Download or read book Islam Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life written by Jörg Matthias Determann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search. Determann takes us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such as wildly popular adaptations of Star Wars and mysterious movements centred on UFOs. Repression is shown to have helped science fiction more than hurt it, with censorship encouraging authors to disguise criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times and on distant planets. The book will be insightful for anyone looking to explore the science, culture and politics of the Muslim world and asks what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would mean for one of the greatest faiths.
Download or read book Islamicates Volume I written by Muhammad Ahmad and published by . This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islamicates is the first in a series of planned anthologies of sci-fi short fiction inspired by Muslim cultures. The anthology consists of twelve stories which were chosen from submissions to the Islamicate Science Fiction Short Story Contes. The contents of the story range from algorithms that allow humans to predict the future, mathematical patterns based on sacred texts, military time travel missions in India to a far future where religion is outlawed on some planets.
Download or read book Althingi The Crescent and the Northern Star written by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our increasingly polarized world there is an urgent need for cross-cultural conversations, bridges of understanding between people of different beliefs, and a recommitment to a common understanding of our shared history: the history not of any one particular group but of humanity itself. Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star, co-edited by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad (A Mosque Among the Stars, Islamicates) and Joshua Gillingham (The Gatewatch, Old Norse for Modern Times), is an anthology of historical fiction which explores the intricate and often-overlooked interactions between intrepid Viking voyagers and inquisitive emissaries from the powerful Islamic kingdoms.Featuring stories by an incredible slate of authors writing in the historical Althingi universe, Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star, offers a glimpse into a fascinating forgotten past and will prove a must-read for fans of both Viking and Islamic history.
Download or read book Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema written by Ira Bhaskar and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the Islamicate cultures that richly inform Bombay cinema. These cultures are imagined forms of the past and therefore a contested site of histories and identities. Yet they also form a culturally potent and aesthetically fertile reservoir of images and idioms through which Muslim communities are represented and represent themselves. Islamicate influences inform the language, poetry, music, ideas, and even the characteristic emotional responses elicited by Bombay cinema in general; however, the authors argue that it is in the three genre forms of The Muslim Historical. The Muslim Courtesan Film and The Muslim Social that these cultures are concentrated and distilled into precise iconographic, performative and narrative idioms. Furthermore, the authors argue that it is through these three genres, and their critical re-working by New Wave filmmakers, that social and historical significance is attributed to Muslim cultures for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Ira Bhaskar is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Richard Allen is Professor and Chair of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Download or read book Toward New Democratic Imaginaries stanbul Seminars on Islam Culture and Politics written by Seyla Benhabib and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines rigorous empirical and theoretical analyses with political engagement to look beyond reductive short-hands that ignore the historical evolution and varieties of Islamic doctrine and that deny the complexities of Muslim societies' encounters with modernity itself. Are Islam and democracy compatible? Can we shed the language of 'Islam vs. the West' for new political imaginaries? The authors analyze struggles over political legitimacy since the Arab Spring and the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS in their historical and political complexity across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Distinguishing multiculturalism from interculturalism and understanding multiple modernities, philosophers in the volume tease out the complexities of civilizational encounters. The volume also shows how the Paris massacres or the Danish caricature controversy do not remain confined to Europe but influence struggles and confrontations within Muslim societies. Gender and Islam are addressed from a comparative perspective bringing into conversation not only the experience of different Muslim countries with Islamic law but also by analysing Jewish family law.
Download or read book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination written by Henry Jenkins and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.
Download or read book Star Warriors of the Modern Raj written by Sami Ahmad Khan and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India is mutating – and its Science Fiction with it. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj is a critical catalogue of contemporary India’s anglophone SF, a path-breaking work that flits between texts, vantage points and frameworks. An alternative to a Eurocentric perspective of SF, this study avoids essentialising definitions and delves into how the world of SF (text) intersects with that of the writer/reader. Fusing paradigms of Science Fiction Studies, South Asian Studies and Postcolonial Studies, among others, the book explicates how India and its SF negotiate one another. It evolves a ‘transMIT thesis’ to analyse how mythology (M), ideology (I) and technology (T) contour Indian SF and its fictional reimaginings. This study identifies the manifestations of divine beings within SF as differing epistemological categories, locates the modes of marginalisation within Indian popular imagination as altars of alterity, before proceeding to analyse how newer technologies engage with socio-political anxieties in and through SF. Interested in learning about Science Fiction and South Asia? Click on the link below to read Mithila Review interview with Sami Ahmad Khan where he discusses his upcoming volume Star Warriors of the Modern Raj. https://mithilareview.com/ahmad_03_21/
Download or read book Area Studies at the Crossroads written by Katja Mielke and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering volume, leading scholars from a diversity of backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and different area studies argue for a more differentiated and self-reflected role of area-based science in global knowledge production. Considering that the mobility of people, goods, and ideas make the world more complex and geographically fixed categories increasingly obsolete, the authors call for a reflection of this new dynamism in research, teaching, and theorizing. The book thus moves beyond the constructed divide between area studies and systematic disciplines and instead proposes methodological and conceptual ways for encouraging the integration of marginalized and often overseen epistemologies. Essays on the ontological, theoretical, and pedagogical dimension of area studies highlight how people’s everyday practices of mobility challenge scholars, students, and practitioners of inter- and transdisciplinary area studies to transcend the cognitive boundaries that scholarly minds currently operate in.
