Publications 1993-

This study of the Lafofa Nuba in the Sudan is the first comprehensive analysis of a matrilineal Nuba group. Through a detailed analysis of local processes of interaction between Nuba and Arab groups, the books throws new light on concepts such as Islamization and Arabization. It is the revised version of the author's Ph.D. thesis from 1991.

Eventually to be completed in six volumes, this work will provide a survey of Muslim authors writing in Arabic in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, and a bibliography of their works. It will thus attempt to provide an outline of the intellectual history of Muslim societies in the areas it covers. The first volume covers Eastern Sudanic Africa (mainly the modern Sudan) until approximately 1900. It comprises twelve chapters, organized by time or period. Among the chapter authors are, M.I. Abu Salim, Albrecht Hofheinz, Yahya M. Ibrahim, Bernd Radtke and Knut S. Vikør.

This collection of letters between the 19th century mystic and teacher Ahmad ibn Idris and his students is the result of joint research carried out in Bergen. It provides primary material to illustrate the theme of Islamic Sufism and reform in the early nineteenth century, and of Africa's Islamic history. The edited Arabic text of the collected letters is printed alongside English translations. Besides the general editors, Albrecht Hofheinz, Ali Salih Karrar, R.S. O'Fahey have taken part in editing, translating and annotating the texts.

The volume analyses and documents some collective consequences of different wars in Africa; thus the immediate national and regional effects of large-scale regional wars in Ethiopia/Eritrea and the Sudan, tribal warfare in southwestern Ethiopia, and indirect and long-term effects of World War I in the Blue Nile basin, as well as the destruction caused by the warring clans and gorups in Somalia. The authors examine issues leading to conflicts and consquences of them on a human and ecological level.

This is the first general history of the Middle East to be published by a Norwegian author. It focuses primarily on the political and intellectual history of the Middle East, trying to explain how the ideas and the actions of the people were interdependent. Emphasis is placed both on the genesis of the Islamic religion and its view of society in the formative period until about 1000, and on the nature of the political structures in the Middle Ages and modern periods. The tenth and sixteenth centuries are thus seen as the crucial periods of change in the history of the Middle East. Shorter essays on the wider Islamic world are also included.

A volume of papers from the second of the triennial Nordic Middle East conferences (held in Copenhagen 1992), this book is centered around the themes of 'The political faces of Islam', 'Christians in the Middle East', 'Sufism and society', 'Studies in Arabic literature' and 'Nomadic, tribal and urban groups and identities'; each representing a workshop at the conference. It contains 24 papers, as well as other surveys of research. While introductory papers by professor John Voll and others address the general theme of 'unity and diversity', the volume as a whole also represents an overview of Middle Eastern research interest in the Nordic countries today. [*]

1994

A comprehensive account of the Caucasian and Central Asian peoples, as well as immigrants to the region, in light of 'ethnic markers', i.e., language and religion. By ranking the various ethnic and national identity factors, it is possible to arrive at Caucasian and Central Asian identity hierarchies consisting of supranational, national and subnational factors. The second section focuses primarily on ethnic nationalism in the region, and the mobilizing rhetoric of ethnic nationalism based on a semiotic approach to political communication.

The Sudan can demonstrate that while there is no short-cut to progress, there is one to decay and misery. After eleven years of peace, the second civil war has now lasted more than ten years. Regional, ethnic and religious conflicts are intensifying all over the country. This book brings together analytical perspectives, data and approaches in order to enhance the understanding of what seems like a 'permanent' catastrophy in the Sudan.

1995

After the Palestinian uprising - the Intifada - broke out, small groups of Israelis and Palestinians decided to open a new bridge to peace based on the idea that if established enemies were able to meet and discuss their problems openly, enemy-images, stereotypes and misconceptions would gradually vanish. This book is a study of such dialogue and co-operation groups. A central focus is put on the individual, and how she interprets the conflict, the prospects for peace, and the dialogue process. In her own ethnic community, the individual dialogue participant faces strong hostility towards 'the other'. Thus conflicts of loyalty may develop and become excruciating. Through a wide focus on symbols and rhetoric used to communicate and produce intra-ethnic unity on both sides, the book (based on the author's Hovudfag thesis) is a contribution to the anthropological debate about ethnicity and ethnic conflict.

