Global Violence and Indonesian Muslim Politics

The attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States and the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan provoked fierce threats of violence in Indonesia, the world's largest majority-Muslim country. Western journalists portrayed these reactions as among the most destabilizing in the Muslim world. Less widely reported, however, was the intensification of a struggle between Muslim proponents of democracy and neof undamentalist conservatives, sparked by the same incidents. This article explores the varied reactions of Muslims to the violence of September 11 and its aftermath in light of this contest between rival Muslim groupings. It examines their competing visions of Islam and nation, as well as their supporting alliances in state and society. The example highlights the pluralism of Muslim politics and the special challenges of democratic transitions. Emphasizing the plurality and permeability of civilizations, the example also suggests that there is no "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West but, rather, a more open process of globalization, localization, and exchange. [Keywords: Islam, Indonesia, violence, democratization, civilization]     

The "amazing" fertility decline: Islam, economics, and reproductive decision making among working-class Moroccan women

Often it is understood that Islam prohibits family planning because the Qur'an does not explicitly address contraception. Public health and development officials have recently congratulated the Muslim world for decreases in fertility given the supposed constraints placed on reproductive healthcare by Islam, while popular culture writers have warned the West of threats by young Muslims if the population goes uncontrolled. This article draws on data collected through interviews with working-class women seeking reproductive healthcare at clinics in Rabat, Morocco, and with medical providers to challenge the link between Islamic ideology and reproductive practices and the correlation among Islam, poverty, and fertility. Morocco, a predominantly Muslim country, has experienced a dramatic decrease in fertility between the 1970s and today. I argue that patients and providers give new meanings to modern reproductive practices and produce new discourses of reproduction and motherhood that converge popular understandings of Islam with economic conditions of the Moroccan working class.     

Scientific life of a French catholic missionary: Henri Fontaine (1924–?)

This article relates the long scientific life of the French catholic missionary, Father/Doctor Henri Fontaine. He is also a geologist, a palaeontologist, an expert on Paleozoic corals and an archeologist. The year 2018 marked his 94^th birthday, 70^th sacerdotal year and 64 years of his scientific career. He has devoted most of his life to scientific activities in East and Southeast Asia: from 1954 to late 1975 in Viet Nam as geologist-expert, from 1978 to 2013 in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam, within the framework of the Coordinating Committee for Coastal and Offshore Geoscience Programmes in East and Southeast Asia (CCOP) and afterwards as a volunteer once he had retired. Until 2018, he published nearly 300 articles about geology, palaeontology and prehistory, mostly as sole author or main author. Although he initially intended to be priest living among villagers somewhere in Asia, his life evolved, in spite of himself, following spiritual, political and scientific events.     

Robert Chambers and Thomas Henry Huxley, Science Correspondents: The Popularization and Dissemination of Nineteenth Century Natural Science

Robert Chambers and Thomas Henry Huxley helped popularize science by writing for general interest publications when science was becoming increasingly professionalized. A non-professional, Chambers used his family-owned Chambers' Edinburgh Journal to report on scientific discoveries, giving his audience access to ideas that were only available to scientists who regularly attended professional meetings or read published transactions of such forums. He had no formal training in the sciences and little interest in advancing the professional status of scientists; his course of action was determined by his disability and interest in scientific phenomena. His skillful reporting enabled readers to learn how the ideas that flowed from scientific innovation affected their lives, and his series of article in the Journal presenting his rudimentary ideas on evolution, served as a prelude to his important popular work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Huxley, an example of the new professional class of scientists, defended science and evolution from attacks by religious spokesmen and other opponents of evolution, informing the British public about science through his lectures and articles in such publications as Nineteenth Century. He understood that by popularizing scientific information, he could effectively challenge the old Tory establishment -- with its orthodox religious and political views -- and promote the ideas of the new class of professional scientists. In attempting to transform British society, he frequently came in conflict with theologians and others on issues in which science and religion seemed to contradict each other but refused to discuss matters of science with non-professionals like Chambers, whose popular writing struck a more resonant chord with working class readers. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The origins of behavior in macromolecules and protocells

This paper was prepared in honor of Marcel Florkin's eightieth birthday, before which he was stricken. Professor Florkin did attain, or rather had bestowed upon him, leadership in several areas of science, especially biochemistry. In his writing, in his editorships, in his organizational activities, and in his investigations he stressed meaningful overviews as well as accurate specialization. He understood the nature of the demanding efforts required to attain significant insight. All who knew him personally recall a thoughtful, friendly, occasionally jolly, personality. He epitomized the senior statesman of science. He will be sorely missed, and long remembered.     

