Assuming a central place in Muslim life, the Qur'an speaks of one community of the faith, the umma. This unity of the faithful is recognised as the default aspiration of the believer, and in the modern era, intellectuals and political leaders have often vied both to define, and to lead it. Based on case studies of actors such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and ISIS, James Piscatori and Amin Saikal consider how some appeals to pan-Islam prove useful, yet other attempts at cross-border institutionalisation including the Sunni Caliphate or the modern Shi'i-inspired Islamic Revolution, founder on political self-interest and sectarian affiliations. Accompanied by a range of scriptural references to examine different interpretations of the umma, Piscatori and Saikal explore why, despite it meaning such widely different things, and its failure to be realised as a concrete project, neither the umma's popular symbolic appeal nor its influence on a politics of identity has diminished.
Late medieval motet texts are brimming with chimeras, centaurs and other strange creatures. In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya explores the musical ramifications of this menagerie in the works of composers Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, and their contemporaries. Aligning the larger forms of motets with the broad sacred and secular themes of their texts, Zayaruznaya shows how monstrous or hybrid exempla are musically sculpted by rhythmic and textural means. These divisive musical procedures point to the contradictory aspects not only of explicitly monstrous bodies, but of such apparently unified entities as the body politic, the courtly lady, and the Holy Trinity. Zayaruznaya casts a new light on medieval modes of musical representation, with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text-music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work.
This text organizes a range of results in chromatic homotopy theory, running a single thread through theorems in bordism and a detailed understanding of the moduli of formal groups. It emphasizes the naturally occurring algebro-geometric models that presage the topological results, taking the reader through a pedagogical development of the field. In addition to forming the backbone of the stable homotopy category, these ideas have found application in other fields: the daughter subject 'elliptic cohomology' abuts mathematical physics, manifold geometry, topological analysis, and the representation theory of loop groups. The common language employed when discussing these subjects showcases their unity and guides the reader breezily from one domain to the next, ultimately culminating in the construction of Witten's genus for String manifolds. This text is an expansion of a set of lecture notes for a topics course delivered at Harvard University during the spring term of 2016.
Many people who do not believe in God believe that 'everything is God' - that everything is part of an all-inclusive divine unity. In Pantheism, this concept is presented as a legitimate position and
Rational Choice Theory and Religion considers one of the major developments in the social scientific paradigms that promises to foster a greater theoretical unity among the disciplines of sociology, p
This volume is an assessment of the performance of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) since its creation in 1963 and of its potential, focusing on Africa's central concerns: decolonisation, Afric
Memorials are proliferating throughout the globe. States recognize the political value of memorials: memorials can convey national unity, a sense of overcoming violent legacies, a commitment to politi
The book provides an up-to-date introduction to the latest version of Unity and its workflow by guiding readers through various prototypes. These range from 2D to 3D game concepts for PC and mobile, w
European legal integration is often justified with reference to the inherent unity of European legal traditions that extend to ancient Rome. This book explores the invention of this tradition, tracing it to a group of legal scholars divided by the onslaught of Nazi terror and totalitarianism in Europe. As exiles in Britain and the US, its formulators worked to build bridges between the Continental and the Atlantic legal traditions, incorporating ideas such as rule of law, liberty and equality to the European heritage. Others joined the Nazi revolution, which promoted its own idea of European unity. At the end of World War Two, natural law and human rights were incorporated into the European project. The resulting narrative of Europe, one that outlined human rights, rule of law and equality, became consequently a unifying factor during the Cold War as the self-definition against the challenge of communism.
With its common colonial experience, an overarching cultural unity despite apparent diversities, and issues of nation-building cutting across national frontiers, South Asia offers a critical site on w
