Sura Headings and Subdivisions in Qur'an Manuscripts from Sub-Saharan Africa: Variations and Historical Implications

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 232-252
Author(s):  
Constant Hamès
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Types Of Information ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
Sahelian Zone

Sura headings, and the information they convey, were formulated well after the Qur'anic revelation itself. Furthermore, they were not determined by authoritative, standardising decisions, as was the case for the Qur'anic text, which has come down to us ne varietur. Given the geographical extension attained by the Islamic world in the course of its history, and in the absence of normalisation due to the disappearance of a centralised power, local variations in sura headings are only to be expected. This is, in effect, the case for Africa. The sampling of Qur'an manuscripts considered here is compared to the standard Egyptian edition of 1923, and reveals differences not only in the titles of the suras but also in the other types of information associated with them, such as indications concerning the place of revelation and the number of verses in each sura. In addition, in some areas, headings are not usually committed to writing, whereas in other local traditions, they may be quite long and contain multiple elements of information. Though these variations may appear to be minor, they are of interest in a comparative perspective, taking into account different zones and eras – especially so if one seeks to discern local identities in the presentation of Qur'an manuscripts. The ones analysed here all come from the Saharo-Sahelian zone: Mauritania (2), Mali (1), Chad (2) and Somalia (1). They are dated to the nineteenth century, with the exception of one early twentieth-century manuscript.

On Using the White Fathers' Archives

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 319-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol W. Dickerman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Local People ◽  
Local Language ◽  
Treasure Trove ◽  
White Fathers ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
European Civilization

The Société des Missionnaires d'Afrique, more commonly known as the Pères Blancs or White Fathers, began its work of proselytizing in northern and sub-Saharan Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their archives, located in Rome, are a treasure trove for Africanists of all disciplines. In founding the order in 1868, Cardinal Lavigerie, archbishop of Algiers, charged its members to bring Christianity to Africa not by imposing European civilization on Africans but rather by converting the inner man while maintaining the external indigenous forms of dress, food, shelter, and especially language. Lavigerie wrote that it was thus indispensible for the fathers to learn the local language as rapidly as possible, and in areas where the language had not yet been studied, one member of the mission was to spend one or two hours each day compiling a dictionary. In addition, the superior of each post was to keep a daily journal in which he entered, among other matters, information gleaned from the local people about their history, geography, and customs. This journal, Lavigerie wrote, could easily become “une mine féconde.” Another obligation of the superior was to send a monthly letter to the Maison-Mère in Algiers describing the progress of the mission, the health of its members, and any extraordinary local events or activities by the authorities.These injunctions of Lavigerie have yielded a very valuable collection of material on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa that is housed in the White Fathers' headquarters in Rome. (The transfer from Algiers took place in 1952.)

Pre-Linnaean pictures of the secretarybird, Sagittarius serpentarius (J. F. )

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAGNAR K. KINZELBACH
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
Rain Forests ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
The Family ◽  
Other Information ◽  
Sub Saharan

The secretarybird, the only species of the family Sagittariidae (Falconiformes), inhabits all of sub-Saharan Africa except the rain forests. Secretarybird, its vernacular name in many languages, may be derived from the Arabic “saqr at-tair”, “falcon of the hunt”, which found its way into French during the crusades. From the same period are two drawings of a “bistarda deserti” in a codex by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250). The original sketch obviously, together with other information on birds, came from the court of Sultan al-Kâmil (1180–1238) in Cairo. Careful examination led to an interpretation as Sagittarius serpentarius. Two archaeological sources and one nineteenth century observation strengthened the idea of a former occurrence of the secretarybird in the Egyptian Nile valley. André Thevet (1502–1590), a French cleric and reliable research traveller, described and depicted in 1558 a strange bird, named “Pa” in Persian language, from what he called Madagascar. The woodcut is identified as Sagittarius serpentarius. The text reveals East Africa as the real home of this bird, associated there among others with elephants. From there raises a connection to the tales of the fabulous roc, which feeds its offspring with elephants, ending up in the vernacular name of the extinct Madagascar ostrich as elephantbird.

