Download or read book Gender Sainthood Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi ism written by Karen G. Ruffle and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of devotional hagiographical texts and contemporary ritual performances of the Shi'a of Hyderabad, India, Karen Ruffle demonstrates how traditions of sainthood and localized cultural values shape gender roles. Ruffle focuses on the annual mo
Download or read book Everyday Shi ism in South Asia written by Karen G. Ruffle and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first textbook to focus on the history of lived Shi'ism in South Asia Everyday Shi'ism in South Asia is an introduction to the everyday life and cultural memory of Shi’i women and men, focusing on the religious worlds of both individuals and communities at particular historical moments and places in the Indian subcontinent. Author Karen Ruffle draws upon an array primary sources, images, and ethnographic data to present topical case studies offering broad snapshots Shi'i life as well as microscopic analyses of ritual practices, material objects, architectural and artistic forms, and more. Focusing exclusively on South Asian Shi'ism, an area mostly ignored by contemporary scholars who focus on the Arab lands of Iran and Iraq, the author shifts readers' analytical focus from the center of Islam to its periphery. Ruffle provides new perspectives on the diverse ways that the Shi'a intersect with not only South Asian religious culture and history, but also the wider Islamic humanistic tradition. Written for an academic audience, yet accessible to general readers, this unique resource: Explores Shi’i religious practice and the relationship between religious normativity and everyday religious life and material culture Contextualizes Muharram rituals, public performances, festivals, vow-making, and material objects and practices of South Asian Shi'a Draws from author's studies and fieldwork throughout India and Pakistan, featuring numerous color photographs Places Shi'i religious symbols, cultural values, and social systems in historical context Includes an extended survey of scholarship on South Asian Shi’ism from the seventeenth century to the present Everyday Shi'ism in South Asia is an important resource for scholars and students in disciplines including Islamic studies, South Asian studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, material culture studies, history, and gender studies, and for English-speaking members of South Asian Shi'i communities.
Download or read book South Asian Religions written by Karen Pechilis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This valuable resource explores the important role which the minority traditions play in the religious life of the subcontinent.
Download or read book The Shi a in Modern South Asia written by Justin Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While most studies of Shi'i Islam have focused upon Iran or the Middle East, South Asia is another global region which is home to a large and influential Shi'i population. This edited volume establishes the importance of the Indian subcontinent, which has been profoundly shaped by Shi'i cultures, regimes and populations throughout its history, for the study of Shi'i Islam in the modern world. The essays within this volume, all written by leading scholars of the field, explore various Shi'i communities (both Isna 'Ashari and Isma'ili) in parts of the subcontinent as diverse as Karachi, Lucknow, Bombay and Hyderabad, as well as South Asian Shi'i diasporas in East Africa. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives including history, religious studies, anthropology and political science, they examine a range of themes relating to Shi'i belief, practice, piety and belonging, as well as relations between Shi'i and non-Shi'i communities.
Download or read book The Shi i World written by Farhad Daftary and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I.B.Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies The world's 200 million Shi'i Muslims express their faith in a multiplicity of ways, united by reverence for the ahl al-bayt, the family of the Prophet. In embracing a pluralistic ethic, fourteen centuries of Shi'i Islam have given rise to diverse traditions and practices across varied geographic and cultural landscapes. The Shi'i World is a comprehensive work authored by leading scholars from assorted disciplines, to provide a better understanding of how Shi'i communities view themselves and articulate their teachings. The topics range from Shi'i Islam's historical and conceptual foundations, formative figures and intellectual, legal and moral traditions, to its devotional practices, art and architecture, literature, music and cinema, as well as expressions and experiences of modernity. The book thus provides a panoramic perspective of the richly textured narratives that have shaped the social and moral universe of Shi'i Muslims around the globe.This fourth volume in the Muslim Heritage Series will appeal to specialists and general readers alike, as a timely resource on the prevailing complexities not only of the 'Muslim world', but also of the dynamic Shi'i diasporas of Europe and North America.
Download or read book Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia written by Michel Boivin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Muslim shrine is at the crossroad of many processes involving society and culture. It is the place where a saint – often a Sufi - is buried, and it works as a main social factor, with the power of integrating or rejecting people and groups, and as a mirror reflecting the intricacies of a society. The book discusses the role of popular Islam in structuring individual and collective identities in contemporary South Asia. It identifies similarities and differences between the worship of saints and the pattern of religious attendance to tombs and mausoleums in South Asian Sufism and Shi`ism. Inspired by new advances in the field of ritual and pilgrimage studies, the book demonstrates that religious gatherings are spaces of negotiation and redefinitions of religious identity and of the notion of sainthood. Drawing from a large corpus of vernacular and colonial sources, as well as the register of popular literature and ethnographic observation, the authors describe how religious identities are co-constructed through the management of rituals, and are constantly renegotiated through discourses and religious practices. By enabling students, researchers and academics to critically understand the complexity of religious places within the world of popular and devotional Islam, this geographical re-mapping of Muslim religious gatherings in contemporary South Asia contributes to a new understanding of South Asian and Islamic Studies.
Download or read book Tellings and Texts written by Francesca Orsini and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide range of literary genres and social and cultural contexts across the region. The texts and practices are contextualized in relation to the broader social and political background in which they emerged, showing how religious affiliations, caste dynamics and political concerns played a role in shaping social identities as well as aesthetic sensibilities. By doing so this book sheds light into theoretical issues of more general significance, such as textual versus oral norms; the features of oral performance and improvisation; the role of the text in performance; the aesthetics and social dimension of performance; the significance of space in performance history and important considerations on repertoires of story-telling. The book also contains links to audio files of some of the works discussed in the text. Tellings and Texts is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian culture and, more generally, in the theory and practice of oral literature, performance and story-telling.
