Russia's Islam: Discourse on Identity, Politics, and Security

Despite the long history of Muslims in Russia, most scholarly and political literatures on Russia’s Islam still narrowly interpret Muslim-Slavs relations in an ethnic-religious oppositional framework. In my work, I examine Russia’s discourse on Islam to argue that, in fact, the role of Islam in post-Soviet Russia is complex. Drawing from direct sources from academic, state, journalistic, and underground circles, often neglected by Western commentators, I identify ideational patterns in conceptualizations of Islam and reconstruct relational networks among authors. To explain complex intertextual relations within specific contexts, I utilize an analytically eclectic method that appropriately combines theories from different paradigms and/or disciplines. Thanks to my multi-dimensional approach, I show that, contrary to traditional views, Russia’s Muslims participate in processes of post-Soviet Russia’s identity formation. Starting from textual contents, avoiding pre-formed analytical frames, I argue that many Muslims in Russia perceive themselves as part of Russian civilization – even when they challenge the status-quo. Building on my initial findings, I state that a key element in Russia’s conceptualization of Islam is the definition, elaborated in the 1990s, of traditional Islam as part of Russian civilizational history, as opposed to extremist Islam as extraneous, hostile phenomenon. The differentiation creates an unprecedently safe, if confined, space for Islamic propositions, of which Muslims are taking advantage. Embedded in debates on Russian civilization, conceptualizations of Islam, then, influence Russia’s (geo)political self-perceptions and, consequently, its domestic and international policies. In particular, Russian so-far neglected Islamic doctrine supports views of Islamic terrorism as a political and not religious phenomenon. Hence, Russia interprets both terrorism and counterterrorism within its own historical tradition, causing its strategy to be at odds with Western views. Less apparently, these divergences affect Russian-U.S. broader relations. Finally, in revealing the civilizational value of Russia’s Islam, I expose intellectual relations among influential subjects who share the aim to devise a new civilizational model that should combine Slavic and non-Slavic, Orthodox and Islamic, Western, and Asian components. In this old Russian dilemma, the novelty is Muslims’ participation.

RELIGIOUS SCULPTURE OF THE CHILOÉ ARCHIPELAGO, FROM THE 17TH TO THE 21ST CENTURY

Despite its central role in religious life of the region, the sculptural tradition of the Southern Chilean Chiloé Archipelago, ranging from the 17th century to the present day, has been vastly understudied. Isidoro Vázquez de Acuña’s 1994 volume Santeria de Chiloe: ensayo y catastro remains the only catalogue of Chilote sculpture. Though the author includes photographs of a vast array of works, he does not attempt to place the sculptures within a chronology, or consider their place within the greater Latin American context. My thesis will place this group of works within a chronological and geographical context that reaches from the 16th century to the present day, connected to the artistic traditions of regions as far afield as Paraguay and Lima. I will first consider the works brought to the Archipelago by religious orders – the Jesuits and Franciscans – as well as influences on artistic style and religious culture throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. I will focus in particular on three works generally considered to be from the 17th and 18th centuries – the Virgin of Loreto at Achao, the Saint Michael at Castro, and the Jesus Nazareno of Caguach – using visual analysis and sifting through generations of primary and secondary sources to determine from where and when these sculptures came. With this investigation as a foundation, I will consider how they inspired vernacular sculptural expression and trace ‘family trees’ of vernacular works based on these precedents. Vernacular artistic traditions are often viewed as derivative and lacking in skill, but Chilote sculptors in fact engaged with a variety of outside influences and experimented with different sculptural styles. I will conclude by considering which aspects of these styles Chilote artists chose to incorporate into their own work, alter or exclude, artistic decisions that shed light on the Archipelago’s religious and cultural fabric.

Metaphysics of love in the religious philosophy of Pável Florensky

This article focuses on the analysis of the concept of love in the religious philosophy of Pavel Florensky, who shares the ontological approach to the consideration of love with other representatives of Russian religious philosophy (N. berdyaev and S. bulgakov). We pay more careful attention to the understanding of love-άγαπαν by Florensky. We have drawn the conclusion that, in the philosophy of P. Florensky, Love, closely connected with truth and beauty, is considered an ontological basis existence of personality. We develop the ideas of Pavel Florensky, and accordingly assume that it is possible to synthesise love-agape and love-eros around the idea of sacrificial love. Agapelogical and erotical ‘bezels’ of one jewel of love is aspects of united love, which is given by God. this gift of God, the gift of united love, is kept by humans through prayer and deeds of love.

