The international politics of tolerance in the Persian Gulf

ABSTRACT

Since the early 2000s, wide-ranging initiatives geared towards the promotion of tolerance, moderation and interfaith dialogue have proliferated throughout the Persian Gulf, culminating most recently in the establishment of the world’s first Ministry of Tolerance in the UAE. For more than a decade, Qatar has hosted annual interfaith conferences on themes such as ‘Steps Towards Tolerance’. Oman and Bahrain have been prominent advocates, pursuing their respective tolerance agendas through academic publications, travelling delegations, exhibitions and international conferences. Even Saudi Arabia, notorious for its intolerance at home, has been a prominent advocate on the world stage. Talk of tolerance, it seems, is everywhere, but what is behind this regional trend? This article situates the emergent political discourse of tolerance in the broader post-9/11 geopolitical context, wherein the ideal of tolerance has been embraced by both the West and the Muslim world as an antidote to the global problem of terrorism. I suggest that Gulf tolerance initiatives are best understood in terms of a broader politics of representation that coheres around the promotion of ‘moderate Islam’, and that in the context of what has been described as the Western ‘civilisational discourse’ of tolerance, Muslim-majority countries are responding with a civilisational discourse of their own.     

Translating the Stuttering Severity Instrument (SSI-3) into Persian: Response to Karimi, Nilipour, Shafiei and Howell

Karimi, Nilipour, Shafiei and Howell have raised some issues in regards to a study of which we were authors (Bakhtiar, Seifpanahi, Hossein, Ghanadzade & Packman, 2010). In that study, we reported the translation of the Stuttering Severity Instrument-3 (SSI-3) into Persian and reported its reliability when used with 12 Persian speaking preschool children who stutter, in Iran. Karimi et al. criticize our methods and claim that we did not specify that the translated test be used with preschoolers. In this response, we maintain that their criticisms of our methods are largely unfounded, especially the suggestion that we did not follow the WHO guidelines for translating questionnaires in our translation procedure. In addition, we show that we did in fact stipulate in our paper that the Persian SSI-3 should be used with preschoolers and that Karimi et al. misquoted us in their claim that we did not.     

The Relationship Between Perceived Probability of Personal Harm and Distressful Reactions During the Gulf War

This study investigated the relationship between threat appraisal, distressful reactions, and coping strategies of Israeli civilians under missile attack during the Gulf War. During the war, 66 subjects were asked about their perceived probability of being hurt by the missiles. Additionally, they completed a questionnaire that measured their fears and symptoms during the war, the State Anxiety scale of the Endler Multidimensional Anxiety Scales, and the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS, Endler & Parker, 1990). The results showed an inverted U-shaped relationship between perceived probability of being hurt and the anxiety measures. A similar curvilinear relationship was found between perceived probability of being hurt and emotion coping strategy. Furthermore, it was found that those who appraised the possibility of being hurt as very high, more often used avoidance coping. The results are discussed within the framework of stress theories and are related to other inverted U-shape relationships found between threat appraisal and stressful reactions.     

A pilot investigation into unimpaired and dyslexic Persian children's word naming and spelling: Implications for models of reading and counselling

There is now a growing body of research examining developmental dyslexia in different languages and writing systems. The phonologically transparent Persian orthography is normally transcribed with two distinct spellings, words spelled with vowels (letters) transcribed as a fixed part of the spelling (transparent) and words spelled with vowels (diacritics) omitted (opaque). This peculiarity of Persian would enable one to examine the impact of transparency, as well as the possible psychological factors associated with verbal punishment in Persian schools on the development of reading and spelling. Twenty-nine Persian children (22 male and 7 female) classified as being developmentally dyslexic (mean age 9.4, SD?=?1.4) were compared with 49 unimpaired male children (mean age 9, SD?=?1.3) on two main aspects of reading Persian opaque and transparent spellings, namely: Spelling and word naming. The results showed an expected impairment on all aspects of reading between unimpaired and children with dyslexia. However, performance of both groups of participants was impaired when performing tasks with opaque as opposed to transparent spellings. There was also a strong correlation between the recorded number of times the dyslexic child was verbally punished and the number of errors on the spelling and naming of transparent and opaque words. These results are supportive of the impact of spelling transparency, as well as psychological variables as factors in the development of reading and spelling.     

Neuropsychological Performance in Gulf War Era Veterans: Motivational Factors and Effort

Assuming that the underlying etiology of unexplained health-related symptoms in returning Gulf War (GW) veterans is multifactorial, the possible role of feigning or exaggeration of symptoms is worth consideration as a contributing factor. The present study assessed the relationship between motivation to perform well during neuropsychological assessment and objective neuropsychological test performance. Motivation was measured as the score on a visual memory task (Test of Memory Malingering, TOMM) of low difficulty. Participants included 77 veterans from the cohorts of GW- (n = 58) and Germany-deployed (n = 19) GW-era veterans described in two other papers in this issue who were administered the TOMM. Most veterans earned perfect or near-perfect scores on the TOMM (48–50/50). Scores 47 were associated with lower scores on neuropsychological tasks assessing attention, executive functions, and memory. Variability in test performance within and between tasks measuring similar functions was also found in participants with lower TOMM scores.     

