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Chapter 2 explicates the five factors of music, medicine, and culture—the physical/biological, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of life that must be factored into human experience to bring about transformation in one or all dimensions; builds upon the quantum theories of Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg, to explore the culture-specific, culture-transcendent and potentially universal aspects of these factors, focusing on the history and culture of Badakhshan Tajikistan and emphasizing the role of a mystical orientation to life, the spiritual power of baraka, the practices of samâ‘ and zekr, prayer, meditation, the Persian language, and maddâh poetry play in the process of devotional musical healing. The chapter also explores collaborative and integrative research where physiological experiments can form part of ethnographic research, and ethnographic research inform experimental health science research and practice.

This chapter analyses the causes of the civil war sparked off by the deposing of Imam al–Salt in 272/886 and which ended up with the collapse of the First Imamate in a Caliphate invasion. It was not really Yaman versus Nizâr conflict, but an increasing marginalization of the northern tribes in manoeuvres over power and patronage in the Imamate system. The actual deposing and replacement of the Imam led to a growing dispute between the so-called Rustâq and Nizwâ parties, which is examined and shown as less to do with politics than principles in the early days of its formulation by Abû Sa'îd al–Kudami and Ibn Baraka. An attempt is made to resolve the confusion over dating events and personalities involved in the complex relationship between interior Oman and the occupying powers on the coast (Saffarids, Bûyids, Qarâmita and their Omani vassals) in the ensuing period, to understand how the (Second) major Imamate was re-established, Rustâq party dogma declared official, causing the Hadrami Imam Abû Ishâq Ibrâhîm b. al–Qays to break away as well as finally alienating the northern Omanis.

This chapter analyses the resurgence of the jazz avant‐garde in New York in the mid‐1960s, focusing in particular upon musicians' negotiation of competing aesthetic, social, and economic imperatives. Through a detailed investigation of shifting patterns of reception in the jazz press, attention is drawn to a complex of factors that lifted the jazz avant‐garde from near obscurity in the early years of the decade, to a canonised status by 1965. Prominent amongst these factors was the politically radical discourse promoted by figures associated with the Black Arts Movement such as Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, which conceived black avant‐garde musicians as shaping the spiritual foundation for revolutionary change. The articulation of a radical social purpose thus assisted the process of canonisation, although this canonisation brought no parallel economic success.

This chapter explores Charles Olson’s and Amiri Baraka’s various ways of letting the body into their writing. Olson’s Maximus (1960-1970), for example, equates fidelity to a viewer’s particular perception and body with fidelity to meaning, privileging American immigrant experiences in the process. He imagines that the puff of air he breathes (when speaking a word) can be an element of that world—like a piece of newspaper—captured by the poet. Drawing on archival sources, we see how Olson injects his pluralist poetics with the administrative ideology he developed in the 1940s at the US Office of War Information. Such a relationship between perception, politics, breath, and meaning also characterizes Amiri Baraka’s early writing (as LeRoi Jones), when he identifies Olson’s influence on his work in “How You Sound??” (1960). Although Baraka’s Black Nationalist poetry of the 1960s and early 1970s explicitly rejects white American poetry, his adoption of Olson’s poetics of identity emphasizes racial qualities of voice over the meaning of words.

Inspired the repressive act of the colonial powers, LeRoi Jones (or known by his Muslim name, Amiri Baraka) capitalizes on his educational background and profession to come up with publications disputing the discourses of the Western civilizations. According to the commentaries, Baraka attempts to acquire an expressive identity and performative arguments in some of his writings—all of which put emphasis on reformations. It is asserted that to be able to employ changes, there must be recognition of the historical facts and contingencies. Despite the criticisms of Baraka's works, the idea that he contributed to the liberalization of his countrymen, the recovery from the black drama, and the restoration of the “spirituality of blackness” will be greatly appreciated by future generations of Africans.