Faith on the Home Front: Aspects of Church Life and Popular Religion in Birmingham, 1939-1945

The nature of religion on the domestic front in Britain during the Second World War has, hitherto, been relatively unexplored. This study focuses on Birmingham and describes wartime popular religion, primarily as recounted in oral testimony. The difference the War made to people’s faith, and the consolation wrought by prayer and a religious outlook are explored, as are the religious language and concepts utilised by the wartime popular media of cinema and wireless. Clerical rhetoric about the War and concerns to spiritualise the war effort are dealt with by an analysis of locally published sources, especially parish magazines and other religious ephemera, which set the War on the spiritual as much as the military plane. A final section of the study is devoted to measuring the extent of the influence of the churches in the creation of a vision for post-war Britain and Birmingham.

Jane Gardam: religious writer

This thesis examines the work of the award-winning contemporary English short story and novel writer Jane Gardam. It proposes that much of her achievement and craft stems from her engagement with religion. It draws on Gardam’s published works from 1971 to 2014 including children’s books and adult novels. While Gardam has been reviewed widely, there is little serious critical appreciation of her fiction and there are misreadings of the influence of religion in her work. I therefore analyse the religious dimensions of her stories: the language, stylistics and hermeneutic of Gardam’s three religious influences, namely the Anglo-Catholic, Benedictine and Quaker movements and how she sites them within her work. The thesis proposes lectio divina, arguably an ancient form of contemporary reader-response criticism, as a framework to describe the Word’s religious agency when embedded or alluded to in fiction. It also considers and applies critical discussion on the medieval concept of the aevum, a literary religious space. Finally, I suggest that religious writing such as Gardam’s has a place in the as yet unexplored ‘poetic’ strand of Receptive Ecumenism, a new movement that seeks to address reception of the Word between members of different faith communities. Having examined many aspects of Gardam’s writing, its history and potential, I conclude that her achievement owes much to her engagement with particular and divergent forms of religious life and practice.

Punks and believers An ethnographic study of subcultural, religious and non-religious identities in Indonesian punk scenes

Punk subculture is often assumed to have an antagonistic disposition towards religion. In this thesis, I examine this relationship in the Indonesian context, where the level of religious devotion is higher than in Western societies. I concentrate on how Indonesian punks who belong to secular punk communities negotiate the relationship between their religious or non-religious and subcultural identities. In addition, I examine the status of religion on the collective level in the punk communities. I collected the ethnographic data on Java in 2012. In addition to semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the analyzed data consists of social media sites, punk records and an online enquiry. I utilized thematic analysis in the study. The notion of identity is understood the way Stuart Hall has conceptualized it. Another essential concept, affect, is derived from Lawrence Grossberg’s theorization. The religious participants separated punk and religion in their lives. Many Muslim informants used an Islamic typology to separate one’s personal relationship with Allah and one’s relationship with other people. While some participants filtered away certain elements of “Western punk”, the majority of them saw ideological similarities between punk and Islam. This relationship was negotiated using both affective and ideological rationalizations. Non-religious punks respected religious people, but criticized radical forms of religiosity. Some of them described the difficulties of maintaining a non-religious identity in Indonesia, and that they have felt less marginalized in the punk community. Almost all of the participants stated that punk scenes should be religiously neutral and viewed integrating punk and religion as a problematic phenomenon.

La santidad compartida: la encrucijada del Islam y la ortodoxia cristiana en los Balcanes, reflejos en Bulgaria

In this doctoral thesis with the title: “The Shared Holiness: The crossroad of Islam and the Christian Orthodoxy in the Balkans, reflections in Bulgaria”, presented by VLADISLAVA SPASOVA ILIEVA, under the direction of Dr. MONTSERRAT ABUMALHAM MAS, and Dr. PEDRO BÁDENAS DE LA PEÑA, we reflect upon the crossroads between the populations in the Balkans, whose conversion into States was significantly influenced by their belonging to the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires. Known as the crossroads of several cultures, the area was the destination of a massive influx of pagan Slaves, as well as the meeting point of Islam and Christianity. Considering the bidirectionality of the processes, we shall focus on the mutual enrichment brought about in the encounter between the religiosities of the Balkans, and we will discuss these points from different perspectives. In the common Balkan-Anatolian space, we turn our attention to the ancient hermits, with the aim of showing the complicity in the relations of coexistence, whether Islamic-Christian, Turkish-Byzantine, Turkish-Bulgarian, or Ottoman-Balkan, and a possible scheme, that could be valid for both social and spiritual growth of the person, as well as for the development of an ethnic or religious community, when sharing the same space with other populations, communities or ethnicities...

