In an extremely rare journalistic and political occurrence, and more particularly for a foreign commentator, 12 British Members of Parliament, Members of the Europen Parliament, Trade Unionists, Green Party members, anti-fascist militants and intellectuals, including well-known former Mayor of Greater London, Ken Livingstone, published an open letter, which amounts to a kind of petition, in support of Raphaël Liogier's article on the Burqa published on Wednesday 27 January 2010.
Written by Raphaël Liogier trans. Alix Philippon, Patrick Hutchinson
Saturday, 16 January 2010 13:39
The floating of the bill on the banning of the integral veil, to be floored at the National Assembly in the thick of a troubled debate around "French identity" (just when the themes of immigration, of the "integration" of populations earmarked as originating from "diversity" from birth, are in full cry in the public sphere) runs a serious risk of spinning off into a symbolic watershed of the current French ruling class's falling away from the principles of the Republic.
Day by day, the idea of the Republic seems progressively to be restricting itself to the rallying call for a national - or even nationalist - hunt whose usual suspects have been familiar game since the 1980's. Those were the days of the first "headscarf controversy", when awaking blear-eyed from the experience of the "30 glorious" years of post-war boom, France crashed headlong into two successive waves of oil crisis and became acquainted with endemic unemployment.
Symptomatic enough of a worrying trend in current French public life, which one might call ‘creeping democratic slippage' - i.e. a manipulative blend of emphatic language games and glitzy stage-setting around humanitarian and moral values accompanying an intermittently ‘visible' decline in the real application of human and citizens' rights, particularly in the workplace, on the campus and in the courts of law - in France (where feasibly 000,1% of Muslim women yet sport anything approaching this anathematized form of apparel) the current media spotlight on the so-called ‘Burqa issue' (comparable to the ‘Niqab' row in some parts of Britain) in close association with the government's diversionary electoral tactics in the name of promoting ‘National Identity', is probably not only politically scary, but might also be highly ‘revealing' on a deeper level of cultural self-analysis.
Jakarta - According to Samuel Huntington, wars between civilisations are arising because of differences in the foundation of history, language, culture, tradition and religion among nations of the world that eventually shape the particular worldview of a certain group toward another. Globalisation has made the world smaller, allowing people to meet more often and increasing awareness of differences, as well as similarities, that separate would-be enemies from allies.
However, Huntington's prediction of a clash of civilisations is rather difficult to apply in Indonesia, which has long been a meeting place for the world's great civilisations. The first foreign influence to infiltrate the region was Indian culture, which spread Hinduism and Buddhism. It was followed by other civilisations, namely the Chinese, the Muslim and, eventually, the Christian West, brought by colonial countries such as the Netherlands.
Amin MAALOUF was born in Beirut in 1949 and went into exile in France in 1976, at the age of 26, in order to flee the Lebanese civil war. After studiying economics and sociology, he began to work in journalism and was special correspondent for twelve years, carrying out missions in more than sixty countries. Former chief editor of the magazine Jeune Afrique, he now spends most of his time writing books.
Getting to know his personal history is essential to understanding why identity, diversity and minorities are his favourite topics: of resolutely catholic stock on the maternal side, his father is a Protestant Arab. The community to which he belongs, called melkite or Greek-catholic, is thus a minority in Lebanon, and he himself, a Christian Arab, is in a rather singular situation, experiencing the feeling, acquired since childhood, of being irremediably a member of a minority, irremediably foreign, wherever he may be.
Faith Makes Us Live, Surviving and Thriving in Haitian Diaspora, Margarita A. MOONEY, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2009, 300 p.
The cataclysmic January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, one of the poorest countries of Central America, has again focused worldwide attention on the political, social and economic situation of the "First Black Republic", founded after a bloody Independence struggle against European colonial rule in 1804. Ever since then a chequered history of long-lived dictatorship and perpetual economic difficulties have contributed to the massive emigration of Haitian residents to the Eastern part of the Island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic) first, and to the United States, Canada and France subsequently, along with other countries.
In her essential book, Margarita Mooney highlights the Haitian Diaspora towards the three main countries which have since received ‘massive' immigration from Haiti in the late 1970's, and especially towards the cities of Miami, Montréal and Paris.
