Lestari Dara Cinta Utami Ginting, Indira Fatra Deni Peranginangin, Rahmansyah Fadlul Al Karim Rambe
This study investigates religious diversity in Indonesia within a historical context, legal contradictions, and cultural acculturation which build the groundwork of living theology. Long-running contacts since the Hindu-Buddhist era, the arrival of Islam via trade and cultural infiltration, help to define Indonesian pluralism. It did not suddenly happen. preaching, Christian colonialism with contemporary education, and the dynamics of Reformasi and independence. Every stage provided particular types of engagement that together created a plurarity only found in the archipelago. The results of this study highlight contradictions at the current level: According to the Religious Harmony Index, interreligious peace is rather strong yet worldwide Studies confirm the high frequency of strict rules and social conflicts. This paradox implies that the state acts both as shield and restrictor, whereas society keeps social cohesiveness by cultural means. Maintaining pluralism has been shown to hinge mostly on cultural acculturation. Slametan, sekaten, yadnya, pela gandong, and grebeg Syawal show that pluralism is practiced daily rather than just founded on dogma or law. The hybridity hypothesis of Homi K. Bhabha helps to clarify that this cultural environment is a "third space" in which identities are negotiated and theological pluralism is formed. Therefore, this study provides a significant theoretical contribution: Indonesian pluralism is a living theology arising from historical negotiation, regulatory contradictions, and cultural conventions. Because this study relies on literature review, ethnographic field research is advised to further investigate the practice of pluralism at the community level. These results are intended to enrich the world dialogue by presenting a culturally grounded model of pluralism as an alternative amid the global crisis of bigotry.
Zeeshan Memon, Yiqi Su, Christo Kurisummoottil Thomas
et al.
World models have emerged as a unifying paradigm for learning latent dynamics, simulating counterfactual futures, and supporting planning under uncertainty. In this paper, we argue that computational epidemiology is a natural and underdeveloped setting for world models. This is because epidemic decision-making requires reasoning about latent disease burden, imperfect and policy-dependent surveillance signals, and intervention effects are mediated by adaptive human behavior. We introduce a conceptual framework for epidemiological world models, formulating epidemics as controlled, partially observed dynamical systems in which (i) the true epidemic state is latent, (ii) observations are noisy and endogenous to policy, and (iii) interventions act as sequential actions whose effects propagate through behavioral and social feedback. We present three case studies that illustrate why explicit world modeling is necessary for policy-relevant reasoning: strategic misreporting in behavioral surveillance, systematic delays in time-lagged signals such as hospitalizations and deaths, and counterfactual intervention analysis where identical histories diverge under alternative action sequences.
Hoseyn Arefiniya, Mohammad Rezapoor, Mostafa Soltani
How human beings will be resurrected in the Day of Resurrection is one of the most important topics related to resurrection in Islamic religions. This article, by collecting information in a library method, in an analytical-comparative method, is the answer to the question that from the perspective of Imamiyyah and Matridiyyah, will the resurrection of man on the Day of Resurrection be in the form of restoration of the destroyed object or will it be the gathering of scattered parts, together with the soul and soul?The purpose of the research is to create a platform for interaction and rapprochement between these two religions . Based on the findings of this research, most of Imamiyya theologians believed in the refusal to restore the dead, and as a result, the human being will be transported in the resurrection in the form of the transfer of the same elemental components, along with the soul and the soul. Unlike a small number of Imami theologians and the majority of Matridiyyah theologians, they believe in the permissibility of returning the annihilated, and as a result, the gathering of all human elements in the resurrection by God's perfect power, will be of annihilation and absolute nothingness. IntroductionThe issue of how the earthly body is resurrected in the afterlife has long been of interest to various schools and sects. Among them, the two theological schools of Imamiyyah and Matridayyyah have emphasized the eternal life of man in the afterlife. However, the fundamental difference lies in the manner in which the earthly body is resurrected to the afterlife, and the secret of this conflict lies in the return of the topic of resurrection to transcendental and non-sensuous matters that human science has not yet been able to explore in detail. (Fayyad Lahiji, Beta: 1/15)The two theological schools of Imamiyyah and Matridayyyah have had many things in common in most theological discussions, including adherence to narration and reason. Meanwhile, in some of the doctrinal issues between the two sects, including resurrection and the return of the extinct and the discussions surrounding it, no detailed and in-depth work has been done; therefore, this factor can be recognized as one of the reasons for the existence of a knowledge gap between these two sects; because responsibility and belief in the resurrection among the followers of these two schools can be a powerful lever in warding off evil and criminal acts; therefore, expressing the various