Diplomatic Divergence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua M. White
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
North Africa ◽  
The Political ◽  
North African ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Legal Challenge ◽  
The North

This chapter discusses the political and religious-legal challenge that North African corsairs posed to the Ottoman treaty regime in a post–“Northern Invasion” Mediterranean, and explores the reasons for and consequences of the diplomatic divergence of the 1620s, when England, France, and the Netherlands began concluding treaties directly with the North African port cities. It argues that the legal and diplomatic fallout of a series of Algerian-Tunisian piratical raids in the 1620s and 1630s led to a permanent restructuring of the imperial center’s relationship with North Africa. As a result, Istanbul washed its hands of responsibility for the North African corsairs’ predations, granting explicit permission to its treaty partners to destroy any African corsairs who threatened them and creating conditions that led to dozens of European punitive expeditions against the North African port cities beginning in the 1660s and culminating in the French invasion of Algiers in 1830.

scholarly journals Identification and Characterization of the Most Common Genetic Variant Responsible for Acephalic Spermatozoa Syndrome in Men Originating from North Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 2187
Author(s):  
Caroline Cazin ◽  
Yasmine Boumerdassi ◽  
Guillaume Martinez ◽  
Selima Fourati Ben Mustapha ◽  
Marjorie Whitfield ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
Transmission Electron Microscopy ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Posterior Part ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
Transmission Electron ◽  
Variant Filtering ◽  
North African Population ◽  
Sperm Nuclei

Acephalic spermatozoa syndrome (ASS) is a rare but extremely severe type of teratozoospermia, defined by the presence of a majority of headless flagella and a minority of tail-less sperm heads in the ejaculate. Like the other severe monomorphic teratozoospermias, ASS has a strong genetic basis and is most often caused by bi-allelic variants in SUN5 (Sad1 and UNC84 domain-containing 5). Using whole exome sequencing (WES), we investigated a cohort of nine infertile subjects displaying ASS. These subjects were recruited in three centers located in France and Tunisia, but all originated from North Africa. Sperm from subjects carrying candidate genetic variants were subjected to immunofluorescence analysis and transmission electron microscopy. Moreover, fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) was performed on sperm nuclei to assess their chromosomal content. Variant filtering permitted us to identify the same SUN5 homozygous frameshift variant (c.211+1_211+2dup) in 7/9 individuals (78%). SUN5 encodes a protein localized on the posterior part of the nuclear envelope that is necessary for the attachment of the tail to the sperm head. Immunofluorescence assays performed on sperm cells from three mutated subjects revealed a total absence of SUN5, thus demonstrating the deleterious impact of the identified variant on protein expression. Transmission electron microscopy showed a conserved flagellar structure and a slightly decondensed chromatin. FISH did not highlight a higher rate of chromosome aneuploidy in spermatozoa from SUN5 patients compared to controls, indicating that intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) can be proposed for patients carrying the c.211+1_211+2dup variant. These results suggest that the identified SUN5 variant is the main cause of ASS in the North African population. Consequently, a simple and inexpensive genotyping of the 211+1_211+2dup variant could be beneficial for affected men of North African origin before resorting to more exhaustive genetic analyses.

scholarly journals Courage and Cowardice in the North African Campaign: The Eighth Army and Defeat in the Summer of 1942

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Fennell
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Dimension ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
High Level ◽  
Eighth Army

High rates of desertion and surrender during the battles in North Africa in the summer of 1942 were a major factor in Eighth Army’s poor combat performance. At the time, some suggested that these problems were symptomatic of a lack of courage or even of cowardice. There are two broad strands to the conceptualization of courage and cowardice. One focuses on the willingness of the person to fight; the other puts emphasis on how actions express an individual’s ability to cope with fear. Whichever conceptualization is used, high morale motivates the soldier to fight and shields the ordinary recruit from his fear, preventing it from overcoming him in battle. Where morale fails, the soldier is left demotivated and burdened with his terror and, therefore, and is therefore prone to desertion or surrender. Because it is extremely difficult to maintain morale at a continuously high level in an environment governed by chance and managed by humans, all soldiers can find themselves in situations where their actions may be judged as cowardly. Alternatively, if they are properly motivated to fight and prepared by the state and military to deal with the unavoidable fear of combat, all soldiers can be labelled courageous. Accordingly, emotive terms should be avoided when attempting to describe rationally explainable outcomes. The undoubtedly negative connotations attached to cowardice in battle and the positive ones attached to courage are, therefore, arguably unhelpful in understanding Eighth Army’s performance in the summer of 1942 and the human dimension in warfare more generally.

scholarly journals The North African “Extremistan” of the Islamic State Caliphate

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-13
Author(s):  
Adrian Cosmin Basarabă ◽  
Maria-Mihaela Nistor
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
North African ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
The North ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
Cellular Matrices

Abstract This article aims at presenting ISIS expansion in North Africa in the first quarter of 2016, with its subsequent implication in the wider framework of Jihadist proliferation worldwide. It can be argued that, while losing real estate in the Middle East, ISIS has started a permanent search for extra-cellular matrices or an ongoing process of de- and reterritorialization. The allegiance and support pledged by other African-based terrorist groups or organizations such as Boko Haram, al-I’tisam of the Koran and Sunnah in Sudan, al-Huda Battalion in Maghreb of Islam, The Soldiers of the Caliphate, al-Ghurabaa, Djamaat Houmat ad-Da’wa as-Salafiya and al-Ansar Battalion in Algeria, Islamic Youth Shura Council, Islamic State Libya (Darnah), in Libya, Jamaat Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, Jund al-Khilafah and Mujahideen Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem in Egypt, Okba Ibn Nafaa Battalion, Mujahideen of Tunisia of Kairouan and Jund al-Khilafah in Tunisia and al-Shabaab Jubba Region Cell Bashir Abu Numan in Somalia is an alarming hypothesis of Jihadism reaching “the threshold of inevitability”- syntagm existent in the network theories of David Singh Grewal- turning a whole region, continent of even world into what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call Extremistan.

