The Inquestia Times. L'Inquestia

As the Arab Spring has shown us, and continues to show us day after day, everyday, in the never ending atrocities coming from reports out of Egypt and Syria, along with widespread protests in Pakistan; with all these uncertainties in the air, the one certain thing we can identify, is that the relationship between Islam and politics is complicated – to say the least. There is not one monolithic Muslim political landscape across Islamdom and the Arab-speaking world, rather instead the political culture is tainted rather with many multi-faceted differences, nonetheless reunited by certain commonalities. Yet, despite all of these national differences which constitute distinct singularities in regards to the Islamisation of each country’s own politics, there are nonetheless commonalities that reunite such national visions or the individual political interpretation of governmental visions, or the culture of ‘government rule’ (Ayoob 2008: 1-22). To understand this shared traditional Isl...

(unpublished (c) Feb., 2011)                       As is often the case with apocryphal literature, subsequent versions of an original text usually survive in later inspired forms or versions, and the early antique text of the Life of Adam and Eve – or in Latin, Vita Adae et Evae – is no different. This Early Antique text survives in different retellings of the lost original, and altogether these different versions traditionally form a part of the Jewish pseudepigraphical group of writings commonly termed the Life of Adam and Eve ; also known as the Apocalypse of Moses , a misnomer applied to the surviving Greek version. Besides the Latin version, the Vita Adae et Evae , the other surviving pseudepigraphical texts that rank alongside it as having been inspired from a mutually shared lost original are namely the following: the Greek Apocalypse of Moses (or, also called the Greek ...

The artistic treatment of the serpent – or snake – in the tradition of the Hindu Nāga worship and the Judaeo-Christian interpretation of Nehushtan, Moses’ so-called “copper snake” along with other possibly related Western symbolic figures (e.i. the caduceus, and the rod of Asclepius), vary considerably in the manner in which they are depicted. The aesthetic styles used to represent the serpentine divine will be explored in this brief article devoted to taking a look at how snakes still possess and evoke powerful symbolic meaning in both culture and religion.      In regards to the Hindu Nāga, there is quite an abundance of similar terminologies that exists in non-Hindu neighbouring Indian countries that have adopted/adapted or borrowed the use of the Sanskrit term Nāga in reference to their own cultural equivalent of the mythic serpentine being. The imagery explored in the scope of this article, however, will limit itself to examining the divine images of th...