David Long's portrait of Saudi Arabia depicts the kingdom as one of the least understood countries in the world. This survey encompasses the many facets of Saudi life - the land and people, their religion and culture, the country's history, politics, economics and foreign policy. Drawing upon extensive firsthand experience of the kingdom, Long depicts the often contradictory impulses of a country committed both to modernization and to the values of a traditional society. Alongside his discussion of oil and the Saudi economy, for example, is a chapter on the annual Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Makkah.
U.S.-Saudi relations have been marked by ambivalence since their inception over 50 years ago. The Arab-Israeli conflict, the division between buyer and seller of oil, the superpower-small state dichotomy, and the divergence of cultures, traditions, and perceptions have all contributed to the anomalies that have marked the relationship between the two countries, although mutual interest has, over time, outweighed mutual antagonism. Dr. Long examines the major factors affecting their association—economic, commercial, military, and political as well as oil-related factors—and develops the thesis that each has evolved a unique internal dynamic and an existence independent of the others. It is primarily in times of crisis that the factors have overlapped in the minds of decision makers, Saudi and American alike. The author argues that a knowledge of the development of each individual element is crucial for understanding the intricacies of current U.S.-Saudi relations.
Saudi Arabia is a young nation with an ancient history. It is one of the most conservative traditional societies in the world grappling with the impact of modernization wrought by the influx of great oil wealth beginning only in the mid twentieth century. Saudi culture is in constant flux, and the culture gap between the West and Saudi Islamic culture is wide. Culture and Customs of Saudi Arabia is the first cultural overview of country and provides timely, authoritative insight into a major Middle Eastern power. The Saudis are a proud people with a closed society, but circumstances have caused them to play an important role in current world affairs. The author has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia and has extensively used his contacts there to provide up-to-date material. Saudi culture developed through age-old interactions between the Arabian peoples and their harsh desert environment. Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam, and the basic Islamic values of Saudi culture have remained to this day. The themes of an ancient desert society infused with Islam values on a collision course with modernity are interplayed throughout chapters on the land, people, and history, traditional Islamic culture and modernization, the extended family and gender roles, cuisine and dress, social customs, rites of passage, and holidays, communication and mass media, and artistic expression. Color photos and a map, chronology, and glossary round out the narrative.
The Global Military March of Southern Sudanese Troops. Centered on a Translation of Umar Tusun’s Heroism of the Egyptian-Sudanese Battalion in the War of Mexico
The Global Military March of Southern Sudanese Troops. Centered on a Translation of Umar Tusun’s Heroism of the Egyptian-Sudanese Battalion in the War of Mexico
In 1863 slaves and conscript soldiers from Sudan landed in Mexico. What has happened? The Egyptian Khedive has sent them on the request of Napoleon III to fight for the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian against the Mexican republican troops of Benito Juarez of Zapotec origin. Although the story of this military adventure is so multi-facetted and connects a mosaic of diverse identities it is largely forgotten. Based on personal experience, literary translations, interviews, and the exploration of other repositories, David E. Long and Sebastian Maisel bring back the life-stories of those brave Sudanese men and their descendants and their ultimate fight for freedom and independence.
Evolution and Religion in American Education shines a light into one of America’s dark educational corners, exposing the regressive pedagogy that can invade science classrooms when school boards and state overseers take their eyes off the ball. It sets out to examine the development of college students’ attitudes towards biological evolution through their lives. The fascinating insights provided by interviewing students about their world views adds up to a compelling case for additional scrutiny of the way young people’s educational experiences unfold as they consider—and indeed in some cases reject—one of science’s strongest and most cogent theoretical constructs. Inevitably, open discussion and consideration of the theory of evolution can chip away at the mental framework constructed by Creationists, eroding the foundations of their faith. The conceptual battleground is so fraught with logical challenges to Creationist dogma that in a number of cases students’ exposure to such dangerous ideas is actively prevented. This book provides a detailed map of this astonishing struggle in today’s America—a struggle many had thought was done and dusted with the onset of the Enlightenment.
Since the energy crisis of 1973, the political, economic, and strategic importance of the Persian Gulf to U.S. interests has become readily apparent. Yet little has been written on the area or on policy considerations toward it. This book, in its second, updated edition, fills a considerable part of the gap in the literature. The first chapter desc
The Qu'ran admonishes Muslims that "the pilgrimage to the temple is an obligation due to God from those who are able to journey there." Today over one and a half million pilgrims annually fulfill this Fifth Pillar of Islam, the Hajj. Saudi Arabia conquered the Hijaz in part to protect Hajjis from abuses in the management of the Hajj. How does that country now administer the religious event that brings so many people, often poor and illiterate, into one small area to perform a variety of complex rituals? How does the government protect its visitors' health and safety, and ensure their proper guidance through the necessary rites? How does it move so many pilgrims in and out of what is essentially an out-of-the-way desert? David Long has set this thoughtful examination of the twentieth-century Hajj within its historical framework. He first provides a clear, concise description of the rituals either necessary or traditional to the proper performance of the Hajj; he then relates how the inhabitants of Mecca used to manage the pilgrimage and finally, relates how the new Saudi rulers gradually brought the Hajj service industry under government regulation. Today there is probably no agency of the Saudi government which is not at least tangentially concerned with the Hajj. Only in the area of health did there exist a history of public management. By the early nineteenth century it had become all too clear that the Hajj served to carry diseases endemic to the Orient to Europe, and by the end of that century health and quarantine procedures were under international control. Today the Saudi government has sole control of these matters. Oil revenue vastly exceeds Hajj revenues—once a major source of Saudi income—but the Hajj continues to play an enormous role in the religious, social, and political life of the country. And even in economics it structures the Saudi businessman's year and provides part- or full-time employment to more Saudi citizens than does the oil industry. This volume contains an extensive bibliography, appendixes containing statistical material on recent Hajjs, maps, and a glossary.
Why a Book on Elijah and Elisha? Because Christians today confront the same issues Elijah and Elisha did: strong spiritual attacks from evil powers operating in the world, the temptation to sacrifice faith through compromise, and the tendency to concentrate on form rather than essence in spiritual life. Because Elijah and Elisha dealt with the key issues of the faith: Christian formation through listening and obeying God, true solitude, prayer, living by faith, compassion, justice, single-minded and wholehearted devotion to God, and evangelism and mission. Pneuma Springs Bible Resources is a ministry of Youth With A Mission's Antioch Institute for International Ministries (www.ywam-aiim.org) designed to produce Bible study materials that equip disciples of Jesus Christ to know the truth in which they stand and to enable them to be God's instruments to extend the Kingdom of God throughout the world. Other available resources include the following books by David E. Ross: A Table Before Me (Xulon Press 2007), Out of the House of Fear, Into the House of Love (Korea YWAM Publishing, www.ywam.co.kr, 2002), and God Loves North Korea (Korea YWAM Publishing, 1999). David E. Ross is a Presbyterian (PCUSA) pastor who together with his wife, Ellen, have more than fifty years of missionary experience and founded Youth With A Mission Korea and the Antioch Institute for International Ministries in Monroe, Washington. Their multi-cultural ministry includes teaching and writing, mentoring long-term missionaries, mobilizing and training Koreans living outside Korea in the diaspora, and working for reconciliation between North and South Korea for the sake of world evangelization.
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