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Samuel Renshaw

Samuel Renshaw (1892–1981) was an American psychologist whose work became famous for a short period of time during World War II when he taught sailors to identify enemy aircraft in a split second, using tachistoscopic training. He generally worked with fast-reading and enhancing the latent ability of the mind. He believed that most people used only one-fifth of their available mind-power to process information. By using methods of flashing pages he produced students who could read as fast as 1,200 to 1,400 words per minute.

Renshaw became involved in the establishment of the Midwestern Psychological Association and served as the organization's Secretary-Treasurer in 1929. For his contributions to the war effort the United States Navy awarded him the Navy Distinguished Public Service Award in 1955. He wrote 23 volumes of a journal Visual Psychology.

Robert A. Heinlein depicted the technique in several of his works, including Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and Gulf (1949); and mentioned Renshaw in the context of the training of Fair Witnesses in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). He cited a Saturday Evening Post article on Renshaw's studies for responses to fan mail about the subject.

This technique and equipment appeared at the Ravenswood School District (near Stanford University) for a short time in the 1960s. Several young students took part in the experiment, which involved film-strip readers and page-at-a-glance equipment.

The "Renshaw Training System for Aircraft and Ship Recognition" is considered to have "saved untold lives during World War II".

title: Samuel Renshaw


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Generic function

In computer programming, a generic function is a function defined for polymorphism.

In statically typed languages
In statically typed languages (such as C++ and Java), the term generic functions refers to a mechanism for compile-time polymorphism (static dispatch), specifically parametric polymorphism. These are functions defined with TypeParameters, intended to be resolved with compile time type information. The compiler uses these types to instantiate suitable versions, resolving any function overloading appropriately.

In Common Lisp Object System
In some systems for object-oriented programming such as the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) and Dylan, a generic function is an entity made up of all methods having the same name. Typically a generic function is an instance of a class that inherits both from function and standard-object. Thus generic functions are both functions (that can be called with and applied to arguments) and ordinary objects. The book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol explains the implementation and use of CLOS generic functions in detail.

One of the early object-oriented programming extensions to Lisp is Flavors. It used the usual message sending paradigm influenced by Smalltalk. The Flavors syntax to send a message is:

With New Flavors, it was decided the message should be a real function and the usual function calling syntax should be used:

message now is a generic function, an object and function in its own right. Individual implementations of the message are called methods.

The same idea was implemented in CommonLoops. New Flavors and CommonLoops were the main influence for the Common Lisp Object System.

Common Lisp
Define a generic function with two parameters object-1 and object-2. The name of the generic function is collide.

Methods belonging to the generic function are defined outside of classes. Here we define a method for the generic function collide which is specialized for the classes asteroid (first parameter object-1) and spaceship (second parameter object-2). The parameters are used as normal variables inside the method body. There is no special namespace that has access to class slots.

Calling the generic function:

Common Lisp can also retrieve individual methods from the generic function. FIND-METHOD finds the method from the generic function collide specialized for the classes asteroid and spaceship.

Comparison to other languages
Generic functions correspond roughly to what Smalltalk terms methods, with the notable exception that, in Smalltalk, the receiver's class is the sole determinant of which body of code is called: the types or values of the arguments are irrelevant (single dispatch). In a programming language with multiple dispatch when a generic function is called, method dispatch occurs on the basis of all arguments, not just one which is privileged. New Flavors also provided generic functions, but only single dispatch.

In JavaScript, a generic function is a function that can work with values of different types, rather than a specific type. This is achieved through the use of type parameters or by dynamically checking the type of the value being operated on. One common use case for generic functions in JavaScript is to create reusable functions that can work with different data types, such as arrays, strings, or objects. JavaScript's dynamic typing system makes it particularly suited for the creation of generic functions, as values can be easily coerced or converted to different types as needed.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Generic function


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Muslim world

The terms Muslim world and Islamic world commonly refer to the Islamic community, which is also known as the Ummah. This consists of all those who adhere to the religious beliefs, politics, and laws of Islam or to societies in which Islam is practiced. In a modern geopolitical sense, these terms refer to countries in which Islam is widespread, although there are no agreed criteria for inclusion. The term Muslim-majority countries is an alternative often used for the latter sense.

The history of the Muslim world spans about 1,400 years and includes a variety of socio-political developments, as well as advances in the arts, science, medicine, philosophy, law, economics and technology during the Islamic Golden Age. Muslims look for guidance to the Quran and believe in the prophetic mission of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, but disagreements on other matters have led to the appearance of different religious schools of thought and sects within Islam. The Islamic conquests, which culminated in the Caliphate being established across three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe), enriched the Muslim world, achieving the economic preconditions for the emergence of this institution owing to the emphasis attached to Islamic teachings. In the modern era, most of the Muslim world came under European colonial domination. The nation states that emerged in the post-colonial era have adopted a variety of political and economic models, and they have been affected by secular as well as religious trends.

, the combined GDP (nominal) of 60 Muslim majority countries was US$5.7 trillion. , they contributed 8% of the world's total. In 2020, the Economy of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation which consists of 57 member states had a combined GDP(PPP) of US$ 24 trillion which is equal to about 18% of world's GDP or US$ 30 trillion with 5 OIC observer states which is equal to about 22% of the world's GDP.

As of 2020, 1.8 billion or more than 25% of the world population are Muslims. By the percentage of the total population in a region considering themselves Muslim, 91% in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA), 89% in Central Asia, 40% in Southeast Asia, 31% in South Asia, 30% in Sub-Saharan Africa, 25% in Asia, 1.4% in Oceania, 6% in Europe, and 1% in the Americas.

Most Muslims are of one of two denominations: Sunni Islam (87–90%)*
 * Sunni Islam: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide "Sunni Islam is the dominant division of the global Muslim community, and throughout history it has made up a substantial majority (85 to 90 percent) of that community."
 * and Shia (10–13%).See
 * However, other denominations exist in pockets, such as Ibadi (primarily in Oman). Muslims who do not belong to, do not self-identify with, or cannot be readily classified under one of the identifiable Islamic schools and branches are known as non-denominational Muslims.   About 13% of Muslims live in Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country; % of Muslims live in South Asia, the largest population of Muslims in the world; % in the Middle East–North Africa, where it is the dominant religion; and 15% in Sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa (primarily in Nigeria). Muslims are the overwhelming majority in Central Asia, the majority in the Caucasus,  and widespread in Southeast Asia. India has the largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and Egypt are home to the world’s second, fourth, sixth and seventh largest Muslim populations respectively. Sizeable Muslim communities are also found in the Americas, Russia, India, China, and Europe. Islam is the fastest-growing major religion in the world partially due to their high birth rate,   according to the same study, religious switching has no impact on Muslim population, since the number of people who embrace Islam and those who leave Islam are roughly equal. China has the third largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries, while Russia has the fifth largest Muslim population. Nigeria has the largest Muslim population in Africa, while Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in Asia.
 * However, other denominations exist in pockets, such as Ibadi (primarily in Oman). Muslims who do not belong to, do not self-identify with, or cannot be readily classified under one of the identifiable Islamic schools and branches are known as non-denominational Muslims.   About 13% of Muslims live in Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country; % of Muslims live in South Asia, the largest population of Muslims in the world; % in the Middle East–North Africa, where it is the dominant religion; and 15% in Sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa (primarily in Nigeria). Muslims are the overwhelming majority in Central Asia, the majority in the Caucasus,  and widespread in Southeast Asia. India has the largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and Egypt are home to the world’s second, fourth, sixth and seventh largest Muslim populations respectively. Sizeable Muslim communities are also found in the Americas, Russia, India, China, and Europe. Islam is the fastest-growing major religion in the world partially due to their high birth rate,   according to the same study, religious switching has no impact on Muslim population, since the number of people who embrace Islam and those who leave Islam are roughly equal. China has the third largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries, while Russia has the fifth largest Muslim population. Nigeria has the largest Muslim population in Africa, while Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in Asia.
 * However, other denominations exist in pockets, such as Ibadi (primarily in Oman). Muslims who do not belong to, do not self-identify with, or cannot be readily classified under one of the identifiable Islamic schools and branches are known as non-denominational Muslims.   About 13% of Muslims live in Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country; % of Muslims live in South Asia, the largest population of Muslims in the world; % in the Middle East–North Africa, where it is the dominant religion; and 15% in Sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa (primarily in Nigeria). Muslims are the overwhelming majority in Central Asia, the majority in the Caucasus,  and widespread in Southeast Asia. India has the largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and Egypt are home to the world’s second, fourth, sixth and seventh largest Muslim populations respectively. Sizeable Muslim communities are also found in the Americas, Russia, India, China, and Europe. Islam is the fastest-growing major religion in the world partially due to their high birth rate,   according to the same study, religious switching has no impact on Muslim population, since the number of people who embrace Islam and those who leave Islam are roughly equal. China has the third largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries, while Russia has the fifth largest Muslim population. Nigeria has the largest Muslim population in Africa, while Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in Asia.
 * However, other denominations exist in pockets, such as Ibadi (primarily in Oman). Muslims who do not belong to, do not self-identify with, or cannot be readily classified under one of the identifiable Islamic schools and branches are known as non-denominational Muslims.   About 13% of Muslims live in Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country; % of Muslims live in South Asia, the largest population of Muslims in the world; % in the Middle East–North Africa, where it is the dominant religion; and 15% in Sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa (primarily in Nigeria). Muslims are the overwhelming majority in Central Asia, the majority in the Caucasus,  and widespread in Southeast Asia. India has the largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and Egypt are home to the world’s second, fourth, sixth and seventh largest Muslim populations respectively. Sizeable Muslim communities are also found in the Americas, Russia, India, China, and Europe. Islam is the fastest-growing major religion in the world partially due to their high birth rate,   according to the same study, religious switching has no impact on Muslim population, since the number of people who embrace Islam and those who leave Islam are roughly equal. China has the third largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries, while Russia has the fifth largest Muslim population. Nigeria has the largest Muslim population in Africa, while Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in Asia.
 * However, other denominations exist in pockets, such as Ibadi (primarily in Oman). Muslims who do not belong to, do not self-identify with, or cannot be readily classified under one of the identifiable Islamic schools and branches are known as non-denominational Muslims.   About 13% of Muslims live in Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country; % of Muslims live in South Asia, the largest population of Muslims in the world; % in the Middle East–North Africa, where it is the dominant religion; and 15% in Sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa (primarily in Nigeria). Muslims are the overwhelming majority in Central Asia, the majority in the Caucasus,  and widespread in Southeast Asia. India has the largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and Egypt are home to the world’s second, fourth, sixth and seventh largest Muslim populations respectively. Sizeable Muslim communities are also found in the Americas, Russia, India, China, and Europe. Islam is the fastest-growing major religion in the world partially due to their high birth rate,   according to the same study, religious switching has no impact on Muslim population, since the number of people who embrace Islam and those who leave Islam are roughly equal. China has the third largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries, while Russia has the fifth largest Muslim population. Nigeria has the largest Muslim population in Africa, while Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in Asia.

