Journal articles on the topic 'Women and religion – Germany'

AbstractGerman-Jewish women are elusive figures in the current literature on World War I. Looking at the complexity of their wartime experience and its consequences for the Weimar years, this article deals with Jewish middle-class women's tripartite motivation as Germans, Jews, and females to make sacrifices for the war. To that end, it traces their efforts to help Germany to victory, to gain suffrage, and to become integrated into German society. At the same time, the article shows how these women not only transformed the war into an opportunity for greater female self-determination but also responded to wartime and postwar antisemitism. The experience of the war and the need for reorientation after 1918 motivated them to become more involved in the affairs of the German-Jewish community itself and to contribute significantly to shaping public Jewish life in Weimar Germany—but without giving up their German identity.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to estimate the association between religious affiliation and the rate of return to human capital for German men and women. Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs data from the 1997, 2003, 2007 and 2011 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel for German men and women in full-time employment between the age of 25 and 54. The association between religious affiliation and wages was estimated using a conventional human capital model. Findings – This paper finds that Catholic men (women) received a wage premium of 4 per cent (3 per cent) relative to their Protestant counterparts, even after controlling for an extensive range of demographic, economic and social characteristics. Originality/value – The study contributes to the literature by providing – to the best of the authors’ knowledge – the first results on the wage premium received by Catholic men and women in the German labour market.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialist government, thousands of former contract workers from Vietnam stayed in the then reunified Germany. Due to their resulting precarious economic situation, a large number of these migrants became engaged in small business and petty trade. Some of them, women in particular, have become successful entrepreneurs and wholesalers in recently built bazaars in the eastern parts of Berlin. Most interestingly, parts of these urban spaces, former industrial areas on the periphery of Germany’s capital, have been transformed into religious places. This article explores the formation of female Vietnamese Buddhist networks on the grounds of Asian wholesale markets. It argues that transnational mobilities in a post-socialist setting encourage border-crossing religious activities, linking people and places to various former socialist countries as well as to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Further, by considering political tensions between Vietnamese in the eastern and western part of Berlin, this contribution illustrates the negotiation of political sensitivities among diasporic Vietnamese in reunited Germany. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among female lay Buddhists, it focuses on entrepreneurship and investigates the relationship between business, migration and religious practices.

This article explores how Afghan (Hazara) women negotiate and sift their religious understandings and identities over time after migrating to Germany. Migration experiences and exposure to German society has impacted their self-narration and conceptualisation of cultural change in their own identity. This ethnographic research illustrates the notion of acceptance or rejection to change among Hazara immigrant women in their lived religion in diaspora. Based on my fieldwork, three different trajectories along religious lines occur in the Afghan diaspora: a group of immigrants, enhancing Islamic values, whose relationship to and involvement in religion intensified and increased; the second group largely consider themselves secular Muslims trying to fully indulge into the new society; the third group has an elastic religious identity, blending Islamic values with Western-inspired lifestyles.

This study explores the possibilities of identification and belonging in a socio-religious space that contains multiple communal boundaries. It is based on narrated accounts of White Christian German women living in Berlin, Germany, who have converted to Islam. Their shared cultural background with other White German women, their new Islamic religion, and, for some, their intermarriage affiliation with Muslims, position these women in a complex relation to the multiple communities within this space. This intersectional positioning opens up possibilities for constructing, negotiating and articulating religious, cultural, and gender identification and belonging. This study aims to investigate how these women construct notions of gender, Islam and Muslimness, and how they position themselves in relation to communal boundaries of identification and belonging. It also explores the sense they make of their positionings, and how these are expressed in their daily lives. To this end, the research describes their encounters in the spheres of the community and the family. The research aims to contribute to an enhanced understanding of gutes Leben, the human flourishing, of White German women who have converted to Islam.

AbstractThis article traces the biography of an Afro-German woman born during the 1920s Rhineland occupation to examine the peculiarities of the black German diaspora, as well as potential connections between these peculiarities and larger trends in the history of German colonialism and racism. “Erika Diekmann” was born in Worms in 1920. Her mother was a German citizen, her father a Senegalese French soldier. Separated from her birth mother at a young age, Erika spent her youth and early adulthood in a school for Christian Arab girls in Jerusalem run by the Protestant order of the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses (KaiserswertherDiakonissen). After World War II, Erika returned to West Germany, but in 1957, she emigrated to the United States, along with her (white) German husband and four children. Erika's story offers unique opportunities for studying Afro-German women's active strategies of making Germany their “home.” It underlines the complicated role of conventional female gender prescriptions in processes of interracial family-building. The centrality of religion to Erika's social relationships significantly enhances our understanding of the complexity of German attitudes toward national belonging and race during the first half of the twentieth century.

Muslimische Frauen sind in der deutschen Politik unterrepräsentiert. Aus einer intersektionalen Perspektive und auf Grundlage qualitativer Interviews mit muslimischen Politikerinnen identifiziert der Artikel Hindernisse und förderliche Faktoren für die politische Repräsentation muslimischer Frauen in Deutschland. Die Analyse macht deutlich, dass für die Unterrepräsentation eine Kombination aus eingeschränktem Kandidatinnenpool und noch unzureichenden Bemühungen der Parteien verantwortlich ist. Insgesamt ähneln die Hindernisse und Erfolgsfaktoren denen, die bereits für Politikerinnen mit Migrationshintergrund herausgearbeitet wurden. Gleichzeitig wird jedoch deutlich, dass Religion als Differenzkategorie quer zu Migrationshintergrund liegt. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass Religion gesondert von Migrationshintergrund zu betrachten ist, wenn Hindernisse, insbesondere für sichtbare Minderheiten, in der Politik genauer erfasst werden sollen.

