Social Studies as Social Reconstruction

Research indicates that most American citizens know little about Islam and, specifically, the major differences between Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims and why this matters to the United States. Although the two major Islamic factions share many common core beliefs and practices, there are some significant religious and political differences dating back to the disagreement over the succession of leadership in the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad died in 632. Indeed, sectarianism has played a pivotal role in the turbulent geopolitics of the Middle East for centuries. Islam must be studied for its contributions and role in world history. Therefore, it is crucial that social studies educators teach not only the core beliefs, rituals, and history of Islam but the differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. This knowledge is vital if Americans are to make prudent decisions regarding support for specific foreign policy positions and decisions regarding Islam and Muslim countries. This article describes and explains the differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and discusses the implications for the United States and social studies education. Finally, the article shows how Islam can be implemented in the NCSS C3 Framework.     

Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States,Mentalities, Modernisation

Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist-religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19^th-century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived ‘core’ European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct ‘Orient’ or ‘East’, bypassed by “modernising” processes. This contribution focuses on (post-)Cold War discourses in social science and shows how these discourses re-produce 19^th-century layers of orientalising map-making and keep East-West differences alive by tracing deficient, fragile or repressive state institutions back to alleged Eastern European ‘mentalities’.     

Between ‘tradition’ and movement: the emergence of Turkey’s Anti-Capitalist Muslims in the age of protest

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the emergence of the “Anti-Capitalist Muslims” (ACMs) movement as the conjunction of critical Muslim politics and grassroots activism in Istanbul, Turkey. It explores the way in which Islam has been reconstituted in Turkish politics, in contrast to both fundamentalism and the government’s neoliberal conservatism. The article draws upon Talal Asad’s definition of Islam as a ‘tradition’ that attempts to achieve coherent narratives in a form which considers and enters into a dialogue with the present context, especially with contemporary social movements. It is argued that, through a dialogue between Islam and anti-capitalist social movements, the ACMs constructed an alternative Islamic tradition, focused especially on emancipation, equality and challenging structures of domination. Yet this alternative tradition proved unable to sustain itself due to the presence of a number of ongoing ridigities, which it is suggested might be addressed in future attempts to construct an anti-capitalist form of Islam.     

Fleeing to Babylon: How the Erie Canal,Diffusion, and Social Structure Forever Changed American Calvinism

The following focuses on the Presbyterian Church in the early 19^th century United States and suggests that by historically examining its structural dynamics, historians and social scientists alike can better understand not only American religious history but also the diffusion process of intellectual innovation.     

从伊斯兰史上的著名清真寺看清真寺功能的多样性

清真寺作为伊斯兰教的重要宗教活动场所,是穆斯林社区的核心。凡是有穆斯林的地方,几乎都有清真寺。特别在中东阿拉伯国家,清真寺更是随处可见。在伊斯兰史上,清真寺在促进穆斯林社会的政治、经济、文化发展方面一直发挥着重要作用,具有诸多社会功能。本文以伊斯兰历史上著名清真寺为例,着重分析清真寺功能的多样性及其在当代的演变情况。     

中东民族主义与伊斯兰教关系评析

中东现代化进程中,现代与传统间产生矛盾的重要原因在于民族主义和伊斯兰教两种意识形态的复杂关系。鉴于此,本文主要从中东民族主义对伊斯兰教的冲击、伊斯兰原教旨主义对民族主义挑战的回应、民族主义与伊斯兰教的矛盾对中东政治发展的影响及其前景等三个方面分析了二者间的复杂关系。     

中东非政府人权组织的特征与挑战

20世纪七十年代末以来,中东地区人权语境逐渐宽松,颁布了各种伊斯兰特色的《人权宣言》,不同层次的人权组织在伊斯兰国家开展活动,这都为中东非政府人权组织的产生提供了理论和组织上的准备。非政府人权组织推动了中东人权观念和人权批判精神的成长,提升了中东各国政府对人权关注程度,并成为国际人权标准内化的重要媒介,缓解了社会内部的对立。"人权依赖综合症"影响到非政府人权组织的特征,人权组织多为社会精英阶层所领导,其活动多限于特定群体和地区。在现代社会,人权组织虽面临诸多挑战,但无疑已成为推动中东政治民主化和人权发展的潜在力量。     

The fourth age and the concept of a ‘social imaginary’: A theoretical excursus

This paper explores the idea of the ‘fourth age’ as a form of social imaginary. During the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, the cultural framing of old age and its modern institutionalisation within society began to lose some of its former chronological coherence. The ‘pre-modern’ distinction made between the status of ‘the elder’ and the state of ‘senility’ has re-emerged in the ‘late modern’ distinction between the ‘third’ and the ‘fourth’ age. The centuries-old distaste for and fear of old age as ‘senility’ has been compounded by the growing medicalization of later life, the emergence and expansion of competing narratives associated with the third age, and the progressive ‘densification’ of the disabilities within the older institutionalised population. The result can be seen as the emergence of a ‘late modern’ social imaginary deemed as the fourth age. This paper outlines the theoretical evolution of the concept of a social imaginary and demonstrates its relevance to aging studies and its applicability to the fourth age.     

