Pro-Palestinian Messaging in Children's Media During the Lebanese Civil War
This article examines the work of Dar al-Fata al-Arabi, a Beirut-based children's publishing house affiliated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1970s and 1980s. Lebanon’s complex and protracted civil war, which saw an Israeli invasion of the country in 1982, forced Dar al-Fata’s relocation to Egypt. Pan-Arab and pro-Palestinian convictions were closely linked during the conflict and while Dar al-Fata sought to elevate revolutionary politics in the global south more generally, its pro-Palestinian media is the only instance of any contemporary Arab publisher directly addressing a nation of children.
Animals in Islamic Philosophy: Humility to Nature and The Bounds of Humanity
Philosophers and mystics in the Islamic tradition generally seek to reconcile the innate anthropocentrism of Islamic cosmology with the Aristotelian axiom that humans are animals. Thus, animals are central to the philosophical question of human nature and the justification for an anthropocentric worldview. Animals have also been consistently used by Islamic philosophers from the 8th century to the modern era to push for an ecological ethic of humility in the face of a natural world created by God.
The Narrative of the Second Crusade: An Alteration of the Traditional Life Cycle
The new life cycle narrative created for the recruitment of second crusaders altered the typical medieval life cycle that existed outside of the crusading enterprise. This new life cycle included a biological-theological division of the different life stages such as conception, birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age, death, and afterlife.