Firearms in Southern Africa: A survey

1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shula Marks ◽  
Anthony Atmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Settler Population ◽  
White Settlement

The relationships of the peoples of southern Africa after the establishment and expansion of the white settlement in the mid-seventeenth century can be seen in terms of both conflict and interdependence, both resistance and collaboration. The conflict often split over into warfare, not only between black and white, but also within both groups. As time passed, firearms came to be used by ever-widening circles of the combatants, often as much the result of the increased collaboration and interdependence between peoples as of the increased conflict. As Inez Sutton has pointed out, ‘in contrast to most of the rest of [sub-Saharan] Africa, the presence of a settler population ensured that the supply of arms was the most modern rather than the most obsolete’, and on the whole non-whites were acutely aware of changes in the manufacture of firearms in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Evolution of Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa - from Nkruma to Mutharika The 2nd

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-112
Author(s):  
Mavhungu Abel Mafukata
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Public Service ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Bureaucratic Corruption ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Key Informant ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Public Views ◽  
Development Prospects

Since Sub-Saharan Africa's first independence in Ghana, the region has experienced massive and costly political and bureaucratic corruption within public service and administration. The causes of the corruption, its nature and form are wide and intertwined. In Sub-Saharan Africa, efforts to curb corruption have failed to discard it. The paper focused on the period from Nkruma in Ghana to Mutharika the 2nd in Malawi. This paper reviewed existing literature on political and bureaucratic corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa while on the other hand the paper employed key informant interviews to gather the required data to investigate, analyse and profile the genesis and evolution of corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa. The key informant interviews were employed to solicit public views and opinion from nineteen key informant participants (n=19) selected from 11 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper found that corruption is legendary; has entrenched itself to becoming some sort of culture in the region, and has become the most difficult socio-economic challenge to resolve in the region despite the various anti-corruption efforts employed by stakeholders to curb it. It emerged through the study that law-enforcement efforts against corruption need some reinforcement in order to be effective and eficient in uprooting corruption in the region. If Sub-Saharan Africa fails to address its corruption challenge, its development prospects would seriously curtailed.

The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Price
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Wood Pulp ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pulp Paper ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.

Sultanism

2021 ◽  
pp. 47-76
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Sub Saharan

To facilitate a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of the concept of sultanism, this chapter provides a detailed theoretical and empirical literature review. Firstly, it considers the oriental origins of the concept, as applied by Max Weber and others to the Ottoman Empire and a number of South Asian examples. Secondly, it traces the emergence of ‘contemporary sultanism’, as applied by scholars to Latin American regimes from the mid-twentieth century and onwards. Thirdly, it explores the more recent concept of neo-sultanism and the development of a distinct international empirical category of autocratic-authoritarianism which includes: various Latin America regimes; some of the former communist republics of central Asia and Eastern Europe; and a number of regimes in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. Finally, it assesses the need to address the scholarly deficit in applying contemporary sultanism or neo-sultanism to the Middle East, and suggests that the present-day Saudi And UAE regimes may be strong examples.

Two Treatments of a Subject: Proust's “La Regarder Dormir” and Valéry's La Dormeuse

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Status ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent Survey ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
Late Nineteenth

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.

scholarly journals Measuring Regional Ethnolinguistic Diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa: Surveys vs. GIS

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S40-S45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Gershman ◽  
Diego Rivera
Keyword(s):  
Geographic Information Systems ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Negative Association ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Population Surveys ◽  
Development Indicators ◽  
Scale Population ◽  
Sub Saharan

Abstract This paper compares two approaches to measuring subnational ethnolinguistic diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa, one based on censuses and large-scale population surveys and the other relying on the use of geographic information systems (GIS). The two approaches yield sets of regional fractionalization indices that show a moderately positive correlation, with a stronger association across rural areas. These differences matter for empirical analysis: in a common sample of regions, survey-based indices of deep-rooted diversity show a more strongly negative association with a range of development indicators relative to their highest-quality GIS-based counterparts.

Teaching National Identity and Alterity

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-126
Author(s):  
Bahar Gürsel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Race Ethnicity

The swift and profound transformations in technology and industry that the United States began to experience in the late 1800s manifested themselves in school textbooks, which presented different patterns of race, ethnicity, and otherness. They also displayed concepts like national identity, exceptionalism, and the superiority of Euro-American civilization. This article aims to demonstrate, via an analysis of two textbooks, how world geography was taught to children in primary schools in nineteenth century America. It shows that the development of American identity coincided with the emergence of the realm of the “other,” that is, with the intensification of racial attitudes and prejudices, some of which were to persist well into the twentieth century.

Spatial Patterns and Trends in Energy Use and Consumption in Africa

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 406-418
Author(s):  
Edwina Kofi-Opata
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Energy Use ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
The Core ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Spatial Pattern Formation ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Health Complications

Energy lies at the core of every human activity and can be described as having a pervasive influence on all aspects of development making it one of the most important resources that belies the development of any given country. Developing countries on the other hand are constantly faced with the daunting task of providing its industries and citizens with energy in its various forms. The resulting effect is limiting economic development and by extension limited social development. In meeting this need, the Ghanaian populace have and continue to rely on traditional biomass amid associated risks and health complications. This article analyzes the factors accounting for the heavy reliance on traditional biomass in Sub Saharan Africa (ssa) with particular reference to Ghana and to determine if these factors promote a spatial pattern formation in energy use.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document