Islam is a moderate religion that is very close to the dignity of women which is very different from the two religions of its predecessors. In both religions women are considered as a burden in life and very detrimental, women's rights are morally and materially ignored. Like ownership of property, the right to issue testimony, identity is assigned to the husband not to his father. Even as far back as 1956 and perhaps up to now in France and Germany full of women's freedom must obtain the husband's permission to conduct transactions, such as buying and selling, grants from his own property. With library studies and comparative approaches and qualitative methods the author reveals whether Jews and Christians have similarities in their treatment of women in theory and is there a difference between the two religions? Do Islam, Judaism and Christianity in theory give equal treatment to women? Let a Muslim know that there is a gap between the teachings of Islam and the behavior of some Muslims today that are no longer in accordance with Islamic norms. Such behavior does not originate from Islam as a moderate religion.Keywords: Islamic Moderation, In Gender, Comparison, Judaism and Christian.

Western countries have experienced a large influx of Muslim immigrants, and concomitantly the Muslim headscarf has become the subject of major controversy. Drawing on theories of stigma, social identity, and multiple discrimination/intersectionality, this study examines the effect of wearing this headscarf in the German labor market. The author applies the method of correspondence testing that allows measuring discrimination in a controlled field setting. Findings show that when applying for a job in Germany, women with a Turkish migration background are less likely to be invited for an interview, and the level of discrimination increases substantially if the applicant wears a headscarf. The results suggest that immigrant women who wear a headscarf suffer discrimination based on multiple stigmas related to ethnicity and religion.

The process of immigration and settlement of Korean nursing women in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s was a process in response to the various social changes that were going on in German society. Their period of living in Germany mostly overlaps with the period of the 68th Movement and the social changes that resulted from it. The social changes caused by the 68th movement have an impact on some of Korean women's recognition of their identity as migrant women workers from the Third World. It was not simply a passive learning process, but an active self-discipline process. Based on the self-identity learned in this process, women play a central role in leading the struggle for the right to stay in 1977-78 to success. They revealed their identity as women from the Third World who live as transnational beings in German society. The awakening of its identity led to an organized new social movement and led to solidarity with various underprivileged people living outside the boundaries.

The number of Muslim-interfaith couples in European countries has become significant due to transnational migration and a growing number of Muslims living in Muslim Minority countries. While the challenges for partners in such unions are complex, this article focuses on the lived experiences of Muslim women in interfaith intimate relationships in Germa ny. Drawing on field interviews with women in mixed-faith relationships, the following questions are central: How do Muslim women conceptualize religious identity and practices? Do they face challenges from different groups (Muslim communities, their families, friends, etc.) and if so, how do these challenges manifest? If respondents create concepts of being Muslim for themselves, how do these evolve in their narratives? How do they question, adapt or discard theological and social demands? Preliminary results illustrate that some respondents would appreciate a Muslim community that accepts their positionality as intermarried Muslim women. Looking at the narration of religious practices and concepts of Muslimness in the interviews, it becomes clear that a classification as haram, or legally forbidden, puts a simple categorical bar in front of a socially and theologically complex context. The inquiry combines interview analysis with situational mapping and is informed by Grounded Theory methodology.

It is not uncommon to find cases of Muslim women being harassed or bullied in many of the Muslim-minority countries because of their dress. These Islamophobic attacks, unfortunately, are not merely conducted by radicalised individuals; but the subjugation of the rights of Muslim women also comes from institutional bodies and governments. Secular nations, such as France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Switzerland, USA, UK, Canada, China, and Russia have either imposed restrictions on Muslim women regarding their dress code. They see veil as a non-acceptance of progressive or cumulative values which is unsurprisingly not welcomed by the Muslim community. In such environment, it is inevitable for the Muslims to understand what the Qur’ān and Sunnah really say about the dress code for Muslim women in order to explain what their religion really requires from them and to communicate it appropriately to the government officials, journalists, politicians, and other relevant stakeholders. It is also essential from the perspective of segregating cultural aspects from the religious aspects. Many of the commonly used words for the dressing of Muslim women are more rooted in culture than the religion. It is accordingly vital to understand what the Qur’ān and Sunnah really command about the women dressing and how it has been interpreted in various Islamic societies and cultures. This paper accordingly presents an analysis of all the relevant Qur’ānic verses and the prophetic traditions (from the 6 most renowned books of ahadith). The linguistic analysis employed in this paper results in the identification of items of dress that were worn by Muslim women to safeguard their modesty during the times of Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ). The same principles are relevant for today’s age and time and the Muslims can use those guidelines to delineate cultural practices from the religious injunctions.

ABSTRACT: The areas of conflict relating to the freedom of religion and women’s rights do not affect the majority of Muslims who practice their religion in Germany and, in the process, they do not clash with the constitutional state. This is also not a matter having to do with those theologians who take their justification for comprehensive religious freedom and equal rights for women from the Koran and, respectively, other normative sources of Islam. Rather, it has to do with those influential scholars who interpret the norms and commands of Islam in such a way that conflicts arise with the laws of a secular constitutional state. These scholars defend the view that the laws of the Sharia are prior to the norms of the secular constitutional state and are obligatory for all Muslims. At the present moment, the question of freedom of religion could be virtually understood as a topic which, in largely secularized Europe and for the religiously neutral state, possesses little relevance. To what extent do inner-Islamic standpoints interest the constitutional state on the question of religious freedom? For the constitutional state, it does not concern itself with the question of evaluating a religion and its doctrinal content. This also applies with respect to Islam. There, however, where actions are justified by religious convictions, or where they follow from them or are declared to be mandatory by influential religious opinion leaders, and where these actions infringe upon established law or limit the basic rights of individuals, the state and its representatives have to concern themselves with these convictions, independent of whether these convictions are of a religious, political, or of a religious and political nature. KEYWORDS: Germany, Islam, freedom of religion, women’s rights, the constitutional state, conflicts

AbstractThe thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw surprising growth in the female branch of the Dominican Order in the south of Germany and broad support of these women across both gender and socio-economic lines. The records of Unterlinden in Colmar, France, and Adelhausen near Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany, show women involved in the foundation, support and daily life of these communities. It was especially in the foundation of these houses that we see such women, often widows, many of whom eventually joined the religious communities they had patronized.