This is the second in a series of six volumes that will provide a survey of Muslim authors writing in Arabic in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, and a bibliography of their works. It will thus attempt to provide an outline of the intellectual history of Muslim societies in the areas it covers. The first volume on Eastern Sudanic Africa (by R.S. O'Fahey), appeared in 1993. This second volume concentrates mainly on writings from Nigeria. Professor Hunwick (of Northwestern University, USA) prepared and completed it during his periods as guest professor at Bergen in 1993-95. Among the chapter authors are, Razaq Abubakre, Hamidu Bobboyi, Roman Loimeier, Stefan Reichmuth and Muhammad Sani Umar.

This study of the founder of the nineteenth-century Sanusiya Sufi order focuses on the scholarly tradition that formed him. The Sanusiya are best known for its military exploits in the anti-colonial struggles of the Sahara, but its background was wholly religious, not militant or political. The founder came from a tradition of Islamic learning and reform that spanned the Islamic world from Morocco to Mecca and beyond. The book discusses al-Sanusi's role in the Sufi network created by his teacher, Ahmad b. Idris, and in the scholarly milieu of the Qarawiyin in Fez. This dovetails with the on-going research in Bergen on the tradition after Ibn Idris, and this book (based on the author's Dr. Philos. thesis) is the fourth in the series of studies on this tradition from the Bergen group.

This book contains the result of ten years of archaeological work in the Atbara Region, Central Sudan. The rich archaeological material uncovered, spans a period of two thousand years, from the 9th to the 10th millennium BP. The adaptation of the people inhabiting the area during this period, was based on a broad spectrum of resources, big game like elephants and giraffe was caught in addition to smaller game. Aquatic resource exploitation seems however to have been most important. Plant utilisation is documented with remains of sorghum recovered, a plant which was later cultivated in Central Sudan. The focus of the research has been on the preconditions and consequences of sedentism.

1996

This is an edition and translation of financial records of a period when the 'modern' Sudan was ruled by its first indigenous ruler, the religious and political leader known as the Mahdi. Although his rule was based on eschatological expectations, his state left behind an extraordinarly rich administrative archive, the organization and presentation of which has been a central theme in the Bergen-Kharoum history cooperation. The present volume is an example of this cooperation, one of the authors is a førsteamanuensis in (African) history in Bergen, the other an archivist at the National Records Office, Khartoum, currently working for a Ph.D. in Bergen.

Although they represent a plurality of the population in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian Muslims are still members of a minority culture in the region that was once Yugoslavia. The question of ethno-national identity has become paramount in this society, and the author focuses on religion as the defining characteristic of identity. Bringa pays particular attention to the roles that women play in defining Muslim identities, and she examines the importance of the household as a Muslim identity sphere. In so doing, she illuminates larger issues of what constitutes 'nationality.' This is a gripping and heartfelt account of a community that has been torn apart by ethnopolitical conflict. It will attract readers of all backgrounds who want to learn more about one of the most intractable wars of the late twentieth century and the people who have been so tragically affected.

This is the first comprehensive study of pastoralism in the Sinkat provice of eastern Sudan. The chapters discuss the effects of the drought and of human activities, and the effects of the pastoral patterns of migration. One author cliams that the recurring catastrophes cannot be caused just by the village inhabitants and their activities, but must be seen in an wider economic and political perspective, where the villages have become more and more marginalized. The books is based on the Red Sea Area Program, see under 'Research: Centre for Development Studies' above. (Previously published as 'Final Report, the Red Sea Area Programme, CDS, Bergen' c. 1994).

This is a revised collection of articles published over the years 1969-90 on the issue, both through lexical studies and on particular authors (Vazov, Vojnikov). Most of the articles focus on the Bulgarian language of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, particularly in Eastern Bulgaria, the influence from Turkish was strong, as it was in literature. This influence has diminished in this century. However, it is still stronger in dialects, slang and similar language variants than normally admitted. This may even have become more noticeable through the greater openness towards such variants in the written language after the fall of communism.

