This essay explores religion’s need for law, comparing the story told in Mitra Sharafi’s Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia (2014)—about the virtual hijacking of British colonial law to serve the communal religious needs of Parsis in colonial India—to other contexts in which secular and religious legal systems have built symbiotic relationships, including in the United States and Thailand....

Salt Lake City , the place where my wife and I and our cats live, is roughly equidistant from the three states of Nevada , Idaho , and Wyoming . Ignoring the admonitions of local church authorities, every weekend thousands of Salt Lakers travel by car, bus, or plane to these neighboring states to gamble in casinos, buy lottery tickets, or (during the summer) bet on horse races. For better or wo...

The post-1989 transformation of the Egyptian art world reveals the particular tenacity of colonial logics and national attachments in culture industries built through anticolonial nationalism and socialism. Tensions emerged between and among Western and Egyptian curators, critics, and artists with the development of a foreign-dominated private-sector art market and as Egyptian art begins to cir...

The American flag is a frequently displayed national symbol in the United States. Given its high visibility and importance, the present research examines the consequences of exposure to the flag on Americans’ sense of national attachment. We hypothesized that the flag would increase patriotism, defined as love and commitment to one’s country, and nationalism, defined as a sense of superiority o...

Muslim art can also have a special significance for the Muslim world of today. Since this is its one cultural achievement widely accepted and admired by the West, a rededication to it can compensate the East to a certain degree for its scientific and technological retardation, something which neither the oil fields nor strategic location can achieve. Be that as it may, there has been and still ...