Terminology
The term has been documented as early as 1912 to encompass the influence of perceived pan-Islamic propaganda. The Times described Pan-Islamism as a movement with power, importance, and cohesion born in Paris, where Turks, Arabs and Persians congregated. The correspondent's focus was on India: it would take too long to consider the progress made in various parts of the Muslim world. The article considered the position of the Amir, the effect of the Tripoli Campaign, Anglo-Russian action in Persia, and "Afghan Ambitions".

In a modern geopolitical sense, the terms 'Muslim world' and 'Islamic world' refer to countries in which Islam is widespread, although there are no agreed criteria for inclusion. Some scholars and commentators have criticised the term 'Muslim/Islamic world' and its derivative terms 'Muslim/Islamic country' as "simplistic" and "binary", since no state has a religiously homogeneous population (e.g. Egypt's citizens are c. 10% Christians), and in absolute numbers, there are sometimes fewer Muslims living in countries in which they make up the majority than in countries in which they form a minority. Hence, the term 'Muslim-majority countries' is often preferred in literature.

History

The history of the Islamic faith as a religion and social institution begins with its inception around 610 CE, when the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a native of Mecca, is believed by Muslims to have received the first revelation of the Quran, and began to preach his message. In 622 CE, facing opposition in Mecca, he and his followers migrated to Yathrib (now Medina), where he was invited to establish a new constitution for the city under his leadership. This migration, called the Hijra, marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. By the time of his death, Muhammad had become the political and spiritual leader of Medina, Mecca, the surrounding region, and numerous other tribes in the Arabian Peninsula.

After Muhammad died in 632, his successors (the Caliphs) continued to lead the Muslim community based on his teachings and guidelines of the Quran. The majority of Muslims consider the first four successors to be 'rightly guided' or Rashidun. The conquests of the Rashidun Caliphate helped to spread Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula, stretching from northwest India, across Central Asia, the Near East, North Africa, southern Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. The Arab Muslims were unable to conquer the entire Christian Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor during the Arab–Byzantine wars, however. The succeeding Umayyad Caliphate attempted two failed sieges of Constantinople in 674–678 and 717–718. Meanwhile, the Muslim community tore itself apart into the rivalling Sunni and Shia sects since the killing of caliph Uthman in 656, resulting in a succession crisis that has never been resolved. The following First, Second and Third Fitnas and finally the Abbasid Revolution (746–750) also definitively destroyed the political unity of the Muslims, who have been inhabiting multiple states ever since. Ghaznavids' rule was succeeded by the Ghurid Empire of Muhammad of Ghor and Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad, whose reigns under the leadership of Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji extended until the Bengal, where Indian Islamic missionaries achieved their greatest success in terms of dawah and number of converts to Islam. Qutb ud-Din Aibak conquered Delhi in 1206 and began the reign of the Delhi Sultanate, a successive series of dynasties that synthesized Indian civilization with the wider commercial and cultural networks of Africa and Eurasia, greatly increased demographic and economic growth in India and deterred Mongol incursion into the prosperous Indo-Gangetic Plain and enthroned one of the few female Muslim rulers, Razia Sultana. Notable major empires dominated by Muslims, such as those of the Abbasids, Fatimids, Almoravids, Gao Empire, Seljukids, largest contiguous Songhai Empire (15th-16th centuries) of Sahel, West Africa, southern North Africa and western Central Africa which dominated the centers of Islamic knowledge of Timbuktu, Djenne, Oualata and Gao, Ajuran, Adal and Warsangali in Somalia, Mughals in the Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc.), Safavids in Persia and Ottomans in Anatolia, Massina Empire, Sokoto Caliphate of northern Nigeria, Toucouleur Empire, were among the influential and distinguished powers in the world. 19th-century colonialism and 20th-century decolonisation have resulted in several independent Muslim-majority states around the world, with vastly differing attitudes towards and political influences granted to, or restricted for, Islam from country to country. These have revolved around the question of Islam's compatibility with other ideological concepts such as secularism, nationalism (especially Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism, as opposed to Pan-Islamism), socialism (see also Arab socialism and socialism in Iran), democracy (see Islamic democracy), republicanism (see also Islamic republic), liberalism and progressivism, feminism, capitalism and more.

Gunpowder empires
Scholars often use the term Age of the Islamic Gunpowders to describe period the Safavid, Ottoman and Mughal states. Each of these three empires had considerable military exploits using the newly developed firearms, especially cannon and small arms, to create their empires. They existed primarily between the fourteenth and the late seventeenth centuries. During the 17th–18th centuries, when the Indian subcontinent was ruled by Mughal Empire's sixth ruler Muhammad Auranzgeb through sharia and Islamic economics, India became the world's largest economy, valued 25% of world GDP.

Great Divergence
The Great Divergence was the reason why European colonial powers militarily defeated preexisting Oriental powers like the Mughal Empire, starting from the wealthy Bengal Subah, Tipu Sultan's Kingdom of Mysore, the Ottoman Empire and many smaller states in the pre-modern Greater Middle East, and initiated a period known as 'colonialism'.

Colonialism

Beginning with the 15th century, colonialism by European powers profoundly affected Muslim-majority societies in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Colonialism was often advanced by conflict with mercantile initiatives by colonial powers and caused tremendous social upheavals in Muslim-dominated societies.

A number of Muslim-majority societies reacted to Western powers with zealotry and thus initiating the rise of Pan-Islamism; or affirmed more traditionalist and inclusive cultural ideals; and in rare cases adopted modernity that was ushered by the colonial powers.

The only Muslim-majority regions not to be colonized by the Europeans were Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Turkey was one of the first colonial powers of the world with the Ottoman empire ruling several states for over 6 centuries.

Postcolonial era
In the 20th century, the end of the European colonial domination has led to creation of a number of nation states with significant Muslim populations. These states drew on Islamic traditions to varying degree and in various ways in organizing their legal, educational and economic systems. The Times first documented the term "Muslim world" in 1912 when describing Pan-Islamism as a movement with power importance and cohesion born in Paris where Turks, Arabs and Persians congregated. The article considered The position of the Amir; the effect of the Tripoli Campaign; Anglo-Russian action in Persia; and "Afghan Ambitions".

A significant change in the Muslim world was the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1908–1922), to which the Ottoman officer and Turkish revolutionary statesman Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had an instrumental role in ending and replacing it with the Republic of Turkey, a modern, secular democracy (see Abolition of the Ottoman sultanate). The secular values of Kemalist Turkey, which separated religion from the state with the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924, have sometimes been seen as the result of Western influence.

In the 21st century, after the September 11 attacks (2001) coordinated by the Wahhabi Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda  against the United States, scholars considered the ramifications of seeking to understand Muslim experience through the framework of secular Enlightenment principles. Muhammad Atta, one of the 11 September hijackers, reportedly quoted from the Quran to allay his fears: "Fight them, and God will chastise them at your hands/And degrade them, and He will help you/Against them, and bring healing to the breasts of a people who believe", referring to the ummah, the community of Muslim believers, and invoking the imagery of the early warriors of Islam who lead the faithful from the darkness of jahiliyyah.

By Sayyid Qutb's definition of Islam, the faith is "a complete divorce from jahiliyyah". He complained that American churches served as centers of community social life that were "very hard [to] distinguish from places of fun and amusement". For Qutb, Western society was the modern jahliliyyah. His understanding of the "Muslim world" and its "social order" was that, presented to the Western world as the result of practicing Islamic teachings, would impress "by the beauty and charm of true Islamic ideology". He argued that the values of the Enlightenment and its related precursor, the Scientific Revolution, "denies or suspends God's sovereignty on earth" and argued that strengthening "Islamic character" was needed "to abolish the negative influences of jahili life."

Islam by country
As the Muslim world came into contact with secular ideals, societies responded in different ways. Some Muslim-majority countries are secular. Azerbaijan became the first secular republic in the Muslim world, between 1918 and 1920, before it was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Turkey has been governed as a secular state since the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. By contrast, the 1979 Iranian Revolution replaced a monarchial semi-secular regime with an Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini.

Some countries have declared Islam as the official state religion. In those countries, the legal code is largely secular. Only personal status matters pertaining to inheritance and marriage are governed by Sharia law. In some places, Muslims implement Islamic law, called sharia in Arabic. The Islamic law exists in a number of variations, called schools of jurisprudence. The Amman Message, which was endorsed in 2005 by prominent Islamic scholars around the world, recognized four Sunni schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali), two Shia schools (Ja'fari, Zaidi), the Ibadi school, and the Zahiri school.