This novel is considered to be one of the finest works of the Arabic novel tradition as well as an invaluable social document. Its framework is the seven days it takes a group of Sufi brothers in a village of the Egyptian delta to prepare for their annual visit to Tanta and the mawlid of their saint, Sayyid al-Badawi. The seven days, being the same seven as that of God's creation of the world, makes the village a microcosm of the universe. The translation of this 'anthropological novel' is the result of years of careful study and revision, in collaboration with the author of the novel, who died in 1990.

In 1906, a new state was created in the region of 'Asir on the border between Yemen and the Hijaz. Its founder was Muhammad al-Yamani al-Idrisi, a member of a respected religious family. He led a rising against the Ottoman for the application of the shari'a, while at the same time making alliances with the various great powers, before the state was eventually integrated in Saudi Arabia. This study traces the rise and fall of the Idrisi state, and searches for its basis between great power politics and the personal and religious prestige of its founder. [*]

A companion volume to Sufi and Scholar (1995) on the Sanusiya Sufi brotherhood of nineteenth-century Sahara and its founder, Muhammad b. 'Ali al-Sanusi, this source book contains biographical detail of all known teachers of the founder, including the most important scholars of Fez at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and of his students in Mecca and in Cyrenaica. Further are details of his intellectual activity, as well as of the organization of the order. The volume also includes the Arabic text of his grandson Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi's al-Fuyudat al-Rabbaniya and of the text of an opponent, Risala fi 'l-ijtihad of Hasan al-'Attar. [*]

1997

This is a study of Said Nursi (1873-1960), the founder of one of the most important religious movements of modern Turkey. He was throughout his life faced with opposition and distrust from the Kemalist state. He was presented as a madman, a Muslim fanatic and a Kurdish nationalist. Yet Said Nursi, an early supporter of Mustafa Kemal, had come to accept many of the tenets of the new state. He did, however, reject the concept of nationalism, both in its Kurdish and Turkish form. This was his main intellectual challenge to the new state, and the reason his movement was targeted for harassment more than the Naksibendis and other religious groups who accepted the idea of a Turkish nation. [*]

The Middle East, far from being a static and isolated region, has always been a cross-roads of influences from east, north and south. Rather than seeing 'culture' in the Middle East and North Africa as an eternal, autochthonous and frozen totality that dominates the other aspects of life and society, it should be regarded as an area which, ever changing, is formed by and reciprocates influences from within and without. This volume of papers from the third Middle East congress of the Nordic countries, focuses on the encounter between the native Middle Eastern and the Other, in terms of the 'borderland' between the Middle Eastern and the outside culture, power relationships in the meeting, and the transformation of social and cultural values in many forms. [*]

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the sight of tens of thousands of non-Kuwaiti Arabs, Indians, East Asians, and Westerners fleeing or trapped under occupation made the outside world suddenly aware of a singular fact of Kuwaiti society that Kuwaitis are an absolute minority in their own country. Basing her analysis on extensive fieldwork, the author examines the social dimension of labor migration to Kuwait since independence, looking at the relations between two sharply differentiated social categories and the politics of exclusion that have allowed Kuwaitis to protect their rights and privileges as citizens against infringement by the huge influx of expatriates.

This book is based on the author's very well received televison series on 'the history of water', tracing the importance of water in social, political and economic context throughout the world.

In this book, Ingvild Gilhus argues that laughter is a central human phenomenon. Humans use laughter as a means to experience the world, categorise its forms and judge its values. But, laughter also transcends language, and is frequently used as a characteristic of the divine. The Mesopotamian Anu, the Israelite Jahweh, the Greek Dionysos, the Gnostic Christ and the late modern Jesus were all laughing gods. Through their laughter, gods prove both their superiority and their proximity to humans. In this comprehensive study, Gilhus examines the relationship between corporeal human laughter and spiritual divine laughter from Classical antiquity, to the Christian West and the modern era. The volume contains sections on the Ancient Near East, Greece, Rome and early Christianity, medieval, and on modernity and the remytologization of laughter, finaly on the religion of jokes.

