| 21. |
- Nilsen, Marte
(författare)
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Negotiating Thainess : Religious and National Identities in Thailand's Southern Conflict
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this study is to investigate how people express religious and national identities in the conflict-ridden Patani region of southern Thailand. In a historical framework of disputes over territory and political legitimacy, where identities have developed in response to an emerging Thai nation, it is of relevance to understand the dynamics of these identities and to disclose how local people perceive themselves, their communities and society at large. While the key to ending the violence in the Patani region will likely be found in negotiations between insurgent groups and the Thai state, the prospects for a lasting peace will also depend on the degree to which such political solutions take the local population into consideration. A history of repressive policies aimed at undermining Malay Muslim culture and attempts to impose the ideology of Thainess upon the region have left the Thai state without legitimacy in the eyes of the Malay Muslim majority. As such, ethnicity and religion have become major sources of dissonance between the Thai state and the local population. Exploring local interethnic relations and attitudes towards Thainess and Thai nation-building is thus of great significance when it comes to comprehending the fundamental conflict lines in the region. Using anthropological fieldwork, this dissertation aims to detect how the concepts of religion and nation define and shape identity in the Patani region among Malay Muslims and Thai Buddhists. It seeks to identify what resonance there is for national and local discourses of religion and nation in the local population, how people are influenced by these discourses and how they redefine them. The findings show that both Malay Muslims and Thai Buddhists have developed multiple identities that tend to shift depending on situation and context. A primary objective of this study is thus to explore why these multiple identities have developed, how they are expressed in daily life and what impact they have on interethnic relations and interpretations of the southern Thai conflict.
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| 22. |
- Offermanns, Jürgen
(författare)
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Der lange Weg des Zen-Buddhismus nach Deutschland : vom 16. Jahrhundert bis Rudolf Otto
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- At the beginning of the 21st Century, Zen Buddhism is no longer an unknown religion in the West. Zen-meditation enjoys great popularity, the books regarding the subject are among the bestsellers and the auditoriums are crowed if the topic concerns the bringing home of Zen Buddhism to a Western audience. At the same time Zen Buddhism today is by no means merely the religion of Zen Buddhists, but practices and teachings of Zen Buddhism are being integrated into a Christian context or find themselves incorporated in the practice of religious groups that can be counted to the New Age movement. The reception of the East Asian religion, as well as the related adaptation to Western ideas and conditions of life are however of an older date. It began already during the 16th Century with the first letters from the Jesuit missionaries in China and Japan that reported about the strange religion of Fo. The reports of the Jesuit missionaries were translated in Europe, censored and then circulated with help of various ways, such as letter collections, the Jesuit theater or the scholastic literature. Since those days the Zen-Buddhist religion in Europe has most of all been an idea, a world of imagination, exposed to social, economical, theological and power political calculi. The information of the Jesuit missionaries from China and Japan, as well as the in-creasingly popular travel literature not only triggered the enthusiasm for China during the Age of Enlightenment, but were the basis for the entire reception of Buddhism during the 17th and 18th Century. These sources of infor-mation, formed the understanding of Zen-Buddhism of people like Athanasius Kircher, G.W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant or the French deist Francois Marie de Marsy. Only in the beginning of the 19th century the first Buddhist writings were translated and thus made available to a wider public. In particular during the 19th Century the reception of Zen Buddhism was exposed to the continuously changing influence of power political interests and diverging theological arguments. Among other things two occurrences were of particular importance for the reception of Zen-Buddhism in Germany; the Meiji-restoration in Japan (1868) and the attempts of various theologians, philosophers and psychologists to lead back "religion" to a universal essence, which is not accessible to rational reason. The Zen interpretations of both D.T. Suzuki and Rudolf Otto were decisively determined by these political and intellectual alterations of the 19th century.
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| 23. |
- Otterbeck, Jonas
(författare)
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Islam på svenska : tidskriften Salaam och islams globalisering
- 2000
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation focuses on written Islamic discourses in Swedish, especially the journal Salaam - Islamisk tidskrift. The journal first appeared in 1986 and is a part of the activities of Islamiska Informationsföreningen. From the beginning, Salaam has been edited by female converts to Islam in their twenties or early thirties. Female converts also account for a large number of the texts that have been published in Salaam, but other women and men have contributed. Only a small number of the articles in the journal, apart from some translations, are by Muslims with a formal Islamic education. The content of Salaam is described at length and commented upon. The dissertation also contains a descriptive overview of all other literature in Swedish produced by Muslims in Sweden during last century. Throughout the second half of the 20th century there has been a small, but ongoing production of texts on Islam written by Muslims themselves in the local languages of all Western European countries. This literature has received little attention from researchers involved in the research field of “Islam in Europe”. On of the main objects of the present study is to put these texts in focus. The central analytic question in the dissertation is why Salaam contains the interpretations of Islam that it does. This leads to a discussion on the genealogy of these interpretations. By combining the sociology of knowledge in the tradition of Peter Berger, the notions of power, discourse and genealogy of Michel Foucault, and theories of globalization and religion, the dissertation attempts to uncover a complex genealogy. Three globally spread discourses are identified as important in the genealogy of Salaam’s discourse: the da‘wa of the Islamic movement; the Western European and North American modernity; and globalization, especially a group of specific, global flows that are connected to certain key values in the above-mentioned modernity. The dissertation includes analytic discussions and descriptions of these three discourses and how they relate to Salaam. Finally, a theoretical discussion on religious interpretation leads to the question whether or not the discourse of Salaam can be called an example of Swedish Islam.