Evidence suggests that accents can be typically more powerful in activating ethnicity categorization than appearance. Concurrently, some social categories, such as ethnicity, can be linked with other categories, such as religion. We investigate how people categorize those who belong to a (mis)matching pair of categories? In the present study, we investigated Germans’ categorization of women either wearing a headscarf (Muslim religious symbol), or not, and speaking either standard German or German with an Arabic accent. The “Who Said What?” paradigm and multinomial modelling yielded that category memory, indicative of subtyping, was best for nonprototypical targets (i.e., headscarf and standard German accent, no headscarf and Arabic accent). In contrast, in-group targets (no headscarf and standard German accent) were individually remembered better than all other targets, whereas nonprototypical targets (no-headscarf and Arabic accent) were not remembered individually at all. These findings are discussed in terms of intersectionality and category prototypicality.

ObjectiveResearch on health services for immigrants has mostly been concerned with access barriers but rarely with appropriateness and responsiveness of care. We assessed whether appropriateness and responsiveness of care depend on migration status, using provision of neuraxial anaesthesia (NA) during labour as indicator. In relation to their migration status, we analysed whether (1) women undergoing elective or secondary/urgent secondary caesarean sections (ESCS) appropriately receive NA (instead of general anaesthesia), (2) women delivering vaginally appropriately receive NA and (3) women objecting to NA, for example, for religious reasons, may deliver vaginally without receiving NA (provider responsiveness).DesignCross-sectional study.SettingThree obstetric hospitals in Berlin, Germany.MethodsQuestionnaire survey covering 6391 women with migration history (first and second generations) and non-immigrant women giving birth; data linkage with routine obstetric data. We assessed the effects of migrant status, German language proficiency, religion and education on the provision of NA (primary outcome) after adjusting for other maternal and obstetric parameters.ResultsThe chance of receiving NA for elective/ESCS was independent of migrant status after controlling for confounding variables (adjusted OR (aOR) 0.93, 95% CI 0.65 to 1.33). In vaginal deliveries, first (but not second) generation women (aOR 0.79, 95% CI 0.65 to 0.95), women with low German language skills (aOR 0.77, 95% CI 0.58 to 0.99) and women with low educational attainment (aOR 0.62, 95% CI 0.47 to 0.82) had lower chances of receiving NA; there was no evidence of overprovision among women with strong affinity to Islam (aOR 0.77, 95% CI 0.63 to 0.94).ConclusionsWe found evidence for underprovision of care among first-generation immigrants, among women with low German language proficiency and particularly among all women with low educational attainment, irrespective of migration status. There was no evidence for overprovision of care to immigrant women, either inappropriately (general anaesthesia for ESCS) or because of low provider responsiveness (no opt-out for NA in vaginal delivery).

The author analyzes the construction of gender and gender roles among the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the former East Germany. From a religious point of view, wives and women in general are subordinate to their husbands, fathers, etc. Within a family and in congregations men are expected to “take the lead” and are responsible for their wives and children. In the former German Democratic Republic this religious discourse competed with the egalitarian and secular discourse of the socialist state, which emphasized the necessity for women to work and the importance of public childcare. Thus, the author addresses the question: how and to what extent did this official state discourse influence the Witnesses’ discursive practices on gender during socialism and until the present day? The author has based her article on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Saxony, eastern Germany.

Following an outbreak of cholera in Hamburg in 1831, Amalie Sieveking founded the Weiblicher Verein für Armen- und Krankenpflege (Women's Association for the Care of the Poor and the Sick). This was the first Protestant religious voluntary society in Germany organized and led by a woman. Sieveking's conception of the Christian life of faith and the contemporary needs of the kingdom of God convinced her that Protestant women needed to assume a more active role in German society. The Women's Association visited the homes of those who were sick or in other difficult personal circumstances. They attempted to promote the comprehensive well-being of those whom they assisted by providing food, clothing and other necessities of life, paid employment, housing and opportunities to cultivate their spiritual life.

AbstractScholarship has demonstrated that religious life for women was more fluid, more tied to the secular world and to gender ideologies, than strict categorizations of monastic versus lay, regular versus extraregular, visual versus intellectual allows. This article argues for the conceptualization and study of female monasticism, and female spirituality in general, as part of a broad continuum—as part of a shared culture of devotional practices—accepted and embraced (to a greater or lesser extent) by both men and women, secular and lay. More specifically, it explores the interaction between secular and professed women in support of monastic life, monastic devotion, and more broadly, medieval religious culture. Religious and lay women collaborated and cooperated to support specific religious communities and particular devotional practices, like the nuns' performance of the liturgy or their duty to remember patrons as part of the monastic memoria. Such collaboration and cooperation, however, has often escaped the notice of historians.

This small book-Islam as an Alternative-by the German ambassadorto Morocco, which contains an excellent foreword by Annemaria e Schimmel,is remarkable for various reasons. Public interest had alwady been heighteneddue to an earlier television interview with the author which, conducted in avery provocative manner, threw his continued diplomatic appointment intoquestion. However, as German attention turned elsewhere, this issue declinedin importance, making it possible for this very eloquent new Muslim to continuerepresenting his country abroad.Events in the Muslim world, such as the Iranian revolution and the Gulfwar, often result in many misrepresentations of Islam in the Western media.But these same events also engender a never-ending series of invitations forreligious dialogue by people of good will who are trying to understand whatis happening and why Islam seems to spread despite its mainly negativeimage in the eyes of non-Muslims. However, Muslims face a problem here:there are few competent dialogue partners who can present accurately the Islamicside. While representatives of the Catholic and Protestant churches areefficiently trained and very well educated, Muslims in Germany are often unableto express fully and coherently their thoughts in German. They alsousually have not received a proper Islamic education. Even if they enroll ina German university specifically for the purpose of acquiring such an education,they are nonetheless tmined to look at their religion through non-Muslimeyes. And it is these very eyes that most often see Islam as “fundamentalist.,“”belligerent,” and “backward, particularly as far as women are concerned,” toname only the most important misconceptions.Hoffmann’s book is remarkable because it deals with many controversialissues head on, thereby providing handy answers and explanations for thoseinvolved in interfaith dialogue. Many new Muslims may have thought alongthe same lines in these matters, but to be able to present them in a few andabsolutely to-the-point replies is another thing.Here are some of these reizworte (emotive words), in an abbreviatedform, together with what the author has to say about them.Fundamentalism: “Each and every religion or ideology develops on somebasics-called Bible, Gospel or ‘Marx, Engels, and Lenin’-which are considereddefinable, concluded, unchangeable and able to support, that is as fundamentals.The same is true of Islam, the fundamentals of which are the ...