Islamic states
Eight Islamic states have adopted Islam as the ideological foundation of state and constitution.

 * 🇦🇫 Afghanistan
 * Brunei
 * 🇮🇷 Iran
 * 🇲🇷 Mauritania
 * 🇴🇲 Oman
 * 🇵🇰 Pakistan
 * 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia
 * 🇾🇪 Yemen

State religion
The following nineteen Muslim-majority states have endorsed Islam as their state religion, and though they may guarantee freedom of religion for citizens, do not declare a separation of state and religion:

 * 🇩🇿 Algeria
 * 🇧🇭 Bahrain
 * 🇧🇩 Bangladesh
 * 🇰🇲 Comoros
 * 🇩🇯 Djibouti
 * 🇪🇬 Egypt
 * 🇮🇶 Iraq
 * 🇯🇴 Jordan
 * 🇰🇼 Kuwait
 * 🇱🇾 Libya
 * 🇲🇾 Malaysia
 * 🇲🇻 Maldives
 * 🇲🇦 Morocco
 * Palestine
 * 🇶🇦 Qatar
 * 🇸🇴 Somalia
 * Syria
 * 🇹🇳 Tunisia
 * 🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates

Secular states
Twenty-two Secular states in the Muslim world have declared separation between civil/government affairs and religion.

 * 🇦🇱 Albania
 * 🇦🇿 Azerbaijan
 * 🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina
 * 🇧🇫 Burkina Faso
 * 🇹🇩 Chad
 * 🇬🇲 Gambia
 * 🇬🇳 Guinea
 * 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau
 * 🇮🇩 Indonesia (except Aceh province)
 * 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan
 * Kosovo
 * 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan
 * 🇲🇱 Mali
 * 🇳🇪 Niger
 * 🇳🇬 Nigeria
 * 🇸🇳 Senegal
 * 🇸🇱 Sierra Leone
 * 🇸🇩 Sudan
 * 🇹🇯 Tajikistan
 * 🇹🇷 Turkey
 * 🇹🇲 Turkmenistan
 * 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan

Others

 * 🇱🇧 Lebanon

Muslim-minority states
According to the Pew Research Center in 2015 there were 50 Muslim-majority countries, which are shown in the Government and religion section above in the article. Apart from these, large Muslim populations exist in some countries where Muslims are a minority, and their Muslim communities are larger than many Muslim-majority nations:
 * 🇮🇳 india: 200 million Muslims (14.6%)
 * 🇪🇹 ethiopia: 34.7 million Muslims (31.3%)
 * 🇨🇳 china: 25–40 million Muslims (2–3%)
 * undefined: 19.4 million Muslims (35.2%)
 * 🇷🇺 russia: 14–20 million Muslims (10–14%)
 * 🇨🇮 côte d'ivoire: 12 million Muslims (42%)
 * undefined: 10 million Muslims (15%)
 * 🇵🇭 philippines: 8–9 million Muslims (9–10%)

Politics

During much of the 20th century, the Islamic identity and the dominance of Islam on political issues have arguably increased during the early 21st century. The fast-growing interests of the Western world in Islamic regions, international conflicts and globalization have changed the influence of Islam on the world in contemporary history.

Demographics
More than 24.1% of the world's population is Muslim, with an estimated total of approximately 1.9 billion. Muslims are the majority in 49 countries, they speak hundreds of languages and come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The city of Karachi has the largest Muslim population in the world.

Geography

Because the terms 'Muslim world' and 'Islamic world' are disputed, since no country is homogeneously Muslim, and there is no way to determine at what point a Muslim minority in a country is to be considered 'significant' enough, there is no consensus on how to define the Muslim world geographically. The only rule of thumb for inclusion which has some support, is that countries need to have a Muslim population of more than 50%.

In 2010, 73% of the world's Muslim population lived in countries where Muslims are in the majority, while 27% of the world's Muslim population lived in countries where Muslims are in the minority. India's Muslim population is the world's largest Muslim-minority population in the world (11% of the world's Muslim population). Jones (2005) defines a "large minority" as being between 30% and 50%, which described nine countries in 2000, namely Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, North Macedonia, and Tanzania. As of 2024, however, Nigeria has become a Muslim-majority country.

Islam
The two main denominations of Islam are the Sunni and Shia sects. They differ primarily upon of how the life of the ummah ("faithful") should be governed, and the role of the imam. Sunnis believe that the true political successor of Muhammad according to the Sunnah should be selected based on ٍShura (consultation), as was done at the Saqifah which selected Abu Bakr, Muhammad's father-in-law, to be Muhammad's political but not his religious successor. Shia, on the other hand, believe that Muhammad designated his son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib as his true political as well as religious successor.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world, between 87 and 90%, are Sunni. Shias and other groups make up the rest, about 10–13% of overall Muslim population. The countries with the highest concentration of Shia populations are: Iran – 89%, Azerbaijan – 65%, Iraq – 60%, Bahrain – 60%, Yemen – 35%, Turkey – 10%, Lebanon – 27%, Syria – 13%, Afghanistan – 10%, Pakistan – 10%,       and India – 10%.

Non-denominational Muslims make up a majority of the Muslims in seven countries (and a plurality in three others): Albania (65%), Kyrgyzstan (64%), Kosovo (58%), Indonesia (56%), Mali (55%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (54%), Uzbekistan (54%), Azerbaijan (45%), Russia (45%), and Nigeria (42%). They are found primarily in Central Asia. Kazakhstan has the largest number of non-denominational Muslims, who constitute about 74% of the population. Southeastern Europe also has a large number of non-denominational Muslims.

The Kharijite Muslims, who are less known, have their own stronghold in the country of Oman holding about 75% of the population.

Islamic schools and branches
The first centuries of Islam gave rise to three major sects: Sunnis, Shi'as and Kharijites. Each sect developed distinct jurisprudence schools (madhhab) reflecting different methodologies of jurisprudence (fiqh).

The major Sunni madhhabs are Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali.

The major Shi'a branches are Twelver (Imami), Ismaili (Sevener) and Zaidi (Fiver). Isma'ilism later split into Nizari Ismaili and Musta’li Ismaili, and then Mustaali was divided into Hafizi and Taiyabi Ismailis. It also gave rise to the Qarmatian movement and the Druze faith, although Druzes do not identify as Muslims. Twelver Shiism developed Ja'fari jurisprudence whose branches are Akhbarism and Usulism, and other movements such as Alawites, Shaykism and Alevism.

Similarly, Kharijites were initially divided into five major branches: Sufris, Azariqa, Najdat, Adjarites and Ibadis.

Among these numerous branches, only Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali, Imamiyyah-Ja'fari-Usuli, Nizārī Ismā'īlī, Alevi, Zaydi, Ibadi, Zahiri, Alawite, Druze and Taiyabi communities have survived. In addition, new schools of thought and movements like Quranist Muslims and Ahmadi Muslims later emerged independently.

Other religions
There are sizeable non-Muslim minorities in many Muslim-majority countries, includes, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Bahai's, Druzes, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Yarsanis and Zoroastrians. The Muslim world is home to some of the world's most ancient Christian communities, and some of the most important cities of the Christian world—including three of its five great patriarchates (Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople). Scholars and intellectuals agree Christians have made significant contributions to Arab and Islamic civilization since the introduction of Islam, and they have had a significant impact contributing the culture of the Middle East and North Africa and other areas. Pew Research Center estimates indicate that in 2010, more than 64 million Christians lived in countries with Muslim majorities (excluding Nigeria). The Pew Forum study finds that Indonesia (21.1 million) has the largest Christian population in the Muslim world, followed by Egypt, Chad and Kazakhstan. While according to Adly A. Youssef and Martyn Thomas, in 2004, there were around 30 million Christians who lived in countries with Muslim majorities, with the largest Christian population number lived in Indonesia, followed by Egypt. Nigeria is divided almost evenly between Muslims and Christians, with more than 80 million Christians and Muslims.

In 2018, the Jewish Agency estimated that around 27,000 Jews live in Arab and Muslim countries. Jewish communities have existed across the Middle East and North Africa since the rise of Islam. Today, Jews residing in Muslim countries have been reduced to a small fraction of their former sizes, with the largest communities of Jews in Muslim countries exist in the non-Arab countries of Iran (9,500) and Turkey (14,500); both, however, are much smaller than they historically have been. Among Arab countries, the largest Jewish community now exists in Morocco with about 2,000 Jews and in Tunisia with about 1,000. The number of Druze worldwide is between 800,000 and one million, with the vast majority residing in the Levant (primarily in Syria and Lebanon).

In 2010, the Pew Forum study finds that Bangladesh (13.5 million), Indonesia (4 million), Pakistan (3.3 million) and Malaysia (1.7 million) has a sizeable Hindu minorities. Malaysia (5 million) has the largest Buddhist population in the Muslim world. Zoroastrians are the oldest remaining religious community in Iran.

Literacy and education
The literacy rate in the Muslim world varies. Azerbaijan is in second place in the Index of Literacy of World Countries. Some members such as Iran, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan have over 97% literacy rates, whereas literacy rates are the lowest in Mali, Afghanistan, Chad and other parts of Africa. Several Muslim-majority countries, such as Turkey, Iran and Egypt have a high rate of citable scientific publications.

In 2015, the International Islamic News Agency reported that nearly 37% of the population of the Muslim world is unable to read or write, basing that figure on reports from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In Egypt, the largest Muslim-majority Arab country, the youth female literacy rate exceeds that for males. Lower literacy rates are more prevalent in South Asian countries such as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but are rapidly increasing. In the Eastern Middle East, Iran has a high level of youth literacy at 98%, but Iraq's youth literacy rate has sharply declined from 85% to 57% during the American-led war and subsequent occupation. Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, has a 99% youth literacy rate.