Following an agreement between the DSRC (Development Studies Research Centre, University of Khartoum), and the CEDEJ (Centre d'Études et de Documentations Juridiques, Économiques et Sociales, Cairo), a joint research program on the Kassala-Godaref states of the Sudan was launched in March 1994. It undertook the indexing and cataloguing of all the Sudan National Records Offices (NRO) Kassala Files.
The NRO Kassala files include 2,884 items and covers all the condominium period including the years 1956-1966. Most of the information in the files is general correspondence relating to tribal questions, general administrative policy, local government councils and town councils, boundaries, agricultural schemes, lands and registration of lands, sagias, warrants, ordinances and minutes of meetings.

1998

How successful has the Oslo peace process been? This volume critically assesses the effectiveness of the accords, the consequences for Israel/Palestine in general and for the Palestinian society specificially. It demonstrates that the effects of the process, in terms of creating peace, has been meagre. By scrutinizing its framework, the contributors expose the limitations of the process and seriously question whether it can ever lead to a lasting peace in the Middle East. This collections represents the first in-depth critical and analytical assessment of the Oslo process, including its impact on Palestinian society which was affected most by the process.

Modern studies of classical Arabic rhetoric ('ilm al-balagha) has mainly focused on only one of the three disciplines that make up this field, the science of metaphors ('ilm al-bayan). However, to the Arab theoreticians, it was rather the science of meanings, the 'ilm al-ma'ani that was the most important science of balagha. The changed emphasis of the modern conception is probably a result of their focusing on rhetoric as part of poetics and literary criticism rather than of grammar and logic.
This book turns the spotlight back to the 'ilm al-ma'ani. It is an introduction to the work of the qadi and grammarian Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Rahman al-Qazwini, known as khatib Dimashq (d. 1338). It presents his terminology and conceptual apparatus as it was laid out particularly in his main work, Talkhis al-Miftah, and presents his scholarly background and position in the madrasa system of the early fourteenth century. [*]

This book analyses and questions the centrality of Non-governmental organizations that have arisen in the last two decades. Do they provide excuses for spending cuts, or are they better at spending resources? Is the relationship between state and society changed? These and other questions are studied from the cases of Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Bangladesh and Nicaragua.

This books book goes on to consider the concept of martyrs: The political nature of Islamic rituals, female mortuary rites, women making the pilgrimage, reproduction of the Islamic social order and disorder, Islamic modesty and veiling, modernisation and revolution, and family management in the context of change. The study shows that there is an increasing number of women embracing Islamic orthodoxy and intellectualism, and that contemporary Iranian women's orthodoxy is not a reaction against the social and moral order, but is a part of a new religious practise and the recreation of a new identity model among women.

The current Islamic revival is frequently associated with fundamentalism aand radical politics. This reinforces Western perceptions of Islamic women as victims of sexisist and reactionary rule. What many outsiders fail to realize is that quite a number of Muslim women are ardently embracing their religion as a means through which they can express gender identity, power and creativity. In overturning ingrained notions of Muslim women's subjugation, this book situates Islam as a religion undergoing reinterpretation and change - especially in relation to gender identities - rather than as a monolithic movement reacting against westernization and modernization. Through their political, educational and recreational activities, more and more Muslim women are setting agendas of their own and are actively redifining the role of women in Muslim society.

In a world constantly mourning the loss of unique cultures to the spread of homogeneity, the Muslim Beja of the Red Sea Hills in North-Eastern Africa [the Sudan]-have been able to maintain their culture through social, economic, and environmental changes. In this book, the author argues that the telling of mythical narratives among the Beja is at least partly accountable for this remarkable persistence.
Specifically, the book explores the way in which Muslim Hadandowa Beja pastoralists of North-Eastern Africa reason about health, sickness, and misfortune. But the guiding question of the book - What must one know to understand a Beja personal or mythical narrative? - echoes the questions of social anthropologists everywhere. Through line-by-line analysis and examination of 'implicit' knowledge within stories, this study of a people with an unusually rich and varied oral tradition becomes an archetype of the process of understanding the foreign while providing insight into the preservation of the familiar.