Unlike Christianity, which regards the word “Pharisee” as synonymous with “hypocrite,” “legalist,” and “petty-bourgeois,” Jews have always understood Pharisaism as the correct and trustworthy side of Judaism. Since the eighteenth century, all disputants who participated in the great controversies and schisms within Judaism have claimed to represent the true heirs of the Pharisees. For example, adherents of the strong anti-Hasidic movement initiated by R. Eliyahu of Vilna in the second half of the eighteenth century, who are usually referred to in literature by the negative appellation “opposers” (םירננחמ), referred to themselves by the positive title “Pharisees” (םישורפ). When the Reform movement was founded in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the goal of reforming the Jewish religion to make it more “modern” and acceptable to its neighbors, the reformers perceived themselves as the true heirs of the Pharisees. In his important study of the Pharisees and Sadducees, Abraham Geiger, one of the founders, ofWissenschaft des Judentumsand an important spokesman for the radical wing of the Reform movement, formulated the view of the flexible open-minded Pharisees, who reformed Judaism to the point of contradicting the laws set out in the Pentateuch, in order to accommodate them to their changing needs. Geiger's opponents easily produced evidence that negated his findings and proved beyond doubt that they, in their conservative strain, were the real heirs of Pharisaism. To his opponents, Geiger was a representative of the detestable Sadducees or their later counterparts, the Karaites.

Germans were active in constructing transcultural experiences on a global scale – for better or worse – from Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map on. Most of those who have been studied were men, but women traveled and migrated as well, and they supported those who did financially, institutionally, and emotionally. Their movements and actions have left fewer and more shadowy records than those of men, but a more gender-balanced account of global connections in the early modern period is emerging. This essay examines three ways in which German women’s actions shaped the early modern world in the realm of religion: women’s establishment of religious communities, women’s patronage of overseas missions, and women’s proselytizing, particularly that undertaken by Moravians. All of these built on networks and traditions established in Europe, but ones that already reached across political boundaries in the splintered world of the Holy Roman Empire, or beyond it to co-religionists in Prague, Paris, or Copenhagen.

During mid-eighteenth century a religious revival had reached Sweden from Germany: The Moravian movement. One significant characteristic of this movement was that it gave the individual the right to express a personal confession of faith in his or her own words. As a consequence, women in Moravian circles had unique opportunities to act and speak in public. They did so in writing and even by preaching, something that was denied them in most other religious contexts. This was the case in orthodox Lutheranism, which was the dominating doctrine at the time, imposed by the authorities in Sweden. In this artide, which is based on my ongoing research project in comparative literature ("Gender, power and religious rhetoric in the Swedish eighteenth-century Moravian movement"), I discuss how gender was constructed in religious songs written by some Moravian writers and how women writer's gained religious and rhetorical authority. For comparison male authors also are brought into the discussion. Primarily my discussions are based on rhetorical analysis, i.e. of rhetorical devices, such as metaphorical language and ways of argumentation. The gender bound elements that are used in the songs cannot in any uncomplicated way be related to the sex of the author. Nevertheless, one can distinguish means of empowerment for women. Certain images could for example destabilize the thought of women as passive and subordinated objects. Furthermore qualities associated with the feminine, such as nurturing and caretaking, is positively described in some of these songs and taken in as a part ofdeity. It becomes clearthat although religion limited women's participation in public religious language and ideas, it could at the same time be used to exceed gender bound limits.

The author of the article, first of all, draws attention to the current problems of protection and protection of human rights, which unfortunately are traced within the territorial jurisdiction of the European Union. Such problem is quite well demonstrated by Berbel Koffler, as the Commissioner of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany on human rights and humanitarian aid policy. Indeed, the Ombudsman of Germany has raised a number of deep dilemmas: violence against human rights defenders on the grounds of their professional activity, the relation of human rights institutions with public security and economic development. In fact, these questions, in varying percentages, are equally relevant to many countries in the world. In the outlined context, the case of the European Court of Human Rights “Gabriel Weber and Caesar Richard Saravia v. Germany” of 29.06.06 was analyzed. Actually, this case covers directly the issues of human rights and national security of Germany. Grounds for initiating this case have arisen in connection with the legislative provisions of the Law of Germany on the Restriction of the Secret of Correspondence, Mail and Telecommunications of 13.08.68., ("Law G-10"), taking into account changes made under the Anti-Crime Act of 28.10.94, which extend the powers of the Federal Intelligence Service, within the so-called strategic monitoring. It is about collecting information by listening to telephone conversations in order to identify and prevent serious threats to the Federal Republic of Germany, such as: armed attacks on its territory, international terrorist attacks, other serious crimes. According to the applicants who worked as journalists, strategic monitoring can be used against individuals to prevent effective journalistic investigations. In view of these suspicions, the applicants argued that they had violated the human rights guaranteed by the Convention, such as the right to privacy and correspondence, the violation of press freedom, and the right to an effective remedy. The ECHR Judges, having examined the circumstances of the case, concluded that there were no grounds to satisfy the complaints on the basis of the following arguments: 2) German legislation, as part of strategic monitoring, is endowed with adequate and effective safeguards against abuse by authorized entities. In addition, the article analyzes the multi-vector issue of banning citizens of some European Union countries from wearing hats that completely or partially hide their faces. The fact is that, under such restrictions, in particular, the traditional clothing of women adherents of Islam has fallen. It is a “burqa” and a “niqab”. The presented study is mainly based on the legislative practice of France, Belgium, which provides for administrative as well as criminal penalties for non-compliance with the stated prohibition. In such cases as S.А.С. France, Belkacemi and Oussar v. Belgium, Dakir v. Belgium, the applicants, alleged that they had violated the human rights guaranteed by the Convention, including: the right to respect for their private life; the right to freedom of expression of one's religion or belief; the right to freedom of expression; the right to freedom of association; humiliating treatment and discrimination against the enjoyment of the abovementioned human rights. According to most ECHR judges, who have dealt with the said cases, the disputed prohibition is not necessary in a "democratic society for public safety" but its main task is to preserve the conditions of "cohabitation" as an element of "protection of the rights and freedoms of others." In the context of this debate, attention was paid indirectly to such EU Member States as: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Switzerland. Keywords: human rights, legal guarantees, security, privacy.

