1,720,975 research outputs found
Soul Food: The Condemnation of Fatness and Apotheosis of Thin Bodies in Christian Diet Books
No full textIn this thesis, I examine the social and religious pressures to diet on obese and overweight\ud
individuals. I also contest the ubiquitous notion found in Christian diet books that weight loss is\ud
salvific. These books follow a formulaic concept that losing weight means gaining spirituality,\ud
strengthening the correlation between a small body mass and a spiritual zenith. Further, they\ud
condemn behaviors that are associated with being overweight and obese, as the sin of gluttony\ud
also becomes a sin against societal norms. Additionally, remaining fat is perceived as a choice\ud
going against God’s plan. I argue that the promoted salvific experience of losing weight becomes\ud
paradoxically oppressive and submissive, as a duality of virtue and sin is aligned with thinness\ud
and fatness, respectively. This paradox becomes especially harsh for overweight females who\ud
lose weight through loss of agency and control over food consumption. I then introduce personal\ud
narratives of women recovering from eating disorders. Through a close reading, I navigate the\ud
same arguments about oppression and submission with regard to food consumption through the\ud
experiences of underweight women recovering from serious anxieties with food and bodies.\ud
Next, I build upon how these reconstructions of dieting habits intersect with culturally\ud
constructed norms about the female body and beauty ideals. I implement a counterexample in\ud
which women are force-fed and fatness is ideal. Through my comparison of corpulence as both\ud
the preeminent and defective female body shape, I demonstrate that the control of food\ud
consumption is essentially the control of how female bodies contribute to their surrounding\ud
society
Believing in the Beat: The Religiosity of Electronic Dance Music
No full textElectronic dance music is a musical and cultural phenomenon that has seen a\ud
drastic increase in popularity over the past decade. As such, it has received nominal\ud
serious academic inquiry in regards to its heavily present religious features, which\ud
appear most prominently in electronic dance music’s live setting. Building upon my\ud
fieldwork at electronic music shows and festivals as well as interviews with a variety\ud
of participants, I have illuminated its religious elements, which range from the\ud
ritualistic manner of dancing it produces to the ingestion of consciousness-altering\ud
substances, the unique, ineffable experiences that it generates.\ud
Based on my findings, I have concluded that electronic dance music is highly\ud
religious. I have employed thinkers such as Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, and\ud
Thomas Tweed to illustrate the connections between religiosity and electronic dance\ud
music, as seen by established scholars. Additionally, I have made a comparison\ud
between the features New Religious Movements and electronic dance music, finding\ud
significant limitations.\ud
Furthermore, I have conducted a critical study of the religiosity of electronic\ud
dance music, deducing through interviews and fieldwork its abundance of religious\ud
features, as seen in its performance and experience
Writing Against the Grain: Representations of Muslim Women in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret
No full textThis thesis analyzes Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret for its construction of female Muslim identity. Aboulela, a Muslim Sudanese immigrant to Britain, portrays a story of migration and conversion to break down the Western image of a stable, essential Muslim woman. She forms part of a larger context of postcolonial, often female, authors who use literature to question or undermine dominant accounts of the world. To understand their work, it is often necessary to examine those dominant accounts and representations as the larger network of meaning in which these authors write
The Road to Revolution: Egyptian Identity, Islam, and the Struggle to Create an Islamic Democracy
No full textThis thesis explores the context upon which the revolution that begins in Egypt on January 25, 2011 is the culmination of the people’s frustrations with the political violence that not only in the physical sense, but also directed toward Islam. Since the 1970s Egypt has been the center of Islamic social activism, which has created a more religious society among the\ud
Egyptian people but has created a “seculareligious” state. This new form of political interaction with religious life in Egypt is the result of the country’s history with Colonialism and how orientalist ideas toward Islam and its relationship to democracy, have defined the county’s\ud
current political system. This culminates with the revolution in January 2011 with the elimination of the old democracy in attempt to form an Islamic democracy
Constructing Sacred History: The Islamic Conquest of Jerusalem 638 CE and the Narrativization of Religious Identity
No full textA myriad of written historical sources that began to be produced during the early Abbasid\ud
Caliphate detail the events surrounding the Islamic Conquest of Jerusalem in 638 CE. An\ud
