Journal of Iranian Cultural Research
Year:2009 | Volume:2 | Issue:6|Papers Count:11

This article aimed to investigate the intercultural sensitivities between Sunnite Turkmen groups and Shiite groups in Golestan province of Iran through considering the most important factors influenced it. The intercultural development inventory (IDI), which designed according to Milton Bennet's the intercultural sensitivities theory, was utilised to examine the intercultural sensitivities between those Muslim groups. The intercultural sensitivities theory essentially states that the more communication among people leads them to have the less intercultural sensitivities. In other words, the development of communications among people causes to diminish their intercultural sensitivities. In this study, both virtual and actual measurement domains were used in order to measure the communications development of two groups. The development of virtual communications was measured according people's interactivity with different types of media, especially Satellite and Internet, whereas the actual one was measured based on three cities varying according to different religious distribution. Finally this article concluded that the development of virtual and actual communications led to decreasing intercultural sensitivities among people in this area.

As a fascinating issue for the scholars in Religion Studies, religious experience has a long-lasting theological and social background in Christianity and Occidental history which has caused to the present increasing attention to the matter. However, as other concepts ad categories, its development in Iran has experienced a distorted process of just Academic and theoretical debates and not to experience it practically. Avoiding evaluating the term from Islamic theological point of view, while introducing some of its theological or historical and social backgrounds in the west, I attempt to make theologists and philosophers of religion, in addition to the religious psychologists and sociologists pay more attention to the necessity of caution and focus on the nature and status of religious Experience in Religion Studies, and its relation with religiosity.

This paper attempts to study the correlation between IRIB’s Religious and Non-religious programs, and the levels of religiosity in Iran. Accordingly, I would firstly explain the key concepts as religious program, non-religious program, religious broadcasting, and Ideological broadcasting; then, analyzing some instant programs, from non-religious to religious, I would attempt to formulize their impacts on one’s definition of religion - either as a private or simultaneously private and public matter. It is shown that in the trilogy of purely religious, purely entertaining, and mediated religious programs, it is the third which satisfy a religious television’s ideal.

The present study attempts to illustrate transformations in religiosity in Iran in last three decades. Leaning on the survey data in last three decades in Iran, we attempt to explain the transformation of religiosity among Iranian adults, youth, men, and women respectively; in addition to the degree of transformation among different social classes over the time. Results show that one cannot argue about the transformation in religiosity as a whole, but should consider different social groups and different aspects of religiosity separately. It shows that individual religious behavior is steadily increasing, although with some degree of variation among different social groups; while some common rituals has decreased within which aspect women show different behavior from the others. Furthermore, Beliefs and religious experiments and intuitions were in high levels.

Increasing presence of Islam all over the world is an undeniable truth, and not only Muslims, but also other people endorse this truth. In the USA, like other countries, a Muslim minority has appeared which is in interaction, or even in confrontation, with the hegemonic majority. Among the intercultural communication’s theorists, Mark Orbe and Regina Spellers study this interaction or confrontation in their theory of co-culture. Thus, applying phenomenology and theory of “the silent group” and theory of “point of view”, one can study Muslim agents’ behavior as a co-cultural group confronting the hegemonic group which is hierarchically in the high level of identity. In such a condition, American Muslims have applied a special communication strategy, both in relation with each other and with the dominant structure. This may occurred either as complete conformity with the dominant condition, or as insulation, or as cambium interaction; all depending on the historical experiments and deep interactions.

According to its nature and intent, religious identity is almost the most important part of human identity and plays a determinant role in the process of identity-building in the society. It could be said that enforcement of this identity would guide to the stability of other parts of human identity as a whole, while any disturbance in religious identity would cause crisis in it. This is especially correct in the communities within which religion plays a crucial role in the social structuring. The present study discusses the outputs of an empirical investigation and thus attempts to show the affecting factors on the matter. We have studied 400 junior students in Shiraz’s high school, including girls and boys. Results show that 88 percent of the students have high sense of religious identity, while just 4 percent feel crisis in this field.

Impiety was one of the two charges against Socrates. As a civil religion (within which politics and religion are mutually intertwined) was the then-dominated religion in Athens, impiety was regarded as a civil laws violation. Thus, charge of impiety, as a political subversion, might lead Socrates to death. However, in Apology there are some signs of Socrates’ religiousness as swearing and the claim to be at service of the Polis’ formal gods and goddess which lead to the question whether Socrates were an impious person, in addition to the question concerning the reasons why Socrates was sentenced to death, while he has showed his religiousness. In this study, we argued the nature of Socrates’ religiousness and offered an interpretation of Socrates’ silent confrontation with Athenians as is described in the court and his advocacy there. Therefore, introducing the state of religion in Athens, it would be shown that Socrates goes not deep in the inspirations, but intervening personal negative accounts, argues for a private religious experience, while does not offers any substitution for the formal religion.

Islamic Revolution and the consequent Islamic state in Iran have revived Iranian-Islamic civilization’s discourse in a modern form which is rooted in both Iranian and Islamic ancient civilizations. Post-revolutionary Iran, as an obviously determinant country in this civilizational field, which has developed the civilization in the modern era, necessarily has to think and act civilizationally in order to resist western Humanist and Materialist affects.Academy is the place within which knowledge, as clearly one of the most important foundations of civilization-building, is produced. Civilization-building is the horizon toward which Iranian Universities should orient themselves. Academy is the canon of science, knowledge, and culture, and therefore plays an affective role in the formation, development and flourishing of a civilization; and it could be said that University is the foundation on which civilization is built. In other words, University in the modern era is not only the site of education and research, but also as an epistemological basis, participates in the process of culture and civilization-building; the matter which this study attempts to elaborate. Thus, we attempt to explain and define the necessary tools and indicators in the process.

In 1985 Gayatri Spivak, criticizing western academic communities, proposed this question that “Can the subaltern speak? “ The   answer to this question necessitates the consideration of humanities and any kinds of discourse which bring about subalterns. Postcolonial discourse as a critical, liberal, and anticolonial criticizes this discourse. Postcolonial thinker seeks a period during which an eastern person was defined against a western person. Identification modern subject is the topic that the postcolonial thinker like Michael Foucault questions about while dealing with archaeology. The appearance of a person as an eastern date back to the time when the existence of the outside world resulted from the subject. An eastern can speak when s/he criticizes the subject based on which the humanities are constructed. Obtaining a definition of human being and the way s/she faces the world in order to understand it, is the primary step of introducing an alternative for authoritative humanities. Postcolonial thinker‘s method in understanding other and the outside world based on intersubjectivity. By establishing human studies instead of western humanities and local humanities and by critical view on spivak’s intellectual paradigm, this method of understanding provides spivak’s question with a positive answer contrary to his own negative answer.