In the streets of the Tunisian summer getaway of Hammamet, in the seething quarters of Sadr City or in the claustrophobic neighborhoods of Beirut, hopelessly divided by the most primordial of religious and clan loyalties, Arab states looked exhausted, ossified and ideologically bankrupt, surviving merely to perpetuate themselves.
His dewy vixens, cuddly plush pets, alchemical symbols, religious emblems, primordial landscapes and slabs of meat challenge his audience not necessarily with their own oddity but with the introduction of their soothing cultural familiarity into unsettling circumstances.
Very few contemporary filmmakers venture so boldly or grandly onto the primordial terrain of philosophical and religious inquiry where the answers to basic and perennial questions seem to lie.
He described politics as an activity involving theater, music and even religious rites since "primordial" times, and, with a dash of humor, said about his field, "Just as psychoanalysts help people to have sex without guilt, we help people to like politics without remorse".
WATER, soil, wind, the sun, salt... in religious language, all the primordial elements of human experience have taken on new layers of meaning, as prophets, preachers and scribes down the ages, inspired or otherwise, struggled to express their intimations of the divine.
Theological and philosophical speculations and controversies centre within and between religious communities over the issues of the primordial nature of reality, dualisms, the process of creation, and the nature of time and space.
Her art has been seen as evoking primordial images of womanly power, the supernatural heft of indigenous Latin American religious ritual and the pain of exile from her native Cuba, which she left at 12, fleeing the Castro revolution.
This position was taken up and elaborated by an Austrian priest-anthropologist, Wilhelm Matthäus Schmidt, who reversed the evolutionary theory, holding that there was a primordial notion of a supreme being, a kind of original intellectual and religious conception of a single creator god, that degenerated in subsequent cultural stages.
Their obscene and sacrilegious actions punctuate the most important religious ceremonies and serve as a sign of the presence of the powerful primordial beings and as a means of social control by their satire of the antisocial behaviour of particular individuals.
It finds that, while a Muslim religious tradition predisposed a region's leaders to press greater separatist demands, such primordial factors were filtered through a rational calculus of the region's relative bargaining power in negotiations with the center and of the leader's own organizational interests.
That enabled them to focus on the advance of gay marriage, which they say not only betrays religious tradition but, more than any other development, undermines society because "marriage is the primordial human institution, a reality that existed long before the establishment of what we now know as the state".