Although it guarantees individual religious freedom and the inviolability of “human dignity,” the German Basic Law also infers the principle ofstate neutralityregarding the exercise of religious freedom in public life and civil service domains. TheLänder(states), however, enjoy substantial discretion in matters of religion and education, which has led to major divisions as to whetherMuslimas(Muslim women) can wear headscarves aspublicemployees. In 2006 Berlin adopted its own Neutrality Law (Berliner Neutralitätsgesetz) prohibiting religious attire among teachers, judges, and police. Within weeks, the city-state's first anti-discrimination officer was overwhelmed with new discrimination cases involving private sector employers as well. This essay examines the tensions and paradoxes inherent in Berlin's efforts to uphold religious “neutrality” among civil servants while also meeting the requirements of Germany's General Equal Treatment Act and three recent EU Directives 2000/43/EC, 2000/78/EC, and 2002/73/EG), addressing race, religion and equal treatment in employment, respectively. This article argues that the Neutrality Law not only violates national and supranational anti-discrimination regulations but that local officials are actually drawing upon the latter to undermine the enforcement of their own statute, in the hope that it will be repealed.

Bordered nation-state approaches are increasingly challenged and they rarely hold up under critical questioning. In this essay I discuss the cultural interactions across Central Europe that preceded the nineteenth-century development of national consciousness and—for many only after 1918—independent states. I argue that identities based on religion, profession or craft, administrative or military expertise characterized people more than those founded on ethnocultural/regional origin during the various migrations of the period. A dual outward-inward perspective focuses on the influence of German-speakers in other parts of Europe and on men and women from other cultures in the core German-language regions. I carry the story up to the 1930s and I argue that transregional and transcultural approaches are empirically sounder than transnational ones. It follows that migrant destinations also need to be addressed as micro- or macro-regions—the several distinct locations in Eastern, East Central, and Southeastern Europe, for example—rather than in terms of states.

The article describes Jehovah’s Witnesses women as one of less remembered groups among victims of the Nazi regime. What is pointed out, first of all, is the state of research ontheir history, especially pertaining to their camp experience, Western literature on the subject and a negligible number of Polish research works devoted to the topic in question, and also some methodological dilemmas related to researching it. The author presents the circumstances of German Jehovah’s Witnesses after Hitler’s seizure of power, their subsequent persecutions, and also – reconstructed on the basis of documents, witnesses reports, and the members of persecuted group themselves – the fate of female followers of this religion (“the purple triangles”) in concentration camps. The author’s main points of focus are, described by witnesses/beholders/onlookers of the events, acts and attitudes of “the purple triangles” marked by strong spirituality, at the same time unbreakable/intransigent in their defiance of/against violence and the authorities’ orders. (Everybody knew that Jehovah’s Witnesses could have basically “sign off” from the camp by putting their signature at the bottom of a declaration that they would renounce their faith and cease to practise their religion.) Such a defiance may be better understood, the author claims, by interpreting it in the light of the anthropological concept of emotional communities.

This research aims to find out how the parenting pattern is conducted by Indonesian women who experience mixed marriage where they marry foreign men and live in their husbands’ countries. The research method used is Qualitative with Phenomenological approach. Using Purposive Sampling Technique, five Indonesian women were gathered as informants where 3 of them live in Europe : The United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Germany while 2 others live in Canada. Data collection was conducted using online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to be further analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to reveal in detail how participants interpreted their personal and social worlds. The results show that participants conduct Democratic parenting style; a combination of appreciation for the individuality of the children and efforts to shape social values gradually. This parenting pattern was formed by building an agreement with their husbands towards their own religions and Indonesian cultures. The country provision and protection of children aged 18 to have the rights to live separately from their parents has encouraged participants to conduct some particular standards for their children. Additionally, the results show that participants managed to conduct similar parenting style held by their parents.

ON the morning of 12 January 1904, shooting started in Okahandja, a small town in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia. When the Herero–German war finally ended four years later, Herero society, as it had existed prior to 1904, had been completely destroyed. In the genocidal war which developed, the Herero were either killed in battle, lynched, shot or beaten to death upon capture, or driven to death in the waterless wastes that make up much of Namibia. Within Namibia, the surviving Herero were deprived of their chiefs, prohibited from owing land and cattle, and prevented from practising their own religion. Herero survivors, the majority of whom were women and children, were incarcerated in prison camps and put to work as forced labourers for the German military and settlers.Over the years there have been a fair number of works dealing with the causes and effects of the Herero–German war of 1904–8. It has been argued that the loss of land, water, cattle and liberty, coupled with the activities of unscrupulous traders and German colonial officials, steered the Herero into launching a carefully planned, countrywide insurrection against German colonial rule. In brief, ‘in 1904, the Herero, feeling the cumulative and bitter effects of colonial rule in South West Africa, took advantage of the withdrawal of German troops from central Hereroland…and revolted’.

