مطالب

Piety for Muslim women is an internal source of agency, which motivates their social presence and fulfills their political commitments. In spite of the prevalence of Orientalist views on Muslim women for centuries, a new space has opened under transnational feminism in recent years to re-consider their socio-political interpretations. The present paper discusses the situation of women in West Asia, where global terrorism has emerged with a recently developed counter-terrorism outlook among Muslim women. Defending the Shiite sanctuaries in Syria and Iraq against the Takfiris symbolically embodies this counter-terrorism ideology, for which hundreds of Muslims have sacrificed their lives. This study explores the ideas and ideals of Shiite Iranian and Afghan women who have lost their husbands in Syria or Iraq fighting against the ISIS. Deep semi-structured interviews depicted their definitions of “martyrdom” as a new and transnational identity. In addition, the analysis of their understanding of opportunities and challenges, within the family or at a social scale, revealed five major themes: a) transnational solidarity of the Islamic Ummah, b) the significance of jihadi culture to preserve the global peace, c) strong Shiite leadership/Wilayat-al-Faqih, d) motherhood a simultaneous opportunities and challenges, and e) intersectionality of motherly challenges for Afghan women.

The Middle East and North Africa regions have been the focus of security crises since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Although insecurity has not been restricted in this region, its effects are evident in other regions of the international system, especially in the European countries. With this in mind, the main question of the present article is how can a comprehensive model be presented to fundamentally resolve the security issue in the region. The result of this study is that "regional awareness" is a concept on the basis of which one can find a way out of the existing security impasse. In fact, the results are based on the fact that native solutions to the security of the country, instead of rental security, bring peace and security to the region. In this regard, governments, intellectuals, and people must engage in regional negotiations to fulfill their national interests.

Properly inves tigating the potential of nature in the formation of architectural concepts needs a theoretical framework in which its analytical components can explain the methods of utilization of nature. Although some attempts have been made in this regard, considering the missing elements, there is s till a significant gap in the literature and a s tudy for introducing a more comprehensive theoretical framework has yet to be conducted. The aim of this s tudy is, therefore, firs tly, to present a theoretical framework that can explain the role of nature in the creation of architectural concepts by its detailed factors and, secondly, to apply this framework for inves tigating nature-inspired works of Toyo Ito. Accordingly, this documentary paper is based on a theoretical approach supported mainly by the outcomes of a literature review and case s tudy analysis, which utilizes the descriptive-analytical method. For the case s tudy part, projects were selected from various scales and functions to ensure proper evaluation. Both qualitative and quantitative tactics have been used in data analysis. Findings demons trated that the highes t rate in regards to the itemized factors of the Theoretical Framework of the s tudy relates to ‘Integration of natural elements in spatial articulation’ and the lowes t rate corresponds to ‘Usage of material in their raw and brutal s tate’. Moreover, though the highes t level of utilization of nature among the cases, is related to ‘Grin Grin’, a large-scale project, yet considering all the frequencies, it can be argued that the larger scale does not necessarily imply the higher frequency.