaches to dreaming and pertinent anthropological studies. This paper situates these interconnected disciplinary approaches to dreaming in the context of the historical development of thinking about culture and dreaming. The dream is considered as a multiple human resource. Discussion focuses on a fourfold approach to the dream: as therapeutic and existential encounter; as potential social knowledge; as cultural template; and finally as reflexive opportunity. Overall, the paper asserts the centrality of the dream as both a cultural and therapeutic resource.