Suchergebnisse

This study of ritual and symbolism in Muslim society is based mainly on ethnographic data and Arab Islamic literature on the rain prayers. The author demonstrates that the rain rituals are rites of spiritual passage from disobedience to God to reverence for Him. Empirical data are gathered during the author's fieldwork expeditions to village of Sidi Ameur in the Sahel of Tunisia in 1965-1966, 1972, and 1984. (DÜI-Hns)

It is methodologically misleading to try to understand the code of modesty in illiterate Arab Muslim villages by dubious interpretation of Quranic verses or archaic literary Arabic words. It is also dangerous to generalize about the modesty of Arab Muslim women on the basis of the analysis of idioms peculiar to a particular Arab community. The code of modesty of Arab Muslim women in a certain community could not be understood independently of the values and the images prevalent in this community.

This article argues that Israel substituted the Palestinian refugees' internationally recognized right of return with a family reunification program during its maneuvering over admission at the United Nations following the creation of the state in May 1948. Israel was granted UN membership in 1949 on the understanding that it would have to comply with legal international requirements to ensure the return of a substantial number of the 750,000 Palestinians dispossessed in the process of establishing the Zionist state, as well as citizenship there as a successor state. However, once the coveted UN membership had been obtained, and armistice agreements signed with neighboring countries, Israel parlayed this commitment into the much vaguer family reunification program, which it proceeded to apply with Kafkaesque absurdity over the next fifty years. As a result, Palestinians made refugees first in 1948, and later in 1967, continue to be deprived of their legally recognized right to return to their homes and their homeland, and the family reunification program remains the unfulfilled promise of the early years of Israeli statehood.