hajib posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2005
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0 comments
The Qur'anic view of the ideal society is that the social and moral values have to be upheld by both Muslim men and women and there is justice for all, i.e. between man and man and between man and woman. The Qur'anic legislation regarding women is to protect them from inequities and vicious practices (such as female infanticide, unlimited polygamy or concubinage, etc.) which prevailed in the pre-Islamic Arabia. However the main purpose is to establish to equality of man and woman in the sight of God who created them both in like manner, from like substance, and gave to both the equal right to develop their own potentialities. To become a free, rational person is then the goal set for all human beings. Thus the Qur'an liberated the women from the indignity of being sex-objects into persons. In turn the Qur'an asks the women that they should behave with dignity and decorum befitting a secure, Self-respecting and self-aware human being rather than an insecure female who felt that her survival depends on her ability to attract or cajole those men who were interested not in her personality but only in her sexuality
--
hijab posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2005 | 0 comments
When the pre-Islamic Arabs went to battle, Arab women seeing the men off to war would bare their breasts to encourage them to fight; or they would do so at the battle itself, as in the case of the Meccan women led by Hind at the Battle of Uhud. This changed with Islam, but the general use of the veil to cover the face did not appear until 'Abbasid times. Nor was it entirely unknown in Europe, for the veil permitted women the freedom of anonymity. None of the legal systems actually prescribe that women must wear a veil, although they do prescribe covering the body in public, up to the neck, the ankles, and below the elbow. In many Muslim societies, for example in traditional South East Asia, or in Bedouin lands a face veil for women is either rare or non-existent; paradoxically, modern fundamentalism is introducing it. In others, the veil may be used at one time and European dress another. While modesty is a religious prescription, the wearing of a veil is not a religious requirement of Islam, but a matter of cultural milieu
"The Middle Eastern norm for relationships between the sexes is by no means the only one possible for Islamic societies everywhere, nor is it appropriate for all cultures. It does not exhaust the possibilities allowed within the framework of the Qur'an and Sunnah, and is neither feasible nor desirable as a model for Europe or North America. European societies possess perfectly adequate models for marriage, the family, and relations between the sexes which are by no means out of harmony with the Qur'an and the Sunnah. This is borne out by the fact that within certain broad limits Islamic societies themselves differ enormously in this respect."
--
boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
An obscure, ill-organised sect that claimed to possess supernatural powers, it drew its members mainly from the poor and dispossessed of northern China. The foreigners called them "boxers" because of the ritualistic martial arts they practiced
--
boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
Their lives had long been a losing struggle against cycles of flood, drought, and famine. The arrival in China of increasing numbers of foreigners had only deepened their misery
Some foreigners came in pursuit of commerce, and the new technologies they brought with them - steamboats and locomotives, telegraph systems and mining equipment - not only offended the spirits of earth, water, and air but also robbed many chinese of their jobs
Often ignorant, dissmissive, or contemptuous of the native culture, they (christian missionaries) and their aggressive proselytising threatened the very fabric of chinese family and village life. The boxers despised their chinese converts as traitors, "rice christians" who had sold themselves for a square meal
--
boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
The boxers' simmering resentment erupted across the northern provinces of Shantung, Shansi , and Chihli in the summer of 1900
Chanting mobs surrounded the mission stations and dragged out their terrorised occupants
Some they killed on the spot; others they took to boxer temples to be slowly tortured to death. Tens of thousands of chinese converts, protestants and catholic, were murdered - hacked to death, skinned alive, set alight, or buried still living
The foreigners in Peking - nearly 900 men, women, and children from the eighteen most powerful nations in the world - were beseiged in the diplomatic quarter. Established in the 1860s following China's defeat in the war with Britain and France, the quarter was by 1900 a commerical as well as a diplomatic district
The beseiged cooked and ate unappetizing, indigestible meals of rice and horsemeat and were glad of them. Nearly everyone got dysentery. In the heat of the humid Peking summer, thick swarms of black flies and the sickly sweet stench of rotting flesh were everywhere
--
boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
Watching and waiting on events from within Peking's fabled pink-walled Forbidden city was the "Old Buddha", Tzu Hsi, the sixty-five-year-old Empress Dowager of China. A reactionary to the core, she had recently incarcerated her nephew the emperor for daring to lead a reform movement
She shared the boxers' loathing of the foreigners in china and was astute enough to realise 2 things: first, the boxers could help her sweep the hated interlopers out of china, and second, their genuine social and economic grievances had to be harnessed or they might be turned against her and the manchu dynasty. It proved her greatest mistake
Both Tientsin and Peking were thoroughly and indiscriminately looted by all nationalities and all classes. Many innocent civilians commited suicide rather than face being raped and akilled. Moats, rivers, and wells became clogged with bodies. It was a bloody bloodbath and it backfired badly on Tzu Hsi.