A 2011 Pew Research Center showed that at the time about 36% of all Muslims had no formal schooling, with only 8% having graduate and post-graduate degrees. The highest of years of schooling among Muslim-majority countries found in Uzbekistan (11.5), Kuwait (11.0) and Kazakhstan (10.7). In addition, the average of years of schooling in countries in which Muslims are the majority is 6.0 years of schooling, which lag behind the global average (7.7 years of schooling). In the youngest age (25–34) group surveyed, Young Muslims have the lowest average levels of education of any major religious group, with an average of 6.7 years of schooling, which lag behind the global average (8.6 years of schooling). The study found that Muslims have a significant amount of gender inequality in educational attainment, since Muslim women have an average of 4.9 years of schooling, compared to an average of 6.4 years of schooling among Muslim men.

Refugees

According to the UNHCR, Muslim-majority countries hosted 18 million refugees by the end of 2010.

Since then Muslim-majority countries have absorbed refugees from recent conflicts, including the uprising in Syria. In July 2013, the UN stated that the number of Syrian refugees had exceeded 1.8 million. In Asia, an estimated 625,000 refugees from Rakhine, Myanmar, mostly Muslim, had crossed the border into Bangladesh since August 2017.

Culture
Throughout history, Muslim cultures have been diverse ethnically, linguistically and regionally. According to M. M. Knight, this diversity includes diversity in beliefs, interpretations and practices and communities and interests. Knight says perception of Muslim world among non-Muslims is usually supported through introductory literature about Islam, mostly present a version as per scriptural view which would include some prescriptive literature and abstracts of history as per authors own point of views, to which even many Muslims might agree, but that necessarily would not reflect Islam as lived on the ground, 'in the experience of real human bodies'.

Classical culture
The term "Islamic Golden Age" has been attributed to a period in history during which science, economic development and cultural works in most of the Muslim-dominated world flourished. The age is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars from various parts of the world sought to translate and gather all the known world's knowledge into Arabic, and to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258. The Abbasids were influenced by the Quranic injunctions and hadiths, such as "the ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr," that stressed the value of knowledge. The major Islamic capital cities of Baghdad, Cairo, and Córdoba became the main intellectual centers for science, philosophy, medicine, and education. During this period, the Muslim world was a collection of cultures; they drew together and advanced the knowledge gained from the ancient Greek, Roman, Persian, Chinese, Vedic, Egyptian, and Phoenician civilizations.

Ceramics

Between the 8th and 18th centuries, the use of ceramic glaze was prevalent in Islamic art, usually assuming the form of elaborate pottery. Tin-opacified glazing was one of the earliest new technologies developed by the Islamic potters. The first Islamic opaque glazes can be found as blue-painted ware in Basra, dating to around the 8th century. Another contribution was the development of fritware, originating from 9th-century Iraq. Other centers for innovative ceramic pottery in the Old world included Fustat (from 975 to 1075), Damascus (from 1100 to around 1600) and Tabriz (from 1470 to 1550).

Literature
The best known work of fiction from the Islamic world is One Thousand and One Nights, a compilation of folk tales from Sanskrit, Persian, and later Arabian fables. The concept had been influenced by a pre-Islamic Persian prototype Hezār Afsān (Thousand Fables) that relied on particular Indian elements. It reached its final form by the 14th century; the number and type of tales have varied from one manuscript to another. This work has been very influential in the West since it was translated in the 18th century, first by Antoine Galland. Imitations were written, especially in France. Various characters from this epic have themselves become cultural icons in Western culture, such as Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba.

An example of Arabic poetry and Persian poetry on romance is Layla and Majnun, dating back to the Umayyad era in the 7th century. It is a tragic story of undying love. Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the national epic of Greater Iran, is a mythical and heroic retelling of Persian history. Amir Arsalan was also a popular mythical Persian story.

Ibn Tufayl (Abubacer) and Ibn al-Nafis were pioneers of the philosophical novel. Ibn Tufail wrote the first Arabic novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Philosophus Autodidactus) as a response to Al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and then Ibn al-Nafis also wrote a novel Theologus Autodidactus as a response to Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus. Both of these narratives had protagonists (Hayy in Philosophus Autodidactus and Kamil in Theologus Autodidactus) who were autodidactic feral children living in seclusion on a desert island, both being the earliest examples of a desert island story. However, while Hayy lives alone with animals on the desert island for the rest of the story in Philosophus Autodidactus, the story of Kamil extends beyond the desert island setting in Theologus Autodidactus, developing into the earliest known coming of age plot and eventually becoming the first example of a science fiction novel.

Theologus Autodidactus, written by the Arabian polymath Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288), deals with various science fiction elements such as spontaneous generation, futurology, the end of the world and doomsday, resurrection, and the afterlife. Rather than giving supernatural or mythological explanations for these events, Ibn al-Nafis attempted to explain these plot elements using the scientific knowledge of biology, astronomy, cosmology and geology known in his time. Ibn al-Nafis' fiction explained Islamic religious teachings via science and Islamic philosophy. Translations of Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus appeared in Latin (1671), English (1708), German, and Dutch. These European-language translations may have later inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Robert Boyle's The Aspiring Naturalist.

Philosophy

One of the common definitions for "Islamic philosophy" is "the style of philosophy produced within the framework of Islamic culture." Islamic philosophy, in this definition is neither necessarily concerned with religious issues, nor is exclusively produced by Muslims. The Persian scholar Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980–1037) had more than 450 books attributed to him. His writings were concerned with various subjects, most notably philosophy and medicine. His medical textbook The Canon of Medicine was used as the standard text in European universities for centuries. He also wrote The Book of Healing, an influential scientific and philosophical encyclopedia.

Another figure from the Islamic Golden Age, Avicenna, also founded his own Avicennism school of philosophy, which was influential in both Islamic and Christian lands.

Yet another influential philosopher who had an influence on modern philosophy was Ibn Tufail. His philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, translated into Latin as Philosophus Autodidactus in 1671, developed the themes of empiricism, tabula rasa, nature versus nurture, condition of possibility, materialism, and Molyneux's problem. European scholars and writers influenced by this novel include John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, Melchisédech Thévenot, John Wallis, Christiaan Huygens, George Keith, Robert Barclay, the Quakers, and Samuel Hartlib.

Islamic philosophers continued making advances in philosophy through to the 17th century, when Mulla Sadra founded his school of Transcendent theosophy and developed the concept of existentialism.

Other influential Muslim philosophers include al-Jahiz, a pioneer in evolutionary thought; Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), a pioneer of phenomenology and the philosophy of science and a critic of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Aristotle's concept of place (topos); Al-Biruni, a critic of Aristotelian natural philosophy; Ibn Tufail and Ibn al-Nafis, pioneers of the philosophical novel; Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, founder of Illuminationist philosophy; Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, a critic of Aristotelian logic and a pioneer of inductive logic; and Ibn Khaldun, a pioneer in the philosophy of history.

Sciences
Ibn al-Haytham is also regarded as the father of optics, especially for his empirical proof of the intromission theory of light. Jim Al-Khalili stated in 2009 that Ibn al-Haytham is 'often referred to as the "world's first true scientist".' al-Khwarzimi's invented the log base systems that are being used today, he also contributed theorems in trigonometry as well as limits. Recent studies show that it is very likely that the Medieval Muslim artists were aware of advanced decagonal quasicrystal geometry (discovered half a millennium later in the 1970s and 1980s in the West) and used it in intricate decorative tilework in the architecture.

Muslim physicians contributed to the field of medicine, including the subjects of anatomy and physiology: such as in the 15th-century Persian work by Mansur ibn Muhammad ibn al-Faqih Ilyas entitled Tashrih al-badan (Anatomy of the body) which contained comprehensive diagrams of the body's structural, nervous and circulatory systems; or in the work of the Egyptian physician Ibn al-Nafis, who proposed the theory of pulmonary circulation. Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine remained an authoritative medical textbook in Europe until the 18th century. Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (also known as Abulcasis) contributed to the discipline of medical surgery with his Kitab al-Tasrif ("Book of Concessions"), a medical encyclopedia which was later translated to Latin and used in European and Muslim medical schools for centuries. Other medical advancements came in the fields of pharmacology and pharmacy.

Some most famous scientists from the medieval Islamic world include Jābir ibn Hayyān, al-Farabi, Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Biruni, Avicenna, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Ibn Khaldun.

Technology

In technology, the Muslim world adopted papermaking from China. The knowledge of gunpowder was also transmitted from China via predominantly Islamic countries, where formulas for pure potassium nitrate were developed.

Advances were made in irrigation and farming, using new technology such as the windmill. Crops such as almonds and citrus fruit were brought to Europe through al-Andalus, and sugar cultivation was gradually adopted by the Europeans. Arab merchants dominated trade in the Indian Ocean until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century. Hormuz was an important center for this trade. There was also a dense network of trade routes in the Mediterranean, along which Muslim-majority countries traded with each other and with European powers such as Venice, Genoa and Catalonia. The Silk Road crossing Central Asia passed through Islamic states between China and Europe. The emergence of major economic empires with technological resources after the conquests of Timur (Tamerlane) and the resurgence of the Timurid Renaissance include the Mali Empire and the India's Bengal Sultanate in particular, a major global trading nation in the world, described by the Europeans to be the "richest country to trade with".

