Behçet Kemal Çağlar's Kur’ân‐ı Kerîm'den İlhamlar (Inspirations from the Holy Qur’ān): A Kemalist's Personal,Poetic Response to the Qur’ān

Behçet Kemal Ça?lar, 1908–1969, is the author of a commentary of the Qur’ān, Kur’ân‐? Kerîm'den ?lhamlar (‘Inspirations from the Holy Qur’ān’), published in 1966. This work can be described as a poetic reflection on the Qur’ān. It does not adhere to rendering every line or verse, but instead insists on maintaining a rhythmic cadence and end‐rhyme. Although it resembles a translation in some ways, Ça?lar refuses to call his work a translation. This paper begins by introducing Ça?lar and his text, a brief history of Turkish translations of the Qur’ān, then Ça?lar's approach is contrasted with the aims of translators of the Qur’ān. Ça?lar's text is studied in more detail, providing a sample of the Turkish text and a translation of it into English, focusing on Ça?lar's reflection on Sūrat ?aha. Through this study, it becomes clear that as a result of his prioritizing the literary aspects of the Qur’ān in his reflection, Ça?lar's book has an advantage over literal translations of the Qur'an and it can be useful for Qur’ān translation. At the same time, Ça?lar's book is a reflection of a desire to develop a Turkish Islam—a manifestation of Islam that came from Turkey, that reflected its language and culture and that was intelligible to its people.     

‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London

In December 1932, police raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue. They found almost sixty men dancing, many in female clothing and make–up. An ongoing encounter between the police and working–class queer social worlds drew the ballroom into a public domain within which masculine sexualities were contested, produced and consumed. The ensuing trial gripped metropolitan opinion, becoming the most notorious and widely reported ‘pansy case’ of the 1930s. This paper explores the complex nexus of spaces and practices that cohered in the case as a site at which the queer subject was definitionally produced. During the trial both legal authorities and newspapers and the defendants sought to produce a stable contradistinction between queer and normal, though the meanings they invested in that difference diverged radically. Yet focusing upon the intersecting sites through which this queer subject was constituted – the city, the body and the police/policed interface – suggests the unsettling ambiguities undermining the stability of that difference. Throughout the case, the difference between queer and normal often seemed anything but self–evident, and the arrested men appeared an electric threat to the metropolitan cultural landscape.     

‘It’s a man’s world’: Recent Studies of Male Representation of the Female in the Middle Ages

Blamires, Alcuin (ed.) Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. An Anthology of Medieval Texts Baldwin, John W. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 Kay, Sarah and Rubin, Miri (eds) Framing Medieval Bodies Lomperis, Linda and Stanbury, Sarah (eds) Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature Burns, E. Jane Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature Krueger, Roberta L. Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance Cazelles, Brigitte The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century Meale, Carol M. (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500 Cherewatuk, Karen and Wiethaus, Ulrike (eds) Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistology Genre     

Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra in Translation: A Century of Interpretation of a Sanskrit Mahāyāna Text

Many translations of ?āntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra, a Sanskrit Mahāyāna Buddhist text of seventh/eighth‐century India, have been published since 1892. ?āntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra is one of the few Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist texts available in Sanskrit and it was influential in Tibetan Buddhist schools. This article explores how translation of the Bodhicaryāvatāra is no longer the preserve of scholars but has moved to being carried out by Buddhist practitioners influenced by Tibetan schools of Buddhism. It shows how translators’ motives for translating the text have reflected changing attitudes to Buddhism and its texts. ?āntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra has been translated as a source of information, a literary work, an inspirational work and, with the rise of Western interest in Tibetan Buddhism in the late twentieth century, as a vehicle for the transmission of Buddhist teachings. Nevertheless, further scholarly investigation of the Sanskrit text of the Bodhicaryāvatāra remains to be done.     

Women’s History in France: An Ill-Defined Subject

As a new approach and subject, women’s history in France is ill-defined as an academic category and remains on the margins of mainstream history. The concept of gender, a necessary analytical tool, cannot in itself suffice; the historicity of the tensions between men and women must be restored. At stake is the tension between a continuous linear history and the historical discontinuities which arise in its gaps and flaws, the tension between female individuals [individues] who, as objects of representation, are taken to be representative of their sex, and critical subjects who confront representation as a form of power.     

Being ‘there’: At the front line of the ‘European refugee crisis’ ‐ part 2

In the course of 2015, Skala Sykamnias, a fishing village and tourist idyll on the northern coast of Lesbos, by accident of its geographical location, became the informal gate into Europe for more than 200.000 refugees. In this article the author analyzes the massive flows of people and things that transverse his fieldwork site from different directions: the great diversity of actors enacting what are often dissonant ideals and strategies; the various theatres of operation and reception ‘structures’; both frontline and back stage; and the debates that revolve around humanitarian action in the region. The local community is falling apart whilst to those incoming it represents a gateway to freedom. It is becoming a mini theatre of conflicts that echo wider debates on the political future of Europe.     

An angel’s power in a bishop’s body: the making of the cult of Aubert of Avranches at Mont-Saint-Michel

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Benedictine monks of Mont-Saint Michel promoted the cult of Aubert of Avranches, the abbey’s legendary co-founder, and used his newly rediscovered relics as a means of accessing the patronage and power of the elusive, incorporeal archangel Michael, the community’s other founder. Texts, images, the strategic placement of Aubert’s relics throughout the abbey church reinforced the association between these two saints, rendering Aubert more powerful and Michael more accessible. This local study of the interaction between these two cults at the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel suggests that medieval monastic uses of relics were more creative and varied than is generally recognized and that relationships between saints within a single cultic environment could be extremely complex and unstable.