In her final years she was forced to embrace the very reforms she had earlier resisted and indeed to introduce them so quickly that they undermined the dynasty she had fought to preserve
The last emperor, Pu Yi, was deposed in 1911, just three years after her death
--
boxer legacy posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
As China underwent her metamorphosis, the events of 1900 continued to resonate. The boxers were lauded and indeed reinvented for propaganda purposes. They achieved deeper significance as a metaphor for chinese pride and patriotism than their activities in 1900 deserve
In 1903 the republican Sun Yat-Sen praised the boxers for rising up in the face of an impotent court to prevent the dismemberment by the foreigners. During the 1920s the chinese communists depicted the boxers as anti-imperialist patriots
In 1955 Chou En-lai called the boxer revolt "one of the cornerstones of the great victory of the chinese people 50 years later". In 1960, to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the rising, a play was written about the boxers by a Manchu whose father had been in the Imperial Guard at the time
That the boxer rising was a kind of harbinger of the people's revolution was part of the official folklore of the cultural revolution. The rhetoric in one booklet published towards the tail end was typical: "Armed with swords and spears and shouting anti-imperialist slogans, they [ the boxers ] stood erect before the imperialists and their lackeys"
During the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, young protesters told foreigners they felt like the boxers of old, invulnerable against bullets
--
- posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
--
- posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
--
red posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 | 0 comments
Like the Red Guards, the Red Lanterns were young, consisting mostly of teenagers, and they were rebellious, with a decided preference (as mythologized) for behaving outrageously toward civilized idols
The red lantern became a powerful emblem of the revolutionary spirit in the hands of Jiang Qing, who wrote a political opera titled The Red Lantern
--
red lanterns posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 | 0 comments
During the latter stage of the Cultural Revolution the Red Lanterns thus became not just an emblem of revolutionary ideals but also an empowering feminist symbol
--
red lanterns posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 | 0 comments
The Red Lanterns reemerged as symbolic historical figures of the late Cultural Revolution during the anti-Confucian campaign of 1973. This campaign was an effort to eradicate ideas such as the low status and subordination of women which were associated with Confucianism
--
urban men posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 | 0 comments
this is one ambitious urbanite
probably couldnt make 200 that day
--
urban men posted on Friday, September 16, 2005 | 0 comments
There were many urban males in the shop
There is finally a shop for urban men
--
Meiji Restoration posted on Friday, September 16, 2005 | 0 comments
The Meiji Restoration (明治維新; Meiji Ishin), also known as the Meiji Ishin, Revolution or Renewal, was a chain of events that led to a change in Japan's political and social structure.
The Tokugawa bakufu came to an official end on November 9, 1867, when the 15th Tokugawa Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu "put his prerogatives at the emperor's disposal" (Beasley, 52) and then resigned his position 10 days later. This was effectively the "restoration" (Taisei Hōkan) of imperial rule, although Yoshinobu retained considerable power
The leaders of the Meiji Restoration, as this revolution came to be known, claimed that their actions restored the emperor's powers. This is not in fact true
The Meiji Revolution can be seen as a catalyst towards industrialization in Japan that led to the rise of the island nation as a world power by 1918, under the slogan of "National Wealth and Military Strength"
--
Red lanterns posted on Thursday, September 15, 2005 | 0 comments
Attacks on Westerners and Chinese Christians were a prominent feature of Chinese society during the late Qing
Typically these attacks have been attributed to xenophobia, a fear of foreigners, or seen as a response to imperialism in its many forms - religious, social, economic, and political.