1999

Right in the middle of the Sahara desert, near Niger's borders with Libya and Chad, lies a small string of oases called Kawar. Their position is about as isolated as can be imagined, surrounded by some of the world's most hostile desert areas. And yet the economy of Kawar and its main town Bilma is completely based on external trade, the oasis being one of West Africa's major producers of salt. Thus its history can only be understood as a part of a wider regional development, as a southwards extension of Maghrebi Islamic civilization as well as the northern frontier of 'sub-Saharan Africa'.
This study of Kawar's history is therefore also a history of the central Sahara. It first describes the economic foundation of the oasis and the salt trade. Following this is a survey of its place in central Saharan history, from the first Greek and Roman travellers, through Fezzani, Bornu and Tuareg rule until it was incorporated in the French colonial empire in 1906. [*]

The papers in this book (anthroplogists and historians) discuss what is termed as 'local Islam' in cases from West Africa to China. All convey a feeling of dissatisfaction with the term, relating to conceptual problems of seeing Islam as either local or global. Rather, they argue for a focus not on 'Islam' but on the lives of Muslims, in the context of complex historical developments. The issue of how classify combinations of so-called Muslim beliefs, customs and identities is thus wrongly put. The understanding of Muslim communities comes not from classification, but from understanding the content of the discourse itself. The task is to move beyond the Orientalist notions of an unchanging world of Islam and to focus on the diversity of Muslim experiences.

This is a study of the former director of the National Records Office, the national archives, of the Sudan, written by an historian who formerly worked there (later research fellow at the University of Bergen). Professor Abu Salim is a prolific writer, not least known for his monumental 8-volume collection of documents from the Sudanese Mahdi (al-Athar al-kamila), but also for varied studies as on the saqiya irrigations system, land property conflicts and many other. This book studies his activities as director of the archives, and as editor and author of historical works.

2000

Is globalization an inevitable development that the Middle East must only adapt to, for better or for worse? An opportunity to join the global village? Or is it an imperialist strategy that denies the peoples of the developing world a chance to realize their potentials? Is the cultural influence of globalization only one-way, from the North to the South, or is the Middle East also a producer of a globalizing discourse? These are the kinds of questions that the articles in this collection raise. The answers do not speak with one voice, but their concern is the same, to place a critical focus on the process of globalization in the Middle East, but also to see the Middle Easterners as actors and not just as victims in the process. This book is a selection of papers from the Fourth Nordic Conference on Middle Eastern studies, with the same theme as the book title, held in Oslo in August 1998. [*]

The Moroccan mystic and theologian Ahmad Ibn Idris (1749-1837) was one of the most dynamic personalities in the Islamic world of the nineteenth century. Through his teachings and the activity of his students important Sufi orders were founded which exerted wideranging social and political influence, orders such as the Sanusiyya in Libya and the Khatmiyya in the Sudan.
The present work contains an Arabic edition and translation with commentary of two texts which throw light on Ibn Idris' attitude towards the religious-dogmatic questions of his day. The first text, Risalat al-Radd 'ala ahl al-ra'y, provides information about Ibn ldris' relation to the Islamic schools of law, in particular his position regarding the ijtihad-taqlid debate.
The second is a vivid report of a debate that Ibn Idris entered into with Wahhabi theologians in the Yemeni city of Sabya in 1832. The introduction of the present book examines the tumultuous circumstances in which the texts were composed and sketches the larger cultural and intellectual context which shaped Ibn Idris'world of ideas.

This major source for the study of South East Asian Islam is edited with commentary and introduction, and was prepared by Dr. Abu Shouk during his time as research fellow in Bergen.

This book contains bibliographical references to:
- 6234 books, articles and reports about the region registered
- 3218 annotated titles. All disciplines/all topics are covered
- A chronology of events 1956-2000
- an inventory of NGOS/UN-organisations with description of activities and addresses.

The aim of this work is to be more useful for future research, policy and development interventions than just another study of "development constraints" or "development opportunities", which due to the security and logistical situation would unavoidably be a superficial study. We also wanted to "protest" against a dominant culture within development-oriented research and practice - the fetishism of the present and the lack of institutional memory. By publishing an overview of what has been written about development, culture, health problems, agricultural potential etc. in the Southern Sudan, the intention was to make it more difficult for aid organisations, aid consultants and development planners in the future to operate as if the area was a "tabula rasa" as far as research was concerned, by making it more easy to access existing knowledge and thus indirectly help to improve the quality of development efforts.