angles of the resurrection can lead to the advancement of comparative and approximate studies among a significant range of Sunni Hanafi Matridi and Shia Twelvers.Meanwhile, the main research question between the Imamiyyah and the Matridiyyah is whether the resurrection of man in the resurrection is in the form of a return of the annihilated or not? That is, will the return of man on the resurrection be from annihilation and absolute nothingness, or will the return of man be in the form of a collection of scattered parts in the world?Using the analytical-comparative method, this research seeks to compare and contrast the views of the theologians of the two Imamiyyah and Matridiyyah schools on the manner of resurrecting man in the refusal to return the annihilated or its permissibility. Most Imamiyyah have argued in the discussion of the resurrection and the discussions around it, such as the permissibility or refusal of the return of the annihilated, using two narrative-rational methods; because in their doctrinal discussions, especially on the resurrection, they have used rational arguments in addition to narration (Mutahari, 1376: 3/92-95; Jibraeli, 1398: 59-65 and 273-283 and 289-290). However, most of the Matridi scholars are right. In most of their doctrinal discussions, they have also relied on reason in addition to narration. However, in the discussion of the resurrection and the discussions surrounding it, such as the return of the dead, they have been completely "narrative-oriented" and have only paid attention to auditory arguments, because from the perspective of this group, the discussions of the resurrection and its surroundings are beyond the reach of reason. (Matridi, 1427: 6-8; Samarqandi, 1440: 183; Nasafi, 1432: 428; Ibn Hammam, 2005: 140) For example, Najm al-Din Omar Nasafi, Abu al-Barakat Nasafi, and Ibn Kamal Pasha state in this regard: Many scholars of the Matridis school are silent on the extent and quality of the restoration of bodies and have generally agreed on accepting the restoration of bodies, whether it is restoration in the separation and addition of parts, or restoration from the non-existent; because they consider this discussion to be from narrations and they believe whatever the Quran and narrations indicate about it. (Nasfi, Bita: 108-110; Nasfi, 1432: 436-440; Ibn Kamal Pasha, 1430: 129) Therefore, in this article, first, the refusal or permissibility of restoring the extinct is examined from the perspective of the Imamiyyah and the Matridayyyah. Then, after determining the permissibility or refusal of restoring the extinct, the results and consequences of each of the views are discussed from the perspective of the two theological sects. BackgroundMany studies have been conducted on the issue of the return of the dead and the manner of human resurrection, some of the most important of which are:1- The article "The role of the issue of the return of the dead in the disputes of Islamic sects regarding the doctrine of bodily resurrection" by Ali Ma'mouri. In this article, the author examines the refusal or permissibility of the return of the dead from the perspective of some Ash'arite scholars such as Fakhr al-Razi, some philosophers such as Ibn Sina, and some philosopher-theologians such as Khwaja Nasir, Mulla Sadra, and Allama Tabataba'i.2- The article "A Study of the Return of the Dead from the Perspective of Islamic Theologians and Philosophers" by Ali Zia'i. In this article, the author first defines the return of the dead, then refers to the proponents of the permissibility and refusal of the return of the dead and their arguments from the perspective of some Ash'arite, Mu'tazilite, and Imamite scholars, and some scholars of the Mash'a and Transcendental Wisdom schools.3- The article “Revelationary Criticism and Analysis of the Assumption of the Extinction of Resurrection” by Seyyed Hassan Batha’i Golpayegani, the author in this article has responded to the suspicion of the assumption of the extinction of death; therefore, to move on to a clear answer, he first addressed the conceptualization of the assumption of the extinction, then the integration of the scattered elements, then he examined and analyzed the relationship between the assumption of the extinction and resurrection from the perspective of Imamiyyah theologians and some Ash’arites, as well as philosopher-theists of the Imamiyyah tradition such as Khwaja Nasir and Mulla Sadra, and Mohaqiq Sabzevari. Then he criticized and analyzed the suspicion of the extinction with the verses of the Quran; and finally, he came to the conclusion that the afterlife of man was not an example of the assumption of the extinction of death; so that the suspicion of the extinction of death was created.However, the advantage of the present research is that this article has considered and analyzed the issue of refusal and permissibility of the assumption of the extinction, as well as the transfer of the essence or likeness of the main and secondary elements from the perspective of the Imamiyyah and the Matridayyyah in a comparative manner; while the above studies, firstly, have not discussed the issue of nullification from the perspective of the Imamiyyah and the Matridayyyah, and secondly, they have not analyzed and examined the quality of the transfer of the same or similar main and secondary components in the discussion of the permissibility or refusal of nullification between the two schools of thought of the Imamiyyah and the Matridayyyah, or have paid less attention to this question with this approach. Thirdly, also, considering the examination conducted in the Matridayyyah school, no significant research has been seen on the issue of nullification; this reason could be another advantage of this study.