Download or read book Teaching the Global Middle Ages written by Geraldine Heng and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2022-10-28 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past. The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.
Download or read book The History of Islam Volume 1 written by S. E. Al-Djazairi and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2018-01-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume of The History of Islam focuses on the period elapsing from around the mid 6th century CE until the final years of the 9th.It begins, however, with a lengthy chapter dealing with modern narrative of Islamic history, and how this narrative, rather than improving with time, has simply deteriorated so much that Muslim history written in our day is largely incomprehensible.The work, then, relying on both Western and Muslim sources, old and new, deals with the more salient events of Islamic history. Its focus in this volume is on the rise and expansion of Islam and the early caliphate. The vast expansion under the first three caliphs of Islam and the Umayyad dynasty is dealt with in detail. The work includes maps that sum up different events taking place in different parts of the realm in order to provide an overview of Islamic history at a glance.
Download or read book Seven Surrenders written by Ada Palmer and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL CATEGORY* From 2017 John W. Campbell Award winner, Ada Palmer, the second book of Terra Ignota, a political SF epic of extraordinary audacity “A cornucopia of dazzling, sharp ideas set in rich, wry prose that rewards rumination with layers of delight. Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent.” —Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings In a future of near-instantaneous global travel, of abundant provision for the needs of all, a future in which no one living can remember an actual war...a long era of stability threatens to come to an abrupt end. For known only to a few, the leaders of the great Hives, nations without fixed locations, have long conspired to keep the world stable, at the cost of just a little blood. A few secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction can ever dominate, and the balance holds. And yet the balance is beginning to give way. Mycroft Canner, convict, sentenced to wander the globe in service to all, knows more about this conspiracy the than he can ever admit. Carlyle Foster, counselor, sensayer, has secrets as well, and they burden Carlyle beyond description. And both Mycroft and Carlyle are privy to the greatest secret of all: Bridger, the child who can bring inanimate objects to life. Shot through with astonishing invention, Ada Palmer's Seven Surrenders is the next movement in one of the great SF epics of our time. “Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a long time.” —Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead Terra Ignota 1. Too Like the Lightning 2. Seven Surrenders 3. The Will to Battle At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Cyberpunk and Visual Culture written by Graham Murphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the expansive mediascape of the 1980s and 1990s, cyberpunk’s aesthetics took firm root, relying heavily on visual motifs for its near-future splendor saturated in media technologies, both real and fictitious. As today’s realities look increasingly like the futures forecast in science fiction, cyberpunk speaks to our contemporary moment and as a cultural formation dominates our 21st century techno-digital landscapes. The 15 essays gathered in this volume engage the social and cultural changes that define and address the visual language and aesthetic repertoire of cyberpunk – from cybernetic organisms to light, energy, and data flows, from video screens to cityscapes, from the vibrant energy of today’s video games to the visual hues of comic book panels, and more. Cyberpunk and Visual Culture provides critical analysis, close readings, and aesthetic interpretations of exactly those visual elements that define cyberpunk today, moving beyond the limitations of merely printed text to also focus on the meaningfulness of images, forms, and compositions that are the heart and lifeblood of cyberpunk graphic novels, films, television shows, and video games.
Download or read book American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 23 3 written by Philipp Bruckmayr and published by International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). This book was released on 2006-07-03 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS) is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world:anthropology, economics, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, religious law, and traditional Islam. Submissions are subject to a blind peer review process.
Download or read book The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States written by Edward E. Curtis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-18 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a patchwork narrative of Muslims from different ethnic and class backgrounds, religious orientations, and political affiliations, bringing together an unusually personal collection of essays and documents from an incredibly diverse group of Americans who call themselves Muslims.
Download or read book Christianity in India written by Robert Eric Frykenberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-26 with total page 611 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores historical understandings of Christian communities, cultures, and institutions within the Indian world from their beginnings to the present time. Frykenberg focuses on trans-cultural interactions within Hindu and Muslim environments, uncovering complexities as Christianity intermingled with indigenous cultures.
Download or read book Boy of Fire and Earth written by Sami Shah and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-06-29 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born of a smokeless fire, and raised in Karachi, Wahid’s life comes apart when he loses the girl he loves to vengeful djinns. Setting out on a journey to recover her soul and find out the truth of his own origins, he is accompanied by Iblis, the Devil himself. Together, they traverse a city infested with corrupt cops and hustling beggars, and discover deathly creatures lurking under its sinister surface, even as the threat of Judgement Day looms large. Sami Shah’s Boy of Fire and Earth is a dark, and often funny, novel of great imagination and power.
Download or read book The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
