Muslim Women In War And Crisis : Representation and Reality

The following text 'Muslim Women In War And Crisis' is written by Lina Abirafeh and edited by Faegheh Shirazi . In the following text writer talks about women's rights in Afghanistan . 

She starts her talk with describing the gender politics in Afghanistan . She explains in the 19th century there had been an attempt of emanipation of women in Afghanistan . She also describes the relation between modernization and conservative black lash .

She then focuses on the post war period where aid agencies tried to save the afghan women . They also designed aid programs which have been unable to integrate women . Because  Afghan women were potrayed as weak women who need help from something because they cannot do it themselves . 

Then the writer also talks about the interview she had with the afghan women in the rural area where all of them were the participants of the aid program . She began her research by analyzing the identity to challenge the assumptions the gender , as self identity was the most important for analizing Afghan women . She asked them certain questions to get a better understanding of how Afghans themselves value certain aspects of their identities . The main objective of this interview was to demonstrate that does the aid programming artificial divisions based on sex may not be valid for some participants . Then she also talks about the worlds view about the afghan women is like slaves of men and prisoners in home . The meaning of women in Afghanistan has come to be "being deprived of all kinds of rights " Afghan women are synonymous with guilt and shame . Women in Afghanistan must give positions to themselves and have to struggle for there own rights in the society . She says that women are not allowed to educate because men are afraid to loose their importance as the 'man , important person of the house ' . 

Most important is what she writes about awareness that women suffer because they are not able to see the world from their eyes instead they are forced to do the things always told by others that has made them to suffer them alot . 

The Ephemera Of Eternity : The Irish Catholic Memorial Card As Material Culture

The following text 'The Ephemera Of Eternity : The Irish Catholic Memorial Card As Material culture is written by 'Mary Ann Bolger' . Mary Ann Bolger is a lecturer in Design History and Theory at Dublin Institute of Technology . She is a graduate of joint MA in history of design at the royal college of art and the Victoria and Albert Museum , London . 

She starts her text with describing the Irish Culture describing the relationship between the Irish culture to death . But the majority of this text focuses on the political uses of death and the funeral and on the folk tradition of the wake . She then focuses on the design of the memorial card , it is a mass produced object intimately associated with Irish catholic mourning . It has become throughout the twentieth century though largely undocumented , aspect of Irish Catholic funeral practice . A memorial card is a single or bi-folded card about two inches by four , with a holy picture on the obverse , typically an image of a christ , the virgin or a saint , sometimes reproductions of famous often counter-reformation , art works . O n the reverse sides one finds the name , date of death and address of the deceased and few short prayers .

A brief history of memorial cards : 

Memorial cards have only been a part of Irish Catholic Funeral practice since the 1870s , but the use of printed obituary cards in a catholic context seems to date to the first half of the seventeenth century . It was in the first decade that advertisements for catholic memorial cards first appeared in Ireland , during what the historian Emmet Larkin termed the devotional revolution . 

Evidence of the surviving cards appears that the repositiories supplied lithographed french and german holy cards with reverse either left blank or stereotyped with standard prayers to the Irish print trade . The modernisation of Irish Culture ,devotional revolution was a part of moderm form of production . Certainly the religious goods depots provided an economical way for Irish printers to produce high quality illustrated cards . 

Nowadays the trend is changing they mostly use photos of people rather than the potraits which represents the identity of the following family . The development of these memorial cards can be seen stylish and continuous as we can see earlier portraits were used but in todays world they use photos which is influenced by the printing techniques and styles . But at the end i like the tradition of the Catholic Ireland of the memorial cards but i think nowadays it is getting more modernised and commercial .