Standing in solidarity with and for the Earth is crucial for ecological conservation and preservation, particularly in the face of ongoing environmental crises such as pollution, deforestation, and climate change. Historically, solidarity empowered nations, to achieve significant milestones, including independence across Africa. However, current negligence of our Mother earth has led to severe consequences, including food insecurity and natural disasters, causing significant distress to the planet. This paper advocated for solidarity in the integration of Indigenous African knowledge as a powerful remedy for environmental degradation. African indigenous values, rooted in community unity and solidarity, have proven effective over time. Africans believed that taking care of their environment demanded solidarity with the living, the dead, the unborn and with flora and fauna. This traditional societies therefore emphasized collective responsibility for the environment, fostering teachings that were passed down through generations. For instance, the Luhya community in Kenya exemplified this approach through their commitment to conserving Kakamega Forest, the last remaining tropical rainforest in the country. This article explored the Luhya’s solidarity as a means of preserving their ecosystem. The paper hypothesized that the unity among the Luhya had played a vital role in sustaining the Kakamega forest. By applying Afroecosolidarity theory, the research suggested that a harmonious relationship between humans and nature was essential for environmental sustainability. The endeavour argued that the ecological crisis faced today was fundamentally a moral issue, advocating for community-based solidarity as a solution to conservation challenges. Additionally, the paper highlighted the efforts of Indigenous peoples in managing their environments, aligning with Principle 22 of the Rio Declaration. Through qualitative research methods, data was gathered from both primary and secondary sources to reinforce the argument that collective action rooted in Indigenous values can effectively address contemporary ecological challenges. The ultimate goal was to demonstrate that solidarity within communities is key to ecological preservation and to safeguarding our shared environment, emphasizing the interdependence of humanity and nature.
World models have shown potential in artificial intelligence by predicting and reasoning about world states beyond direct observations. However, existing approaches are predominantly evaluated in synthetic environments or constrained scene settings, limiting their validation in real-world contexts with broad spatial coverage and complex semantics. Meanwhile, remote sensing applications urgently require spatial reasoning capabilities for disaster response and urban planning. This paper bridges these gaps by introducing the first framework for world modeling in remote sensing. We formulate remote sensing world modeling as direction-conditioned spatial extrapolation, where models generate semantically consistent adjacent image tiles given a central observation and directional instruction. To enable rigorous evaluation, we develop RSWISE (Remote Sensing World-Image Spatial Evaluation), a benchmark containing 1,600 evaluation tasks across four scenarios: general, flood, urban, and rural. RSWISE combines visual fidelity assessment with instruction compliance evaluation using GPT-4o as a semantic judge, ensuring models genuinely perform spatial reasoning rather than simple replication. Afterwards, we present RemoteBAGEL, a unified multimodal model fine-tuned on remote sensing data for spatial extrapolation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RemoteBAGEL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on RSWISE.
Foundational world models must be both interactive and preserve spatiotemporal coherence for effective future planning with action choices. However, present models for long video generation have limited inherent world modeling capabilities due to two main challenges: compounding errors and insufficient memory mechanisms. We enhance image-to-video models with interactive capabilities through additional action conditioning and autoregressive framework, and reveal that compounding error is inherently irreducible in autoregressive video generation, while insufficient memory mechanism leads to incoherence of world models. We propose video retrieval augmented generation (VRAG) with explicit global state conditioning, which significantly reduces long-term compounding errors and increases spatiotemporal consistency of world models. In contrast, naive autoregressive generation with extended context windows and retrieval-augmented generation prove less effective for video generation, primarily due to the limited in-context learning capabilities of current video models. Our work illuminates the fundamental challenges in video world models and establishes a comprehensive benchmark for improving video generation models with internal world modeling capabilities.
