Search results for ""author heather j. sharkey""
University of California Press Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
Histories written in the aftermath of empire have often featured conquerors and peasant rebels but have said little about the vast staffs of locally recruited clerks, technicians, teachers, and medics who made colonialism work day-to-day. Even as these workers maintained the colonial state, they dreamed of displacing imperial power. This book examines the history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898-1956) and the Republic of Sudan that followed in order to understand how colonialism worked on the ground, affected local cultures, influenced the rise of nationalism, and shaped the postcolonial nation-state. Relying on a rich cache of Sudanese Arabic literary sources, including poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as on colonial documents and photographs, this perceptive study examines colonialism from the viewpoint of those who lived and worked in its midst. By integrating the case of Sudan with material on other countries, particularly India, Sharkey gives her book broad comparative appeal. She shows that colonial legacies--such as inflexible borders, atomized multi-ethnic populations, and autocratic governing structures--have persisted, hobbling postcolonial nation-states. Thus countries like Sudan are still living with colonialism, struggling to achieve consensus and stability within borders that a fallen empire has left behind.
£27.00
Princeton University Press American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire
In 1854, American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement aiming for worldwide evangelization. Protected by British imperial power, and later by mounting American global influence, their enterprise flourished during the next century. American Evangelicals in Egypt follows the ongoing and often unexpected transformations initiated by missionary activities between the mid-nineteenth century and 1967--when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War uprooted the Americans in Egypt. Heather Sharkey uses Arabic and English sources to shed light on the many facets of missionary encounters with Egyptians. These occurred through institutions, such as schools and hospitals, and through literacy programs and rural development projects that anticipated later efforts of NGOs. To Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians, missionaries presented new models for civic participation and for women's roles in collective worship and community life. At the same time, missionary efforts to convert Muslims and reform Copts stimulated new forms of Egyptian social activism and prompted nationalists to enact laws restricting missionary activities. Faced by Islamic strictures and customs regarding apostasy and conversion, and by expectations regarding the proper structure of Christian-Muslim relations, missionaries in Egypt set off debates about religious liberty that reverberate even today. Ultimately, the missionary experience in Egypt led to reconsiderations of mission policy and evangelism in ways that had long-term repercussions for the culture of American Protestantism.
£25.20
University of Pennsylvania Press The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom
The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom offers theoretical, historical, and legal perspectives on religious freedom, while examining its meaning as an experience, value, and right. The volume starts from the premise that the terrain of religious freedom has never been easy and smooth. Across societies and throughout history, defending or contesting principles of religious freedom has required compromise among multiple interests, balancing values, and wrangling with the law. Drawing on examples from the United States and around the world, and approaching the subject from the disciplines of history, law, sociology, philosophy, religious studies, and political science, the essays in this volume illustrate these challenges. They sketch the contours of contemporary debates while showing how the landscape of religious freedom has shifted over time. They consider various stakeholders that have asserted competing claims, among them individuals and groups; members of minority and majority communities; states and corporations (including both religious organizations and businesses); and believers and non-believers. Taken together, the studies in this volume suggest that understanding religious freedom means grappling with conflicting and perhaps irreconcilable claims about whose rights should prevail over others, what religion is or may be, and how religion should relate to other cultural values.
£40.50