FATHER PLAY: IS IT SPECIAL?

Both mothers and fathers play with their children, but research on parent–child play interactions is conducted with mothers three times more often than it is with fathers. The articles in this special issue address this gap by focusing on the nature and quality of father–child play, across cultural contexts, and considering whether father play offers something unique and special for early human development, in infancy or early childhood. The studies show that fathers can be just as developmentally supportive as are mothers in terms of being playful and engaged with their children in ways that are related to greater child socioemotional competence, emotion regulation, and vocabulary, and to less aggression, anxiety, and negativity. We encourage future research to examine the cultural influences, family system dynamics, and specificity of timing and types of father–child play in relation to children's developmental competence.     

Tradition,Reason, and Qur’anic Exegesis in the Modern Period: The Hermeneutics of Said Nursi

Key figures in modernist Qur’an exegesis include Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and Muhammad ?Abduh (d. 1905). This article presents the exegetical principles of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1877–1960), a Muslim thinker and a major twentieth-century Turkish scholar who is not necessarily to be labelled a ‘modernist’, on tafsīr bi-al-ma?thūr (tradition-based exegesis) and tafsīr bi-al-ra?y (reason-based exegesis) with special reference to the views of early Muslim modernist thinkers. It particularly refers to Nursi’s work on u?ūl al-tafsīr, Mu?ākamāt (Reasonings), and his one-volume commentary, Ishārāt al-i?jāz (Signs of Inimitability), in order to understand his method of tafsīr. The purpose of the article is to place Nursi within the historical framework of Qur’an exegesis and it argues that, while there are some similarities between ?Abduh and Nursi since the latter is influenced by the former, the methodological differences are clear. While ?Abduh’s method is text-based, Nursi’s is based on kalām (Islamic theology). While ?Abduh is critical of the classical style tafsīr and linguistic discussions in tafsīr, Nursi can be considered to be a modern representative of the Ottoman exegetical school and a follower in the way of al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538?1144), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606?1210) and al-Bay?āwī (d. 685/1286).