Making Fatima’s Presence Visible : Embodied Practices, Shiʿi Aesthetics and Socio-Religious Transformations in Iran

Iran has witnessed an increase in cohabitation relationships, or so-called white marriages (izdiwāj-i sifīd), which has caused wide political and religious efforts in cultivating religious selves based on an Islamically defined moral order. This article examines the symbolic re-enactment of the wedding of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and the first Shiʿi Imam, a ritual which participants use to receive spiritual legitimation for their cohabitation practices. These re-enactments are organized by the Shirazis, the designation given to followers of Muhammad al-Shirazi (1928–2001) and of his brother Sadiq al-Shirazi (b. 1942). Shirazis use the aesthetic enactment of the wedding of Fatima to build an alternative to state-centred structures of domination within Iranian society. Through using the materiality of representations, Shirazis in Iran aim to counter societal changes around sexual relationships and cohabitation practices, which young Iranians use to express political disobedience. Women of this study, however, shared embodied experiences of seeing Fatima and constructed their own collective identity and articulation of political dissensus. Refusing the defined moral order of both the regime as well as the Shirazis, women fight for their politics of recognition by defining their own sexual identities and gender relations

The Art of Resistance in Islam : The Performance of Politics among Shi'i Women in the Middle East and Beyond

Based on first-hand ethnographic insights into Shi‘i religious groups in the Middle East and Europe, this book examines women’s resistance to state as well as communal and gender power structures. It offers a new transnational approach to understanding gender agency within contemporary Islamic movements expressed through language, ritual practices, dramatic performances, posters, and banners. By looking at the aesthetic performance of the political on the female body through Shi‘i ritual practices – an aspect that has previously been ignored in studies on women’s acts of resistance – Yafa Shanneik shows how women play a central role in redefining sectarian and gender power relations in the Middle East and the European diaspora.Yafa Shanneik is a Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the agency and authority of women in Shi‘i and Sunni Muslim communities in the Middle East and their transnational links to Europe. She was awarded three British Academy grants to examine understandings of gender relations and women’s resistance to patriarchal gender norms among Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the Middle East and Europe

DCU 250 Arabic dependency bank: an LFG gold standard resource for the Arabic Penn treebank

This paper describes the construction of a dependency bank gold standard for Arabic, DCU 250 Arabic Dependency Bank (DCU 250), based on the Arabic Penn Treebank Corpus (ATB) (Bies and Maamouri, 2003; Maamouri and Bies, 2004) within the theoretical framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). For parsing and automatically extracting grammatical and lexical resources from treebanks, it is necessary to evaluate against established gold standard resources. Gold standards for various languages have been developed, but to our knowledge, such a resource has not yet been constructed for Arabic. The construction of the DCU 250 marks the first step towards the creation of an automatic LFG f-structure annotation algorithm for the ATB, and for the extraction of Arabic grammatical and lexical resources

Refugee camps as spaces of rescue in times of Covid-19 : invisible mobilities in Bourj Albarajenah

This paper aims to explore the peculiarity of the pandemic in stateless communities. Through a case study from a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, we analyse how Palestinian refugees were affected by and responded to the pandemic. We find that the legal exclusion of refugees from the state protection has generated invisible mobility, which further increased the risk of spreading the virus. Refugees have founded their own community response mechanisms of food sharing and crowdfunding. They established Aman medical centre in the camp, which has become a destination for infected, yet undocumented, residents of the city. We conclude how Palestinian refugees used this invisible mobility to save other refugees, therefore proving how refugee camps can become spaces of rescue in times of global emergency.Peer reviewe

Corrosion Inhibition of AISI 316L and Modified-AISI 630 Stainless Steel by the New Organic Inhibitor [(CH3)2N]3PSe in Chloride Media:Electrochemical and Physical Study

We evaluate the effect of the Tris-dimethylaminoselenophosphoramide (SeAP)on the corrosion inhibition of modified-AISI 630 and AISI 316L stainless steel (SS) in 3 wt. % NaCl. The electrochemical behaviors of tested SS samples are investigated before and after adding the Seep into the chloride media by potentiodynamic polarization technique. The adsorption of SeAP onto both SS surfaces is verified by global discharge optical emission spectroscopy (GDOES).  SeAP is found to be a good inhibitor for SS corrosion, especially when added at a concentration of 0.5 wt. %

The eroticization of space and language through desire in Gail Scott's My Paris

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : Thèses et mémoires - FAS - Département d'études anglaises

Shia marriage practices:Karbala as lieux de mémoire in London

Muslim marriages have gained much attention in public debates and academic research. This article examines marriage practices among displaced Iraqi Shia migrants in the UK. Only a few studies have examined this group and fewer by investigating their marriage practices as a way to preserve their religious and cultural memory (Halbwachs 1992). The article is based on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, which refers to spaces, objects or events that have a significant meaning to a particular groups’ collective memory (Nora 1989, 1996). I argue in this paper that the transnational aspects of cultural memory expressed in Shia marriage practices such as rituals, images, and objects among the Iraqi Twelver Shia women in the UK can be regarded as examples of transnational Shia lieux de mémoire. These marriage practices, although appropriated for various personal, social, and religious memories outside of any national framework, are still highly politicized. The article focuses on the practice of sofrat al-‘aqd (for short sofra) that provides women with the ability to articulate their religious and social identity through material objects placed on the sofra that act as women’s transnational Shia lieux de mémoire