The ability to simulate the effects of future actions on the world is a crucial ability of intelligent embodied agents, enabling agents to anticipate the effects of their actions and make plans accordingly. While a large body of existing work has explored how to construct such world models using video models, they are often myopic in nature, without any memory of a scene not captured by currently observed images, preventing agents from making consistent long-horizon plans in complex environments where many parts of the scene are partially observed. We introduce a new persistent embodied world model with an explicit memory of previously generated content, enabling much more consistent long-horizon simulation. During generation time, our video diffusion model predicts RGB-D video of the future observations of the agent. This generation is then aggregated into a persistent 3D map of the environment. By conditioning the video model on this 3D spatial map, we illustrate how this enables video world models to faithfully simulate both seen and unseen parts of the world. Finally, we illustrate the efficacy of such a world model in downstream embodied applications, enabling effective planning and policy learning.
Muhammad Qasim Ali, Aditya Sridhar, Shahbuland Matiana
et al.
Humanoid robots, with their human-like form, are uniquely suited for interacting in environments built for people. However, enabling humanoids to reason, plan, and act in complex open-world settings remains a challenge. World models, models that predict the future outcome of a given action, can support these capabilities by serving as a dynamics model in long-horizon planning and generating synthetic data for policy learning. We introduce Humanoid World Models (HWM), a family of lightweight, open-source models that forecast future egocentric video conditioned on humanoid control tokens. We train two types of generative models, Masked Transformers and Flow-Matching, on 100 hours of humanoid demonstrations. Additionally, we explore architectural variants with different attention mechanisms and parameter-sharing strategies. Our parameter-sharing techniques reduce model size by 33-53% with minimal impact on performance or visual fidelity. HWMs are designed to be trained and deployed in practical academic and small-lab settings, such as 1-2 GPUs.
Humans develop an understanding of intuitive physics through active interaction with the world. This approach is in stark contrast to current video models, such as Sora, which rely on passive observation and therefore struggle with grasping physical causality. This observation leads to our central hypothesis: authentic physical intuition of the world model must be grounded in extensive, causally rich interactions with the real world. To test this hypothesis, we present WoW, a 14-billion-parameter generative world model trained on 2 million robot interaction trajectories. Our findings reveal that the model's understanding of physics is a probabilistic distribution of plausible outcomes, leading to stochastic instabilities and physical hallucinations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this emergent capability can be actively constrained toward physical realism by SOPHIA, where vision-language model agents evaluate the DiT-generated output and guide its refinement by iteratively evolving the language instructions. In addition, a co-trained Inverse Dynamics Model translates these refined plans into executable robotic actions, thus closing the imagination-to-action loop. We establish WoWBench, a new benchmark focused on physical consistency and causal reasoning in video, where WoW achieves state-of-the-art performance in both human and autonomous evaluation, demonstrating strong ability in physical causality, collision dynamics, and object permanence. Our work provides systematic evidence that large-scale, real-world interaction is a cornerstone for developing physical intuition in AI. Models, data, and benchmarks will be open-sourced.
Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) is the problem of planning conflict-free paths from the designated start locations to goal positions for multiple agents. It underlies a variety of real-world tasks, including multi-robot coordination, robot-assisted logistics, and social navigation. Recent decentralized learnable solvers have shown great promise for large-scale MAPF, especially when leveraging foundation models and large datasets. However, these agents are reactive policy models and exhibit limited modeling of environmental temporal dynamics and inter-agent dependencies, resulting in performance degradation in complex, long-term planning scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose MAPF-World, an autoregressive action world model for MAPF that unifies situation understanding and action generation, guiding decisions beyond immediate local observations. It improves situational awareness by explicitly modeling environmental dynamics, including spatial features and temporal dependencies, through future state and actions prediction. By incorporating these predicted futures, MAPF-World enables more informed, coordinated, and far-sighted decision-making, especially in complex multi-agent settings. Furthermore, we augment MAPF benchmarks by introducing an automatic map generator grounded in real-world scenarios, capturing practical map layouts for training and evaluating MAPF solvers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAPF-World outperforms state-of-the-art learnable solvers, showcasing superior zero-shot generalization to out-of-distribution cases. Notably, MAPF-World is trained with a 96.5% smaller model size and 92% reduced data.
