Identidades marginales


Book Description

Los primeros resultados de esta obra derivan de la Mesa redonda que bajo el título Identidades marginales de la cultura islámica medieval, tuvo lugar en el Instituto de Filología del CSIC en el mes de octubre de 2011. Trata de las diversas formas de marginación, según los modos de ser, modos de actuar o modos de pensar de los individuos estudiados, donde no están todos los grupos marginales sino solo una muestra, no circunscritos al-Andalus sino a otras poblaciones y regiones del Islam. La primera de estas secciones se refiere a los que sufrieron algún tipo de privación o personalidades estigmatizadas: pobres, homosexuales, eunucos¿ Los autores de los artículos prestan atención al tema de la construcción de la identidad cultural, a través de la dialéctica de la inclusión o exclusión en un conjunto de individuos u otro. En la segunda, los artículos versan sobre los diversos modos de comportamiento que, en cierto momento, ocasionaron críticas por parte de los autores de obras. Los individuos considerados aquí transgresores de las normas son con mucha frecuencia ciudadanos perfectamente integrados en los grupos sociales y su rechazo puede estar condicionado por factores diversos, temporales o parciales., sufriendo en ocasiones por desobediencia a la ley sagrada, crítica, marginación o condena. La tercera sección se ocupa de los distintos grupos pertenecientes a las élites intelectuales que, por sus creencias o por la práctica de una determinada doctrina son considerados diferentes por las fuentes o por ellos mismos. Se encuentran aquí individuos que se autodiferencian, y se autoexcluyen por una valoración positiva por lo general de sí mismos (filósofos, etc.), considerándose incomprendidos e infravalorados por el resto de la sociedad, al estimarse superiores de manera excepcional.




Concubines and Courtesans


Book Description

Concubines and Courtesans contains sixteen essays that consider, from a variety of viewpoints, enslaved and freed women across medieval and pre-modern Islamic social history. The essays bring together arguments regarding slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production (songs, poetry and instrumental music), sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time. They range over nearly 1000 years of Islamic history - from the early, formative period (seventh to tenth century C.E.) to the late Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal eras (sixteenth to eighteenth century C.E.) - and regions from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Central Asia (Timurid Iran). The close, common thread joining the essays is an effort to account for the lives, careers and representations of female slaves and freed women participating in, and contributing to, elite urban society of the Islamic realm. Interest in a gendered approach to Islamic history, society and religion has by now deep roots in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The shared aim of the essays collected here is to get at the wealth of these topics, and to underscore their centrality to a firm grasp on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.




Descending with angels


Book Description

Over several years, Christian Suhr followed Muslim patients being treated for jinn possession and psychosis in a Danish mosque and in a psychiatric hospital. Through rich filmic and textual case studies, he shows how the bodies and souls of Muslim patients become a battlefield between the moral demands of Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states. The book reveals how both psychiatric and Islamic healing work to produce relief from pain, and also entail an ethical transformation of the patient and the cultivation of religious and secular values through the experience of pain. Creatively exploring the analytic possibilities provided by the use of a camera, both text and film show how disruptive ritual techniques are used in healing to destabilise individual perceptions and experiences of agency, which allows patients to submit to the invisible powers of psychotropic medicine or God.




Muslim Midwives


Book Description

This book reconstructs the role of midwives in medieval to early modern Islamic history through a careful reading of a wide range of classical and medieval Arabic sources. The author casts the midwife's social status in premodern Islam as a privileged position from which she could mediate between male authority in patriarchal society and female reproductive power within the family. This study also takes a broader historical view of midwifery in the Middle East by examining the tensions between learned medicine (male) and popular, medico-religious practices (female) from early Islam into the Ottoman period and addressing the confrontation between traditional midwifery and Western obstetrics in the first half of the nineteenth century.




Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050–1614


Book Description

Through crusades and expulsions, Muslim communities survived for over 500 years, thriving in medieval Europe. This comprehensive study explores how the presence of Islamic minorities transformed Europe in everything from architecture to cooking, literature to science, and served as a stimulus for Christian society to define itself. Combining a series of regional studies, Catlos compares the varied experiences of Muslims across Iberia, southern Italy, the Crusader Kingdoms and Hungary to examine those ideologies that informed their experiences, their place in society and their sense of themselves as Muslims. This is a pioneering new narrative of the history of medieval and early modern Europe from the perspective of Islamic minorities; one which is not, as we might first assume, driven by ideology, isolation and decline, but instead one in which successful communities persisted because they remained actively integrated within the larger Christian and Jewish societies in which they lived.




The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 2, Medieval Science


Book Description

This volume in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of science in the Middle Ages from the North Atlantic to the Indus Valley. Medieval science was once universally dismissed as non-existent - and sometimes it still is. This volume reveals the diversity of goals, contexts and accomplishments in the study of nature during the Middle Ages. Organized by topic and culture, its essays by distinguished scholars offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of medieval science currently available. Intended to provide a balanced and inclusive treatment of the medieval world, contributors consider scientific learning and advancement in the cultures associated with the Arabic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew languages. Scientists, historians and other curious readers will all gain a new appreciation for the study of nature during an era that is often misunderstood.




Concubines and Courtesans


Book Description

Concubines and Courtesans contains sixteen essays on enslaved and freed women across medieval and pre-modern Islamic social history. The essays consider questions of slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production, sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time.




Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction, and Vampiric Conquest


Book Description

"Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her verse, especially the aggressively sexualized perspective never before found in texts written by Spanish American women. Agustini sought, like the men around her, to free herself and her writing from traditional sexual limitations. Even more daringly, she responded to their language with her own feminized discourse, developing an innovative way of expressing her sexual and artistic expressions." -- Book jacket.




Connected Stories


Book Description

Concepts such as influence, imitation, emulation, transmission or plagiarism are transcendental to cultural history and the subject of universal debate. They are not mere labels imposed by modern historiography on ancient texts, nor are they the result of a later interpretation of ways of transmitting and teaching, but are concepts defined and discussed internally, within all cultures, since time immemorial, which have yielded very diverse results. In the case of culture, or better Arab-Islamic cultures, we could analyze and discuss endlessly numerous terms that refer to concepts related to the multiple ways of perceiving the Other, receiving his knowledge and producing new knowledge. The purpose of this book evolves around these concepts, and it aims to become part of a very long tradition of studies on this subject that is essential to the understanding of the processes of reception and creation. The authors analyze them in depth through the use of examples that are based on the well-known idea that societies in different regions did not remain isolated and indifferent to the literary, religious or scientific creations that were developed in other territories and moreover that the flow of ideas did not always occur in only one direction. Contacts, both voluntary and involuntary, are never incidental or marginal, but are rather the true engine of the evolution of knowledge and creation. It can also be stated that it has been the awareness of the existence of multidimensional cultural relations which has allowed modern historiography on Arab cultures to evolve and be enriched in recent decades.




Celibate and Childless Men in Power


Book Description

This book explores a striking common feature of pre-modern ruling systems on a global scale: the participation of childless and celibate men as integral parts of the elites. In bringing court eunuchs and bishops together, this collection shows that the integration of men who were normatively or physically excluded from biological fatherhood offered pre-modern dynasties the potential to use different reproduction patterns. The shared focus on ruling eunuchs and bishops also reveals that these men had a specific position at the intersection of four fields: power, social dynamics, sacredness and gender/masculinities. The thirteen chapters present case studies on clerics in Medieval Europe and court eunuchs in the Middle East, Byzantium, India and China. They analyze how these men in their different frameworks acted as politicians, participated in social networks, provided religious authority, and discuss their masculinities. Taken together, this collection sheds light on the political arena before the modern nation-state excluded these unmarried men from the circles of political power.