Beyond barbarity and concealment: animal sacrifice and religious slaughter in Islamic responses to postdomesticity

In a society where animals to be consumed as food are produced using modern industrial animal farming system (described as postdomestic in Bulliet [2005 Bulliet, R. W. 2005. Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The past and Future of Human–Animal Relationships. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]]), most people who consume animals are very much removed from the production process. Most consumers do not participate actively or have intimate knowledge of the rearing and slaughtering of animals for food. In this article, I critically analyse existing Islamic responses to problems arising from the postdomestic condition with regard to consuming animal as food. In this article, my analysis focuses on making explicit the connection between the assumption of barbarity in the civilising discourse surrounding religious requirement for animal slaughter and the problem of postdomestic concealment of animals we consume. Furthermore, I analyse the role that the Islamic requirement for animal slaughter (zabiha) and the tradition of Festival of Sacrifice (eid al-adha) can have potential solutions that religion can offer to the problems of postdomesticity.     

Hidden or Forbidden,Elected or Rejected: Sufism as ‘Islamic Esotericism’?

The article analyses the background of a popular conception of Sufism as equivalent to ‘Islamic esotericism’ by tracing two different but sometimes confluent currents: reifications of Sufism within Western romanticist and modern environments, and the approach to it in Islamic reformist movements. A further aim is to nuance and problematize such understandings, making use of examples from both historical and contemporary Sufism. Finally, the article briefly discusses possible pros and cons related to the interbreeding of Islamic Studies and the academic studies of Western esotericism.     

A Reappraisal of the Role of Muḥibb al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb and the YMMA in the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood

In contemporary academic literature, the name of the Syrian publisher and journalist Mu?ibb al-Dīn al-Kha?īb often appears in connection with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood during the interwar years. Although his role in the transition of ?asan al-Bannā's movement from a marginal to a significant socio-political player in Egyptian affairs has been mentioned in numerous works, no comprehensive study has yet been undertaken to determine how and by what means exactly al-Kha?īb supported al-Bannā's organization in its early years. The following article is an attempt to answer these questions by showing the strategic importance of al-Kha?īb and his network in helping al-Bannā develop from being an Arabic teacher in a primary school to one of the main leaders of the Islamist movement in Egypt.     

Evaluating health care work settings: A holistic conceptual framework

Abstract

After offering a systems perspective that considers a diversity of job-related and personal factors, we discuss the determinants and impacts of health care work climates and how staff morale and performance can influence the treatment milieu and quality of patient care. We also describe the physical features, organizational structure and policies, and suprapersonal and task factors that help to shape health care work climates. We then review research on the connections between work climate and staff morale and performance, the interplay of work climate factors, and the role of personal factors in these relationships. Finally, we orovide some ideas about how to improve health care work settings and focus on some promising new research directions.     

A provocation to mission: Constance Padwick's study of Muslim devotion

This article offers an examination of the work of Constance Padwick (1886–1968), who served as a ‘literature missionary’ with the Church Missionary Society and the International Missionary Council in Egypt and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Through a study of Padwick's life-long engagement with popular Muslim devotional prayers, the article demonstrates how she was inspired to use language, devotion and liturgy to call for a richer, bolder and deeper Christian presence in the Muslim world. Formed by the prevailing Evangelical tradition of the epoch, Padwick was drawn to Islam's mystical tradition. Her commitment to teasing out underlying similarities between the two traditions influenced the theology of mission that she developed, as her study of Muslim devotions led her to encourage a greater emphasis on the contribution that Arabic Christian devotional literature could make to Protestant missions in the Muslim world. In addition to shaping a specific missiological approach, the experience of Islamic popular piety led her to exhort her colleagues to cooperate more closely with the Eastern churches in order to build up and strengthen the ancient Christian presence in the Arab world.     

Relational trauma in infancy. Psychoanalytic,attachment and neuropsychological contributions to parent–infant psychotherapy

Abstract

The paper argues that residential projects working mainly with those diagnosed schizophrenic are specialized work groups, in Bion's terms, operating upon the assumption of pairing, and illustrates this with reference to a period of organizational change at one such project. The reasons why this might be so are discussed, and are related to the central issue of hope and despair in work with those who are unlikely to recover.     

Caught in the crossfire: A case of mistaken identity among religious revivalists and secularists

The discussion of Islamic and Protestant revivalisms inflames not only believers but secularists as well. This paper is about standpoint and perceived standpoint in relation to carrying out feminist research about why some women in a liberal democracy join revivalist movements. The article also discusses the variegated nature of power relations within the research process. Situated within a Women's Studies Centre the author found herself in the crossfire between secular feminists and religious revivalists—some members of each group insisting she represented the position of the opposing view. This paper explores the conflictual situation and resulting ‘epistemological vertigo’ in circumstances where revivalists and secularists each believed in the stereotype of the other and assumed the researcher embodied it.     

Re-conceptualising the religious habitus: Reflexivity and embodied subjectivity in global modernity

The utility of the notion of the religious habitus rests on its capacity to illuminate how embodied dispositions emergent from routinised practices come to be socially and culturally significant. This has been called into question, however, by global changes that undermine the societal stability and personal habits on which it is often understood to rely, stimulating instead reflexive engagements with change. After assessing conventional conceptions of the religious habitus vulnerable to such criticism, we utilise the writings of Latour in developing a new understanding of the term. Re-conceptualising the religious habitus as something reflexively re-made or instaured, through the cultivation of a subjectivity that locates human action, feeling and thought at the embodied intersection of worldly and other-worldly realities, we illustrate the value of this approach with reference to contemporary Pentecostalism and Islam.     

Everyday lived Islam: religiosities and identities of Muslim women in the Republic of Macedonia

In the Republic of Macedonia, most Muslim women belong to the Albanian minority. Particularly due to the current fractured nature of the Macedonian societal body and the diverse historical developments that have led to this, the importance of ethnic identities is emphasised and religious identities, especially Orthodox Christian and Muslim identities, fortify them. Everyday lived religion, its active enacting, and the values Islam represents can be important to Muslim women in the Republic of Macedonia and manifest themselves, for instance, in the human relationships within Muslim communities. Everyday lived Islam may also be an important factor when women’s roles in the larger societal context are examined. The 19 Albanian women whom I interviewed during the period 2008–2009 described in a relatively detailed manner their everyday lived Islam and religiosities, how these affected their lives and how these were localised in everyday situations. This also gave an insight into the way the Muslim women negotiated their identities in different contexts. In this article I examine, drawing on the concepts of everyday lived religion, religiosity, and identity, how Islamic values and traditions could be localised through women’s narratives in relationships within the Muslim communities, between men and women, between different Muslim communities, and in the wider societal context.