Objectives of the research: The aim of the article was to identify and analyse problematic areas related to how early Islam is presented and narrated in history textbooks, taking into account the local context.
Research methods: The data corpus consists of 12 history textbooks. The mixed methods approach applied in the study included cluster analysis and discourse analysis.
A brief description of the context of the issue: Islam and Muslims occupy limited space in the Polish school curricula, yet there is a plethora of information about the Islamic world in the public discourse. This puts a tremendous challenge on the shoulders of teachers and textbook authors to accurately present information about Islam and Muslims in schools.
Research findings: Three problematic areas were discovered and analysed: (a) narrating Islam from a mainstream, non-Muslim perspective, which in the Polish case might be skewed into presenting Islam through the lens of Catholicism; (b) navigating between historical accounts and legends whilst presenting early Islam; and (c) explaining past events by interpreting them through contemporary events.
Conclusions and recommendations: The article concludes by indicating challenges of teaching different religions in a largely mono-religious school setting, from the perspective of the classroom majority and Muslim students. Due to the marginal presence of Muslims in the public sphere, these narratives call for a more balanced approach. Otherwise, they can only further alienate and otherise Muslim students in the classrooms – and Islam in mainstream society.
Learning world models offers a promising avenue for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. By allowing agents to plan actions or exploratory goals without direct interaction with the environment, world models enhance exploration efficiency. The quality of a world model hinges on the richness of data stored in the agent's replay buffer, with expectations of reasonable generalization across the state space surrounding recorded trajectories. However, challenges arise in generalizing learned world models to state transitions backward along recorded trajectories or between states across different trajectories, hindering their ability to accurately model real-world dynamics. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel goal-directed exploration algorithm, MUN (short for "World Models for Unconstrained Goal Navigation"). This algorithm is capable of modeling state transitions between arbitrary subgoal states in the replay buffer, thereby facilitating the learning of policies to navigate between any "key" states. Experimental results demonstrate that MUN strengthens the reliability of world models and significantly improves the policy's capacity to generalize across new goal settings.
This study was undertaken to examine and gain better understanding of the impact that “modernization” or “urbanization” has on members of the diaspora community. Using the Osun Osogbo festival in Nigeria as a case study, the study examined the perception of these members
of the Nigerian diaspora community to the festival, their notion of cultural tourism celebration and their desire to participate. The study explored these migrants’ reservations with celebration
activities at the Sacred Grove during the festival. This exploratory study employed a qualitative research design based on in-depth interviews to elicit data. The target population were first-generation Nigerian migrants of Yoruba descent who live in South Africa. Findings from the
migrants’ experiences revealed that their reluctance was due to their reservation on the spiritual or religious undertones attached to these spiritual festivals. Many of these returning migrants no
longer desire to be identified with local religious or spiritual celebrations. By tapping into tourism and heritage, the study thus submits that, enhancing the relevance of the grove and the festival, as a tool to improve cultural and heritage tourism will best be achieved if religion can be separated from cultural celebrations.
The question of land is indeed a vexing one in contemporary South Africa. White control of land and the unequal distribution thereof was one of the pillars of the apartheid system. During colonial rule and under apartheid, numerous communities were simply expelled from their
land. The Land Act of 1913 had a diabolical effect in dislocating communities and separated people from their traditional inheritance and from each other. Dispossession of land by its original inhabitants in waves of incessant forced removals proved to be highly distressing and
ultimately led to enduring poverty for the masses. It is important in our predominantly Christian society to atone for past ills and to redress some of the ills relating to land which were in fact human rights abuses, by considering inter alia, Leviticus 25 as a starting point. Thus, a
Christian stance is considered to be important from both a biblical and ethical perspective as land dispossession due to inhuman laws is addressed. We are stressing the fact that only in a liberating relationship with God can we consider and apply human rights and that in African
thought social issues are viewed from a communitarian perspective in which the common good takes precedence.