analysis of these early narratives reveals a process of self-fashioning that was accomplished through the careful depiction of sacred space with relation to the conquest. Jerusalem is the only city that is claimed as sacred by the three Abrahamic monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is in localities in Jerusalem that these traditions claim to have\ud
experienced interactions between the earthly and the divine, and it is in these spaces that\ud
eschatological belief posits that these interactions will again occur. In depicting the Conquest of Jerusalem, Muslim historians capitalized on the histories already existent about the city,\ud
possessed by Christians and Jews. Rather than rejecting all that had come prior, Muslim\ud
historians grafted their own history into the complex religious heritage associated with the city. The emphasis that the narratives place on actions occurring on and around the Temple Mount and foundation Rock, as well as the careful depictions of Umar Ibn Khattab, who is said to have negotiated the terms of the capitulation of the city, suggests that these historical narratives served an important role for early historiographers. Resultant from the strong emphasis on depictions of sacred space, these accounts exist at the expense of other information about the conquest, some of which has been lost altogether; thus these thematic connections are what come to negotiate\ud
understandings of the shifting of authority in Jerusalem. These narratives allowed historians to define Muslim beliefs about and connections to the city in a comprehensive way, accounting for the beliefs of prior traditions, creating discourse of codified communal memory that was\ud
disseminated among future generations. In narrating these histories in a profoundly sacred space,\ud
early Muslim historians effectively defined their own identity in relation to the other two\ud
Abrahamic faiths, and determined how the city would function for Islam into modernity
Medicine & Mimicry: I‘jaz ‘Ilmi as Post-Colonial Discourse
No full textMy thesis is about a modern form of Qur’anic hermeneutics called i‘jaz ‘ilmi, which\ud
translated from Arabic means “scientific inimitability.” This genre of literature illustrates the ways in which all discoveries of modern science and scientific knowledge are contained within the Qur’an. This fact, in turn, demonstrates that the Qur’an is an inimitable miracle from God. In my text, I excavate the intellectual history behind this field of exegesis, discussing the fact that it ultimately sprung out of the nineteenth century colonial encounter between Europe and the Global South (discounting South America). In order to fully examine this phenomenon I have drawn upon a number of historical moments, intellectual movements, and mediums, including the medieval Muslim translation movement, the Enlightenment, Colonial British travel photography, and the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century.\ud
What I present here is a reflection on how to understand the paradoxical mixing of religion and science seen in this discourse, along with a theoretical strategy and a narrative for how to comprehend and contextualize it. These works present a discrete form of scriptural reasoning, which may be best understood through the lens of post-colonial theory. Seeing it in this light, it is clear that this discourse of scientific inimitability problematizes and menaces the normative scientific understanding of the world by questioning the boundaries of truth and forcing reflection in its readers. The genre presents a Qur’anic translation and reclamation of modern science, and is the product of a long historical process of epistemological shifts, impositions, and absorptions between and within different cultures. Overall, my piece is at once a\ud
map and a chronology, outlining the history, evolution, and structural relationships that led to this Qur’anic rebellion against a deep rooted intellectual project of colonial domination and control
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The Vernacular Qur\u27an: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis
No full textExamines the debates surrounding the translatability of the Qur\u27an in early Islamic intellectual history and explores early practices of translating the Qur\u27an into Persian and the development of vernacular exegetical literature in Khurasan and Central Asia from tenth to thirteenth centuries. --author-supplied descriptio
Mapping Frontiers Across Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation and the \u27Abbasid Empire
No full textMy first monograph, Mapping Frontiers across Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation, and the Abbasid Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2011), explores the intersection of scriptural hermeneutics and descriptive geography and empire. I examine the ways in which the Abbasid intellectual elite, primarily in the ninth century, constructed and projected knowledge about the world and their place in it through a growing body of administrative geographical writing which drew upon an eschatological discourse associated with frontiers and the limits of imperial power. --author-supplied descriptio
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