Apparent diversity of belief and dogmatic uniformity in advanced industrial societies
In the advanced industrial countries, New Religious Movements are often presented as an expression of the deregulation of belief systems, or as a manifestation of the atomisation of belief. The existing movements are thus deemed to be widely diffused, highly diversified, waxing and waning according to prevalent fashions and fads, exposed to the volatile vagaries of unpredictably discontinous adhesion and membership.
Research carried out within the framework of the Observatoire du Religieux (World Religion Watch) over the last decade or so seems however clearly to demonstrate that, in contradistinction with the idea of a multi-coloured, chaotic patchwork of diversity reigning among new religious groups, and despite or beyond surface phenomena, on the contrary the NRG display a fast-developping trend towards an increasingly widespread dogmatic uniformity common to most advanced industrial countries, a phenomenon which we have already designated under the umbrella term of ‘individuo-globalism'.
Since its inception, Pakistan, created in 1947 in the name of Islam, has been an arena of heated competition over the "assets of salvation" (Max Weber). Sufism, as the contested "mystical" aspect of faith, has naturally become part and parcel of the ideologisation of Islam and hence of the language of Muslim symbolic politics. From the days of the great reformist Mohammed Iqbal[1], who reinterpreted Sufism in a more dynamic idiom witn a view to empowering the new Muslim community, to the latest somewhat frantic political endeavours of the National Sufi Council, Sufism in Pakistan has strongly emerged as a relevant symbol in analyzing the never ending ideological debate on the identity of a country caught in the murderous crossfire of controversial political contexts.
The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebelsis a book based on the research done by Hella Winston for her Doctorate in sociology at the City University of New York. She develops in that book a glimpse of Hassidic life, focusing her story on the Satmar community.
The Hassidic movement was founded three hundred years ago in the Ukraine by the rabbi Israel ben Eliezer; also known as the Baal Shem Tov (master of the good name).
It started as a radical movement against the rabbis of the times who enforced the study of the torah as essential to religious life and their persecution of the lower cast Jewry. The movement provided poor and illiterate Jews a way to have a relationship with God without the study of the torah being a necessary element. Therefore, they attached much importance to dance and song; believing that they were a way to become closer to God, in the same manner as studying the holy texts.
« Holy War, Jihad, Crusade: Violence and religion in Christianity and Islam» (:« Guerre sainte, jihad, croisade : Violence et religion dans le christianisme et l'islam »), by Jean Flori
Jean Flori is a contemporary French medieval historian. He is a senior researcher at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). His specialties are: the ideologies of warriors and religious mentalities in France and Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The theme of his PhD was the requalification of knighthood and chivalry, and he has since published several books concerning this theme in the Middle Ages. This book we are reviewing was published in June 2002. The aim of the book is mainly to demonstrate how the armed struggles between Christianity and the Muslim world led to a binary cristallisation of the doctrine of "Jihad" in Islam and of the idea of the Crusade among Christians. The author focuses on the deep origins of these concepts, tracking them back to sources to be found in the Gospel and the Koran, providing a historical background for the elaboration of such ideologies.
Written by Colin Thubron, trans. Claire Zandomeneghi
Friday, 08 January 2010 15:00
De tous les récits de voyages jamais écrits, aucun ne s'est avéré aussi fécond en sources d'émerveillement que le récit de Marco Polo, La description du Monde . Publié pour la première fois aux alentours de 1300, il décrit une terre si envoûtante de par sa nouveauté qu'y pénétrer pouvait se comparer au fait de passer de l'autre côté d'un miroir. C'est ce passage -d'une Europe restée provinciale vers un empire d'une éclatante étrangeté - qui confère au récit encore aujourd'hui une qualité quasi onirique. A l'époque de sa parution, et pendant plusieurs générations, le livre de Marco Polo a été le plus souvent considéré comme la simple affabulation d'un vaniteux marchand assoiffé de gloire. Son portrait d'une Chine à l'apothèose de la puissance de la dynastie Mongole - portrait riche en détails qui a longtemps paru par trop fantastique pour être crédible - s'est vu en grande partie corroboré seulement des siècles plus tard.
