Women and Demons

Women and Demons
Author: Gerda Sengers
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2021-10-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004475982

This rich ethnographic study describes the nearly impossible challenge of the daily existence of women in the poor neighbourhoods of Cairo. When these women fall ill they often put the blame on beings from an invisible world that invaded their body (possession), and they seek the help of traditional healers in the Zar ceremony or Koran healing. This book examines in detail the links between cosmology, power and gender. It tackles questions such as ‘what is possession, what is being said with it, and what does society have to do with it?’. The author, who lived a long time in various poor areas of Cairo, attended many sessions of Koran healing and participated in the Zar ceremony. She observed and interviewed many possessed women, as well as healers and other ‘demon specialists’.

Asfuriyyeh

Asfuriyyeh
Author: Joelle M Abi-Rached
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0262044749

The development of psychiatry in the Middle East, viewed through the history of one of the first modern mental hospitals in the region. ʿAṣfūriyyeh (formally, the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane) was founded by a Swiss Quaker missionary in 1896, one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in the Middle East. It closed its doors in 1982, a victim of Lebanon's brutal fifteen-year civil war. In this book, Joelle Abi-Rached uses the rise and fall of ʿAṣfūriyyeh as a lens through which to examine the development of modern psychiatric theory and practice in the region as well as the sociopolitical history of modern Lebanon. Abi-Rached shows how ʿAṣfūriyyeh's role shifted from a missionary enterprise to a national institution with wide regional influence. She offers a gripping chronicle of patients' and staff members' experiences during the Lebanese Civil War and analyzes the hospital's distinctive nonsectarian philosophy. When ʿAṣfūriyyeh closed down, health in general and mental health in particular became more visibly “sectarianized”—monopolized by various religious and political actors. Once hailed for its progressive approach to mental illness and its cosmopolitanism, ʿAṣfūriyyeh became a stigmatizing term, a byword for madness and deviance, ultimately epitomizing a failed project of modernity. Reflecting on the afterlife of this and other medical institutions, especially those affected by war, Abi-Rached calls for a new “ethics of memory,” more attuned to our global yet increasingly fragmented, unstable, and violent present.

Transnational Arab Stardom

Transnational Arab Stardom
Author: Kaya Davies Hayon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2024-01-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501393235

Building on the work of star studies scholars, this collection provides contextual analyses of off-screen representation, as well as close textual analyses of films and star personas, thereby offering an in-depth study of the Arab star as text and context of Arab cinema. Using the tools of audience reception studies, the collection will also look at how stars (of film, stage, screen and new media) are viewed and received in different cultural contexts, both within and outside of the Arabic-speaking world. Arab cinema is often discussed in terms of political representation and independent art film, but rarely in terms of stardom, glamour, performance or masquerade. Aside from a few individual studies on female stardom or aspects of Arab masculinity, no major English-language study on Arab stardom exists, and collections on transnational stars or world cinema also often neglect to include Arab performers. This new book seeks to address this gap by providing the first study dedicated entirely to stardom on the Arab screen. Structured chronologically and thematically, this collection highlights and explores Arab film, screen and music stars through a transnational and interdisciplinary set of contributions that draw on feminist, performance and film theories, media studies, sound studies, material culture, queer star and celebrity studies, and social media studies.

Trials of Arab Modernity

Trials of Arab Modernity
Author: Tarek El-Ariss
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823252353

Challenging prevalent conceptualizations of modernity—which treat it either as a Western ideology imposed by colonialism or as a universal narrative of progress and innovation—this study instead offers close readings of the simultaneous performances and contestations of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, the book reveals these trials to be a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity. In pointed and witty prose, El-Ariss bridges the gap between Nahda (the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment) and postcolonial and postmodern fiction.

Caring for Arab Patients

Caring for Arab Patients
Author: Laeth Nasir
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2018-12-20
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1315347121

This practical and patient-centred guide assists medical professionals in delivering better clinical care to Arab patients. In examining the psychosocial underpinnings of Arab medicine, this unique book summarises and assesses the latest research, taking into account the needs and priorities of Arab patients. Important issues covered include patient education, compliance, 'doctor shopping', and psychiatric and mental health services. The evidence-based approach integrates academic research and first-hand experience from the unique bicultural position of the contributors. "Caring for Arab Patients" is vital for all healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists and occupational therapists with responsibilities for Arab patients, throughout the world. Students of medicine and nursing will find much of interest, as will healthcare managers, researchers, academics, policy makers and shapers.

The Medieval Islamic Hospital

The Medieval Islamic Hospital
Author: Ahmed Ragab
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2015-10-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1107109604

The first monograph on Islamic hospitals, this volume examines their origins, development, architecture, social roles, and connections to non-Islamic institutions.

Working Out Egypt

Working Out Egypt
Author: Wilson Chacko Jacob
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2011-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822346745

Describes how attempts to create a modern Egyptian self free from the colonial gaze were enacted through discourses of gender and sexuality during the British colonial period.

Evil Eye, Jinn Possession, and Mental Health Issues

Evil Eye, Jinn Possession, and Mental Health Issues
Author: G. Hussein Rassool
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317226984

Evil Eye, Jinn Possession, and Mental Health Issues raises awareness of the cultural considerations, religion and spirituality involved in the assessment of Muslim patients with mental health problems. The belief that Jinn spirits can cause mental illness in humans through affliction or possession is widely accepted among Muslims, meaning this belief is a crucial, but frequently overlooked, aspect of mental health problems with Muslim patients in psychiatric care. This book explores the nature of such beliefs, their relationship to mental health and the reasons for their importance in clinical practice. The book argues that it is vital to consider mental disorders as a multifactorial affair, in which spiritual, social, psychological and physical factors may all play a role. It suggests differential diagnostic skills may have an important part to play in offering help to those who believe their problems are caused by possession, and provides accessible literature on clinical issues and practice, interventions, management and evidence-based practice to help health workers achieve a better understanding of Muslim beliefs about possession and how to work with patients that hold such beliefs. Evil Eye, Jinn Possession, and Mental Health Issues is an essential manual for mental health professionals, social workers and psychologists. It should also be of interest to academics and students in the healthcare sciences.

Religion, My Own

Religion, My Own
Author: Mattityahu Peled
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351319264

The Egyptian writer Najib Mahfuz has been acclaimed by many Arab critics as the greatest living Arabic literary writer and one of the pioneers of social criticism in literature in Egypt. This work, the only major book-length study of Mahfuz's work, traces his literary development as a writer and analyzes the thematic aspect of his work: the relationship between individual and society. Mahfuz's method of presenting this relationship in his novels and short stories is studied within the context of his Islamic world view. , Mahfuz's writing follows the models set by modern Western literature. His unique contribution to Egyptian literature is that he made the novel and the short story a means of exploring indigenous problems. Egyptian writers who preceded him paved the way for his achievements, but none reached his mastery. He enabled the Egyptian genius to express itself in literary forms new to Arabic Literary tradition. The literary career of Mahfuz is marked by three distinct phases. The first is the Pharaonic phase (1935-38), in which three historical novels were written. The second is the realistic phase (1938-52), in which most of his great works were written, including the Cairo trilogy. The third phase began, after a pause of six years, in 1958, and is distinguished by symbolic writings and a deep concern for the individual in a changing society.