Search results for ""Author Eric Ross""

A book about contemporary urban design, a metaphysical worldview and a cultural process that transcends the pre-colonial/colonial/post-colonial divides. Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba is a geographical study of the modern Muslim holy city of Touba in Senegal, capital of the Mouride Sufi order. Touba was founded in 1887 by a Sufi shaykh in a moment of mysticillumination. Since the death of the founder in 1927, the Mouride order has designed and built the entire city. Touba is named for Tûbâ, the "Tree of Paradise" of Islamic tradition. This archetypal tree articulates Islamic conceptions of righteous life on earth, divine judgment, and access to the Hereafter; the city of Touba actualizes this spiritual construct. Important aspects of its configuration, such as the vertical and horizontal alignment of its monumental central shrine complex, its radiating avenues and encircling ring roads, and the actual trees that mark its landscape relate directly to the archetypal tree of Sufi theosophy. The relationship between the spiritualarchetype and its earthly actualization as a city is explained by recourse to Sufi methodology. The book employs a semiotic analysis of urban form, cartography, hermeneutics, field investigation and analysis of satellite imagery in order to relate contemporary urban design issues to overarching metaphysical concepts. Sufi City also explores the history of urban networks in Senegal since the emergence of autonomous Muslim towns in the seventeenth century. Finally, the layout of Senegal's modern Sufi cities is related to the monumental palaver trees that marked that country's historic settlements. Eric S. Ross is a cultural and urban geographer who holds a degree inIslamic Studies. Since 1998 he has been Assistant Professor of Geography at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Apart from research on Sufi orders and Muslim towns in Senegal, he has studied cultural tourism and urban planning in Morocco.

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As in his popular earlier book Beyond the River and the Bay, the bulk of the story is told by a character of Ross' invention, Ian Alexander Bell Robertson. Robertson, an Edinburgh gentleman born at the end of the Scottish enlightenment, acquired a deep sympathy for the displaced crofters and agricultural labourers of the Scottish Highlands. He lived in Quebec City between 1840 to 1842 to prepare a study of the Canadas intended either as a guide for the immigrant or, as Ross feels more likely, a record of the colonies at the moment they united and embarked on a promising future together. While Ross himself sets the work in historical context and explains the use of a fictitious author, it is Robertson, a keen observer, who describes in detail numerous aspects of Canadian life in 1841: transportation, communications, social institutions and customs, life on the new farms, and the relationship between the French and English residents of the colonies -- a relationship which in many ways resembles that of today. Throughout the book, Ross has interspersed snippets of information and illustration to supplement Robertson's writings. Scrupulously researched and easily accessible, Full of Hope and Promise will interest anyone wishing to know more about everyday life in Upper and Lower Canada at the time of the 1841 Union.

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