Written by Wendy Doniger, trans:Cécilia Do, Anna Kermagoret
Thursday, 17 December 2009 23:10
Beaucoup de gens en Inde croient que, étant donné que le Mahâbhârata - antique poème épique en sanskrit, relatant une apocalyptique guerre fratricide - se trouve être un livre tragique et violent, il est périlleux de garder l'intégralité du texte chez soi ; par conséquent, la plupart de ceux qui le possèdent en range une partie ailleurs, pour mieux se sentir en sécurité. De toute façon, le Mahâbhârata occuperait une surface non négligeable du rayonnage de n'importe quelle bibliothèque, car elle comporte environ 75 000 vers - certains en recensent 100 000 - autrement dit, trois millions de mots, soit 15 fois la longueur de la Bible Hébraïque en y ajoutant le Nouveau Testament, ou sept fois la taille de l'Illiade et l'Odyssée pris ensemble, tout en se trouvant être en fait cent fois plus intéressant.
In an extremely rare journalistic and political occurrence, and more particularly for a foreign commentator, 12 British Members of Parliament, Members of the Europen Parliament, Trade Unionists, Green Party members, anti-fascist militants and intellectuals, including well-known former Mayor of Greater London, Ken Livingstone, published an open letter, which amounts to a kind of petition, in support of Raphaël Liogier's article on the Burqa published on Wednesday 27 January 2010.
The floating of the bill on the banning of the integral veil, to be floored at the National Assembly in the thick of a troubled debate around "French identity" (just when the themes of immigration, of the "integration" of populations earmarked as originating from "diversity" from birth, are in full cry in the public sphere) runs a serious risk of spinning off into a symbolic watershed of the current French ruling class's falling away from the principles of the Republic.
Symptomatic enough of a worrying trend in current French public life, which one might call ‘creeping democratic slippage' - i.e. a manipulative blend of emphatic language games and glitzy stage-setting around humanitarian and moral values accompanying an intermittently ‘visible' decline in the real application of human and citizens' rights, particularly in the workplace, on the campus and in the courts of law - in France (where feasibly 000,1% of Muslim women yet sport anything approaching this anathematized form of apparel) the current media spotlight on the so-called ‘Burqa issue' (comparable to the ‘Niqab' row in some parts of Britain) in close association with the government's diversionary electoral tactics in the name of promoting ‘National Identity', is probably not only politically scary, but might also be highly ‘revealing' on a deeper level of cultural self-analysis.
Jakarta - According to Samuel Huntington, wars between civilisations are arising because of differences in the foundation of history, language, culture, tradition and religion among nations of the world that eventually shape the particular worldview of a certain group toward another. Globalisation has made the world smaller, allowing people to meet more often and increasing awareness of differences, as well as similarities, that separate would-be enemies from allies.
Amin MAALOUF was born in Beirut in 1949 and went into exile in France in 1976, at the age of 26, in order to flee the Lebanese civil war. After studiying economics and sociology, he began to work in journalism and was special correspondent for twelve years, carrying out missions in more than sixty countries. Former chief editor of the magazine Jeune Afrique, he now spends most of his time writing books.
Raphaël LIOGIER
Since its inception, Pakistan, created in 1947 in the name of Islam, has been an arena of heated competition over the "assets of salvation" (Max Weber). Sufism, as the contested "mystical" aspect of faith, has naturally become part and parcel of the ideologisation of Islam and hence of the language of Muslim symbolic politics. From the days of the great reformist Mohammed Iqbal
« Holy War, Jihad, Crusade: Violence and religion in Christianity and Islam» (:« Guerre sainte, jihad, croisade : Violence et religion dans le christianisme et l'islam »), by Jean Flori
Beaucoup de gens en Inde croient que, étant donné que le Mahâbhârata - antique poème épique en sanskrit, relatant une apocalyptique guerre fratricide - se trouve être un livre tragique et violent, il est périlleux de garder l'intégralité du texte chez soi ; par conséquent, la plupart de ceux qui le possèdent en range une partie ailleurs, pour mieux se sentir en sécurité. De toute façon, le Mahâbhârata occuperait une surface non négligeable du rayonnage de n'importe quelle bibliothèque, car elle comporte environ 75 000 vers - certains en recensent 100 000 - autrement dit, trois millions de mots, soit 15 fois la longueur de la Bible Hébraïque en y ajoutant le Nouveau Testament, ou sept fois la taille de l'Illiade et l'Odyssée pris ensemble, tout en se trouvant être en fait cent fois plus intéressant.