Jackson Hlungwani is a locally recognised South African artist and he is internationally acclaimed with a considerable amount of literature written about his life and work, highlighting his uniqueness distinct rural style (Leibhammer & Nel, 2022) and commercialised value
(Lauwrens, 2007: 121-124). He was born around 1923 (according to his grandmother, it was during the time of the Kaiser’s war) (Burnett, 1989: 4). Having acknowledged his contribution to the arts, this paper analyses the man and his work from a different viewpoint, focusing on three aspects of his life namely the human, spiritual and artistic. However, these three aspects should not be considered three independently functioning sides of this man’s existence but three tightly interwoven elements. The research investigates how Hlungwani’s physical pain was embodied in his religious activities and wooden creations and how his suffering, caused by a chronic condition of damaged body tissue, was faced, accepted and assimilated to
become a source of spiritual strength supporting his religious ideology and artistic inspiration guiding his remarkable creativity. This study highlights how this South African-born artist dealt with his chronic, somatic condition and turned it from a supernatural condemnation into a source of spiritual strength and creative inspiration. Therefore, through a comparative
approach, the study uses relevant published and unpublished biographic material, justified critics and preserved manuscripts in libraries, the media, art museums and exhibitions to unpack the theme of physical pain as a source of spiritual and artistic inspiration in Jackson Hlungwani’s work.
Starting off by categorizing the specific means through which modernity manifests itself in the field of religion and utilizing an ethnography-based methodological strategy, the following paper documents the emergence of Zalmoxianism, a contemporary replica of the religion of the Dacians, which are considered the ancestors of Romanians; they used to inhabit areas around the Carpathians and the Lower Danube before the Roman Conquest (106 A.D.). While subscribing to the theoretical precepts meant to surpass the sociological prejudice according to which modernity exhausts a religiously transcendent view on the world, this paper closely analyzes the conceptual deconstruction of secularization as a total phenomenon while sat the same time isolating the social actor as a non-secularized segment.
To cope with the challenging environment of the planned high luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), scheduled to start operation in 2029, CMS will replace its entire tracking system. The requirements for the tracker are largely determined by the long operation time of 10 years with an instantaneous peak luminosity of up to $7.5\times 10^{34}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ in the ultimate performance scenario. Depending on the radial distance from the interaction point, the silicon sensors will receive a particle fluence corresponding to a non-ionizing energy loss of up to $Φ_{\text{eq}} = 3.5\times 10^{16}$ cm$^{-2}$ . This paper focuses on planar pixel sensor design and qualification up to a fluence of $Φ_{\text{eq}} = 1.4\times 10^{16}$ cm$^{-2}$. For the development of appropriate planar pixel sensors an R\&D program was initiated, which includes $n^+$-$p$ sensors on 150 mm (6'') wafers with an active thickness of 150 $μm$ with pixel sizes of $100\times 25$ $μm^2$ and $50\times 50$ $μm^2$ manufactured by Hamamatsu. Single chip modules with ROC4Sens and RD53A readout chips were made. Irradiation with protons and neutrons, as well was an extensive test beam campaign at DESY were carried out. This paper presents the investigation of various assemblies mainly with ROC4Sens readout chips. It demonstrates that multiple designs fulfill the requirements in terms of breakdown voltage, leakage current and efficiency. The single point resolution for $50\times 50$ $μm^2$ pixels is measured as 4.0 $μm$ for non-irradiated samples, and 6.3 $μm$ after irradiation to $Φ_{\text{eq}} = 7.2\times 10^{15}$ cm$^{-2}$.
Often times, a written piece unfolds with a presentation which is somewhat introductory in nature. In this sphere, the preamble of the subject matter is unveiled and this tends to form the framework of the whole literature; in fact, a clear picture of the foreword helps the reader, audience or interpreter unravel the message of the piece because the prologue serves as a key to unlock
several other parts of the book. This understanding seems inherent in the Gospel of John, one of the books that present the account of Jesus’ ministry on earth. Although, the book of John has been widely controversial, its prologue (1:1-18) is an integral portion in the account and it has received a great deal of attention because of its wholeness and its importance to the book in its
entirety. This study critically engages the prologue of the Johannine Gospel with the view of ascertaining its significance and importance to the Gospel account as a whole.
