Search

Christian communities in Palestine and Al-Andalus faced similar challenges during the ninth century. Although Muslim authorities tolerated Christianity and enshrined a certain degree of religious freedom, they downgraded these communities and encouraged conversion to Islam. In the long span, Christian communities decreased because many of their leading members emigrated or converted. Moreover, many of those that remained adopted the Arabic language, dressed like Muslims, and became increasingly assimilated into the ruling elite Muslim culture. This article suggests that the contacts and reciprocal influence between Christian communities from Palestine and Spain during this period were more substantial than hitherto perceived. Thus, they used the same methods with some local adaptations to tackle their critical situation. They introduced a growing use of Arabic in religious life, established and upgraded important pilgrimage shrines, and some extremist monastic communities fostered and encouraged martyrdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Islamic Ethics is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper analyses the discourse of sacrifice in Shakespeare's Coriolanus (1608) from a presentist, Palestinian perspective. I propose that Coriolanus stages for Palestinian readers and audiences their construction of mothers as the breeders of fighters, the mothers' roles of teaching and preparing their sons for sacrifice which they receive with congratulatory celebration through the noble mother, Volumnia, who raises her sole son, Coriolanus, as a warrior and sacrifices him for the sake of Rome. I contend that Volumnia and some Palestinian mothers of martyrs live through their sons, receiving honorary titles of fame and pride. Virgilia's worry about her husband resonates with the Palestinian mothers who oppose martyrdom and express their condemnation of the acts of martyrdom. In both the fictional world of Coriolanus and contemporary Palestine, women who defy the ideology of martyrdom are stigmatised by their societies, for they imperil the structures of Roman and Palestinian cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature, regardless of it various genres, is a mirror to the reality it represents. Any change in reality is reflected without doubt in it. Poets and writers are the first to be affected by a change in reality and subsequently making its reflection in their works. As the Palestinian cause has its own central significance on the Islamic and Arabic situations especially after the 1948 Nakbah, this reflection had stood out the most among the learned stratum of the society. A term called the literature of return had sprung up in reaction to he Nakbah that resulted in the migration of thousands to scattered nations. This type of literature has its own stylistic characteristics and contents that shed lights on the issue and emphasize on their rights of return which rejected any proposal to resettlement and the ignoring of rights. The study would shed light on four major themes: the right to return, the features and characteristic of their birth place, the longing to their homes, sacrifice, struggle, martyrdom and detention. The study will focus on the poems of the Palestinian poets in this regard after the Nakbah. The study concluded that this type of literature consists of various themes that shape up the different perspectives of the poets. They wrote under various topics that are hand in hand with the political and revolutionary reality of the issue of Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the second Intifada which started in 2002 and ended sometime in mid 2000s, Palestinian male and female martyrs used video testimonies, records and documents of death, using the first person pronoun so as to articulate their missions and justifications for carrying out their acts of martyrdom. This study, which focuses on Palestinian female martyrs' video-testimonies, investigates the elusive relationship between martyrdom and witness. I contend that the female martyr is a witness to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to the oppression and dehumanisation to which Palestinians are subject. Palestinian female martyrs are also witnesses to Arab leaders' weakness and their inability to defend Palestine. The act of martyrdom is a collective one, involving the martyr, the agent of narration and the audience. The audience, who bears witness to the martyr, is necessary for martyrdom to be recognised and to take place. I argue that the end of the martyr's speech marks out her silence and her transformation into an icon of resistance, heroism and sacrifice. The corpse of the martyr is transformed into the corpus of martyr's speeches and images that are disseminated by the audience who bear witness to the acts of martyrdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Struggle, personal sacrifice and death play significant roles in Palestinian poetry - a poetry of national struggle whose poets are driven to defend the existence of people and land by way of a fighting poetry which serves as a resistance to occupation. This article traces the evolution of the motifs of resistance and death in the poetry of Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish. It distinguishes between two main types of death in Darwish's poetry; these are collective death, which the author expresses by way of his people's experiences with death, and individual death, as reflected in the poet's own experience with death. The articleexplores each of these types and analyses their conceptual evolution. It shows how the changes which occurred in this motif are reflected in the poetic forms used by Darwish. In this paper we aim to show that Darwish's view of death is multi-faceted and takes into account chronological and geographical, as well as personal aspects. His attitude towards death is complex and is not limited to the ideological aspect. The paper provides a comprehensive investigation into this multiplicity in Darwish's poetry [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current thesis explores the Palestinian suicide martyrs (Istishhadiyin) and the martyrdom operations from the point of view of their families and relatives. The study has tackled the issue of martyrdom operations as a multi dimensional phenomenon addressed by both theoretical and applied researches. The thesis addressed a new social phenomenon which spread in the Palestinian society in all its groups, youth and social classes. The Palestinian suicide martyrs (Istishhadiyin) were able to implement two hundred qualitative martyrdom operations that rocked Israel and raised a large scale wave of reactions locally and internationally; they constituted a turning point in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; it is rare to find a similar phenomenon to this one with this huge number of Palestinian suicide martyrs in any other place in the world. They have their own psychological, social, religious and national features which qualified them to do this strategic action. Besides, the thesis focuses on identifying the main motives which drove the Palestinian youth to carry out such operations and the relationship between the emergence of these operations and Israeli crimes committed against the rights of the unarmed Palestinian people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aesthetically articulates the representation of the Palestinian city in modern Arabic poetry in order to argue that while Arab -and non-Arab poets-incorporate variety of attitudes toward the city, the presentation of the Palestinian city reveals a radical difference from the rest of Arabic and non-Arabic poetry due to the peculiar history of struggle, resistance and victimization characterizing life in the Palestinian metropolis. To the Palestinian poets, in particular, the city is part of a homeland they have lost or a refugee camp that has been resisting the invaders for decades. Contrary to western cities inhabited by alien residents such as Eliot's Prufrock, or Arab cities populated by strangers, outsiders, whores, outcasts and political prisoners as in the literary cities of Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab and Ahmed Abdul-Muti Hejazi, the Palestinian city is inhabited by heroes and martyrs. These heroes who appear in contemporary Palestinian poetry and take different shapes personify the struggle and resistance of a nation that has frequently refused to surrender at times of crisis. Representing the spirit of the Palestinian people confronting a world replete with treachery and hypocrisy, the Palestinian city and its nameless heroes, in contemporary Arabic poetry, is an embodiment of an eternal and unlimited Palestinian dream, the dream of return, rebirth and liberation. In this context, the paper affirms that unlike Arab cities which are associated with decadence, corruption, exploitation and moral bankruptcy, the Palestinian city, due to the Palestinian history of exile, resistance, victimization and pain, is viewed in Arabic/Palestinian poetry as a location of heroism, struggle, defiance and martyrdom [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses ethnographic studies of violence in everyday life, with information on anthropological research on the role of pain in relationships and the interlocutory dimension of pain. Topics include social attitudes toward the body's physical vulnerability; the moral and ethical dimensions of regimes of historicity; and the use of ethnography to study social attitudes toward martyrdom in Palestinian refugee camps in Southern Lebanon. The work of anthropologists Talal Asad, Veena Dasa, and Elizabeth Povinelli on the history of violence, pain, and martyrdom in Islam is examined.