Muslim engineers in the Islamic world made a number of innovative industrial uses of hydropower, and early industrial uses of tidal power and wind power. The industrial uses of watermills in the Islamic world date back to the 7th century, while horizontal-wheeled and vertical-wheeled water mills were both in widespread use since at least the 9th century. A variety of industrial mills were being employed in the Islamic world, including early fulling mills, gristmills, paper mills, hullers, sawmills, ship mills, stamp mills, steel mills, sugar mills, tide mills and windmills. By the 11th century, every province throughout the Islamic world had these industrial mills in operation, from al-Andalus and North Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia. Muslim engineers also invented crankshafts and water turbines, employed gears in mills and water-raising machines, and pioneered the use of dams as a source of water power, used to provide additional power to watermills and water-raising machines. Such advances made it possible for industrial tasks that were previously driven by manual labour in ancient times to be mechanized and driven by machinery instead in the medieval Islamic world. The transfer of these technologies to medieval Europe had an influence on the Industrial Revolution, particularly from the proto-industrialised Mughal Bengal and Tipu Sultan's Kingdom, through the conquests of the East India Company.

Arts
The term "Islamic art and architecture" denotes the works of art and architecture produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by culturally Islamic populations.

Aniconism
No Islamic visual images or depictions of God are meant to exist because it is believed that such artistic depictions may lead to idolatry. Muslims describe God by the names and attributes that, according to Islam, he revealed to his creation. All but one sura of the Quran begins with the phrase "In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful". Images of Mohammed are likewise prohibited. Such aniconism and iconoclasm can also be found in Jewish and some Christian theology.

Arabesque
Islamic art frequently adopts the use of geometrical floral or vegetal designs in a repetition known as arabesque. Such designs are highly nonrepresentational, as Islam forbids representational depictions as found in pre-Islamic pagan religions. Despite this, there is a presence of depictional art in some Muslim societies, notably the miniature style made famous in Persia and under the Ottoman Empire which featured paintings of people and animals, and also depictions of Quranic stories and Islamic traditional narratives. Another reason why Islamic art is usually abstract is to symbolize the transcendence, indivisible and infinite nature of God, an objective achieved by arabesque. Islamic calligraphy is an omnipresent decoration in Islamic art, and is usually expressed in the form of Quranic verses. Two of the main scripts involved are the symbolic kufic and naskh scripts, which can be found adorning the walls and domes of mosques, the sides of minbars, and so on.

Distinguishing motifs of Islamic architecture have always been ordered repetition, radiating structures, and rhythmic, metric patterns. In this respect, fractal geometry has been a key utility, especially for mosques and palaces. Other features employed as motifs include columns, piers and arches, organized and interwoven with alternating sequences of niches and colonnettes. The role of domes in Islamic architecture has been considerable. Its usage spans centuries, first appearing in 691 with the construction of the Dome of the Rock mosque, and recurring even up until the 17th century with the Taj Mahal. And as late as the 19th century, Islamic domes had been incorporated into European architecture.

Calendar
Two calendars are used all over the Muslim world. One is a lunar calendar that is most widely used among Muslims. The other one is a solar calendar officially used in Iran and Afghanistan.

Women
According to Riada Asimovic Akyol while Muslim women's experiences differs a lot by location and personal situations such as family upbringing, class and education; the difference between culture and religions is often ignored by community and state leaders in many of the Muslim majority countries, the key issue in the Muslim world regarding gender issues is that religious texts constructed in highly patriarchal environments and based on biological essentialism are still valued highly in Islam; hence views emphasizing on men's superiority in unequal gender roles are widespread among many conservative Muslims (men and women). Orthodox Muslims often believe that rights and responsibilities of women in Islam are different from that of men and sacrosanct since assigned by the God. According to Asma Barlas patriarchal behaviour among Muslims is based in an ideology which jumbles sexual and biological differences with gender dualisms and inequality. Modernist discourse of liberal progressive movements like Islamic feminism have been revisiting hermeneutics of feminism in Islam in terms of respect for Muslim women's lives and rights. Riada Asimovic Akyol further says that equality for Muslim women needs to be achieved through self-criticism.

title: Muslim world


text:
Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin (born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin, ; January 3, 1901 – January 19, 1985) was a German-American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty. In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna. They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Early life
Voegelin was born in Cologne on January 3, 1901. His parents moved to Vienna in 1910, and he eventually studied at the University of Vienna. The advisers on his dissertation were Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann. After his habilitation there in 1928, he taught political theory and sociology. In Austria, Voegelin began lasting friendships with Alfred Schütz and with F. A. Hayek.

Career
As a result of the Anschluss in 1938, Voegelin was fired from his job. Narrowly avoiding arrest by the Gestapo and after a brief stay in Switzerland, he arrived in the United States. He taught at various universities before he joined Louisiana State University's Department of Government in 1942. Voegelin remained in Baton Rouge until 1958, when he accepted an offer by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität to fill Max Weber's former chair in political science, which had been unoccupied since Weber's death in 1920. In Munich, he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft. Voegelin returned to the United States in 1969 to join Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace as Henry Salvatori Fellow. There he continued his work until his death. He was a member of the Philadelphia Society.

Although some have found his books obscure, according to his student Ellis Sandoz, he was a "wonderfully lucid lecturer with the gift of explaining with complete intelligibility the most abstruse theories to the comprehension and fascination" of his students.

Work
In his later life Voegelin worked to account for the endemic political violence of the twentieth century, in an effort variously referred to as a philosophy of politics, history, or consciousness. In Voegelin's Weltanschauung, he "blamed a flawed utopian interpretation of Christianity for spawning totalitarian movements like Nazism and Communism." Voegelin eschewed any ideological labels or categorizations that readers and followers attempted to impose on his work. Nevertheless, his work came to the forefront during the Cold War and was adopted mainly by conservatives.

Voegelin published scores of books, essays, and reviews in his lifetime. An early work was Die politischen Religionen (1938; The Political Religions), on totalitarian ideologies as political religions due to their structural similarities to religion. He wrote the multi-volume (English-language) Order and History, which began publication in 1956 and remained incomplete at the time of his death 29 years later. His 1951 Charles Walgreen lectures, published as The New Science of Politics, is sometimes seen as a prolegomenon to this series, and remains his best known work. He left many manuscripts unpublished, including a history of political ideas, which has since been published in eight volumes.

Order and History was originally conceived as a five-volume examination of the history of order occasioned by Voegelin's personal experience of the disorder of his time. The first three volumes, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, and Plato and Aristotle, appeared in rapid succession in 1956 and 1957 and focused on the evocations of order in the ancient Near East and Greece.

Voegelin then encountered difficulties which slowed down the publication. This, combined with his university administrative duties and work related to the new institute, meant that seventeen years separated the fourth from the third volume. His new concerns were indicated in the 1966 German collection Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik. The fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, appeared in 1974. It broke with the chronological pattern of the previous volumes by investigating symbolizations of order ranging in time from the Sumerian King List to Hegel. Work on the final volume, In Search of Order, occupied Voegelin's final days and it was published posthumously in 1987.

One of Voegelin's main points in his later work is that our experience of transcendence conveys a sense of order. Although transcendence can never be fully defined or described, it may be conveyed in symbols. A particular sense of transcendent order serves as a basis for a particular political order. A philosophy of consciousness can therefore become a philosophy of politics. Insights may become fossilised as dogma.

Voegelin is more interested in the ontological issues that arise from these experiences than the epistemological questions of how we know that a vision of order is true or not. For Voegelin, the essence of truth is trust. All philosophy begins with experience of the divine. Since God is experienced as good, one can be confident that reality is knowable. Given the possibility of knowledge, Voegelin holds there are two modes: intentionality and luminosity. Visions of order belong to the latter category. The truth of any vision is confirmed by its orthodoxy, by what Voegelin jokingly calls its lack of originality.

Voegelin's work does not fit in any standard classifications, although some of his readers have found similarities in it to contemporaneous works by, for example, Hans Jonas, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Voegelin often invents terms or uses old ones in new ways. However, there are patterns in his work with which the reader can quickly become familiar.

According to Ellis Sandoz, Voegelin may well be America's leading philosopher, and is rightly compared with the premier minds of our century and, perhaps, of the millennia. Thomas Altizer has said that Order and History "may someday be perceived as the most important work of Old  Testament scholarship ever written in  the United States,"  adding that it  is noteworthy  that  it  was  written  by  a  political scientist and  philosopher.

Among indications of growing engagement with Voegelin's work are the 305 page international bibliography published in 2000 by Munich's Wilhelm Fink Verlag; the presence of dedicated research centers at universities in the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom; the appearance of recent translations in languages ranging from Portuguese to Japanese; and the publishing of a 34 volume collection of his primary works by the University of Missouri Press and various primary and secondary works offered by the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

On gnosticism
In his The New Science of Politics, Order and History, and Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin opposed what he believed to be unsound Gnostic influences in politics.

Eugene Webb stated that Voegelin understood "gnosis" as "a purported direct, immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical reflection; the special gift of a spiritual and cognitive elite" and "gnosticism" as "A type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. Gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism)."

Accordingly, Voegelin distinguished between ancient and modern gnosticisms: whereas the former sought salvation in a realm transcending the actual world, the "modern" form aimed to change it immanently (see below). Apart from the Classical Christian writers against heresy, his sources on Gnosticism were secondary since the texts of the Nag Hammadi library were not yet widely available. For example, Voegelin used Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Jonas.

Voegelin perceived similarities between ancient Gnosticism and modernist political theories, particularly Communism and Nazism. He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection from society and a belief that this lack is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. That alienation has two effects:
 * The first is the belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (he claimed that the Gnostics themselves referred to that as gnosis).
 * The second is the desire to implement and or create a policy to actualize the speculation, or Immanentize the eschaton: to create a sort of heaven on earth within history.

According to Voegelin, the Gnostics really reject the Christian eschaton of the kingdom of God and replace it with a human form of salvation through esoteric ritual or practice.