Argumentación, decisión y justificación: retratos de conversos al Islam en Bogotá

Los estudios de las prácticas sociales se han abordado desde diversas perspectivas. Algunas se enfocan principalmente en el rol de las instituciones, estructuras o de las ideologías para la comprensión de las prácticas sociales; mientras que otras, de manera opuesta, se han enfocado en el estudio de las acciones de los individuos. La presente investigación se afilia a esta segunda perspectiva del estudio social y a partir de la misma estudia un fenómeno social particular, el cual es, el fenómeno de la conversión religiosa. A partir del estudio de las acciones de los individuos y, principalmente, de las argumentaciones y justificaciones que dan de la misma, el presente documento busca dar cuenta de los motivos que fundamentan e impulsan la conversión y el cambio radical dentro del sistema de creencias del Individuo.

Genetic Aspects Of Athletic Performance: The African Runners Phenomenon.

The current dominance of African runners in long-distance running is an intriguing phenomenon that highlights the close relationship between genetics and physical performance. Many factors in the interesting interaction between genotype and phenotype (eg, high cardiorespiratory fitness, higher hemoglobin concentration, good metabolic efficiency, muscle fiber composition, enzyme profile, diet, altitude training, and psychological aspects) have been proposed in the attempt to explain the extraordinary success of these runners. Increasing evidence shows that genetics may be a determining factor in physical and athletic performance. But, could this also be true for African long-distance runners? Based on this question, this brief review proposed the role of genetic factors (mitochondrial deoxyribonucleic acid, the Y chromosome, and the angiotensin-converting enzyme and the alpha-actinin-3 genes) in the amazing athletic performance observed in African runners, especially the Kenyans and Ethiopians, despite their environmental constraints.

The Effect Of Celastrol, A Triterpene With Antitumorigenic Activity, On Conformational And Functional Aspects Of The Human 90kda Heat Shock Protein Hsp90α, A Chaperone Implicated In The Stabilization Of The Tumor Phenotype.

Hsp90 is a molecular chaperone essential for cell viability in eukaryotes that is associated with the maturation of proteins involved in important cell functions and implicated in the stabilization of the tumor phenotype of various cancers, making this chaperone a notably interesting therapeutic target. Celastrol is a plant-derived pentacyclic triterpenoid compound with potent antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anticancer activities; however, celastrol's action mode is still elusive. In this work, we investigated the effect of celastrol on the conformational and functional aspects of Hsp90α. Interestingly, celastrol appeared to target Hsp90α directly as the compound induced the oligomerization of the chaperone via the C-terminal domain as demonstrated by experiments using a deletion mutant. The nature of the oligomers was investigated by biophysical tools demonstrating that a two-fold excess of celastrol induced the formation of a decameric Hsp90α bound throughout the C-terminal domain. When bound, celastrol destabilized the C-terminal domain. Surprisingly, standard chaperone functional investigations demonstrated that neither the in vitro chaperone activity of protecting against aggregation nor the ability to bind a TPR co-chaperone, which binds to the C-terminus of Hsp90α, were affected by celastrol. Celastrol interferes with specific biological functions of Hsp90α. Our results suggest a model in which celastrol binds directly to the C-terminal domain of Hsp90α causing oligomerization. However, the ability to protect against protein aggregation (supported by our results) and to bind to TPR co-chaperones are not affected by celastrol. Therefore celastrol may act primarily by inducing specific oligomerization that affects some, but not all, of the functions of Hsp90α. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first work to use multiple probes to investigate the effect that celastrol has on the stability and oligomerization of Hsp90α and on the binding of this chaperone to Tom70. This work provides a novel mechanism by which celastrol binds Hsp90α.

Neurodevelopment Of Small-for-gestational Age Infants: Behavioral Aspects In First Year.

The purpose of this study was to compare the behavior of full-term small-for-gestational age (SGA) with full-term appropriate-for gestational age (AGA) infants in the first year of life. We prospectively evaluated 68 infants in the 2nd month, 67 in the 6th month and 69 in the 12th month. The Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II were used, with emphasis on the Behavior Rating Scale (BRS). The groups were similar concerning the item interest in test materials and stimuli; there was a trend toward differences in the items negative affect, hypersensitivity to test materials and adaptation to change in test materials. The mean of Raw Score was significantly lower for the SGA group in the items predominant state, liability of state of arousal, positive affect, soothability when upset, energy, exploration of objects and surroundings, orientation toward examiner. A lower BRS score was associated with the SGA group in the 2nd month.

Brij Detergents Reveal New Aspects Of Membrane Microdomain In Erythrocytes.