Download or read book Iran and the Deccan written by Keelan Overton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.
Download or read book Shi i Islam written by Moojan Momen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From infallible Imams to Ayatollahs in Iran, Shi’ism has long been a prominent, if misunderstood, branch of Islam. It regards Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, as the Prophet’s legitimate successor. But theological differences between the Shi’ah and Sunni Muslims have led to sectarian violence, massacres and the desecration of holy sites. In this Beginner’s Guide, Dr Moojan Momen offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of Shi’ism, tracing the history of the community, its leadership and doctrines, from its inception to modern times. Packed with useful tables, family trees and text boxes, this engaging and up-to-date guide is a perfect introduction to the historical and geopolitical causes of religious tensions still troubling the Middle East today.
Download or read book Partners of Zaynab written by Diane D’Souza and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do pious Shia Muslim women nurture and sustain their religious lives? How do their experiences and beliefs differ from or overlap with those of men? What do gender-based religious roles and interactions reveal about the Shia Muslim faith? In Partners of Zaynab, Diane D'Souza presents a rich ethnography of urban Shia women in India, exploring women's devotional lives through the lens of religious narrative, sacred space, ritual performance, leadership, and iconic symbols. Religious scholars have tended to devalue women's religious expressions, confining them to the periphery of a male-centered ritual world. This viewpoint often assumes that women's ritual behaviors are the unsophisticated product of limited education and experience and even a less developed female nature. By illuminating vibrant female narratives within Shia religious teachings, the fascinating history of a shrine led by women, the contemporary lives of dynamic female preachers, and women's popular prayers and rituals of petition, Partners of Zaynab demonstrates that the religious lives of women are not a flawed approximation of male-defined norms and behaviors, but a vigorous, authentic affirmation of faith within the religious mainstream. D'Souza questions the distinction between normative and popular religious behavior, arguing that such a categorization not only isolates and devalues female ritual expressions, but also weakens our understanding of religion as a whole. Partners of Zaynab offers a compelling glimpse of Muslim faith and practice and a more complete understanding of the interplay of gender within Shia Islam.
Download or read book Interpreting Islam in China written by Kristian Petersen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the Han Kitab, a corpus of early modern Chinese language Islamic texts that reinterpreted Islam through the lens of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian terminology.
Download or read book Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism written by EMILIA. BACHRACH and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. This book considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Through hagiographies that narrate the relationships between the deity Krishna and the Pushtimarg's early leaders and their disciples, these hagiographies provide community history, theology, vicarious epiphany, and models of devotion. While steeped in the social world of early-modern north India, these texts have continued to be immensely popular among generations of modern devotees, whose techniques of reading and exegesis allow them to maintain the narratives as primary guides for devotional living in Gujarat-the western state of India where the Pushtimarg thrives today. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of Hindi and Gujarati texts, the book examines how members of the community engage with the hagiographies through recitation and dialogue in temples and homes, through commentary and translation in print publications and on the Internet, and even through debates in courts of law. The book argues that these acts of reading inform and are informed by both intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and also by politically potent disputes over matters such as temple governance. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning.
Download or read book Revolution Beyond the Event written by Charlotte Al-Khalili and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.
Download or read book Making Gender in the Intersection of the Human and the Divine written by Thomas Donlin-Smith and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays challenges the traditional patriarchal approach to sacred literature by highlighting gender parity in sacred texts and envisioning the rise of the matriarchy in the future. The authors redefine Biblical Greek words like malakoi and arsenokoitai used in condemnation of homosexuality, and Qur’anic words like darajah and qawwamun, used for establishing patriarchy. One author reexamines the role of the Nepalese Teej festival of fasting and worship of the god Shiva in promoting male hegemony in Hinduism. Other papers examine passages like Proverbs 31:1-31, the stories of Sarah and Rahab in the Bible, the role of Mary in the Qur’an, and the Dharmic conversion in chapter 27 of the Lotus Sutra. This book makes it clear that sacred literature is subject to human understanding as it evolves through space and time. Today, as more women are educated and actively engaged in political, economic, and social life, religions are challenged to redefine gender roles and norms.
Download or read book Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India written by Kalyani Devaki Menon and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India. Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.
Download or read book Proceedings of the Fourth Annual International Conference on Shi i Studies written by Jafar Ahmad and published by ICAS Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Annual International Conference on Shi‘i Studies is organised by the Research and Publications Department of The Islamic College, London. The conference aims to provide a broad platform for scholars working in the field of Shi‘i Studies to present their latest research and to explore diverse opinions on Shi‘i thought, practice, and heritage. This book comprises a selection of papers from the fourth conference held on 5-6 May 2018.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Companion to Islamic Studies written by Clinton Bennett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Companion to Islamic Studies is a comprehensive one volume reference guide to Islam and study in this area. A team of leading international scholars - Muslim and non-Muslim - cover important aspects of study in the field, providing readers with a complete and accessible source of information to the wide range of methodologies and theoretical principles involved. Presenting Islam as a variegated tradition, key essays from the contributors demonstrate how it is subject to different interpretations, with no single version privileged. In this volume, Islam is treated as a lived experience, not only as theoretical ideal or textual tradition. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including a substantial A-Z of key terms and concepts, chronology and a detailed list of resources, this is the essential reference guide for anyone working in Islamic Studies.