The primary feature that characterizes a tendency as gnostic for Voegelin is that it is motivated by the notion that the world and humanity can be fundamentally transformed and perfected through the intervention of a chosen group of people (an elite), a man-god, or men-Gods. The Übermensch is the chosen one who has a kind of special knowledge (like magic or science) about how to perfect human existence.

That stands in contrast to a notion of redemption that is achieved through the reconciliation of mankind with the divine. Marxism, therefore, qualifies as "gnostic" because it purports that the perfect society on earth can be established once capitalism has been overthrown by the proletariat. Likewise, Nazism is seen as "gnostic" because it posits that utopia can be achieved by attaining racial purity once the master race has freed itself of the racially inferior and the degenerate.

In both cases specifically analyzed by Voegelin, the totalitarian impulse is derived from the alienation of the individuals from the rest of society. That leads to a desire to dominate (libido dominandi), which has its roots in the Gnostic's conviction of the imperative of his vision but also in his lack of concord with a large body of his society. As a result, there is very little regard for the welfare of those who are harmed by the resulting politics, which ranges from coercive to calamitous (such as the English proverb: "You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet" or its Russian variety: "When you chop wood, chips fly").

Immanentizing the eschaton
One of his most quoted passages (by such figures as William F. Buckley Jr.) is:

"The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy."

From this comes the catchphrase: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!", which simply means: "Do not try to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now" or "Don't try to create Heaven on Earth."

When Voegelin uses the term gnosis negatively, it is to reflect the word as found in the Manichaeism and Valentinianism of antiquity. As it is later then immanentized (or manifest) in modernity in the wake of Joachim of Fiore and in the various ideological movements outlined in his works. Voegelin also builds on the term "Gnosticism" as it is defined by Hans Jonas in his The Gnostic Religion, in reference to Heidegger's Gnosticism, which is to have an understanding and control over reality that makes mankind as powerful as the role of God in reality.

Voegelin was arguing from a Hellenistic position that good gnosis is derived from pistis (faith) and that the pagan tradition made a false distinction between faith and noesis. Furthermore, the dualist perspective was the very essence of gnosticism via the misuse of noema and caused a destructive division between the internal and external world in human consciousness. To reconcile the internal (subjective) and external (objective) world of consciousness was the restoration of order.

Social alienation
Voegelin identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, (a sense of disconnection with society) and a belief that the disconnection is the result of the inherent disorder or even evil of the world. The alienation has two effects:
 * The belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (the Gnostics themselves referred to it as gnosis).
 * The desire to create and implement a policy to actualize the speculation, or as Voegelin described it, to Immanentize the Eschaton, to create a sort of heaven on earth within history by triggering the Apocalypse.

Spiritual revival
Voegelin's work does not lay out a program of reform or offer a doctrine of recovery from what he termed the "demono-maniacal" in modern politics. However, interspersed in his writings is the idea of a spiritual recovery of the primary experiences of divine order. He was not interested so much in what religious dogmas might result in personal salvation but rather a recovery of the human in the classical sense of the daimonios aner (Plato's term for "the spiritual man"). He did not speculate on the institutional forms in which a spiritual recovery might take place but expressed confidence that the current 500-year cycle of secularism would come to an end because he stated that "you cannot deny the human forever."

In an essay published in 1965, Voegelin suggested that the Soviet Union would collapse from within because of its historical roots in philosophy and Christianity. Later, at an informal talk given at University College, Dublin, Ireland in 1972, Voegelin suggested the Soviet Union might collapse by 1980 because of its failure to succeed in its domestic commitments and external political challenges.

Reception
Eugene Webb criticized Voegelin's conception of gnosis and his analysis of Gnosticism in general. In the article "Voegelin's Gnosticism Reconsidered," Webb explained that Voegelin's concept of Gnosticism was conceived "not primarily to describe ancient phenomena but to help us understand some modern ones for which the evidence is a great deal clearer." Webb continues, "the category (of Gnosticism) is of limited usefulness for the purpose to which he put it… and the fact that the idea of Gnosticism as such has become so problematic and complex in recent years must at the very least undercut Voegelin's effort to trace a historical line of descent from ancient sources to the modern phenomena he tried to use them to illuminate."

Because Voegelin applied the concept of gnosis to a wide array of ideologies and movements such as Marxism, communism, National Socialism, progressivism, liberalism, and humanism, critics have proposed that Voegelin's concept of Gnosis lacks theoretical precision. Therefore, Voegelin's gnosis can, according to the criticis, hardly serve as a scientific basis for an analysis of political movements. Rather, the term "Gnosticism" as used by Voegelin is more of an invective just as "when on the lowest level of propaganda those who do not conform with one's own opinion are smeared as communists."

Selected bibliography

 * Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes, Tübingen 1928
 * Rasse und Staat. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1933
 * Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte von Ray bis Carus. Junker & Dünnhaupt Berlin 1933
 * Der autoritäre Staat, Wien 1936
 * Die politischen Religionen. Bermann Fischer, Stockholm 1939. Neuauflage München 1996
 * The New Science of Politics. An Introduction, Chicago University Press, Chicago 1952
 * Order and History, 5 Bde. Baton Rouge 1956–1987
 * Wissenschaft, Politik und Gnosis, München 1959, English translation: Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington DC, 1968
 * Anamnesis. Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik, München 1966
 * From Enlightment to Revolution, Durham 1975
 * Autobiographische Reflexionen, Hg. Peter J. Opitz. München 1994
 * Das Volk Gottes. Sektenbewegungen und der Geist der Moderne, München 1994
 * Der Gottesmord. Zur Genese und Gestalt der modernen politischen Gnosis, München 1999
 * Ordnung und Geschichte, 10 Bde. Hg. Dietmar Herz & Peter Opitz, München 2001–2005
 * Die Neue Wissenschaft der Politik, München 2004
 * Anamnesis. Zur Theorie von Geschichte und Politik, Freiburg 2005
 * Das Drama des Menschseins, Passagen, Wien 2007 ISBN 978-3851657241
 * Das Jüngste Gericht Friedrich Nietzsches. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3882218879
 * Conversations with Eric Voegelin, Mitschrift von vier Vorlesungen in Montreal in den Jahren 1965, 1967, 1970, 1976. Thomas More Institute, Montreal 1980
 * Briefwechsel 1939–1949: Eric Voegelin und Hermann Broch, In: Sinn und Form, Heft 2/2008, S. 149–174
 * Briefwechsel, Eric Voegelin und Karl Löwith, In: Sinn und Form, Heft 6/2007, S. 764–794
 * Realitätsfinsternis. Übers. Dora Fischer-Barnicol, Hg. und Nachwort Peter J.Opitz. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2010 ISBN 978-3882216967
 * Was ist Geschichte? Übers. Dora Fischer-Barnicol, Hg. und Vorwort Peter J.Opitz. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2015 ISBN 978-3882210460
 * Glaube und Wissen. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Eric Voegelin und Leo Strauss von 1934 bis 1964. Hg. Peter J. Opitz; Wilhelm Fink, München 2010 ISBN 978-3770549672
 * Luther und Calvin. Die große Verwirrung. Hg. Peter J. Opitz. Wilhelm Fink, München 2011, ISBN 978-3770551590
 * Die Natur des Rechts. Übers. und Nachwort Thomas Nawrath. Matthes & Seitz Berlin, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3882216172

 * Rezension
 * Die Ursprünge des Totalitarismus, Rezension zu Arendts Totalitarismus-Buch, in: Über den Totalitarismus. Texte Hannah Arendts aus den Jahren 1951 und 1953. S. 33–42. Übers. Ursula Ludz. Hg. Ingeborg Nordmann. HAIT, Dresden 1998 ISBN 3931648176

 * The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin
 * Volume 1: On the Form of the American Mind, edited by Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper
 * Volume 2: Race and State, edited by Klaus Vondung
 * Volume 3: The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus, edited by Klaus Vondung
 * Volume 4: The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State, edited by Gilbert Weiss
 * Volume 5: Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, edited by Manfred Henningsen
 * Volume 6: Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, edited by David Walsh
 * Volume 7: Published Essays, 1922–1928, Edited by Thomas W. Heilke and John von Heyking
 * Volume 8: Published Essays, 1929–1933, edited by Thomas W. Heilke and John von Heyking
 * Volume 9: Published Essays, 1934–1939, edited by Thomas W. Heilke
 * Volume 10: Published Essays, 1940–1952, edited by Ellis Sandoz
 * Volume 11: Published Essays, 1953–1965, edited by Ellis Sandoz
 * Volume 12: Published Essays, 1966–1985, edited by Ellis Sandoz
 * Volume 13: Selected Book Reviews, edited by Jodi Cockerill and Barry Cooper
 * Volume 14: Order and History, Volume I, Israel and Revelation, edited by Maurice P. Hogan
 * Volume 15: Order and History, Volume II, The World of the Polis, edited by Athanasios Moulakis
 * Volume 16: Order and History, Volume III, Plato and Aristotle, edited by Dante Germino
 * Volume 17: Order and History, Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age, edited by Michael Franz
 * Volume 18: Order and History, Volume V, In Search of Order, edited by Ellis Sandoz
 * Volume 19: History of Political Ideas, Volume I, Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity, edited by Athanisios Moulakis
 * Volume 20: History of Political Ideas, Volume II, The Middle Ages to Aquinas, edited by Peter von Sivers
 * Volume 21: History of Political Ideas, Volume III, The Later Middle Ages, edited by David Walsh
 * Volume 22: History of Political Ideas, Volume IV, Renaissance and Reformation, edited by David L. Morse and William M. Thompson
 * Volume 23: History of Political Ideas, Volume V, Religion and the Rise of Modernity, edited by James L. Wiser
 * Volume 24: History of Political Ideas, Volume VI, Revolution and the New Science, edited by Barry Cooper
 * Volume 25: History of Political Ideas, Volume VII, The New Order and Last Orientation, edited by Jürgen Gebhardt and Thomas A. Hollweck
 * Volume 26: History of Political Ideas, Volume VIII, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man, edited by David Walsh
 * Volume 27: Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings, edited by Robert Anthony Pascal, James Lee Babin, and John William Corrington
 * Volume 28: What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, edited by Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella
 * Volume 29: Selected Correspondence, 1924–1949, edited with an introduction by Thomas Hollweck
 * Volume 30: Selected Correspondence, 1950–1984, edited with an introduction by Thomas Hollweck
 * Volume 31: Hitler and the Germans, edited by Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell
 * Volume 32: The Theory of Governance and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1921–1938, edited by William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss
 * Volume 33: The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939–1985, edited by William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss
 * Volume 34: Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index, edited with introductions by Ellis Sandoz

Primary literature
All of Voegelin's writing is published as his Collected Works (CW), reviewed by Mark Lilla, "Mr. Casaubon in America" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (June 28, 2007): 29–31.

