Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract

The European aristocratic imaginary and the Eastern paradise: Europe, Islam and
China 1100-1780. Batchelor. Robert Kinnaird, Jr. Ph.D. University of California, Los
Angeles, 1999.218~A~d.v isers: John Brewer and David Sabean.
The disseaion investigates changes in the social imaginary of the European aristocracy,
which centered on the garden as a space of social and cultural production, to argue that first
Islam and later China played an integral role in the formation of conceptions of both aristocratic
society and later the nation in Europe. The nineteenth century institution of
Orientalism as a scholarly and literary form of writing about the East cannot be understood
without an historical understanding of its basis in earlier aristocratic attempts to define and
maintain their class status in emerging nation states by drawing upon cultural models perceived
as external and superior to Europe. An interest in the unique combination of sensuality
and emtic love with formal geometry and a strict ordering of nature in the Islamic garden
drove this process during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, while in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, especially in England, the “irregular” nature of the Chinese garden
with its “management of contrasts” and “concealment of the bounds’’ captivated the attention
of a “patriotic” and nationally oriented aristocracy and gentry. These exchanges came
out of, and were in turn shaped by, a formal commerce in writings and images that developed
first locally in the Meditemean and then globally between Europe and China.
Bayazid Bistami an analysis of early Persian mysticism (ninth century, Islam). Tehmi,
Diane. Ph.D. Cofwnbia University, 1999. 147pp. Adviser: Hamid Dabashi.
This study is an analysis of the development of early Persian mysticism with specific reference
to the ninth century Islamic mystic Bayazid Bistami. The study contains historical,
political, social, religious, and literary background of Bayazid in Islamic thought. A complete
translation of the sayings of Bayazid, certain metaphors employed by him for the clarification
of his doctrine, and an alphabetized list of names of the persons and places mentioned
in the text are also brought into consideration. This study also contains background
of his life. contemporaries, and contribution to Sufism. as well as terminology, symbolic
metaphors, and annotation of expressions and technical terms in his work.
Terrorism in the name of religion: perceptions and attitudes of religious leaders from
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the United States. Al-Khattar, Aref M. Ph.D.
Idiana University of Pennsylvania, 1998. 365pp. Adviser: W. Timothy Austin.
This dissertation analyzes the way in which spiritual leaders representing Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam perceive terrorism. In-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted
to explore how Rabbis, Priests, and Imams/Sheiks from three monotheistic religions
define and justify terrorism in the name of religion. Also addressed are what functions, if
any, religious leaders can or should play in fostering better understanding of terrorism in the
U.S.A. or elsewhere. A stratified, purposive sample of 24 participants was drawn from an
available population of religious leaders (representing their major sects) from the Northeast
region of the United States. Following traditions appropriate to qualitative research, data
was collected, sorted and analyzed. Findings of this study confiied the difficulty of defining
terrorism. All participants agree that terrorism cannot be justified in their religions.
Nevertheless, many of them gave some justifications of certain terrorist acts without specifically
considering these acts as terrorism. It was concluded that violence, but not terrorism, ...