中东恐怖主义产生的原因

中东地区的恐怖主义产生和发展与其宗教、民族、历史、文化有密切关联。宗教极端主义分子常为他们的恐怖活动披上神圣的宗教外衣以实现其政治目的。中东地区的各种社会问题长期得不到公正解决加剧了不同宗教、文明间的碰撞，刺激了恐怖活动的发生。     

Policing The Lost: The Emergence of Missing Persons and the Classification of Deviant Absence

In the mid-19 ^th century, increases in global migration and mobility produced a discernable rise in the number of ambiguous absences. This shift, combined with a novel expectation, linked to improved communications technology, that such absences might be resolved engendered the emergence of missing persons as a social category. A demand on the part of families of the missing that the state aid in their location would produce a Bourdieusian classification struggle over how to define and categorize this new mass of absences. At issue would be whether an ambiguously absent individual was merely absent, as a routine component of social life, or whether the individual merited legitimation by the state as a new form of deviant: a "missing" person. Scholars have described the emerging administrative state’s enhanced powers of surveillance and classification and its persistent inclination to render their populations, in James Scott’s phrase, “legible.” Brought to the attention of the state, missing persons represented a body of people who had conspicuously fallen out of official sight. Yet, instead of attempting to fix this omission by gathering additional information on the lost — to, in effect, see the missing — as theories of the state would lead us to expect, the state chose to look away. In the United States, the state, in the form of municipal police departments, resisted classifying absences as cases of missingness and pushed back against families’ requests for aid. Leveraging the inherently ambiguous characteristics of the missing, the state promoted a definition of missing persons that conveniently freed it from the burden of managing an unmanageable population. In this article, drawing from archival data, I challenge prevailing theories of the modern state that emphasize its avidly classificatory nature by offering a case in which legibility was strategically withheld and a population was, in service of state interests, intentionally obscured. Only after the state lost its symbolic monopoly and the category was raced and gendered, becoming, in public discourse, associated with a socially valuable demographic – namely, young, white women – would the state, facing a threat to its legitimacy, deem the missing as worthy of being seen.

     

From leprosy to The Willow Tree: decoding disability and Islamic spirituality in Iranian film

The lack of attention in academic discourse to representations of disability in films from the Middle East has led to an incomplete picture of representations of disability in global cinema. For instance, the diverse meanings of disability in Iranian cinema and the influence of disability on the emergence of Iranian New Wave cinema have been almost completely ignored by scholars. A number of award-winning films from Iran have featured disability as central to their narratives – such as The House is Black (1963), Taste of Cherry (1997), The Color of Paradise (1999), The Willow Tree (2005), and The Painting Pool (2013). Disability in these films serves alternatively as a symbol of spiritual possibility, a mark of marginalization, and a covert social critique. These films examine the emotional, physical, and social implications of disability, while celebrating the cultural power of film to challenge social, religious, and artistic barriers.     

Forging a diagonal instrument for the global left: the vessel

ABSTRACT

This article takes up Samir Amin’s challenge to rethink the issue of global political organization by proposing the building of a diagonal political organization for the Global Left that would link local, national and world regional and global networks and prefigurational communities to coordinate contention for power in the world-system during the next few decades of the 21st century. The World Social Forum (WSF) process needs to be reinvented for the current period of rising neo-fascist and populist reactionary nationalism and to foster the emergence of a capable instrument that can confront and contend with the global power structure of world capitalism and aid local and national struggles. This will involve overcoming the fragmentation of progressive movements that have been an outcome of the rise of possessive individualism, the precariat, and social media. We propose a holistic approach to organizing a vessel for the global left based on struggles for climate justice, human rights, anti-racism, queer rights, feminism, sharing networks, peace alliances, taking back the city, progressive nationalism and confronting and defeating neo-fascism and new forms of conservative populism.     