Historians have also pointed to Western imperialism as an explanation for the hostile treatment of Westerners and Chinese Christians in the nineteenth century
To be sure, imperialist expansion by Westerners in Chongqing elicited hostility that was targeted against their foreign identities
Taking advantage of new privileges exacted in the post-Opium War treaties, Western missionaries and Chinese Christians were much more aggressive in their efforts to encroach upon the local power structure
the conflict between Boxers and Christians was not regarded by the Boxers as a purely military confrontation. Instead, it was seen by them as a contest pitting their magic and the efficacy of their gods against those of the Christian missionarie
Although (married) adult women, who had been polluted by menstruation, intercourse, and childbirth, threatened the efficacy of the Boxers' magico-religious ritual, not all females were seen by the movement as being of negative influence
In fact, corps of female adolescents called the Red Lanterns played a role counterpart to that of the Boxers
The Red Lanterns were typically young enough that they had not experienced marriage, intercourse, or childbirth, and in the near famine conditions of the time many had not yet undergone menarche
This lack of female pollution ensured their purity, upon which their potent magical powers were based
When opponents of the Boxer movement wished to a cast aspersions on the Red Lanterns, for example, they called their morality into question by implying that they engaged in promiscuity or illicit sexual relations, rather than doubting the possibility of the magical powers which the Red Lanterns claimed
the Red Lanterns have been mythologized in several different ways in order to serve the needs of two distinct phases of the Cultural Revolution era
The Red Lanterns were emphasized because the Red Guards identified with them and because they possessed a potent revolutionary symbolism
--
The respected scholar, Muhammad Asad6, commenting on Qur'an 24:31 says " The noun khimar (of which khumur is plural) denotes the head-covering customarily used by Arabian women before and after the advent of Islam. According to most of the classical commentators, it was worn in pre-Islamic times more or less as an ornament and was let down loosely over the wearer's back; and since, in accordance with the fashion prevalent at the time, the upper part of a woman's tunic had a wide opening in the front, her breasts were left bare. Hence, the injunction to cover the bosom by means of a khimar (a term so familiar to the contemporaries of the Prophet) does not necessarily relate to the use of a khimar as such but is, rather, meant to make it clear that a woman's breasts are not included in the concept of "what may decently be apparent" of her body and should not, therefore, be displayed.
The Qur'anic view of the ideal society is that the social and moral values have to be upheld by both Muslim men and women and there is justice for all, i.e. between man and man and between man and woman. The Qur'anic legislation regarding women is to protect them from inequities and vicious practices (such as female infanticide, unlimited polygamy or concubinage, etc.) which prevailed in the pre-Islamic Arabia. However the main purpose is to establish to equality of man and woman in the sight of God who created them both in like manner, from like substance, and gave to both the equal right to develop their own potentialities. To become a free, rational person is then the goal set for all human beings. Thus the Qur'an liberated the women from the indignity of being sex-objects into persons. In turn the Qur'an asks the women that they should behave with dignity and decorum befitting a secure, Self-respecting and self-aware human being rather than an insecure female who felt that her survival depends on her ability to attract or cajole those men who were interested not in her personality but only in her sexuality
--
hijab posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2005 | 0 comments
In Surah 24: 31(Ayah), the Qur'an advises women to cover their "adornments" from strangers outside the family. In the traditional and modern Arab societies women at home dress quite differently compared to what they wear in the streets. In this verse of the Qur'an, it refers to the institution of a new public modesty rather than veiling the face
When the pre-Islamic Arabs went to battle, Arab women seeing the men off to war would bare their breasts to encourage them to fight; or they would do so at the battle itself, as in the case of the Meccan women led by Hind at the Battle of Uhud. This changed with Islam, but the general use of the veil to cover the face did not appear until 'Abbasid times. Nor was it entirely unknown in Europe, for the veil permitted women the freedom of anonymity. None of the legal systems actually prescribe that women must wear a veil, although they do prescribe covering the body in public, up to the neck, the ankles, and below the elbow. In many Muslim societies, for example in traditional South East Asia, or in Bedouin lands a face veil for women is either rare or non-existent; paradoxically, modern fundamentalism is introducing it. In others, the veil may be used at one time and European dress another. While modesty is a religious prescription, the wearing of a veil is not a religious requirement of Islam, but a matter of cultural milieu
"The Middle Eastern norm for relationships between the sexes is by no means the only one possible for Islamic societies everywhere, nor is it appropriate for all cultures. It does not exhaust the possibilities allowed within the framework of the Qur'an and Sunnah, and is neither feasible nor desirable as a model for Europe or North America. European societies possess perfectly adequate models for marriage, the family, and relations between the sexes which are by no means out of harmony with the Qur'an and the Sunnah. This is borne out by the fact that within certain broad limits Islamic societies themselves differ enormously in this respect."
