Mālik and Medina : Islamic legal reasoning in the formative period /
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This book studies the legal reasoning of Mālik ibn Anas (d. 179 H./795 C.E.) in the Muwaṭṭa' and Mudawwana . Although focusing on Mālik, the book presents a broad comparative study of legal reasoning in the first three centuries of Islam. It reexamines the role of considered opinion ( ra'y ), dissent, and legal ḥadīths and challenges the paradigm that Muslim jurists ultimately concurred on a "four-source" (Qurʾān, sunna , consensus, and analogy) theory of law. Instead, Mālik and Medina emphasizes that the four Sunnī schools of law ( madhāhib ) emerged during the formative period as distinctive, consistent, yet largely unspoken legal methodologies and persistently maintained their independence and continuity over the next millennium.
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1 online resource (552 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004247888 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Saying All That Can Be Said : The Art of Describing Sex in Jin Ping Mei /
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In Saying All That Can Be Said , Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering common views of those portrayals as "just sex" or as "bad sex," he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded with social and aesthetic purpose. McMahon places the novel in the historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being. Echoing the novel's way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin Ping Mei's language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the boundaries of orthodox culture's cleanly authoritative style, and which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think about sexual culture in premodern China. See Less
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Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9780674291355
9781684176564
Mapping value orientations in Central and Eastern Europe
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Since the dramatic events in 1989 and 1990, Central and Eastern Europeans have been engaged in a process of democratization and liberalization which are transforming their societies fundamentally. The rapid transformation processes appear to be very differential and the particular patterns are complex to interpret and understand. This volume elaborates on a number of issues that seem particular important for the people in Central and Eastern Europe: the development and working of democracy, the public support for, legitimacy and efficacy of democracy and the free market economy, and of course the stability of the newly established political culture.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004216488 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.