Korean Association of Middle Eastern Studies

This chapter presents the reading of Waryam Singh Sandhu’s “I am Feeling Fine Now” and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Lubdhak, originally written in Punjabi and Bangla, respectively. Set against periods of political violence, these stories of canine characters provoke us to think how an ethical recognition of animal pain can enable an intersubjective and trans-species engagement with precarity and vulnerability. In Sandhu’s story, which has the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement as its backdrop, humans need to kill their cohabitant dog in order to survive in the climate of terror. Bhattacharya’s novella presents terrified dogs and other animals that will soon be eradicated from the city of Kolkata. Notwithstanding certain humanist and anthropomorphizing gestures, the aural-scape of these narratives undoes the singular narrative of humanism. These texts, Sinha argues, urge us to listen to the dogs’ barking not as the other of human language; rather, only an ethico-political aural attunement to these dying and suffering dogs’ barking can potentially pave a way out of dehumanized anthropocentrism.

This chapter discusses how the religious disciplining of childhood is narratively and visually staged in the children's literature produced by one of the dominant publishing houses of this market since the 1970s. It demonstrates how particular aesthetic and moral codes inform the literature, relating both to traditional Islamic norms of figurative representation and to the needs and opportunities of the British minority situation. The chapter deals with religious children's literature only in this narrow sense, and the concept of Islamic children's literature will be reserved for pedagogical-literary products with the explicit religio-ideological purpose of preserving and adjusting young religious identity in accordance with the needs of European minority existence. It focuses on some reflections about how this literary-religious disciplining, through the creative staging of visual norms and narrated virtues, relate to some characteristics of the genre of children's literature as discussed by Nodelman, and specifically to the notion of "pleasure".

The literature on student activism finds that protesters come from prestigious universities and from the social sciences and humanities. Studies of political Islam, however, emphasize the prominence of engineering and medical students from secular institutions. Contributing to both literatures, this paper investigates Islamist students targeted by security forces in Egypt following the coup of 2013. Matching 1,352 arrested students to the population of male undergraduates, it analyzes how the arrest rate varied across 348 university faculties. We find that activists came disproportionately from institutions that provided a religiously inflected education. This contradicts the conventional emphasis on secular institutions. Most importantly, we find that Islamists tended to come from faculties that required higher grades and that admitted students who studied science in secondary school. Controlling for grades, engineering and medicine were not especially prominent. These findings suggest that Islamist students conform to the more general pattern: political activism attracts the academic elite.

Heavy metal is now over forty years old and has developed into a diverse and multi-faceted genre. Wherever it is found and however it is played, metal's fascination with transgression has often meant it has been embroiled in controversy. Controversies surrounding the alleged connection between heavy metal and, variously, sexual promiscuity, occultism and Satanism, subliminal messages, suicide and violence have made heavy metal a target of moral panics over popular culture. Metal has variously embraced, rejected, played with and tried to ignore this controversy and it remains irrevocably marked by its controversial, transgressive tendencies. This anthology provides a thorough investigation of how and why metal becomes controversial, how metal 'scenes' are formed. It examines the relationship between metal and society, including how fans, musicians and the media create the culture of heavy metal. This collection looks at some of the consequences of heavy metal’s transgressions. As we shall outline in this introduction, metal’s transgression has caused it to be a frequently controversial music.