Paths of Prayers in Ottoman North Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 295-341
Author(s):  
Deniz Beyazit
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
First Time ◽  
Visual Apparatus

Abstract This article discusses The Met’s unpublished Dalāʾil al-khayrāt—2017.301—(MS New York, TMMA 2017.301), together with a group of comparable manuscripts. The earliest known dated manuscript within the corpus, it introduces several iconographic elements that are new to the Dalāʾil, and which compare with the traditions developing in the Mashriq and the Ottoman world in particular. The article discusses Dalāʾil production in seventeenth-century North Africa and its development in the Ottoman provinces, Tunisia, and/or Algeria. The manuscripts illustrate how an Ottoman visual apparatus—among which the theme of the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina, appearing for the first time in MS New York, TMMA 2017.301—is established for Muhammadan devotion in Maghribī Dalāʾils. The manuscripts belong to the broader historic, social, and artistic contexts of Ottoman North Africa. Our analysis captures the complex dynamics of Ottomanization of the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire, remaining strongly rooted in their local traditions, while engaging with Ottoman visual idioms.

Decolonization and Migration

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maud S. Mandel
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
North African ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The North ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Jewish Populations ◽  
The Way

This chapter builds on the link between French colonial policies and Muslim–Jewish relations in the metropole by tracing how decolonization throughout North Africa changed the way a diverse set of social actors, including French colonial administrators, international Jewish spokesmen, and a wide range of indigenous nationalist groups conceptualized Jewish belonging throughout the region. It argues that the process led to the emergence of the “North African Jew,” a category to which no individual ascribed but that worked rhetorically to unite the diverse Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian Jewish populations into a collective often understood to be in conflict with “North Africans,” “Muslims,” or “Arabs.”

A Collection of African Red Slip Ware in the Náprstek Museum

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Vlastimil Vrtal
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Representative Sample ◽  
Ceramic Production ◽  
Pottery Production ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
Functional Types ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Late Roman

A group of six specimens of Late Roman pottery from the region of North Africa forms part of collections of the Náprstek Museum. The group comprises of vessels from several different functional types, forming a representative sample of the pottery production of the region. The paper discusses the setting of the individual vessels in the North African ceramic production, their dating, and provenance.

A new record of Tricholoma caligatum (Tricholomataceae) from North Africa with a discussion of related species

Phytotaxa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 282 (2) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
MOUNIA BENAZZA-BOUREGBA ◽  
JEAN-MICHEL SAVOIE ◽  
ZOHRA FORTAS ◽  
CHRISTOPHE BILLETTE
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Markers ◽  
North Africa ◽  
New Record ◽  
Morphological Traits ◽  
Mixed Forest ◽  
Morphological Data ◽  
North African ◽  
Mediterranean Species ◽  
Molecular Analyses ◽  
The North

Among the Basidiomycota, matsutake are the most appreciated mushrooms in Japan. Some Tricholoma species belonging to matsutake group are exported from North Africa to Japan. Until the beginning of the 21st century, the North African ‘matsutake’ was identified as T. caligatum, which is a circum-Mediterranean species described in 1834. However, recent molecular analyses uncover some North African isolates as T. anatolicum, which is a species described from Turkey in 2003. As a result, the presence of T. caligatum in North Africa remained to be confirmed. We analyzed a recent specimen collected in Algeria from mixed forest and based on molecular and morphological data, we found that it belongs to T. caligatum, indicating the existence of two species in North Africa. Morphological traits and molecular markers are proposed here to easily distinguish these two species from each other. The concept of both the species and their respective geographic distributions are discussed.

scholarly journals Innovation in North African Agriculture and Food

New Medit ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Research Field ◽  
North African ◽  
Food Sector ◽  
The North ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
Social Organizational ◽  
African Agriculture

Innovation plays an essential role in addressing the interlinked environmental, social, and economic challenges facing the agri-food sectors in the North Africa region. This systematic review analyses the state of research on innovation in North African agri-food sector and investigates whether sustainabil-ity is addressed in the research strand. The analysis shows an increasing interest in the research field, although many publications are authored by scholars based in institutions outside North Africa. Most of the selected documents deal with crops and the production stage of the food chain. The focus is generally on technical innovations while social, organizational, and marketing ones are overlooked. There are growing attempts to connect innovation to sustainability and sustainable development by moving towards the concept of ‘sustainable innovation’. Factors hindering agri-food innovation relate to policy, research, institutional environment, extension, and human capital. The promotion of innovation in the North Afri-can agri-food sector is crucial to unlock the sector’s potential and improve its competiveness, resilience, and sustainability.

scholarly journals The Influence of Oil Prices on Islamic Banking Efficiency Scores during the Financial Crisis: Evidence from the MENA Area

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Ali Said
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Oil Prices ◽  
Islamic Banking ◽  
Islamic Banks ◽  
North African ◽  
Banking Efficiency ◽  
Mena Countries ◽  
The North

<p><em>The present paper measured the influence of the oil prices on the Islamic banking efficiencies scores during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. The study showed that there is no a direct relationship between the oil prices and the efficiencies scores of Islamic banks in the MENA area. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that Islamic banks in the GCC area showed a higher mean in pure technical efficiency compared to Islamic banks in the North African and other MENA. Islamic banks in other MENA countries and North Africa considered to be technically inefficient. The inefficiencies were due to the underdeveloped banking system and the lack of experiences in those countries to allocate resources between the bank inputs and outputs. </em></p>

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