Thomas Hunt Morgan as an Embryologist: The View from Bryn Mawr

Thomas Hunt Morgan taught at Bryn Mawr College from 1891 until1904. During his years there he concentrated his research interestson embryology; he included regeneration as an integral partof development. This article maintains that Morgan did not abandonhis interest in embryology when he became a geneticist at Columbia,but it deals mainly with his teaching and research while atBryn Mawr. He worked on the development of a great diversityof organisms, plant and animal, he used widely differing experimentalmethods to investigate them, and he concerned himself with manydifferent general and special problems. He strove to investigateproblems that were directly soluble by experimental intervention,and was highly critical, in the best possible way, of the experimentsand interpretations made by his contemporaries, who regardedhim as a leader. He exerted his influence on developmental biologynot only through his research, but also through a number offine textbooks, and by his teaching. During his Bryn Mawr yearshe encouraged his students, undergraduate and graduate, to carryout independent research. He sometimes published with them asco-author, but dozens of articles by his students were publishedwithout carrying Morgan's name as co-author.     

The Islam of anthropology

Research on ‘Muslim societies’ is a controversial topic in the present, particularly given the US army’s current employment of anthropological experts in war zones under military occupation. In 2006 the UK Foreign Office, too, sought to include anthropologists in its worldwide research project entitled ‘Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalization’, with grants given outside the normal process of research funding and differently assessed. In this article, I immodestly argue for how the discipline of anthropology should apprehend and analyse Islam in the present political context. The paper claims that anthropological research provides an antidote to the Islamophobia of much talk about Islam in the Australian public sphere, an Islamophobia originating not only from the right but from some leftists and feminists as well.     

Murder by Suicide: Episodes from Muslim History

Suicide terrorism and other operations that consume the killer's life employ beliefs and practices intended to reconcile the killer with his or her own death. This article reviews three episodes from Muslim history: the Assassins of Syria and Persia, juramentado in the Philippines, and Husayn's martyrdom at Karbala. Each of these episodes manifests a different symbolic stratagem: the neutralization of transition anxiety, the sacrificial fusion of murder and suicide, and the justifying projection of the past onto the present. [Keywords: suicide terrorism, Islam, Middle East, Iran, Philippines]     

'Representing' British Muslims: the strategic dimension to identity construction

This article explores how Muslim identity is constructed in different ways by two groups of political activists in Britain. At the heart of our investigation is an interest in how these different definitions of Muslim identity are organized to promote different forms of political action. We pay particular attention to how these groups employ the same Islamic concept, da'wah (the injunction to invite people to Islam), and show that it only gains meaning when invoked and deployed in the context of practical argumentation. That is, the meaning of such concepts is not a fixed given but highly contingent upon the contrasting strategic concerns of those claiming to represent the community. While these points have a general applicability, they are particularly important in the analysis of Muslim political activity. For too long, the ahistorical essentialist assumptions of 'Orientalism' have obscured the fundamentally contested and strategically constructed nature of Muslim identity.     

祝贺生物化学家、营养学家郑集教授百岁华诞

郑集是我国老一辈著名的生物化学家、营养家家 ,是我国生物化学、营养学的先导者之一 ,衰老生物化学的主要奠基者 .郑集 1 90 0年生于四川省南溪县农村 ,家境贫寒 .他的童年和青年时期都是在贫病交加的情况下度过的 .他没有读过正规中学 ,他克服难以想象的困难考入南京东南大学 (后改为中央大学 ) ,1 92 8年毕业 .后来 ,他有幸出国深造 ,1 934年获美国印第安那大学博士学位 .当即回国 ,开始他的教学和蛋白质化学、营养学的研究工作 .1 937～ 1 946年学校因抗战西迁四川 ,尽管条件极度困难 ,他在工作之余还著书立说 ,创办杂志和筹建学会 .抗战胜利后 ,回到南京重建实验室 ,奋力工作 .1 949年解放以后 ,郑集先后在南京大学 (原名中央大学 )、军医大学和调整后的南京大学工作至今 .1 957年在南京大学建立生物化学专业 ,培养了许多专业人才 .70年代初开辟衰老生化机制的研究 ,提出代谢失调学说 .已经发表的论文和著作达 30 0篇 /本 ,获得国内外荣誉证书和奖状等 50多件 .郑集工作勤奋 ,孜孜不倦 ,几乎将节假日都用来工作 .他性格顽强 ,不怕困难 ,勇于做开创性的工作 .他讲课内容丰富 ,善于启发 ,被学生誉为艺术享受 .他对学生和青年教师全面关心 ,要求严格 ,许多学生畏而敬之 .他生活俭朴 ,品德高尚 ,他将仅     