Increasingly in today’s world we are experiencing intensifying antagonisms around religious and ethno-cultural differences. The confrontation between political Islam and the so-called ‘West’ has replaced the rhetoric of the Cold War against communism. This new constellation has not only challenged the hypothesis that ‘secularization’ inevitably accompanied modernity but has also placed on the agenda political theology as a potent force in many societies. This article analyzes the contemporary revival of political theology by focusing on the headscarf debate in comparative constitutional perspective. It compares the well-known decision of the French Parliament banning the wearing of the headscarf in public schools (2004) with the decision of the German Constitutional Court concerning whether Fereshta Ludin, an Afghani-German teacher wearing the hijab, could teach in German schools (2003) and with the more recent judgment of the Turkish Constitutional Court (summer 2008) upholding the ban on the wearing of the scarf or the turban in institutions of higher learning. At stake in these debates is not only the meaning of fundamental human rights but also why women and their bodies become the object of disciplinary conflicts in culture, law and religion.

To suggest that authentic Christianity is an insurrectionary faith, a standing provocation to the conventional values of society is, on the face of it, to invite derision. Yet the ferocity with which the first Christians were persecuted was in no small part due to their subversive teachings and practices which gave women, slaves and artisans ideas above their station. This subversive dimension may often have been forgotten. It can hardly have been very evident to the inhabitants of Wittenberg in 1515, for example, yet within a decade Germany was to be embroiled in an unprecedented crisis of authority, one which led not only to turmoil in the world of student and scholar and cleric, but to the greatest social upheaval prior to the French Revolution, to the uffrur we know as the Peasants' War.

In November of 2003, I received an e-mail from Diana, a 26 year old Hungarian Ph.D.-student of archaeology and Egyptology. She is also interested in gender studies, she wrote me, especially in the cult of female goddesses. She also sent me the article on this topic that she had recently published in the very mainstream Hungarian journal of religious studies, theReview of History of the Church. In this article, she refers to articles published in English, French, German and Italian, quoting sources in Latin and in Ancient Greek. In the e-mail, Diana asked for my help to give suggestions about literature on re-interpreting the role of women in religion because she was familiar with my work on populism, religion and gender. Before the reader starts believing that I am using this very precious occasion to celebrate the developing communication between two generations of female scholars in Hungary, I would like to continue the story with a police report issued on the 23 June in 2004. In this police report, it was announced that, posters announcing a meeting of the so-calledGroup of Hungarian Futurehad been placed on the main boulevard of Budapest Arrow Cross. As is well known, the Arrow Cross was the Hungarian Nazi Party before and during World War II. The Group which is so concerned about the so-called Hungarian Future has 27 members and the founder of this group is Diana.

We can assume that we find for the first time in the 15th century the character of Šahrazād as a courageous woman who had taken upon herself to get the king away from his bias against the women after his wife deceived him. Šahrazād tells him stories in which women have not infrequently more fortitude and deserve more to be trusted than men who are sometimes immature. But there are also from the same century other stories in which ancient themes continue, for instance about crafty and lustful women. In the 16th century, “Dalila the wily” upgrade crafty women, but in the seventeeth century, the Ottoman’s connections with Protestant communities in Germany introduced to the Arabian Nights European witches and bird-women. Anyway men have to avoid to fall in love with women. During the 18th century, a solution to the problem of good relationship between men and women is sketched in the “Masrūr and Zayn al-Mawāṣif” story. The two characters, a christian man and a jewish woman, live happily after they had both converted to Islam. In the same way, the Arabian Nights end when the king gives up his bias against the women and marry Šahrazād, “a good wife [. . .] a pure, a chaste, a devout one”. But he has to keep faith with his wife and preserve responbility for her, according to Islamic Law. Du ixe/xve siècle semble dater le personnage d’une Šahrazād qui s’est donné pour mission de faire revenir le roi de ses préventions sur les femmes, après qu’il ait découvert l’infidélité de son épouse. Šahrazād lui présente des contes où les femmes apparaissent souvent comme plus fortes et dignes de confiance que les personnages masculins, parfois immatures. Mais le recueil enregistre également pour cette époque, des contes où les vieux topoï de la femme rusée et lubrique persistent. Au xe/xvie siècle, le personnage de « Dalila la Rusée » revalorise la ruse des femmes, mais, au xie/xviie siècle, les contacts du pouvoir ottoman avec les protestants d’Allemagne introduisent dans les contes des Nuits, sorcières et femmes-oiseaux venues d’Europe, et les femmes à nouveau sont renvoyées à leur rôle de reproductrices dont il ne faut surtout pas s’éprendre. C’est au xiie/xviiie siècle, qu’une solution s’ébauche. Dans le conte de « Masrūr et Zayn al-Mawāṣif », les deux héros, un chrétien et une juive, trouvent leur bonheur dans une conversion à l’islam. De même à la fin des Nuits, lorsque le roi abandonne ses préventions à l’égard des femmes et épouse Šahrazād, la « bonne épouse [. . .] pure, chaste et pieuse », devient l’épouse du roi revenu de ses erreurs, et au roi s’imposent pour sa part les devoirs de fidélité et d’autorité sur sa femme, comme l’enseigne l’Islam. This article is in French.