Secondary literature

 * Cooper, Barry: Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, University of Missouri Press, 1999.
 * Hund, Wulf D.: The Racism of Eric Voegelin. In: Journal of World Philosophies, 4, 2019, 2, pp. 1–22.
 * Federici, Michael: Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order, ISI Books 2002, basic introduction.
 * McAllister, Ted V: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and The Search for a Postliberal Order' University Press of Kansas, 1995.
 * Sandoz, Ellis: The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction Louisiana State UP, 1981, advanced.
 * Trepanier, Lee, and Steven F. McGuire, eds. Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition: Explorations in Modern Political Thought  (University of Missouri Press; 2011) 284 pp; essays on his relationship to Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Gadamer.
 * Webb, Eugene: Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History University of Washington Press, 1981.
 * Webb, Eugene: Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History University of Washington Press, 1981.

title: Eric Voegelin


text:
Harmonic series

Harmonic series may refer to either of two related concepts:

 * Harmonic series (mathematics)
 * Harmonic series (music)

title: Harmonic series


text:
Talk:Idol worship

Idol worship vs idolatry
I've only just begun this and have little academic knowledge of it. Please feel free to contribute rather than redirect or delete.

The main reason for restarting this as an article is because I feel there is a difference from idolatry - and that article discusses the matter in biblical terms, as a sin, rather than presenting an overview of it as a cultural form.

I might have to wade through Man and his Symbols and The Golden Bough again...Totnesmartin 19:56, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Skeptical
I question whether this actually exists at all. Do people worship the physical object, or the entities/forces of which the physical object is a representation or a housing? I'm not familiar with any documented cases of the former.

Septegram 19:37, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

 * it appears to be done informally in Jainism, and I'm still looking elsewhere (eg those virgin mary pictures and statues? The kaaba?) I wrote, then abandoned, a section on Sikhism (based on a badly-worded encyclopedia article, then found a proper explanation on Sikh websites). There are probably historical instances from around the world as well. Some Neo-pagans and New Agers do the same for the spirits of various places. But I need sources.Totnesmartin 19:47, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

 * The Kaaba is specifically not worshiped. Statues are foci for attention, but the object of worship is S/He who is represented thereby.  Similarly, Neo-Pagans may revere the spirit of a place, but that's different from worshiping the place itself.  As for Jains, I can't say.
 * Septegram 19:51, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for putting me right re kaaba. Totnesmartin 21:05, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Glad to be of service; it's all about getting the Wiki right, isn't it? Hope I didn't come across as harsh.
 * Septegram 21:38, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
 * i *was* jumpy for a bit... This page was once a slanging match and revert war... Totnesmartin 21:46, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Septegram, yes, it does exist. Andries 08:59, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

 * Can you document this, Andries? Every case I've ever read or seen involved not worshiping the object, but what the object represents.
 * Thanks,
 * * Septegram * Talk * Contributions * 09:19, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Septegram,I think I had misunderstood your question which I now see is quite a difficult one. Andries 10:12, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the answer is certainly yes, but the places to look are not in Islam or Christianity (or Buddhism, mostly), but Hindism, Ancient Egypt/Greece/Rome etc, and more recent local religions - Fetish etc. Of course it is a complex question. Johnbod 13:05, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Puja
"Idol Worship" in itself sounds like a very non-neutral title under which to discuss the topic. In my opinion the Hinduism and Jainsim sections would be more appropriately explored within the Puja article. Does any else agree/disagree? Regards, Gouranga(UK) 14:21, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

 * There should be an article on the topic as a whole. Johnbod 13:00, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

 * Now I'm looking further, it appears that this page was originally re-directed to Idolatry which is a far better article and more neutral title. It was recently un-directed here. I'm re-directing it back to the Idolatry article, as the subject matter is identical in scope. Regards, Gouranga(UK) 15:03, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Cult image is a less loaded title, albeit a scrappy article at present. This material would be better there.

 * Idolatry is the least neutral title, as it is defined as a sin - it could hardly be more POV! Also the article has nothing on Hinduism, let alone Ancient Egypt, Greece etc. Personally I think Cult image and Idol worship should be merged and improved, but the material here should certainly be reinstated. Johnbod 13:00, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

title: Talk:Idol worship


text:
Stanley, Falkland Islands

Stanley (also known as Port Stanley) is the capital city of the Falkland Islands. It is located on the island of East Falkland, on a north-facing slope in one of the wettest parts of the islands. At the 2016 census, the city had a population of 2,460. The entire population of the Falkland Islands was 3,398 on Census Day on 9 October 2016.

Stanley is represented by five of the eight elected members of the Legislative Assembly of the Falkland Islands, Stacy Bragger, Barry Elsby, Mark Pollard, Roger Spink and Leona Vidal Roberts. An elected Town Council of Stanley existed from 1948 to 1973.

On 14 June 2022, Stanley received letters patent, formally awarding it city status.

Facilities and infrastructure
Stanley is the main shopping centre on the islands and the hub of East Falkland's road network. Attractions include the Falkland Islands Museum, Government House—built in 1845 and home to the Governor of the Falkland Islands—and a golf course, as well as a whale-bone arch, a totem pole, several war memorials and the shipwrecks in its harbour. The Falkland Islands Company owns several shops. Stanley has four pubs, 11 hotels and guesthouses, three restaurants, a fish and chip shop and the main tourist office. There are three churches, including the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral, the southernmost Anglican cathedral in the world, and the Roman Catholic St. Mary's Church. A bomb disposal unit in the town is a legacy of the Falklands War.

The town hall serves as a post office, philatelic bureau, law court and dance hall. The police station also contains the islands' only prison, with capacity for 13 inmates.

The community centre includes a swimming pool (the only public one in the islands), a sports centre, and school. A grass football pitch is located by the community centre. A separate building houses the college of further education and the library. A new sports centre is under construction to the south of the town centre, next to a newly-laid floodlit all-weather pitch.

Stanley Racecourse, located on the west side of Stanley, holds a two-day horse racing meeting every year on 26 and 27 December. The Christmas races have been held here for over 100 years.

Stanley Golf Course has an 18-hole course and a club house. It is also located to the west of Stanley.

King Edward VII Memorial Hospital is the islands' main hospital, with doctors' practice and surgery, radiology department, dental surgery and emergency facilities.

The Port Stanley Airport operates internal flights, and scheduled international passenger flights operate from the RAF Mount Pleasant military airbase.

Stanley is also home to the Falkland Islands Radio Station (FIRS), the Stanley office of the British Antarctic Survey, and the office of the weekly Penguin News newspaper.

History
The original capital of the islands was at Port Louis to the north of the present site of Stanley, on Berkeley Sound. Captains Francis Crozier and James Clark Ross were recruited by Governor Richard Moody in his quest to find a new capital for The Falklands. Both Crozier and Ross (who are remembered in Crozier Place and Ross Road in Stanley) were among the Royal Navy's most distinguished seafarers. They spent five months in the islands with their ships Terror and Erebus, later lost looking for the Northwest Passage. Governor Moody (after whom Moody Brook is named), however, decided to move the capital to Port Jackson, which was renamed "Stanley Harbour", after a survey. Stanley Harbour was considered to have a deeper anchorage for visiting ships. Not all the inhabitants were happy with the change; a JW Whitington is recorded as saying, "Of all the miserable bog holes, I believe that Mr Moody has selected one of the worst for the site of his town."

Work on the settlement began in 1843 and it became the capital in July 1845. It was named after Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies at the time. In 1849, 30 married Chelsea Pensioners were settled there to help with the defence of the islands and to develop the new settlement.

The settlement soon grew as a deep-water port, specialising at first in ship repairs; before the construction of the Panama Canal, Port Stanley was a major repair stop for ships travelling through the Straits of Magellan. The rough waters and intense storms found at the tip of the continent forced many ships to Stanley Harbour, and the ship repair industry helped to drive the island economy. Later it became a base for whaling and sealing in the South Atlantic and Antarctic.

Later still it was an important coaling station for the Royal Navy. This led to ships based here being involved in the Battle of the Falkland Islands in the First World War, and the Battle of the River Plate in the Second World War.

Landslides caused by excessive peat cutting destroyed part of the town in 1879 and again in 1886, which killed two people. At about midnight on 29 November 1878 a black moving mass, several feet high, was moving forwards at a rate of 4 mph or 5 mph. The next morning the town was cut in two; the only way to travel between the two parts was by boat.

During the Second World War, a hulk in Stanley Harbour was used for interning the British Fascist and Mosleyite Jeffrey Hamm. A minor figure in the British Union of Fascists (BUF) at the time, Hamm moved to the Falkland Islands in 1939 to work as a teacher. He was arrested there (under Defence Regulation 18B) in 1940 for encouraging fascist views among his pupils and his BUF membership and later transferred to a prison camp in South Africa.