Time Construction in Insurance Society

This article deals with the social meaning of insurance contracts in the late medieval and modern society. Starting from the empirical analysis of one of the early marine insurance contracts which were stipulated in the second half of the 14^th century, the hypothesis is suggested that the premium rate coincides with the estimated average frequency of sea accidents. By means of a proto‐probability calculus, rate was used by the early insurers for trading risks. Therefore the main thesis arises that insurance premium is a way of giving a certain price to the uncertainty of the future and that it indeed represents the cost of such observation. A comparison with the original function of money in primitive societies based on reciprocity is finally developed in order to explain how time construction is contingent on social structures.     

Reframing the History of the Competition Concept: Neoliberalism,Meritocracy, Modernity

This paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English language dictionaries and encyclopaedias, using a method of ‘conceptual history’. I show how the concept, its grammatical forms, and characteristic associations have evolved substantially since the eighteenth century. This finding is placed in a broader explanatory context, arguing that it is the combined rise of a set of core institutions of modernity, not just capitalism but also democracy, adversarial law, science, and civil society, that deeply embeds competition in the modern world. The decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the national subordination of martial power, opened the way for more ‘liberal’ forms of society in which authority is routinely contested through competition, across economy, politics, culture and beliefs. Appreciating this is a necessary step towards truly grappling with the effects of competition on modern life.     

试论美国反恐与中东局势

美国巧遇恐怖袭击与中东地区关联深厚，而反恐行动更是为本已动荡的巴以局势增添了新的变数。反恐利益主导下的美国中东政策的不稳定性客观上加剧了中东局势的动荡。随着反恐行动的后续发展，伊拉克成为新打击对象，中东的两大热点--巴以争端和伊拉克问题在反恐框架中相互交织，中东局势未来走向与美国反恐息息相关。在可预见的将来，美国中东政策将在确保中东根本利益不受影响的前提下，根据反恐需要做相应调整，而巴以冲突将维持可控制的低烈度状态。     

Early Modern Antwerp: The First “World City”?

It is problematic to think of globalization as a new phenomenon and to believe that the phenomenon of a world city, embedded in the global division of labor, is a 20^th century novelty. World city literature in sociology often emphasizes, if not assumes, the relatively recent emergence of world cities in the “new” international division of labor. Sixteenth century Antwerp, however, was the first world city of an expanding capitalist world economy. Understanding this phenomenon and its decline can raise important questions about the modus operandi of subsequent world cities.     

State Building as a Source of Islamic Political Organization1

Previous research on political Islam in the Middle East and North Africa has been limited in providing a generalizable theory of its origins and systematically account for the cross‐national variation in the prevalence of Islamic movements. Following a state‐centered approach, this study argues that state‐building activities are a primary origin of Islamic movements. Regimes adopt religious symbolism and functions that legitimate the role of Islam in the public sphere. State incorporation of religion thus creates Islam as a frame for political action, with increased access to mobilizing resources and better able to withstand repression and political exclusion. To provide an explicit and systematic test of cross‐national variation, data on 170 political and militant organizations across the region are analyzed. Results indicate that state incorporation of religion is a crucial factor in the religiosity of movement organizations. Mixed effects of political exclusion and repression are found. No support is found for theories of economic grievances or foreign influence as causes of Islamic mobilization. In sum, analysis suggests that a state‐centered perspective is the most fitting account of political Islam.     

伊斯兰教与韩国的中东外交

韩国伊斯兰教因朝鲜战争中土耳其军队参战之故而正式重新传入,历经50余年的发展历程。韩国伊斯兰教在成立合法组织、修建遍布全国的清真寺、完成朝觐功课、翻译韩文《古兰经》以及成立伊斯兰经学院等方面著有成绩,穆斯林人数也有相当数量的增长。韩国中东外交也自1957年因与土耳其建交而开启,韩国主要在中东开展了经济、国际贡献①以及文化等领域外交,在中东地区已具一定的影响力。韩国伊斯兰教团体对于韩国的中东外交在不同层面多有参与,对于官方的中东外交是一种有力的补充。     

Wealth Inequality: Historical Trends and Cross‐National Differences

This article provides an overview of the recent literature on wealth inequality from a comparative and historical perspective. I first discuss how the stock, composition, and distribution of wealth changed from the 18^th century onwards. In the second part of the paper, I move on to the causal questions: What factors drive wealth inequality? Why does the distribution of wealth vary across nations? In the third and concluding section I briefly discuss the socio‐political challenges posed by increasing wealth inequality, and identify several key questions for research going forward.