But even more important; this bibliography should serve the intellectual debate and discourse among the southerners and among the Sudanese. It aims at giving both a comprehensive picture of how the southerners and their environment have been represented to the world at large and of how their societies and nature have been and become changed during the centuries. Since ignorance about the southern Sudan must be one reason why, since independence, the Sudanese have been waging bloody wars against each other and millions of people have lost their lives due to destruction and starvation, this bibliography may prove useful in contributing to a Sudanese discourse based on balanced, rational arguments. I also hope that this bibliography will be useful for scholars dealing with the Sudan especially and Africa and the Middle East in general. [*]

This book contains bibliographical references to 3486 books, articles and reports about the region.
1532 of the entries are with annnotations in order to help and guide the user of the bibliography. All disciplines and topics are covered

It is more important than ever to understand the economic, political and cultural role of the River Nile. This book has been written in the belief that such a mighty river, running from the heart of Africa to the Mediterranean and crossing the borders of ten countries comprising more than 300 million people, deserves an extensive, multidisciplinary bibliography, presenting in one book, what has been said about her.

The Nile has intrigued people, historians and poets since the days of Cheops up to the present day and will continue to be at the heart of regional economy, politics and culture in the decades and centuries ahead. This most famous of all famous rivers has been described in the ancient stories of Herodotus and in the travel notes of Arab scholars and European explorers, and in the many modern books about Nile geology, Nile hydrology, Nile dams and Nile politics. The present bibliography demonstrates the enormous scope and the usefulness of this literature and of the research that has been carried out in the past. Such a broad bibliography may help overcome some unhelpful perspectives that have been nurtured by narrower national, social or disciplinary concerns, and by neglect of past experiences.

Contents:
- all types of literature (books, theses, articles in scientific journals, consultancy reports and government reports). Only published or generally available literature is listed, not ordinary archival material and secret diplomatic documents etc.
- literature within all scientific disciplines, from geology and geography, history and anthropology, to medicine and zoology, as well as botany and hydrology.
- travel literature.
- planning- and project literature, produced both by government bodies, international agencies and consultancy firms.
- literature on basin wide planning, water agreements, water need assessments for sectors and countries etc. The focus of this bibliography is the River Nile as an international and transboundary river. [*]

2001

The book looks at central problems when the area between the Nile and the Red Sea is seen as a cultural landscape. One third of land mass of this earth, the territories of of half of the world's countries and the residence of a large part of the world's populations are in barren areas. In many cases this is due to human activities.

The desert is normally seen as a barren landscape not fit for habitation. But the contributors wish to show the diversity of people actually living in this territory. There are thousands of inhabitants, there are trees and pasture sufficient to satisfy the demands of those willing to adapt. For ages, access to water and vegetation has created a basis of life for inhabitants, and on this basis they have constructed a nomadic lifestyle based on animal husbandry. The book puts the native population in focus, together with the material and social factors that has taken part in forming their lives.

The contributors have a background in different fields, such as Botany, Geography, Egyptology, History and Hydrology, and the individual contributors also contain personal perspectives on their discoveries.

In this book are collected thirteen texts, complete or fragmentary, of gospels that were not included into the Bible. Among them are The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Peter, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, The Secret Gospel of Mark, the infancy gospels of James and Thomas, and the Gospel of Nicodemus. This is the first direct translation of these texts from their original languages into Norwegian. The book includes an introductory essay written by Halvor Moxnes.

2002

This book contains translations of some of the most known gnostic documents. Among them are The Secret Book of John, The Nature of the Archons, texts about Simon Magus, Thunder (Bronte), The Gospel of Truth, Ptolemaeus's letter to Flora, The Tripartite Tractate, The Gospel of Philip, Poimandres, and the Song of the Pearl. Ingvild Sælid Gilhus and Einar Thomassen have translated the texts directly from Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Syriac, together with an introductory essay on gnosticism.

Second edition of the book first published in 2000.