Humboldt,Darwin, and population

Conclusions I have attempted to clarify some of the pathways in the development of Darwin's thinking. The foregoing examples of influence by no means include all that can be found by comparing Darwin's writings with Humboldt's. However, the above examples seem adequate to show the nature and extent of this influence. It now seems clear that Humboldt not only, as had been previously known, inspired Darwin to make a voyage of exploration, but also provided him with his basic orientation concerning how and what to observe and how to write about it. An important part of what Darwin assimilated from Humboldt was an appreciation of population analysis as a tool for assessing the state of societies and of the benefits and hardships which these societies can expect to receive from the living world around them.Darwin exhibited in his Journal of Researches a casual interest in the economic and political conditions of the countries he visited, but these considerations were much less important to him than to Humboldt. Instead, Darwin, with the assistance of Lyell's Principles of Geology, shifted from Humboldt's largely economic framework to a biological one built around the species question. This shift led Darwin away from a consideration of how the population biology of animals was related to man's economy to focus instead upon how population biology fitted into the economy of nature.Humboldt's Personal Narrative served very well as a model for Darwin's Journal of Researches, thereby helping Darwin gain scientific eminence. The Journal of Researches, like virtually all of Humboldt's writings, was a contribution to scientific orthodoxy. But Darwin had, along the way, acquired an urge to do more than just add his building blocks to the orthodox scientific edifice. He decided to rearrange those blocks of knowledge into a different structure, and for that task neither Humboldt's Personal Narrative nor any other of his works could serve as a model. Humboldt had lacked the confidence which Darwin needed that biogeography and the origin of species could be understood. Humboldt had not explored very far the possible connections between biology and geology. Nor had he provided a general synthetic account of population biology. Had he done so, he might have been more explicit about the extent of his endorsement of Malthus. But even if he had, Humboldt's strong orientation toward cooperation would probably have inhibited his recognition of the importance of competition in nature.Lyell, who had also benefited from reading Humboldt, gave Darwin insights that were lacking in Humboldt's Personal Narrative. Lyell admirably demonstrated how stratigraphy, paleontology, biogeography, and population biology could be interrelated, and his reasons for doing so were essentially the same as Darwin's. Lyell's understanding of biogeography and ecology came from the writings of Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle as much as from Humboldt's, and from the former Lyell derived an appreciation for the importance of competition and also a confidence that the mysteries of biogeography could be explained.¹¹⁷ Furthermore, Lyell's discussion of all these subjects and also of evolution in his Principles of Geology is a good synthetic argument that was the ideal model for Darwin's greatest book.Darwin, having become convinced that species change through time, was able to synthesize in his mind the contributions which he had derived from the writings of Humboldt and Lyell as they applied to the species question. When Darwin wrote his Journal of Researches there were two large gaps in his thinking about evolution that bothered him—the mechanism of evolution and the causes of extinction. It was only after reading Malthus in 1838 that he realized, as Lyell had more or less pointed out, how important was competition in nature. He now had the general outlines for his theory, and in the 1845 abridged edition of his Journal, now retitled The Voyage of the Beagle, he inserted a fuller discussion of competition in nature which showed his awareness of its importance as an ecological factor.¹¹⁸ An abridged version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the History of Science Society in Washington, D.C., on 29 December 1969.     