This book of postwar American poetry's obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Friendship.” Emerson drives home his belief that true friendship, at its most intense and productive, is a wonderful yet confounding contradiction. This equivocal attitude about friendship and the possibilities for communion with others has reverberated throughout the history and development of American poetry. The book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-World War II American poetry and its development. By focusing on the work and interrelations of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets—the “New York School” poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka—the book investigates the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the uneasy role of the individual within them.

This chapter provides a theoretical and historical background for the subsequent analysis of how dissonant companionship plays out in the work of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka. It examines the entrenched concept that the avant-garde is a communal enterprise and will draw attention to the enduring individualism that threatens to explode that notion. It then situates the post-war avant-garde within two crucial contexts to understand better this strain of nonconforming individualism, the profound ambivalence that post-war avant-garde poets feel toward the avant-garde itself, and the theory of discordant friendship that is so central to their work. The chapter looks at how the poets of the 1950s are affected by distinctive features of 1950s Cold War culture.

The supreme importance of turning away—and its centrality to the definition of poetry itself—speaks volumes about Amiri Baraka's poetics and the course of his volatile, controversial career. The strenuous effort to push off from whatever has moved him, at whatever cost, is truly the soul of Baraka's work. Baraka's emphasis on “turning away” closely resembles the idea of “abandonment” so important to the brand of radical, experimental individualism that begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson and energizes the New American Poetry of Baraka and his compatriots. Baraka's relationship with the white avant-garde community is not, as most accounts have it, a simple case of a young, confused African-American poet desperately searching for his “true” voice, eventually triumphing by shedding his white friends and their way of writing and at last arriving at a more political and “blacker” art.

Amiri Baraka envisions poetry to be a form of contentious position-taking in the literary field. In his poems, his plays, and his one highly experimental novel, Baraka's writing confronts, in diverse ways, the conflict between the nonconformist impulse and the desire to join forces with a collective artistic movement. From his older friend Frank O'Hara, Baraka learns that poetry itself can be an arena in which to grapple with friendship and its discontents, even to play off the writing of one's friends. However, Baraka's writings are fraught with even greater pain, urgency, and indecision than O'Hara's ambivalent poems. His works simultaneously celebrate and try to jettison a series of intertwined values and concepts: avant-garde poetics, whiteness, Western literary tradition, and, as this chapter suggests, homosexuality.

This book has examined a vision of poetry that icontinually turns away from and returns to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka and their contemporaries. The postwar avant-garde New American Poetry and the various tributaries that flow from it, among them Language poetry, establish poetry as a unique forum in which to negotiate the paradoxes of affiliation, assimilation, friendship, and personal autonomy. By continuously confronting in memorable words and metaphors its philosophical, psychological, social, and poetic quandaries, post-war American poetry demonstrates that friendship is surely one of the most curious of human phenomena, one that Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly calls a “paradox in nature.” From the 19th century to the present moment, some of the most vibrant, most enduring American writing has attempted to shed light on this infinitely rich relation, this knotty oxymoron so central to cultural narratives, literature, and people's lives.

Annual special issues of Scientific American enabled the public to learn about a scientific topic and sometimes to see that scientific knowledge was provisional, the subject of dispute within the profession itself. Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island responds to the divisions about nuclear energy revealed in two special issues on energy and ecology. The chapter offers a detailed close reading of George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” in the context of a special issue of Scientific American on the city. Whether or not Oppen read the magazine, he responded to current debates among social scientists about how to solve the problems of the metropolis, especially their use of the calculative rationality that Heidegger deplored. In one article, Kevin Lynch claims that the city is a work of art. Oppen’s poem disagrees, and the chapter shows just how extensively he works to challenge the aesthetic vision of the city as art. The final section of the chapter places Amiri Baraka’s poem “Ka ‘Ba” in the context of the mostly liberal discussions of race science in Scientific American, and also discusses the wider debates about the persistence of eugenicist racial science in other scientific journals.

