نشریه مطالعات شبه قاره
سال چهارم شماره 11 (تابستان 1391)

The world has always suffered from strife,conflicts and violence arising due to differences of race, color, ethnicity, creed, religion and region. In today’s world, many statesmen and political analysts have attributed conflicts and strife to ‘Clash of Civilizations’ particularly between the Eastern and Western world. Therefore, the world today desperately needs to talk about ‘Dialogue of Civilizations’ rather than ‘Clash of Civilizations’ to preserve peace and amity. One of the greatest philosopher-poets and a visionary of the 20th century, Mohammad Iqbal, has attempted such dialogue through his works specially poetry. This paper discusses how his critique of the West as well as the East was aimed at reconciliation of the two, and not rejection leading to conflicts.

In the pluralistic and full of conflicts world of today, the issue of understanding tolerance, forbearance and peaceful coexistence is an inevitable urgency, and contemplating the deep thoughts and works of Mir Syed Ali Hamadani and his contents about techniques to achieve a peaceful life represents his attention towards this necessity of ‘human society’. ‘Tolerance and forbearance’ in his thought is a moral and human virtue whose origin is Islam and the holy Quran. He believes that Allah’s pardon and mercy for people is vast which presents hope and joy so that they could know their contemporary time optimistically and dynamically. The current study reviews ‘tolerance’ and ‘forbearance’ in “Zakhirat-ul-Muluk”of Mir Syed Ali Hamadani by Content Analysis Method.

The Indian subcontinent, witnessing many historical ups and downs, especially after the British colonialism, created the ground for the formation of various religious and political movements. New Islamic thoughts came to existence in India with the modernism doctrine, intended to correct and challenge the imported thoughts remaining from the colonialism era. The new schools of thought came with special interpretation of the Islamic religious beliefs, in particular concerning the Quran. One of these movements was Quranism whose followers believed the Quran was the only source of Sharia. It was formed upon two main ignoring the value of hadith, and resorting to the Quran as the only source for religious interpretation. Quranism movement created the ground for the formation of a fundamentalist group called Ahl al-Quran, both bearing many shortcomings. The focus of the present study is on the Quranism school of thinking.This article used the descriptive-analytical method to search through history and hadith resources as well as the Quran itself to find the underlying reasons for the formation of the Quranism school of thinking, concluding that Quranism was an extreme form of Ahl al-Hadith school of thinking.

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) was the last great poet and writer of the Mughal period. Ghalib’s grandfather, Quqan Khan of Samarqand came to India during the reign of Shah Alam II. Undoubtedly Mirza Ghalib was a poet and writer of the Mughal era but he lived and wrote in the British India also. Ghalib was a product of Mughal society on the one hand, was also influenced by the British on the other. He has profusely written about the British in his works. A sizeable portion of his poetry in Persian is devoted to the odes of Queen Victoria, Governor Generals, and Chief Secretaries of Govt. of India and a host of other British dignitaries The Persian letters of Ghalib are full of appreciation for the British. He came in contact with several British secretaries of India in whom he found efficient administrators and good human being. His personal contact with them made him their great admirer and he considered them as his friends. Undoubtedly the British were the new paymasters of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. He had all the reasons to admire and appreciate the British Raj which was destined to usher in modern life and society in the Indian subcontinent. Hence Ghalib felt the impact of change and as such he became not a traditional but a modern poet and writer. The genius of Ghalib is more of intellect than of emotion. The present paper intends to discuss Ghalib’s Persian writings in which the British Raj will be fairly reflected.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship of coping strategies with mental health in Iranian and Indian students. The sample of this study is comprised of 800 university students, 400 students from Iran (University of Sistan and Baluchestan), and 400 students from India (Aligarh Muslim University). Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS) by Endler and Parker (1990) and General Health Questionairre-28 (GHQ) by Goldberg and Hillier (1979) were administered on the subjects. Correlation and step-wise multiple regression are used to evaluate the research hypotheses. Significantly negative correlation was found between problem focused coping strategies and mental health (GHQ-total), significantly positive correlation was found between emotion focused coping strategies and mental health with 99% confidence but avoidance-focused coping strategies was not significantly correlated with mental health among students. Step-wise multiple regression analyses revealed that emotion-focused coping strategies was first, and problem-focused coping strategies was second important predictor of mental health, but avoidance–focused coping strategies was not a predictor of mental health.

The present paper will acquaint the reader with the life of the well-known character of Sufism, namely, Ali Ibn Usman Hujwiri. The author, having taken a new approach, endeavors to analyze the impression of different teachers and leaders on Hujwiri during his adventurous migration. To illustrate, Abul-Abbas Shaghani, Abu-Ahmad Mozaffar Hamdan, Abul-Ghasem Korrakani, Imam Abul-Ghasem Ghushairi and Sheikh Abul-Fazl Mohammad Ibn Hasan Khottali have effective roles in Hujwiri’s later approaches to life and religion, whose influence will be described subsequently. Furthermore, he surveys the extent to which different sources or references had influenced Hujwiri’s outlook. The reflection of these impacts will be clearly traced in Hujwiri’s masterpiece, Kashf al-Mahjub (Revelation of the Veiled). Resale-ye Ghushairie by Imam Abul-Ghasem Ghushairi, Sharh al-Ta’arrof by Mostamli Bokhari, Al-Loma’ by Abu-Nasr al-Sarraj and Tabaqat al-Sufiyya by Abu-Abd al-Rahman Sulami are some of the mentioned sources which formulated Hujwiri’s thought and vision in one way or another.

The word feminism refers to the advocacy of women’s right seeking to remove restrictions that discriminate against women. It relates to the belief that women should have the same social, economic and political rights as men. Feminism has often focused upon what is absent rather than what is present. The word feminist refers to the person who advocates or practices feminism and it takes political position. Female is the matter of biology and feminine is a set of culturally defined characteristics. Indian feminists have also fought against cultural issues within the patriarchal society, such as inheritance laws and practice of widow immolation known as sati. Unlike the western feminist movements, India’s movement was initiated by men and then joined by women. The feminist literary criticism spent most of its energy describing how women were represented in literary works by both men and women writers. Deshpande, as a great feminist and Indian novelist, presents a sensitive portrayal of Indian womanhood treading the labyrinthine paths of human mind and sheds light on the subtleties of the human female. Her novels are in themselves the schools of psyche based on lives and problems of women only. Each novel is a voyage of discovery for her, a discovery of herself, of other humans, of our universe.