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"ASCETICISM"
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IRibât/I in Early Islamic Ifrîqiya: Another Islam from the Edge
After a difficult conquest under the Umayyads, the eastern Maghreb or Ifrîqiya region was turned into the western borderland of the Abbasid Empire in the second half of the 8th century, and its governance was soon delegated to the Aghlabid Emirate (800–909). In this context, the Sahel (or Ifriqîyan coastline) quickly became a major centre of asceticism and pious collective retreat in places dedicated to ribât activities. This practice provided a framework for the life of devout people who kept a watchful eye on the Byzantine enemy while zealously performing their devotions. A genuine frontier society of religious men and devotees, ascetics and traditionalists arose in this burgeoning coastal fringe. Over the last two decades, this topic has given rise to a very rich historiography, notably produced by Tunisian researchers who have profoundly renewed our understanding. Based on these considerable achievements, the present contribution proposes to broaden the analysis in order to show how the rise of this movement of warrior piety, advocating an ideal of jihâd, must be related to a more global phenomenon, considered at the scale of the Abbasid Empire. Remaining in a comparative dimension, this article also proposes several approaches to the specific architecture of ribât sites, especially the place devoted to the community mosque.
Journal Article
Asceticism and Society in Crisis
John of Ephesus traveled throughout the sixth-century Byzantine world in his role as monk, missionary, writer and church leader. In his major work,The Lives of the Eastern Saints, he recorded 58 portraits of monks and nuns he had known, using the literary conventions of hagiography in a strikingly personal way. War, bubonic plague, famine, collective hysteria, and religious persecution were a part of daily life and the background against which asceticism developed an acute meaning for a beleaguered populace. Taking the work of John of Ephesus as her guide, Harvey explores the relationship between asceticism and society in the sixth-century Byzantine East. Concerned above all with the responsibility of the ascetic to lay society, John's writing narrates his experiences in the villages of the Syrian Orient, the deserts of Egypt, and the imperial city of Constantinople. Harvey's work contributes to a new understanding of the social world of the late antique Byzantine East, skillfully examining the character of ascetic practices, the traumatic separation of \"Monophysite\" churches, the fluctuating roles of women in Syriac Christianity, and the general contribution of hagiography to the study of history. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.
eBook
Thorns in the Flesh
The literature of late ancient Christianity is rich both in saints who lead lives of almost Edenic health and in saints who court and endure horrifying diseases. In such narratives, health and illness might signify the sanctity of the ascetic, or invite consideration of a broader theology of illness. In Thorns in the Flesh, Andrew Crislip draws on a wide range of texts from the fourth through sixth centuries that reflect persistent and contentious attempts to make sense of the illness of the ostensibly holy. These sources include Lives of Antony, Paul, Pachomius, and others; theological treatises by Basil of Caesarea and Evagrius of Pontus; and collections of correspondence from the period such as the Letters of Barsanuphius and John.Through close readings of these texts, Crislip shows how late ancient Christians complicated and critiqued hagiographical commonplaces and radically reinterpreted illness as a valuable mode for spiritual and ascetic practice. Illness need not point to sin or failure, he demonstrates, but might serve in itself as a potent form of spiritual practice that surpasses even the most strenuous of ascetic labors and opens up the sufferer to a more direct knowledge of the self and the divine. Crislip provides a fresh and nuanced look at the contentious and dynamic theology of illness that emerged in and around the ascetic and monastic cultures of the later Roman world.
eBook
Clothed in the Body
Hunt examines the apparent paradox that Jesus' earthly existence and post resurrection appearances are experienced through consummately physical actions and attributes yet some ascetics within the Christian tradition appear to seek to deny the value of the human body, to find it deadening of spiritual life. Hunt considers why the Christian tradition as a whole has rarely managed more than an uneasy truce between the physical and the spiritual aspects of the human person. Why is it that the 'Church' has energetically argued, through centuries of ecumenical councils, for the dual nature of Christ but seems still unwilling to accept the full integration of physical and spiritual within humanity, despite Gregory of Nazianzus's comment that 'what has not been assumed has not been redeemed'?
eBook
An Anthropological Outline of the Sutta Nipāta: The Contemplative Experience in Early Buddhist Poetry
By examining the Sutta Nipāta, considered one of the collections containing the oldest texts of the Pāli canon, this study aims to reconstruct social, historical, and anthropological aspects of archaic Buddhist doctrine at the time of its definition in dialectic with the forces of orthodoxy and constituted power in 6th century BCE India. This study also provides important insights into the development and definition of contemplative practices devoted to the search for the ‘absolute’ (paramattha and brahmavihāra), which has often received little attention in meditation studies.
Journal Article
The Political Asceticism of Mamata Banerjee: Female Populist Leadership in Contemporary India
Operating within the androcentric premises that support idealized models of populist leadership, self-representations cultivated by female populist leaders often involve precarious balancing acts, compelling them to appropriate contextualized traditionalist discourses and modes of power to qualify for conventional leadership models. This article engages with the stylistic performance of populist leadership by Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress in the state of West Bengal, India, focusing on her adoption of the discursive mode of political asceticism, nativist rhetoric, and religious iconography. Through an interpretive analysis of selected party documents, autobiography, and semistructured interviews with Banerjee's followers and critics, the article delineates Banerjee's populist self-fashioning as a political ascetic and explores perceptions of her leadership. The article argues that while the self-makings of female populist leaders remain fraught and contested, they contribute substantially toward redrawing the boundaries of both conventional leadership models and the broader political landscapes they inhabit.
Journal Article
Asceticism as Renouncing and Embracing the World in Ibn ‘Arabī’s Radical Metaphysics
Asceticism or renunciation (zuhd) is generally viewed as turning away from the world and all it has to offer in order to connect to the divine. The well-known mystical theorist, Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn ‘Arabī (d. 638/1240), adds a denotation of asceticism to this conventional definition. Ibn ‘Arabī argues that the impetus for the creation of the cosmos was the divine wish to be known by something other than Itself. As the fulfilment of this wish, the universe is nothing but a manifestation of the cataphatic aspect of God described as His ‘most beautiful Names’ (al-Asmā’ al-ḥusnā) in the Qur’an, which is not God as He truly is in His apophatic essence that can never be comprehended, much less manifested. This means that there are two forms of asceticism or connecting to the divine: one is to assert God’s transcendence and His true apophatic nature by renouncing the world, while the other is to emphasise His comparability by embracing the world as a manifestation of God’s most beautiful Names. Ibn ‘Arabī presents the world-renouncing form of asceticism through the chapter of Prophet Idrīs in his most popular work, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, and he presents the world-embracing from of asceticism through the chapter of Prophet Ilyās. He then combines both forms of asceticism in the chapter of Prophet Muḥammad.
Journal Article