Organ transplantation: contemporary Sunni Muslim legal and ethical perspectives

The problems that organ transplantation poses to the Muslim mind may be summarized as follows: firstly, a Muslim believes that whatever he owns or possesses has been given to him as an amanah (trust) from Allah. Would it not be a breach of trust to give consent for the removal of parts of one's body, while still alive, for transplantation to benefit one's child, sibling or parent? Secondly, the Shari'ah (Islamic Law) emphasizes the sacredness of the human body. Would it not then be an act of aggression against the human body, tantamount to its mutilation, if organs were to be removed after death for the purpose of transplantation? In this paper I attempt to illustrate how the Muslim jurists have tried to resolve the dilemma of Muslims by providing them with certain guidelines based on the original sources of Islam, namely, the Qur'an and the Prophetic tradition. In order to assist the followers of other religious traditions to grasp the gravity of the problem posed by organ transplantation to the Muslim mind, I begin by discussing the opinions of Muslim jurists on the issue of utilization of human parts. Thereafter, I touch upon the resolutions taken by the various Islamic Juridical Academies on the issue in question. Finally, I shed light upon the inclusion of organ donation in a Muslim Will and the enforceable nature of such a will.     

Syncretism and the Politics of the Tingkeban in West Java

For the rural Sundanese of West Java who identify with Nahdatul Ulama Islam, the tingkeban is considered a mandatory ritual to be conducted for a woman who is seven months pregnant. However, like other local practices around birth, the tingkeban has come under state and urban modernising influences that have attempted to displace some of its elements as ‘culture’ rather than ‘religion’ and to discredit many of these as superstitious and backward. This paper examines the ritual elements of the tingkeban that produce and reinforce local cosmological and ontological ideas about the nature of personhood and society, and, in particular, how the ritual highlights the ambivalent status of the villagers within broader relations of power such as the Indonesian State and other forms of Islam existing in Indonesia. The paper also explores how the assumptions within the ideology of modernisation propagated under the last years of the Suharto regime coincide with assumptions in scholarly work such as those underlying Geertz's depiction of the syncretic nature of Javanese religion.     

I. P. Pavlov and K. Lorenz

In the thirtieth, the founder of ethology Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz put forward the new theory of behavior, which was met with considerable resistance of the dominant views on the mechanisms of behavior, including Pavlov's concept. From his first theoretical works and later on Lorenz debated with Pavlov. However, these debates were not reduced to a disagreement. He appreciated greatly the scientific contribution of Pavlov, and the ideas of the Russian physiologist were often the starting point of his own speculations. His polemics with Pavlov differed very much from his uncompromising controversies with behaviorists. When Lorenz compared Pavlov's views with behaviorism, he often preferred Pavlov's ideas. Lorenz also draw some parallels between the Pavlov's understanding of behavior and the ethological approach. Lorenz's discussion with Pavlov about the nature of conditioned reflex is of particular interest, since it stimulated Lorenz to develop the theory of this phenomenon.     

"Fewer children, better life" or "as many as God wants"? Family planning among low-income Iranian and Afghan refugee families in Isfahan, Iran

In the West it is often assumed that religion (esp. Islam) and contraception are mutually exclusive. Yet, the Islamic Republic of Iran has one of the most successful family-planning programs in the developing world, and is often looked to as a potential model for other Muslim countries. Although Iran's family-planning program has been extremely successful among Iranians, it has been far less successful among Afghan refugees and other ethnic groups. Afghans and Iranians both seek services in Iran's public health sector for family health care, treatment of infectious disease, and childhood vaccinations. On these occasions, all adult married patients are strongly encouraged to use family planning to reduce the number of offspring. In this article, we explore how Iran's family-planning program is differentially perceived and utilized among low-income Iranian and Afghan refugee families in rural and urban locations. Particular attention is given to how different interpretations of Islam may or may not influence reproductive health-related behaviors and how cultural factors influence reproductive strategies.     

Mystical Styles of Expression among North Indian Faq?r: Nara as a Manifestation of Hukm

This paper explores the mystical complex of North Indian ‘holy men’ commonly known as faqir and their relationship to mainstream Indian Islam. It is based on research done at the thirteenth century Indo‐Muslim shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, India. Many faqir beliefs and practices diverge from Islamic orthodoxy by emphasising a mystical relationship with the saints. While faqir are Muslims, their emphasis on mystical expressions demarcates them from orthodox styles of Indian Islam. Two of these expressions are hukm, the mystical bond between a faqir and Muslim saint, and nara, a series of expletives used to communicate with the saint when in a euphoric state. Hukm and nara are pivotal to a faqir's mystical complex and are creative sources of his spiritual life. Prompted by a paucity of critical analyses into the area of North Indian faqir mysticism and ritual performance, this paper argues that the interplay between hukm and nara generates a form of creative expression for the faqir that is related to, but independent of, Indo‐Muslim orthodox practices and constitutes an alternative style of religious expression within Indian Islam.