Masks and Modernities

Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia

From the beginning of the Islamic era, Muslim societies have experienced periods of renewal (tajdid). Since the eighteenth century, Muslim societies across the world have been subject to a prolonged and increasingly deeply felt process of renewal. This has been expressed in different ways in different contexts. Amongst political elites with immediate concerns to answer the challenges of the Wes...

Alternative Modernities for Colonial Korea

Muslims and Modernities: From Islamism to Post-Islamism?

A !is article problematizes the complexity of Muslim approaches to the question of modernity. It challenges both a hegemonic voice of a singular and superior Western modernity and an essentialist Islamist response to modernity. It examines the alternative approach of multiple modernities. !is approach calls for a critical dialogue and negotiation between tradition and modernity, expedite...

Ritual, Masks, and Sacrifice

INTRODUCTION Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face. The mask makes the disengagement from ordinary time and the connection to the ancient and repetitive, which is the heart of ritual, psychologically acceptable. Together, ritual and mask facilitate the apprehension of identity and its connections with pa...

Notch Filter Masks: Practical Image Masks for Planet-Finding Coronagraphs

An ideal coronagraph with a band-limited image mask can efficiently image off-axis sources while removing identically all of the light from an on-axis source. However, strict mask construction tolerances limit the utility of this technique for directly imaging extrasolar terrestrial planets. We present a variation on the basic band-limited mask design—a family of “notch filter” masks—that mitig...