Stanley Airport is used by internal flights and provides connections to British bases in Antarctica. Flights to Argentina ended after the 1982 conflict. A weekly flight to Punta Arenas in Chile commenced in 1993, which now operates out of RAF Mount Pleasant. Scheduled passenger flights between the Mount Pleasant airfield and the UK are also operated twice a week by a civilian airline contractor on behalf of the Royal Air Force.

Stanley was occupied by Argentine troops for about 10 weeks during the Falklands War in 1982. The Argentinians renamed the town Puerto Argentino, and although Spanish names for places in the Falklands were historically accepted as alternatives, this one is considered to be extremely offensive by many islanders. Stanley suffered considerable damage during the war, from both the Argentine occupation and the British naval shelling of the town, which killed three civilians. After the British secured the high ground around the town the Argentines surrendered with no fighting in the town itself. The beaches and land around it were heavily mined and some areas remain marked minefields.

Since the Falklands War, Stanley has benefitted from the growth of the fishing and tourism industries in the Islands. Stanley itself has developed greatly in that time, with the building of a large amount of residential housing, particularly to the east of the town centre. Stanley is now more than a third bigger than it was in 1982.

In 2022, as part of Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours, Stanley was one of the successful bids for city status, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the invasion and liberation of the port. On 14 June 2022, Stanley received letters patent from the monarch awarding city status. The Governor of the Falkland Islands, Nigel Phillips, read out the document outside the town hall on the same day.

Etymology

A number of variants of the city's name have appeared in both English and Spanish. Stanley Harbour was originally known as "Port Jackson", and this name would have applied to the area before the town was built. Although the town is officially known as "Stanley", it is frequently referred to as "Port Stanley", especially in British reports about the Falklands War. This is in line with various other settlements around the islands, e.g. Port Howard and Port Stephens. However, "Stanley" without the "Port" prefix was established long before the war, and on 2 August 1956, the Officer Administering the Government of the Falkland Islands reported to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London as follows:

"There is some difficulty over the correct name of the capital. Early despatches contain reference to both Port Stanley and Stanley. Port Stanley was accepted by the Naming Commission set up in 1943 to consider the names then being included on the War Office maps. Local opinion differs on the matter, but there is no doubt that Stanley is now common usage and has been for some considerable time. The capital is defined as Stanley in the Interpretation and General Law Ordinance. In the circumstances I would advise that the correct name for the capital is Stanley."

Spanish and Argentine names
The situation with the Spanish version of the name is far more complicated. Stanley, unlike Port Louis, the former capital of the islands, was a new settlement founded by the British, and therefore did not have a Spanish name of its own. Many Spanish speakers use "Puerto Stanley", as a neutral translation of the British name but it is disliked by supporters of Argentine sovereignty who refuse to recognise English language names. Supporters of the Argentine claim have used several different names, none of which are accepted by the islanders themselves:

 * Puerto Soledad (the port of East Falkland, known in Spanish as Isla Soledad) – reported in 1965, but in fact the old Spanish name of Port Louis, the old capital, not Stanley.
 * Puerto Rivero – a reference to Antonio Rivero, a controversial Argentine figure in the early history of the islands. Used by peronists and the hijackers of Aerolineas Argentinas Flight 648 who landed at Stanley in September 1966. It was also used on 3–4 April 1982 after the Argentine invasion.
 * Puerto de la Isla Soledad – a variant on Puerto Soledad. Used 5 April 1982.
 * Puerto de las Islas Malvinas (Port of the Malvinas/Falklands), used from 6–20 April 1982.
 * Puerto Argentino (Port Argentine) – used ever since 21 April 1982 by the Argentines, although in 1994 the Argentine Government signed an undertaking to review toponymy relating to the Argentine occupation of the islands.

During the 1982 occupation, Patrick Watts of the islands' radio station used circumlocutions to avoid using Argentine names:

""It hurt me greatly to call it [the radio station] Radio Nacional Islas Malvinas, and I used to try to avoid referring to Port Stanley as Puerto Argentino. I called it 'the capital' or the 'largest settlement on the island'""

Climate
The climate of Stanley is classified as a subpolar oceanic climate (Köppen Cfc), bordering very closely on a tundra climate, as the mean temperature is greater than 10 C for two months of the year. Unlike typical tundra climates, however, the winters are very mild, and vegetation grows there that normally could not in a climate this close to a polar climate. Contrast this with Churchill, Manitoba, which also has a near-tundra climate but is much more continental in nature.

The Falkland Islands have displayed a warming trend in recent years; the mean daily January maximum for Mount Pleasant for the years 1999-2012 is 15.1 C compared to Stanley's 1961-90 average of 14.1 C. Previously, Stanley had a tundra climate (ET), due to cool summer temperatures (the mean temperature was less than 10 C in the hottest month).

Like the rest of the archipelago, Stanley has more or less even temperatures through the year and strong westerlies. Precipitation, averaging 544 mm a year, is nonetheless relatively low, and evenly spread throughout the year. Typically, at least 1 mm of rain will be recorded on 125.2 days of the year. The islands receive 36.3% of possible sunshine, or around 1500–1600 hours a year, a level similar to southern parts of England. Daytime temperatures are similar to the Northern Isles of Scotland, though nights tend to be somewhat colder, with frost occurring on more than 1 in 3 nights (128.4 nights). Snow occurs in the winter. Light snowfall can occur at any time of year.

Stanley is a similar distance from the equator to British warm-summer climates like London, Cardiff and Bristol, illustrating the relative chilliness of the climate. In the northern hemisphere, lowland tundra areas are located at latitudes further from the tropics. Many European capitals are also located much farther from the tropics than Stanley is. The nearest larger city of Río Gallegos (the provincial capital of Santa Cruz) in Argentina has a slightly milder climate (annual mean temperature being 1.7 C-change higher) due to its position on the South American mainland, although summers everywhere on this latitude in the southern hemisphere are very cool due to important marine effects.

Temperature extremes at Stanley vary from −11.1 C to 26.1 C. More recently, on 23 January 1992, nearby Mount Pleasant Airport recorded 29.2 C.

Education
The Stanley Infant & Junior School (IJS) is located along John Street at the intersection with Villiers Street in Stanley. The school first opened in 1955 and has about 250 students between the ages of four and 11.

The Falkland Island Community School (FICS) is located on Reservoir Road in Stanley. It has approximately 220 students between 11 and 16.

Miscellaneous

Gypsy Cove, known for its Magellanic penguins, and Cape Pembroke, the easternmost point of the Falklands, lie nearby. Gypsy Cove is four miles (6 km) from Stanley and can be reached by taxi or on foot.

Today, roughly one third of the city’s residents are employed by the government, and tourism is also a major source of employment. On days when two or more large cruise ships dock in the town, tourists frequently outnumber the local residents.

Peat was once a prominent heating/fuel source in Stanley, and stacks of drying peat under cover can still be seen by the occasional house.

Stanley is twinned with Whitby in North Yorkshire, and Airdrie in North Lanarkshire, both in the United Kingdom.

Notable people associated with Stanley

 * George Rennie (1801 or 1802 in Phantassie, East Lothian – 1860 in London), sculptor, politician and governor
 * Mary Ellaline Terriss, Lady Hicks (1871 in Stanley – 1971 (aged 100) in Hampstead, London), known professionally as Ellaline Terriss, a popular English actress and singer, best known for her performances in Edwardian musical comedies
 * Edward Binnie (1884 in Stanley – 1956 in Sandefjord, Norway), the second resident magistrate of South Georgia, serving from October 1914 to April 1927, when he resided at King Edward Point; previously served as customs officer on East Falkland Island
 * McDonald Hobley (1917 in Stanley – 1987), one of the first BBC Television continuity announcers from 1946 to 1956
 * Sir Rex Hunt CMG (1926 in Redcar – 2012 in Stockton on Tees), Governor during the Falklands War
 * Gerald Reive (born 1937 in the Falkland Islands), a New Zealand-based athlete, a lawn bowler at the 2010 Commonwealth Games
 * Terry Peck MBE, CPM (1938 – 2006 both in Stanley), soldier, policeman and legislator
 * Edward Neill "Ted" Baker CNZM (born 1942 in Stanley), a New Zealand scientist specialising in protein purification and crystallization and bioinformatics
 * Alejandro Betts (1947 – 2020), a Falklands-born Argentine air-traffic controller, notable for being the only Falkland Islander to support Argentina's claim to the Falkland Islands
 * Mensun Bound (born 1953 in Port Stanley) is a British marine archaeologist, based in Oxford, Triton Senior Research Fellow in Marine Archaeology at Oxford University
 * James Peck (born 1968 in Stanley), an artist and writer who at one time held both Argentine and British citizenship but has since renounced his Argentine citizenship.

Modern-day politicians

 * Janet Lynda Cheek (born 1948 in Stanley) is a politician, served as a MLA for the Stanley constituency from 1997 to 2005 and from 2009 to 2017
 * Mike Summers OBE (born 1952 in Stanley) is a politician, served as a MLA for the Stanley constituency from 2011 to 2017
 * Sharon Halford (born 1953 in Stanley) is a politician, served as a MLA for the Camp constituency from 1993 to 2001 and from 2009 until 2013
 * Glenn Ross (born 1964 in Stanley) is an engineer and politician, served as a MLA for the Stanley constituency from 2009 to 2011
 * Michael Poole (born 1984 in Falkland Islands) is a politician, served as a MLA for the Stanley constituency from 2013 to 2017
 * Gavin Short (born 1962 in Falkland Islands) was a politician and served as a MLA for the Stanley constituency between 2009 and 2017. He is currently a senior news reporter with FIBS and was re-elected in the 2021 elections.

title: Stanley, Falkland Islands