Dossier Articles

There are few beliefs more entrenched in the modern liberal imagination than that of the virtues of pluralism and a multicultural society. The degree to which Sarajevo has assumed symbolic significance expresses the measure of attachment to the principles of a multicultural, multiethnic community. Just as in the thirties the struggle for Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War became symbolic of the defence of democracy against fascism, so the siege of Sarajevo has assumed a mythic status as a struggle between pluralism and barbarism.

1. Introduction:

An attempt is made in this paper to trace the development of ethnic consciousness and religious fundamentalism among Sri Lankan Muslims and the bearings of this development on Sri Lankan Muslim women.*

At the outset, I should clarify the use of the terms ethnic consciousness and fundamentalism. Both these terms are very popular and controversial in the current socio-political discourse. There are a number of definitions and disagreements about them.

Two Feminisms[1]

In recent years, some post-modern feminists have warned us about the perils of generalizations in feminist theory that transcend the boundaries of culture and region, while feminist critics of postmodernism have argued conversely that abandoning cross-cultural and comparative theoretical perspectives may lead to relativism and eventual political paralysis.[2]As I will argue in this article, t

Islamisms, or diverse representations of political Islam, have become very difficult to ignore and even more difficult to categorize and explain satisfactorily. This is particularly the case when addressing a western audience, which is unfamiliar not only with the multifaceted aspects of Islam, but also with the crucial role Islamic faith plays, in the everyday lives of Muslim people.

Willy Claes, the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), gave Western misperceptions and misrepresentations of Islam and Islamisms a new twist.