This chapter discusses sacred topography, providing a background to pilgrimage sites and the manner in which Jews and Muslims employed Scripture to refer to sacred places. It examines how Jews and Muslims understood sacred space through similar means. It explains how sacred topography, as depicted in Scripture and shaped by the physical environment and sensory and ritual means, informs and transforms the process of rediscovering sacred space. Baraka lies at the foundation of Jewish and Muslim conceptions and perceptions of the sacred. The consecration of sacred space as well as popular stories and traditions described the way in which devotees venerated saints at shrines and interacted with each other.

This chapter discusses the saint, the doctrine of sainthood in Islam, and the absence of doctrine in Judaism. It examines the sanctity of persons as embodied in historical and biographical accounts and theological discussions concerning the saint and miracles in medieval Islam. The Muslim saint was recognised as a mediator, holy person, miracle worker, healer, and a warrior for the faith. The discussion looks at the force of Baraka, which manifested itself in the persons of saints and their belongings and the value with which devotees invested their persons and effects. The absence of living saints and a medieval tradition of saints in Judaism did not preclude the emergence of belief in miracles, which were displayed through the merits of the ancestors at their shrines.

This chapter examines Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964) and The Slave (1964) as dialectical theses on black violence as performance in the Black Arts Movement. By combining Foucault’s idea of “reverse discourse” with Adorno’s notion of “truth content,” this chapter considers Baraka’s plays not as celebrations of violence but as playful meditations on the racial tensions of the 1960s. In particular, Baraka seems to suggest that violence as a political strategy can go only so far—that black art must be radical and salubrious, acerbic and sincere. As texts, Baraka’s plays seem to revel in the very same discourses at the center of their critique.  This type of deconstructive reading of these plays enables a more nuanced engagement with Baraka’s multifaceted, often seemingly contradictory, narratives of resistance to racial hegemonies. 

This chapter shifts from the 'microscopic' to the 'macroscopic' perspective, to make several observations on medieval Islamic constructions of the 'sacred'. It demonstrates similarities between the understanding of sacred place and time, points out the common vocabulary describing them, and lists the shared set of rites performed in them. Recurrent themes - such as references to the benevolent presence of angels, events of sacred history, the apparition of holy men, the remittance of sins, God's excessive mercy and baraka - are noted here. The chapter also summarizes the opinions of the Hanbali-Sunni Ibn Taymiyya and the Shiʿi Ibn Tawus on these beliefs and practices. Notwithstanding pious devotions, festivities associated with sacred times and places served also political ends, communal purposes, and the formation of identities.

Qut al-Qulub (1899–1968) was the second daughter of “al-Sayyidi” 'Abd al-Rahim Mustafa al-Demirdash Pasha and his wife Zeinab, al-Tawdya born April 18, 1899. In her early years, she lived in the spacious surroundings of the Muhammadi lands and apartments. In many Muslim societies, it is common for women to want to bear a male child. It was known in the order that Qut provided a conduit for women who wanted the blessing (Baraka) of the shaikh to help them conceive a male child. There is no doubt for the Demirdashiya that the annual mulid immediately after the three-day retreat is the highlight of the ritual year. Mulid time was also the time when future financial assistance might be discussed, such as funding for a wedding.

The Detroit rock band MC5 are known for their affiliation with the White Panther Party, a radical group founded in Ann Arbor in 1968 by poet, jazz critic, and arts promoter John Sinclair. This chapter argues that the MC5 did not simply engage in cultural appropriation of Black music but rather sought to transform it into a new idiom relevant to white musicians and radicals like themselves. Rather than attempt literal imitations of blues or avant-garde jazz, the MC5 self-consciously adapted the form and style of their African American influences into a new context. This approach also informed their political stance, which was itself an adaptation, sometimes reverential and sometimes whimsical, of the ideas of Black Power figures such as Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver. The MC5 believed that their commitment to African American music inspired and justified their political activism, but this belief was always threatened by their tenuous position as white performers of that music.