Equids--zebras, Asses, and Horses

Equids--zebras, Asses, and Horses
Author: Patricia Des Roses Moehlman
Publisher: IUCN
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2002
Genre: Endangered species
ISBN: 9782831706474

The new Equid Action Plan provides current knowledge on the biology, ecology and conservation status of wild zebras, asses, and horses. It specifies what information is lacking, and prioritizes needed conservation actions. The Action Plan also provides chapters on equid taxonomy, genetics, reproductive biology, and population dynamics. These chapters highlight unsolved issues of taxonomy and genetics. They also provide information and insight into the special demographic and genetic challenges of managing small populations. The chapter on disease provides a review of documented equine disease and epidemiology and focuses on priorities for equid conservation health. The final chapter deals with the importance of developing an assessment methodology that explicitly considers the role of equids in ecosystems and the ecological processes that are necessary for ecosystem viability. The approach of combining ecological field studies and ecosystem modeling should prove useful for the scientific management and conservation of wild equids worldwide. These chapters provide research and conservation practitioners with new information and paradigms.

The Aga Khan Case

The Aga Khan Case
Author: Teena Purohit
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2012-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674071581

An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.

Building the Empire, Building the Nation

Building the Empire, Building the Nation
Author: Daniel Haines
Publisher: OUP Pakistan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199068487

European empires disintegrated during the twentieth century, leaving newly-formed postcolonial states in their wake. In this turbulent period, governments sought new political idioms to support their claims to legitimacy as modern states. In Sindh, a part of British India and (later) of Pakistan, the late colonial and early post-colonial states combined major attempts to control the natural environment with a serious engagement with representative politics in their bid for legitimacy.