1. Introduction During the course of history, music has always occupied an extraordinary position among different cultures and nations. Plato regards music learning as one of children’s educational principles (Plato, Book III, 2004, p. 399). Furthermore, the role of music in humans’ every-day lives is quite clear. Whether in ancient times or today, humans have always paid special attention to music, attempting to convey their messages to God through music and rhythmic words. Despite today’s progress in technology, there are still traditions alive among the people of Zagros which are deeply rooted in mythologies; they are connected to a universe beyond the material world and are mostly accompanied by the sound of Sornā musical instrument. Various functions of this instrument in the culture of the people of Zagros include martial arts, festivities, providing comfort in grief, conveying messages, promising hope, and mythical and mystical functions such as asking for rain, asking for a male offspring, driving the moon out of the hands of evil forces, and helping to find lost corpses in rivers. The present study seeks to provide answers to the following questions: What are the functions of Sornā musical instrument in the culture of the people of Zagros? What are the origins and philosophies behind those functions? 2.Methodology The present study was conducted using the descriptive-analytical method. Data were collected using library studies, field research and references to the comments of philosophers including Aristotle, Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Durant. 3.Discussion The nature of music is complex and mystical. During the course of history, man has always had an exceptional outlook towards music. Particularly in the spiritual culture and folkloric and mythological beliefs of Iranian ethnicities, music has always occupied a special position. Sublime instances of music are manifested through different religions, faiths, and ethnicities. Various rituals and ceremonies of all religions are somehow accompanied by a specific type of music. As two ethnicities that safeguard the Iranian culture, Lurs and Kurds have always had a special place for music in their hearts. In this study, seven cases of the religious functions of Sornā musical instrument in the culture of the people of Zagros is examined; these people play Sornā musical instrument in martial arts, festivities, funerals, wedding ceremonies, and other folkloric traditions. In Lorestan and Bakhtiari, Sornā musical instrument is used to induce excitement and a sense of epic feeling into warriors. Albeit, this type of music is deeply rooted in the Iranian ancient history; in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, there has been many instances of trumpet playing to announce the commencement of wars. In funerals, Sornā musical instrument would be played in a sorrowful tone which also stems from Iranian ancient history and mythology. What makes music in Zagros region a unique genre are the mystical and mythological functions of this musical instrument in the modern world. People of Zagros would seek help from this instrument in order to ask for rain, ask for male offspring, find lost corpses drowned underwater, and seek shelter from natural disasters such as lunar eclipse. Subsequently, it can be expressed that Sornā musical instrument is an inseparable part of the lives of people who live in Zagros region. 4.Conclusion Music occupies an exceptional position in the hearts of all ethnicities and nations throughout the globe. Ancient civilization and humans from past historical periods have had an extraterrestrial perspective towards music; they would attempt to convey their messages to gods through music and rhythm. In ancient times, there has been an inseparable bond between music and temples. Music has retained its special position in the modern world as well. Though Sornā is an international musical instrument with a variety of functions, it has a special bond with souls and minds of the people of Zagros. This instrument has always accompanied these people in battles, festivities, sickness and health. In addition, the instrument serve mystical and mythological functions in the culture of the people of Zagros which is worth reflecting upon in terms of mythological point of view. One of the functions of this instrument involves conveying terrestrial and extraterrestrial messages. In the past where modern messaging services were non-existent, Lurs and Kurds would convey their messages of happiness or sorrow to distant lands using the instrument. Moreover, they would also convey their wishes and requests to God through the magical sound of Sornā musical instrument; a subject also reflected upon by Nietzsche. The majority of common traditions in the culture of the people of Zagros are deeply rooted in myths and incredibly reflect mythological beliefs, all of which are performed using this instrument. One of these rituals is a ceremony held to ask for a male offspring. In this ceremony where Sornā musical instrument is played, a woman who desires to bear a male child would climb a mountain with a group of instrument players and would ask the sun for a male offspring through beautiful poems pertaining to the greatness and fairness of the sun. The song in this ceremony is very similar to a pray written in Mehryasht. She would also bestow upon the sun a piece of bread; according to Iranian and Greek mythological beliefs, the Sun was the god of music and growth and people would bread and flour upon the Sun as well. Additionally, in ceremonies held to ask for rain which is a common affair among almost all faiths and religions, Lurs and Kurds would play Sornā to convey their wishes to God; a subject that is discussed clearly in Tiryasht. Moreover, the people of Zagros believed that lunar eclipses occur as a result of a battle between evil and godly forces. According to their beliefs, the Jinn intended to curse the moon as a force of God; a subject that is mentioned in Avesta and advocated by Al-Biruni. Therefore, people would attempt to curse the Jinn using music (Sornā) which was considered as a godly weapon. Similar to the people from the South and North of Iran, these people would also use the magical force of Sornā to find corpses lost in rivers.
Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture, Fine Arts