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| 24. |
- Schmidt, Garbi
(författare)
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American Medina: A Study of the Sunni Muslim Immigrant Communities in Chicago
- 1998
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Sunni Muslims have immigrated to and lived in Chicago for more than a hundred years. In her book Schmidt seeks, on basis of two periods of extended fieldwork, to provide a description of some activist strata of these religious communities. The description is framed by the portrayal of a number of Muslim institutions existing within the city and the interpretation of Islam that takes place within them. Accordingly, the book grants us a view of the life and activities of a number of Chicago’s Muslim Sunday Schools, full-time schools, Qur’anic schools, Muslim colleges, students’ associations, major Muslim centers, and “paramosques”, as they appear by the late 1990s. The following analysis focuses, from a theoretical point of view, on the dynamics of knowledge production and objectification of knowledge within and directed from these Muslim institutions. Who are considered able to present “authoritative” interpretations of Islam, and how do they obtain this status? Who is their audience? How do such interpretations relate to the diverse ethnical background of the community’s members and the powerful “other” of the United States? Is it at all possible to talk about an “American Islam” and where and how, by whom and for whom, is it formulated?
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| 25. |
- Steen Larsen, Lars
(författare)
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Western esoterism : Ultimate Sacred Postulates and Ritual Fields
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The greater part of Western Esoterism holds beliefs in five important matrices. This branch of esoterism, rooted in a Hermetic milieu, is labelled dialectical esoterism because of the dialectical relationship between the ‘lower’ (man, earth) and the ‘higher’ (heaven, the divine, God). These five matrices are: I: Purpose (pronoia), rather than karma or sin. II: The dialectical relationship between Man and God (or the divine), including the healing of other people, society and/or the Earth. III: The inter-dependency of Dualism and Monism, including the mind and/or the world as a stairway to heaven. IV: Scientific laws are synonymous with spiritual principles. V: The holistic cosmos, including the concept of ‘sympathy’ between its parts. The aim of this thesis is to make clear that Western Esoterism is unique because of the presence of the five matrices and deals with both ‘beliefs’ (recognition) and ‘doing’ (religious practices, e.g. astrology, alchemy, magic and clairvoyance). As a consequence it is also demonstrated that foreign religious ideas and practices can be assimilated because they are transformed and hence adopt new meanings in order to fit the important USP of Western Esoterism.
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| 26. |
- Stenberg, Leif
(författare)
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The Islamization of Science: Four Muslim Positions Developing an Islamic Modernity
- 1996
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis analyses a contemporary debate on the Islamization of science. The four persons discussed here are individuals belonging to a Muslim intellectual elite: the French convert and physician Maurice Bucaille, the Persian-American scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the British-Pakistani author Ziauddin Sardar and the Arab-American scholar Ismail Raji al-Faruqi. They represent four positions in the contemporary understanding of Islam and they all have an influence among other Muslim intellectuals. The debate on the role and function of a specifically Islamic form of science has intensified during, the last 25 years. It can be seen as a part of a broader discussion, where the overall question concerns the function of Islam in relation to modernity. This thesis presents their perspectives on the Islamization of science and points at central elements and patterns in their respective positions. From a theoretical point of view, this thesis is both a study of the history of certain ideas, and an analysis founded on methods within the social sciences. The most central concept in the analysis is "discourse". The word is here used as a technical term denoting the practice that shapes different statements, a practice concerned with power. "Islam" is seen as one such discourse: a field where many Islams fight to become the One Islamic tradition. Different trends are engaged in struggle, and the successful contender becomes, for the time being, the established tradition, until it is challenged by yet another trend. In the analysis, it is shown how the four positions attempt to find their respective ways of acheiving a balance between modern science and Islam, and thereby shape a distinctly Islamic modernity.