The contact between Norway and Africa goes back to the Viking age. The topic of this book is Norwegians who traveled to Africa between 1650 and 1950, and Africans who for various reasons ended up in Norway.

A large number of Norwegian missionaries went to Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to convert the heathen. Others left Norway with dreams of riches and a fresh start. The motives were much the same as those that made people go to America. Some found success, others did not. Africans came to Norway for a variety of reasons. Some were shipwrecked, others came as slaves, or as entertainers and simply as items for exhibit.

The twenty-two contributions present images of adventurism, ingenuity and daring, and show that it was often coincidences that let people to go to far shores.

This book presents the background for today's discussions on the role of Islam in modern society. It describes the basic features of Islam, from the question: "What does Islam mean for Muslims today?"

One cannot comprehend the world-view of Muslims only by studying religion. No-one is "only a Muslim"; everyone base their actions from the totality of the society they live in and the roles they play in it. But the faith and history of Islam does also help to form those who consider themselves as Muslims, and thus form our contemporary world.

This books presents in an introductory fashions the basics of Islam's laws and regulations, as well as Islamic mysticism and the different currents of Islam.

In the 1970s, 'modernization theory' contended that notions of honour would become obsolete in modern democracies. Being an archaic remnant of our pre-modern past, honour would be substituted by dignity under modern conditions. When honour does emerge as a valid social theme in modern society, as it sometimes does during court hearings, in gang fights, and in violent reactions to insult, it is often ascribed to immigration from pre-modern cultures where honour still matters in social life. Thus honour becomes part of the cultural baggage that is transferred to the host country through migration. However, the fact that highly modern social formations like MC gangs are also obsessed with honour seriously questions the validity of classical modernization theories. It seems that honour is not just a pre-modern weed in a modern garden of dignity, but an integral part of modernity.

Since honour emerges under pre-modern as well as under modern conditions, it is relevant to ask under which circumstances it becomes a theme in interaction. Blurring the distinction between the modern and the pre-modern in this manner allows us to ask what honour is really all about. Containing international contributions from Scandinavia, USA, Mexico, Kurdistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Japan, this volume provides first-hand ethnographic accounts and important answers to these vital questions.

This book focuses on the ways in which a particular Islamic brotherhood, or 'tariqa', the 'Alawiyya, spread maintained and propagated its particular brand of the Islamic faith. Originating in the South-Yemeni region of Hadramawt, the 'Alawi tariqa mainly spread along the coast of the Indian Ocean. The book discusses the renowned scholar, Ahmad b. Sumayt. The 'Alawis are here portrayed as one of the many cultural mediators in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Indian Ocean world in the era of European colonialism.

The signing of the Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO in 1993 was considered a high point of Norwegian diplomacy. Following this, the peace process became one of the main focuses of Norwegian development aid. This aid had clear political aims in Palestine. Rapid and visible improvements in the conditions of life for the Palestinians should create support for the negotiations among the people. Other elements of the aid was closely linked to the process of negotiations. A particular effort was put in the so-called "People-to-People" program (P2P), a program for dialogue and co-operation between Palestinians and Israelis, as stated in the Oslo II agreement of 1995. Norway, and the FAFO research institute, was given the role of organizer of the program, with the aim of gathering thousands of Israelis and Palestinians in projects of co-operation and dialogue in order to change the stereotypes of enmity and conflict. But it did not work as planned.

This study looks at the Palestinian experiences with P2P. How it was started, what the experiences were, levels of participation and the political level and in civil society. Why did the Norwegian peace efforts become so problematical?

The law of Islam has always been suspended between, on one side, God, and on the other, the state; between its religious basis and society's needs for the organization of its material aspects.

The Sharia is God's law. But it is not clear what the Sharia should contain. There is even disagreements about whether there is any actual Sharia law in our mundane society or whether it is only an ethical ideal or a divine will that only God can fully know.

This book describes how the theory and method if the Islamic law developed, and how it was practised in courts from the days of the Prophet until today. It shows how this tension between its being God's law and the society's law has influenced both its theory and its practice in the Sharia courts, and tries to demonstrate what is meant when it is said that something, or the opposite, or both at the same time, is "what the Sharia says" and God's law.

Second revised edition of the book first published in 1993.