The article discusses the depth of passionate sacrifice in every walk of Palestinian life. Palestinian and Arab media manifest volumes of written, verbal and visual material on Palestinian martyrs. Glorious deaths of the heroes of the war are presented before the world to arouse national inspiration for revolutionary action. Though specific objects signified as symbols of martyrdom distributed in posters resemble Christian iconography, martyrdom remains a political and media event.

Focuses on the process through which Palestinian women have become Islamikaze martyrs to achieve higher status. Prediction made when the Algerian struggle for independence was described; Initial response to acts of Islamikaze; Reason for the recognition given to Islamikaze operations.

What's wrong with suicide bombing? The tactic has been used by the Tamil Tigers, by the Japanese kamikaze, by al-Qaeda, by Palestinian militants against Israel, by Iraqi defenders loyal to Saddam Hussein against the U.S. invasion, and by others; it is typically understood by these groups as martyrdom rather than suicide. Scientific theories of suicide—biological , psychological, and sociological--do not contribute to an understanding. Nor is the claim that it is amoral, the product of psychopathology or mental illness, adequate. The central moral core of the issue of suicide bombing rests, rather, on the violation of a tacit assumption of equality in combat: ’they’ have a weapon ’we’ don't. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies martyrdom and identity in the Palestinian talmud. History of the idea of martyrdom in the Rabbinic Judaism of late Antiquity; Foundation for the claim that the halakha of the Yerushalmi; Evolution of the Amoraic and editorial views of martrydom.