Membrane microdomains enriched in cholesterol, sphingolipids (rafts), and specific proteins are involved in important physiological functions. However their structure, size and stability are still controversial. Given that detergent-resistant membranes (DRMs) are in the liquid-ordered state and are rich in raft-like components, they might correspond to rafts at least to some extent. Here we monitor the lateral order of biological membranes by characterizing DRMs from erythrocytes obtained with Brij-98, Brij-58, and TX-100 at 4 °C and 37 °C. All DRMs were enriched in cholesterol and contained the raft markers flotillin-2 and stomatin. However, sphingomyelin (SM) was only found to be enriched in TX-100-DRMs - a detergent that preferentially solubilizes the membrane inner leaflet - while Band 3 was present solely in Brij-DRMs. Electron paramagnetic resonance spectra showed that the acyl chain packing of Brij-DRMs was lower than TX-100-DRMs, providing evidence of their diverse lipid composition. Fatty acid analysis revealed that the SM fraction of the DRMs was enriched in lignoceric acid, which should specifically contribute to the resistance of SM to detergents. These results indicate that lipids from the outer leaflet, particularly SM, are essential for the formation of the liquid-ordered phase of DRMs. At last, the differential solubilization process induced by Brij-98 and TX-100 was monitored using giant unilamellar vesicles. This study suggests that Brij and TX-100-DRMs reflect different degrees of lateral order of the membrane microdomains. Additionally, Brij DRMs are composed by both inner and outer leaflet components, making them more physiologically relevant than TX-100-DRMs to the studies of membrane rafts.

Morphological Aspects And Cox-2 Expression After Exposure To 780-nm Laser Therapy In Injured Skeletal Muscle: An In Vivo Study.

The effectiveness of low-level laser therapy in muscle regeneration is still not well known. To investigate the effects of laser irradiation during muscle healing. For this purpose, 63 rats were distributed to 3 groups: non-irradiated control group (CG); group irradiated at 10 J/cm(2) (G10); and group irradiated at 50 J/cm(2) (G50). Each group was divided into 3 different subgroups (n=7), and on days 7, 14 and 21 post-injury the rats were sacrificed. Seven days post-surgery, the CG showed destroyed zones and extensive myofibrillar degeneration. For both treated groups, the necrosis area was smaller compared to the CG. On day 14 post-injury, treated groups demonstrated better tissue organization, with newly formed muscle fibers compared to the CG. On the 21(st) day, the irradiated groups showed similar patterns of tissue repair, with improved muscle structure at the site of the injury, resembling uninjured muscle tissue organization. Regarding collagen deposition, the G10 showed an increase in collagen synthesis. In the last period evaluated, both treated groups showed statistically higher values in comparison with the CG. Furthermore, laser irradiation at 10 J/cm(2) produced a down-regulation of cyclooxygenase 2 (Cox-2) immunoexpression on day 7 post-injury. Moreover, Cox-2 immunoexpression was decreased in both treated groups on day 14. Laser therapy at both fluencies stimulated muscle repair through the formation of new muscle fiber, increase in collagen synthesis, and down-regulation of Cox-2 expression.

Effectiveness Of The Endotracheal Tube Cuff On The Trachea: Physical And Mechanical Aspects.

The inflation pressure of the endotracheal tube cuff can cause ischemia of the tracheal mucosa at high pressures; thus, it can cause important tracheal morbidity and tracheal microaspiration of the oropharyngeal secretion, or it can even cause pneumonia associated with mechanical ventilation if the pressure of the cuff is insufficient. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the RUSCH® 7.5 mm endotracheal tube cuff, this study was designed to investigate the physical and mechanical aspects of the cuff in contact with the trachea. For this end, we developed an in vitro experimental model to assess the flow of dye (methylene blue) by the inflated cuff on the wall of the artificial material. We also designed an in vivo study with 12 Large White pigs under endotracheal intubation. We instilled the same dye in the oral cavity of the animals, and we analyzed the presence or not of leakage in the trachea after the region of the cuff after their deaths (animal sacrifice). All cuffs were inflated at the pressure of 30 cmH2O. We observed the passage of fluids through the cuff in all in vitro and in vivo experimental models. We conclude that, as well as several other cuff models in the literature, the RUSCH® 7.5 mm tube cuffs are also not able to completely seal the trachea and thus prevent aspiration of oropharyngeal secretions. Other prevention measures should be taken.

The relationship between physical aspects of quality of life and extreme levels of regular physical activity in adults

This study aimed to check for any significant differences in perceived quality of life, specifically aspects of a physical nature, among volunteers who are more physically active and those less physically active in a university community. The sample consisted of 1,966 volunteers in a university community in Brazil. To assess physical activity levels, volunteers responded to the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ), and to analyse the perception of quality of life they responded to WHOQOL-bref, which is classified into three groups according to level of physical activity, taking into account the metabolic equivalent index (MET) over a full week. For comparison, consideration was given to the first and third tertiles, respectively, namely groups of more and less active students. The results indicated that individuals who engaged in more physical activity had a more positive perception of quality of life compared to those who were less active in physical aspects related to the ability to work, energy for day-to-day activities and locomotion.