Center Journals

Book Title: On the Sectarian Question and the Problem of Minorities Author: Burhan Ghalioun Place of publication: Doha/Beirut Publisher: ACRPS Date of publication: 2012 Number of pages: 176

What role do mosques play in people’s daily lives, and how is it possible to institute a reading that observes the relationship between the powers that run them and the authorities? This fieldwork needs to draw up a map of the network of mosques and how the functionaries have changed in comparison with the past of this institution of worship. There is also a need to extrapolate a formulation that corrects the pluralist doctrinal influence over the performance of mosques and the development of their tasks by observing the change to the job of imam (al-qayyim) and the avenues resorted to in carrying out their religious profession which ultimately delineates the features of official policy and the public activity undertaken by religious functionaries.

Book Title: Moroccan Jewry from Origins to Winds of Departure Author: Ahmed Chahlan Place of publication: Rabat Publisher: Dar Abi Raqraq Date of publication: 2009 Number of pages: 328

This paper presents a reading of a new form of religiosity that emerged in the squares of the Arab revolutions: the religiosity of young people. The approach of the study rests on the understanding of religion as a cultural system, in an effort to make a socio-cultural contribution to the analysis of the relationship between models of the production of religiosity and the givens of the social structure in Arab societies with a composite makeup. This hypothesis rests on the assumption that the means of communication and imagination and their intensive spread within Arab societies have led to the emergence of a new public sphere – albeit a virtual one – that has broken the link between sheikh and pupil that organized Islam established as the basis for its model of education. When that happened, the Arab social subject could read more than one source for Islamic-political knowledge and chose what suited it or adopt an idea or ideas without the need for involvement with the educational model of the ideological establishment. In this way, the spread of the products of globalization within the middle and lower classes led to the creation of a virtual public sphere, which made religion, as a cultural system, slip out of the grip of the traditional social institutions and become available to the individuals and young people who disassembled it into values which they used to reclaim their social needs and human rights.

Book Title: The Last Decade in Syria’s History: Dialectic of Stagnation and Reform Author: Mohammed Jamal al-Barout Place of publication: Doha/Beirut Publisher: ACRPS Date of publication: 2012 Number of pages: 462

External appearance in Moroccan society until the end of the nineteenth century was largely associated with local culture, geographic region, or social group practicing a specific profession or craft. At the beginning of the twentieth century, manifestations of modernity spread along with the entrance of European colonialism. Traditional dress began gradually to fall back until the 1980s when political Islam emerged and began to rise bringing with it a culture that met with the approval of an educated sector of Moroccan society on the grounds that it was a form of resistance to the alienation of the West. This atavistic trend demands a special reading (a sociological approach) that examines the extent of the effect of diversity and variety in external appearance on the forms of public behavior of civil groups, to reveal those mechanisms and the extent of their links with culture and religiosity.

Book Title: The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World Author: Daniel Howard Yergin Place of publication: London Publisher: Penguin Date of publication: 2011 Number of pages: 711

What does Sufism mean in its Tariqa form? How is Tariqa rationality formed between textual authentication and practical spiritual striving? These questions cannot be answered without returning to the rites of worship and their division into kinds (wird, wazifa, haylala, dhikr) when they began to take on their spatial and organizational space at various times that were instituted at an early period under al-Kalabadhi (10th century AD) and were transmitted to al-Suhrawardi (12th century AD) on to al-Shaarani (15th century AD). This Sufi thread through time led to the formation of methodological structures in accord with spatial environmental conditions and which relied on local organizations and sheikhs of the Tariqas who taught the people the essentials of worship (purity, calmness, silence, reverence, submission). This helped form special schools of fiqh distinct from those found in the doctrinal authorities. What then is the fiqh of the Tariqa and its rulings? This study tries to explain this historically and in terms of the belief.

This study examines the significance of the movement for the veil in Turkey by means of a multilevel analysis of power relations that range from the most private relations between the sexes to the conflict between civilizations. Women’s veiling is used as an analytical tool that draws together power relations hidden in the action of “the civilizing process” between “East and West” and weaves the fabric of political Islam and casts lights on the models of Western modernity through the prism of political Islam. It is therefore a study of “incorporating social gender” in the formulation of political Islam and of modernity. The paper argues that contemporary political Islam cannot be appropriately understood at a remove from the local concepts about Western modernity where women have an enlightenment role.

Far removed from a narrative review of the literature on the philosophy of death, a subject that has long been of concern to philosophers and continues to be so, this study goes deeply into death in the context of the symbolism of contemporary Sudan, and in particular its connection with the politics of that county and its political history, since death is manifest in it in many forms, tangible and symbolic, and its many causes. The main question of the paper is that while death is undoubtedly a social phenomenon, what will we come up with if we handle it as a political phenomenon? The answers come from revisiting the political effect of death (with the death of a political leader or his political end without his biological end) on the course of events in Sudan, most importantly war, which no sooner ends than erupts again, or calms down only to flare up again, in a cycle where death is pivotal. Death controls the creation of peace, since strangely many Sudanese government negotiators have met their deaths in the final stage of talks with armed movements against the central Sudanese government and before the peace deal is signed.