Processing hyponymy in L1 and L2

This study examined the processing of hyponymy in L1 and two levels of performance (overall and high proficiency) in L2 in a group of Persian-English bilinguals. In two experiments, the same participants detected semantic relation in hyponymy pairs (i.e., hyponym-superordinate vs. superordinate-hyponym) in L1 (experiment 1) and L2 (experiment 2). The variables of pair type, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), language, and language proficiency were manipulated. Overall, the results showed that participants' median RTs and SDs were significantly greater in L2. This suggests that L2 processing in unbalanced bilinguals is less automatic than L1 processing. The findings of experiment 2 with the higher proficiency group showed a trend toward performance in L1 and therefore confirmed the prediction of the hierarchical model of bilingual memory that lexical processes in more-fluent bilinguals approximate those of L1 speakers. The results of the two experiments also showed that participants were significantly faster when presented with superordinate-hyponym word pairs than with hyponym-superordinate word pairs at 100-ms SOA in both L1 and L2 conditions. The results at 200-ms SOA, however, showed an opposite trend, although the results with L2 did not reach significance. This trend of results points to a possibility of automatic vs. strategic processing in the sense that participants' processing of hyponymy relation was more strategic than automatic at 200-ms SOA.     

Persian tales on the couch: Notes on folktales as the mirror of the contemporary cultural struggles with gender and sexuality

Abstract

This paper presents a report on our psychoanalytic investigation of cultural folktales, myths, and fables, in which we study, primarily, the extent to which such narratives lurk behind contemporary representations of men and women. Our aim is to identify the multiple narrative structures that form the core plots and storylines of these tales. Following Roland Barthes’ work on mythologies, we want to decode the tales’ ideological components by deciphering the axiomatic assumptions these tales make about the nature of perceived social reality. This represents an attempt to study a mind that is derived from the text. More specifically, we study narratives whose storylines revolve around the struggle between men and women in order to identify the culture’s core concerns about and preoccupations with the relationship between the sexes. We believe that cultural myths or folktales are a royal road to a nation’s collective conscience, and include gendered patterns of defenses, obsessions, fears, and paranoia.     

Contemporary Art and Contemporary Sport in the Arabian Peninsula

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between the development of art and sport in the Arabian Peninsula. In particular, it will be argued that both sport and art can be understood in terms of a trajectory from the ‘modern’ to the ‘contemporary’. Modernity and modernism are introduced through an interpretation of Paul Delaunay’s series of paintings ‘The Cardiff Team’ (1912–22) which may be read as an expression of modernity. The content of the paintings documents core elements of European modernist culture, including technology and science, leisure, consumerism and advertising, and crucially (international) sport. Delaunay’s work provides a background from which to reflect upon the development of sport into something like its contemporary form, in early 20th Europe. By drawing on Terry Smith’s analysis of the difference between modern and contemporary art, and applying this to sport, in order to suggest that there is a distinctive contemporary form of sport, the core tensions within both artistic and sporting practices are argued to lie in the movement from a conception of sport as an expression of modernity, where this is conceived as a universal movement, exemplified by Western humanism, towards a conception of sport as something particularised, expressive of local cultures. The promotion of art institutions and sports events within the Arabian Peninsula highlights the resultant tensions between the neo-colonial influence of Western culture and the reinterpretation of that culture, locally, in order to reflect upon and articulate communal identity within the contexts of globalism and transnationalism.     

In Search of the Supracultural: American Missionaries in the Gulf in 1920s–1930s

ABSTRACT

This article examines the dynamics of cultural encounters, with reference to the concept of Gustav Warneck (1834–1910) of the connections between mission and culture. It introduces the reader to the personal experience of the missionaries of the Arabian Mission, which was launched in 1889 and operated until 1973 in Basra, Amara, Bahrain, Kuwait and Muscat. While the Mission did not bring about the mass conversion of Muslims, its activities resulted in numerous everyday contacts with the local population. The article stresses that missionaries were a diverse group of individuals with different methods and aspirations, and explores how these diversities challenge a narrative on missions that usually reduces them to a homogenized missiology. Much of the content focuses on the 1920s–1930s, a very unique period in the Middle East, and seeks to show the way that the historical and local context shaped the diversities of missiology. Findings suggest that missionaries, as outsiders in the process of contacting the alien culture, often crossed cultural borders, and that these cultural encounters exhibited contrasting dynamics: the exclusion and rejection of local culture was accompanied by the ‘discovery’ of Islam and the search for ‘supracultural’ components of Islamic culture.     

The Sports Path Not Taken: Pearl Diving Heritage and Cosmopolitanism from Below

ABSTRACT

In contrast to camel and horse racing as well as falconry, pearl diving has not been transformed into a popular heritage sport in the countries of the Arab Gulf. One reason for this striking disinterest is that the actual practice of pearling was undertaken by impoverished and exploited workers, and this is no longer compatible with the new prevailing, self-assertive ‘tribal modern’ of the Arab Gulf.