RÉSUMÉLe principal objectif de cet article est d’encourager une approche plus large, supraconfessionnelle, du mariage et de la famille à l’époque moderne. La conjugalité a été “désacralisée” par les réformateurs protestants du 16e siècle. Martin Luther, parmi d’autres, a refusé le statut de sacrement au mariage, tout en valorisant celui-ci comme une arme contre le péché. En réaction, le concile de Trente a réaffirmé avec force que le mariage est bien un des sept sacrements chrétiens. Mais, promouvant la supériorité du célibat, l’Église catholique n’a jamais beaucoup insisté sur les vertus de la vie et de la piété familiales avant le 19e siècle. En parallèle, les historiens décèlent des signes de “sacralisation” de la famille protestante à partir du 16e siècle. Leurs conclusions doivent être relativisées à la lumière de recherches plus récentes et plus critiques, centrées sur les rapports et les représentations de genre. Elles peuvent néanmoins inspirer une étude élargie et comparative, inexistante dans l’historiographie traditionnelle, des réalités et des perceptions de la famille chrétienne au-delà des frontières confessionnelles.MOTS-CLÉ: Époque Moderne, mariage, famille, protestantisme, Concile de TrenteABSTRACTThe main purpose of this paper is to encourage a broader supra-confessional approach to the history of marriage and the family in the Early Modern era. Wedlock was “desacralized” by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. Martin Luther, among others, denied the sacramental status of marriage but valued it as a weapon against sin. In reaction, the Council of Trent reinforced marriage as one of the seven sacraments. But the Catholic Church, which promoted the superiority of celibacy, did little to defend the virtues of family life and piety before the 19th century. In parallel, historians have identified signs of a “sacralization” of the Protestant family since the 16th century. These findings must be relativized in the light of newer and more critical studies on gender relations and representations. But they can still inspire a broader comparative study, non-existent in traditional confessional historiography, of the realities and perceptions of the Christian family beyond denominational borders.KEY WORDS: Early Modern Christianity, marriage, family, Protestantism, Council of Trent BIBLIOGRAPHIEAdair, R., Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996.Beaulande-Barraud, V., “Sexualité, mariage et procréation. Discours et pratiques dans l’Église médiévale (XIIIe-XVe siècles)”, dans Vanderpelen-Diagre, C., & Sägesser, C., (coords.), La Sainte Famille. Sexualité, filiation et parentalité dans l’Église catholique, Problèmes d’Histoire des Religions, 24, Bruxelles, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2017, pp. 19-29.Bels, P., Le mariage des protestants français jusqu’en 1685. 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J., (coord.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, vol. 4, pp. 290-298.Williams, G. H., The Radical Reformation, (1962), 3e ed., Truman State University Press, 2000, pp. 755-798Wunder, H., “He is the Sun. She is the Moon”: Women in Early Modern Germany, Harvard University Press, 1998.Yates, W., “The Protestant View of Marriage”, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 22 (1985), pp. 41-54.

<p>‘Ubi jus ibi remedium’ is a Latin maxim that means ‘where there is a wrong, there is a remedy’. Human rights are expected to be universal and applicable to every human being. In reality not all rights guaranteed in the International Instruments are applicable in some African societies with different culture, religion and norms. Culture shapes the identity of people generally in Africa and elsewhere thus the issue of Cultural Relativism is germane to the very existence of people of African descent. </p><p>International Convention and Instruments provide for Women’ Rights generally and particularly the Right to life.</p><p>The experience in the Women’s Law Clinic (the clinic) of the University of Ibaden has shown the imbalance between Clinical Legal Education (CLE) and the realities in practice. </p><p>This paper considers the cultural practices in some societies in Nigeria, the techniques of CLE adopted in the clinic and the challenges of the 21st Century.</p>

On 27-28 March 2006, Pennsylvania State University hosted an internationalconference on “Islam and Bioethics: Concerns, Challenges, and Responses.”Cosponsored by several academic units in the College of Liberal Arts, theconference brought in historians, health care professionals, theologians, and social scientists from ten different countries. Twenty-four papers were presented,along with Maren Grainger-Monsen’s documentary about an Afghaniimmigrant seeking cancer treatment in California.After opening remarks by Susan Welch (dean, College of Liberal Arts)and Nancy Tuana (director, Rock Ethics Institute), panelists analyzed“Critical Perspectives on Islamic Medical Ethics.” Hamada Hamid’s (NewYork University Medical School) “Negotiating Autonomy and Religion inthe Clinical Setting: Case Studies of American Muslim Doctors andPatients,” showed that few doctors explore the role of religion in a patient’sdecision-making process. She suggested that they rethink this practice.Hassan Bella (College of Medicine, King Faisal University, Dammam)spoke on “Islamic Medical Ethics: What and How to Teach.” His survey, conductedin Saudi Arabia among medical practitioners, revealed that most practitionersapproved of courses on Islamic ethics but did not know if suchcourses would improve the doctor-patient relationship. Sherine Hamdy’s(Brown University) “Bodies That Belong to God: Organ Transplants andMuslim Ethics in Egypt” maintained that one cannot easily classify transplantpatients’ arguments as “religious” or “secular,” for religious values are fusedtogether with a patient’s social, political, and/or economic concerns.The second panel, “Ethical Decision-Making in Local and InternationalContexts,” provoked a great deal of discussion. Susi Krehbiel (Brown University)led off with “‘Women Do What They Want’: Islam and FamilyPlanning in Tanzania.” This ethnographic study was followed by Abul FadlMohsin Ebrahim’s (KwaZulu University, Durban) “Human Rights andRights of the Unborn.” Although Islamic law is commonly perceived asantagonistic to the UN’s charter on human rights, Ebrahim argues that bothmay be used to protect those who can and cannot fight for their right to dignity,including the foetus. Thomas Eich (Bochum University) asserted in“The Process of Decision Making among Contemporary Muslim ReligiousScholars in the Case of ‘Surplus’ Embryos” that decisions reached by internationalMuslim councils were heavily influenced by local politics and contentiousdecisions in such countries as Germany and Australia.The afternoon panel, “The Fetus and the Value of Fetal Life,” focusedon specific issues raised by artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs).Vardit Rispler-Chaim (Haifa University) presented “Contemporary Muftisbetween Bioethics and Social Reality: Pre-Selection of the Sex of a Fetus asParadigm.” After summarizing social customs and religious literature fromaround the world, she claimed that muftis generally favor pre-selection techniquesand suggested that their reasoning is guided by a general social ...

AbstractReligions that are involved in processes of migration face a double challenge: they need to adapt to the new environment due to the different socio-cultural and legal setting; at the same time, a faithful maintenance of ritual practice, religious concepts, worldview, and norms is a prerequisite for the continuation of the very tradition, warding off assimilation. Recent scholarship in social and cultural studies subsumed these processes under the newly 'discovered' term of diaspora. This article employs the term to analyse aspects of religious dynamics caused by constraints of living home away from home. We adopt the neologism “templeisation” introduced by Vasudha Narayanan studying Hindu immigrants from India in the USA, in order to scrutinise incipient changes among Hindu Tamils from Sri Lanka in continental Europe. Templeisation points to a decisive shift of religious observance and ritual practice from the home to the temple, accompanied by a shift in authority away from women and mothers to men and priests. Are these shifts also observable for the Tamil Hindu diaspora in Germany and Switzerland?