--
boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
An obscure, ill-organised sect that claimed to possess supernatural powers, it drew its members mainly from the poor and dispossessed of northern China. The foreigners called them "boxers" because of the ritualistic martial arts they practiced
--
boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
Their lives had long been a losing struggle against cycles of flood, drought, and famine. The arrival in China of increasing numbers of foreigners had only deepened their misery
Some foreigners came in pursuit of commerce, and the new technologies they brought with them - steamboats and locomotives, telegraph systems and mining equipment - not only offended the spirits of earth, water, and air but also robbed many chinese of their jobs
Often ignorant, dissmissive, or contemptuous of the native culture, they (christian missionaries) and their aggressive proselytising threatened the very fabric of chinese family and village life. The boxers despised their chinese converts as traitors, "rice christians" who had sold themselves for a square meal
--
boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
The boxers' simmering resentment erupted across the northern provinces of Shantung, Shansi , and Chihli in the summer of 1900
Chanting mobs surrounded the mission stations and dragged out their terrorised occupants
Some they killed on the spot; others they took to boxer temples to be slowly tortured to death. Tens of thousands of chinese converts, protestants and catholic, were murdered - hacked to death, skinned alive, set alight, or buried still living
The foreigners in Peking - nearly 900 men, women, and children from the eighteen most powerful nations in the world - were beseiged in the diplomatic quarter. Established in the 1860s following China's defeat in the war with Britain and France, the quarter was by 1900 a commerical as well as a diplomatic district
The beseiged cooked and ate unappetizing, indigestible meals of rice and horsemeat and were glad of them. Nearly everyone got dysentery. In the heat of the humid Peking summer, thick swarms of black flies and the sickly sweet stench of rotting flesh were everywhere
--
boxer rebellion posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
Watching and waiting on events from within Peking's fabled pink-walled Forbidden city was the "Old Buddha", Tzu Hsi, the sixty-five-year-old Empress Dowager of China. A reactionary to the core, she had recently incarcerated her nephew the emperor for daring to lead a reform movement
She shared the boxers' loathing of the foreigners in china and was astute enough to realise 2 things: first, the boxers could help her sweep the hated interlopers out of china, and second, their genuine social and economic grievances had to be harnessed or they might be turned against her and the manchu dynasty. It proved her greatest mistake
Both Tientsin and Peking were thoroughly and indiscriminately looted by all nationalities and all classes. Many innocent civilians commited suicide rather than face being raped and akilled. Moats, rivers, and wells became clogged with bodies. It was a bloody bloodbath and it backfired badly on Tzu Hsi.