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| 27. |
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| 28. |
- Svensson, Jonas
(författare)
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Women's Human Rights and Islam : a Study of Three Attempts at Accommodation
- 2000
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation focuses on interpretations of Islam that claim compatibility with international human rights norms in the context of women’s rights. These interpretations are seen as parts of an on-going contemporary international debate on women’s human rights and Islam that engages Muslims as well as non-Muslims. Existing UN-formulated international human rights schemes are a basic starting point. Texts by three internationally renowned Muslim scholars – philosopher and religious studies scholar Riffat Hassan, sociologist Fatima Mernissi and legal studies and human rights scholar Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na‘im – constitute the main part of the material studied. These three individuals become exponents for what is termed an “accommodation-position” among Muslims participating in the debate. The analysis covers methods used in the attempts to provide interpretations of the basic Islamic religious sources – the Qur’an, the hadith-literature and Muslim historiography – which accommodate international human rights norms in the context of women’s rights. Through this activity the exponents produce versions of Islam that compete with other contemporary versions of the religious tradition for general recognition, as the ‘correct’ representation of the divine will. The study also takes into consideration techniques used in the texts to convince different audiences both of the legitimacy of the interpretations presented, and of the interpreters’ authority. A general overview of the international debate on women’s human rights and Islam is provided in order to outline the context of the versions of Islam suggested by Hassan, Mernissi and an-Na‘im. The texts are analysed as parts of this international debate, including their social functions within the debate. One of the questions asked concerns why these interpretations receive international attention and what purposes they fulfil in the international debate. They are also analysed as parts of an on-going, worldwide discussion among Muslim religious activists concerning, for example, the role of religion in society and the issue of religious authority. Theoretical inspiration is found in the academic fields of Islamology, the sociology of knowledge, discourse analysis, gender theory and theories on cultural globalisation.
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| 29. |
- Trulsson, Åsa
(författare)
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Cultivating the Sacred : Ritual Creativity and Practice among Women in Contemporary Europe
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Ritual creativity may seem like a contradiction in terms, yet the religious landscape in contemporary Euro-America is permeate with experimentation of ritual forms, different modalities of action, imagination and play as routes to authenticity. The present study examines different settings in Europe involved in such ritual creativity, which would commonly be classified as postmodern spirituality, new age or Paganism. However, rather than striving for classification and synthesis, it is argued that the amorphous character of much contemporary spirituality, can provide analytical benefits when theorising lived religious practice. The study provides a critical remark to the text-driven approaches prevalent in previous research, and advocates that contemporary spirituality should be localised in the realm of practice, drawing theories of embodiment. Consequently, rather than a fully-fledged worldview outside of individuals and groups, the sacred is continuously cultivated by a series of practices, most notably ritualised practice. The settings presented are conceptualised as interrelated ritual fields. They are also sites where the body is trained and spiritual dispositions are formed that alter the participants' mode of being in the world. We are hence concerned with a conscious habituation achieved through disciplining practice, somatic modes of attention as well as framing and reflection. The study examines features in this process, including use of history, negotiations of power, ritualisation, and global intersections. Moreover, each field highlights different aspects of contemporary ritualising, such as the performance of gender, the sensuous aspects of music and dance, the movements and relationship to the landscape and the divine. The study is grounded in fieldwork, informed by dialogical and participatory modes of research that acknowledges the entangled nature of the scholar and other participants in the field. It is also an example of so-called multi-sited fieldwork, which is increasingly requested to capture the de-territorialised aspects of much of contemporary religious life.
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| 30. |
- Wiig, Arne
(författare)
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Promise, Protection, and Prosperity. Aspects of the "Shield" as a Religious Relational Metaphor in an Ancient Near Eastern Perspective. An Iconographical and Textual Analysis
- 1999
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis discusses the religious metaphorical use of different words for "shield" in the Hebrew Bible and Egyptian and Assyrian literature. The literary contexts in the analysis are delimited based on the observation that they share a similar view of divine intervention in war and an analogous view of the enemy. Using the defensive weapon that we today call the "shield" often meant the difference between life and death for soldiers in the ancient Near East. The primary use of the shield metaphor is primarily is as an effective "border" between "us" and "them." A god "being" his worshipper’s shield is a relational metaphor. Previous research on shields in the ancient Near East concentrated on cultural, philological, and archeological aspects. No researchers have performed a separate, monographical analysis of the shield metaphor. The purpose of this thesis is to broaden the modern reader’s perspective in understanding the original intent and understanding of the shield metaphor. The theoretical and methodological basis of this study is modern metaphor theory, particularly Eva F. Kittay’s perspectival theory, which is a further development of the interaction theory. The intratextual placement of the shield metaphor in the context is studied from a narrator-listener perspective to glean the narrator’s original intent. In particular, the study analyzes how a metaphor generates extratextual, or realitybased, and intertextual associations and connotations, and how a narrator’s awareness of these metaphorical effects control his choice of metaphor in a specific intratextual context. Another focus is the individual reader’s personal understanding, or implicit context, which always colors one’s understanding of a text. This study goes from practical shield use, to theoretical metaphor use, which means that we must first study the shield from a religious and cultural context. Then, the study examines perceptions of protection in general and military aspects of shield use. Both symbolic motifs on shields and iconographical depcitions of shields are analyzed. The text interpretations in this study center in particular on the practical use of shields as a "visual" example for the literary depiction of the interaction between god and man. The study concludes with an analysis of parallel metaphors and parallel metaphorical motifs in connection with the shield metaphor, highlighting central metaphorical concepts.
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