Background and Aim: Abortion has always posed challenges in the areas of ethics, law, religion, philosophy, and reproductive health. Some countries have had different approaches to abortion at different times. Today, abortion is a major challenge in Iran. Social developments and increasing level of health literacy, awareness and participation of women in social and economic fields have led to incompatibility of theoretical and practical aspects in these areas. Women sometimes have abortions without attention to the national law. In Iran, the reasons for legal abortion are the life-threatening conditions of the mother and the fetus. During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, some countries have revised their abortion laws and regulations. In some countries, such as France and Finland, these revisions are permanent; in countries such Portugal and Norway, the changes are temporary; and in other countries such as Germany and Belgium, it is unclear whether the changes are permanent or temporary. In this study, we aim to review the abortion laws and regulations in Europe and Iran. Then, by discussing the new guidelines for the COVID-19 pandemic, we evaluate the effects and consequences of this pandemic on abortion. Methods & Materials: The search was conducted in PubMed/MEDLINE, ScienceDirect, Scopus and Google Scholar as well as national databases such as SID, MagIran, and IranMedex on studies published from 2002 to 2020 using the following keywords:Abortion, illegal abortion, induced abortion, and COVID-19. Due to the onset of SARS-COV1 epidemic in 2002, all articles published between these two outbreaks were searched. Ethical Considerations: All ethical principles were observed in this article. Results: During the COVID-19 pandemic, some European countries revised the abortion laws and regulations, mostly due to realize the reproductive health right. It seems that, this revision has not yet been taken place in Iran. Conclusion: With the emergence of COVID-19, some countries had revised their abortion laws and regulations to reduce unsafe abortions. It seems that during the Covid19 pandemic, due to changes in lifestyle such as social distancing and economic and social lockdowns, it needs to revise medical laws and regulations in health-oriented and time-dependent areas (such as abortion) so that the principles of medical ethics such as beneficence and maleficent, can be applied. Having COVID-19 and consequently abortion during the pandemic is one of the most challenging issues that should be addressed in terms of ethical, jurisprudential and legal aspects. Development of regulations based on ethical principles during the COVID-19 pandemic is necessary to prevent illegal and unsafe abortions.

Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) is in many ways the ancestor of modern Hebrew Bible scholarship. His Prolegomena to the History of Israel condensed decades of source critical work on the Torah into a documentary hypothesis that is still taught today in almost all Hebrew Bible courses in some form. What is not taught as frequently is the anti-Judaism that underpins his hypothesis. This is in part due to unapologetic apologetics regarding Wellhausen’s bias, combined with the insistence that a nineteenth-century scholar cannot be judged by twenty-first century standards. These calls for compassion are made exclusively by white male scholars, leaving Jewish scholars the solitary task of pointing out Wellhausen’s clear anti-Judaism. In a discipline that is already overwhelmingly white, male and Christian, the minimizing of Wellhausen’s racism suggests two things. First, those who may criticize contextual biblical studies done by women and scholars of color have no problem pleading for a contextual understanding of Wellhausen while downplaying the growing anti-Judaism and nationalism that was a part of nineteenth-century Germany. Second, recent calls for inclusion in the Society of Biblical Literature may be well intentioned but ultimately useless if the guild cannot simply call one of its most brilliant founders the biased man that he was.

In recent decades, items of colonial photography, including those dedicated to German East Africa, have become the subject of research by historians and anthropologists. Many of the photographs eventually became postcards issued to introduce newly conquered territories to the citizens of the empire, to a lesser extent their population, culture and way of life, and to a greater extent those achievements (both real and imaginary) that the metropolis had brought. This included military stations, churches, missions, infrastructure (railways, train stations, lighthouses), askari troops recruited from local population, etc. On these postcards we can see various species of acacias and palm trees, numerous Araberstrasse and Kaiserstrasse streets, monuments to the emperor and chancellor, ships in the Dar es Salaam bay, “native beauty” and “native quarters”. On the one hand, postcards reflect what colonizers wanted to display before their homeland, on the other they reflect what this homeland itself wanted to see, e.g. images of exotic hot tropics, successes of German administrators and troops. Postcards, being selected in their very plots and created for the propaganda purposes, depict German East Africa strictly deliberately and strictly as a colony. Bagamoyo served as this colony’s capital for about two years. On postcards depicting the town we see the quintessence of the German military and administrative presence: this is tangible both in the choice of depicted objects (fort, boma, Wissmann’s monument in memory of soldiers who died during the suppression of the coastal uprising, meeting place of the colonial administration, etc.) and the frequency of these choices. Images of local residents on postcards are marginal, the “black quarter” is opposed to new European buildings, and the elements of the Arab-Swahili cultural component of Bagamoyo are not represented at all. On the contrary, photography of Walter Dobbertin allows to have a look at Bagamoyo in the end of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th centuries in a much more complete and complicated way. He took photos of inhabitants of Bagamoyo with clear accent and opened vision – women, children, Arabs, Muslims in kanzu and kofias, without censoring either the phenotype or the cultural components of Islamic religion (mosque, Muslim cemetery, tea houses). It’s fascinating, because negative attitude toward Arabs and Islam is stressed throughout many German colonial narratives written by military and civil officers. The Arabs as “the first colonizers of the region”, i.e. predecessors of Germans themselves, almost never appear on the postcards, as well as Islam-associated objects like mosques or Muslim cemeteries. The article is concerned with this difference between postcards and photographs of Bagamoyo as the latter reveal what had been blind spots of official representation of colony’s first capital and give very personal and much more sincere vision offered by talented photographer Walter Dobbertin.