In her final years she was forced to embrace the very reforms she had earlier resisted and indeed to introduce them so quickly that they undermined the dynasty she had fought to preserve
The last emperor, Pu Yi, was deposed in 1911, just three years after her death
--
boxer legacy posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
As China underwent her metamorphosis, the events of 1900 continued to resonate. The boxers were lauded and indeed reinvented for propaganda purposes. They achieved deeper significance as a metaphor for chinese pride and patriotism than their activities in 1900 deserve
In 1903 the republican Sun Yat-Sen praised the boxers for rising up in the face of an impotent court to prevent the dismemberment by the foreigners. During the 1920s the chinese communists depicted the boxers as anti-imperialist patriots
In 1955 Chou En-lai called the boxer revolt "one of the cornerstones of the great victory of the chinese people 50 years later". In 1960, to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the rising, a play was written about the boxers by a Manchu whose father had been in the Imperial Guard at the time
That the boxer rising was a kind of harbinger of the people's revolution was part of the official folklore of the cultural revolution. The rhetoric in one booklet published towards the tail end was typical: "Armed with swords and spears and shouting anti-imperialist slogans, they [ the boxers ] stood erect before the imperialists and their lackeys"
During the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, young protesters told foreigners they felt like the boxers of old, invulnerable against bullets
--
- posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
--
- posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 | 0 comments
--
red posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 | 0 comments
Like the Red Guards, the Red Lanterns were young, consisting mostly of teenagers, and they were rebellious, with a decided preference (as mythologized) for behaving outrageously toward civilized idols
The red lantern became a powerful emblem of the revolutionary spirit in the hands of Jiang Qing, who wrote a political opera titled The Red Lantern
--
red lanterns posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 | 0 comments
During the latter stage of the Cultural Revolution the Red Lanterns thus became not just an emblem of revolutionary ideals but also an empowering feminist symbol
--
red lanterns posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 | 0 comments
The Red Lanterns reemerged as symbolic historical figures of the late Cultural Revolution during the anti-Confucian campaign of 1973. This campaign was an effort to eradicate ideas such as the low status and subordination of women which were associated with Confucianism
--
urban men posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 | 0 comments
this is one ambitious urbanite
probably couldnt make 200 that day
--
urban men posted on Friday, September 16, 2005 | 0 comments
There were many urban males in the shop
There is finally a shop for urban men
--
Meiji Restoration posted on Friday, September 16, 2005 | 0 comments
The Meiji Restoration (明治維新; Meiji Ishin), also known as the Meiji Ishin, Revolution or Renewal, was a chain of events that led to a change in Japan's political and social structure.
The Tokugawa bakufu came to an official end on November 9, 1867, when the 15th Tokugawa Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu "put his prerogatives at the emperor's disposal" (Beasley, 52) and then resigned his position 10 days later. This was effectively the "restoration" (Taisei Hōkan) of imperial rule, although Yoshinobu retained considerable power
The leaders of the Meiji Restoration, as this revolution came to be known, claimed that their actions restored the emperor's powers. This is not in fact true
The Meiji Revolution can be seen as a catalyst towards industrialization in Japan that led to the rise of the island nation as a world power by 1918, under the slogan of "National Wealth and Military Strength"
--
Red lanterns posted on Thursday, September 15, 2005 | 0 comments
Attacks on Westerners and Chinese Christians were a prominent feature of Chinese society during the late Qing
Typically these attacks have been attributed to xenophobia, a fear of foreigners, or seen as a response to imperialism in its many forms - religious, social, economic, and political.
Historians have also pointed to Western imperialism as an explanation for the hostile treatment of Westerners and Chinese Christians in the nineteenth century
To be sure, imperialist expansion by Westerners in Chongqing elicited hostility that was targeted against their foreign identities
Taking advantage of new privileges exacted in the post-Opium War treaties, Western missionaries and Chinese Christians were much more aggressive in their efforts to encroach upon the local power structure
the conflict between Boxers and Christians was not regarded by the Boxers as a purely military confrontation. Instead, it was seen by them as a contest pitting their magic and the efficacy of their gods against those of the Christian missionarie
Although (married) adult women, who had been polluted by menstruation, intercourse, and childbirth, threatened the efficacy of the Boxers' magico-religious ritual, not all females were seen by the movement as being of negative influence
In fact, corps of female adolescents called the Red Lanterns played a role counterpart to that of the Boxers
The Red Lanterns were typically young enough that they had not experienced marriage, intercourse, or childbirth, and in the near famine conditions of the time many had not yet undergone menarche
This lack of female pollution ensured their purity, upon which their potent magical powers were based
When opponents of the Boxer movement wished to a cast aspersions on the Red Lanterns, for example, they called their morality into question by implying that they engaged in promiscuity or illicit sexual relations, rather than doubting the possibility of the magical powers which the Red Lanterns claimed
the Red Lanterns have been mythologized in several different ways in order to serve the needs of two distinct phases of the Cultural Revolution era
The Red Lanterns were emphasized because the Red Guards identified with them and because they possessed a potent revolutionary symbolism
--