scholarly journals USING FICTION AS A VEHICLE FOR POPULARIZING HISTORY: JURJY ZAIDAN’S HISTORICAL NOVELS

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Abjar Bahkou

Jurji Zaydan was born in Beirut, Lebanon on Dec. 14, 1861, into a Greek Orthodox family. Many of his works focused on the Arab Awakening. The journal that he founded, al-Hilal, is still published today. His writings have been translated from Arabic into Persian, Turkish and Urdu as well as English, French and German. By the time he died unexpectedly in Cairo on July 21, 1914, at the age of fifty three, he had already established himself, in a little over twenty years, as one of the most prolific and influential thinkers and writers of the Arab Nahda (Awakening), but also as an educator and intellectual innovator, whose education was not based on traditional or religious learning. Philip Thomas called Zaydan, “the archetypical member of the Arab Nahda at the end of nineteenth century.” Zaydan transformed his society by helping build the Arab media, but he was also an important literary figure, a pioneer of the Arabic novel, and a historian of Islamic civilization. Zaydan was an intellectual who proposed new world view, a new social order, and new political power. Zaydan was the author of twenty-two historical novels covering the entirety of Arab/Islamic history. In these novels Zaydan did not attempt to deal with the history in chronological order, nor did he cover the whole of Islamic history; rather, his purpose was to popularize Islamic history through the medium of fiction. This paper will offer a brief analytical outline of Zaydan’s historical novels and how his critics viewed them.  

Numen ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 341-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brannon Wheeler

AbstractThe following pages examine the relationship between the prophet Muhammad's sacrifice of the camels and the distribution of his hair at the conclusion of his farewell pilgrimage just before his death. A study of the accounts of the Prophet's camel sacrifice shows that it prefigures the annual rites of the Hajj using the biblical model of Abraham's sacrifice to align other pre-Islamic practices, including those associated with the cult at Mecca, with the origins of a specifically Islamic civilization. The prophet Muhammad's distribution of his hair, detached from his body at the time of his desacralization from the Hajj delineates the Meccan sanctuary as the place of origination from which was spread both the physical and textual corpus of the Prophet's life. Whether by design or not, the traditional Islamic descriptions of this episode from the life of the prophet Muhammad are not unlike narratives found in Buddhist, Iranian, Christian and other traditions in which the body of a primal being is dismembered to create a new social order. Through the gift of the sacrificial camels and parts of his own body, the prophet Muhammad is portrayed, in this episode, as making a figurative and literal offering of himself at the origins of Islamic civilization.


1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-440
Author(s):  
Yuni Setia Ningsih

Family is a tiny scope that will bring someone to social life. The fine social order influenced by condition of every family inside it, because society is an accumulation and reflection of lifestyle, world view, even way of thinking of every individual in a family. Good or worse community at social life is depending on family condition. Family is playing important role to direct children to become good moral generation on and beneficial for society. Therefore, to realize that goal, children emotional education from early age at family scope is requirement. 


Imbizo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Clement Olujide Ajidahun

This article is a thematic study of Femi Osofisan’s plays that explicitly capture the essence of blackism, nationalism and pan-Africanism as a depiction of the playwright’s ideology and his total commitment to the evolution of a new social order for black people. The article critically discusses the concepts of blackism and pan-Africanism as impelling revolutionary tools that seek to re-establish and reaffirm the primacy, identity, and personality of black people in Africa and in the diaspora. It also discusses blackism as an African renaissance ideology that campaigns for the total emancipation of black people and a convulsive rejection of all forms of colonialism, neo-colonialism, Eurocentrism, nepotism and ethnic chauvinism, while advocating an acceptance of Afrocentrism, unity and oneness of blacks as indispensable tools needed for the dethronement of all forms of racism, discrimination, oppression and dehumanisation of black people. The article hinges the underdevelopment of the black continent on the deliberate attempt of the imperialists and their black cronies who rule with iron hands to keep blacks in perpetual slavery. It countenances Femi Osofisan’s call for unity and solidarity among all blacks as central to the upliftment of Africans. The article recognises Femi Osofisan as a strong, committed and formidable African playwright who utilises theatre as a veritable and radical platform to fight and advocate for the liberation of black people by arousing their revolutionary consciousness and by calling on them to hold their destinies in their hands if they are to be emancipated from the shackles of oppression.


Author(s):  
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra ◽  
Adrian Masters

Scholars have barely begun to explore the role of the Old Testament in the history of the Spanish New World. And yet this text was central for the Empire’s legal thought, playing a role in its legislation, adjudication, and understandings of group status. Institutions like the Council of the Indies, the Inquisition, and the monarchy itself invited countless parallels to ancient Hebrew justice. Scripture influenced how subjects understood and valued imperial space as well as theories about Paradise or King Solomon’s mines of Ophir. Scripture shaped debates about the nature of the New World past, the legitimacy of the conquest, and the questions of mining, taxation, and other major issues. In the world of privilege and status, conquerors and pessimists could depict the New World and its peoples as the antithesis of Israel and the Israelites, while activists, patriots, and women flipped the script with aplomb. In the readings of Indians, American-born Spaniards, nuns, and others, the correct interpretation of the Old Testament justified a new social order where these groups’ supposed demerits were in reality their virtues. Indeed, vassals and royal officials’ interpretations of the Old Testament are as diverse as the Spanish Empire itself. Scripture even outlasted the Empire. As republicans defeated royalists in the nineteenth century, divergent readings of the book, variously supporting the Israelite monarchy or the Hebrew republic, had their day on the battlefield itself.


2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Mark Long ◽  
Alex S. Wilner

Deterring terrorism is no longer a provocative idea, but missing from the contemporary theoretical investigation is a discussion of how delegitimization might be used to manipulate and shape militant behavior. Delegitimization suggests that states and substate actors can use the religious or ideological rationale that informs terrorist behavior to influence it. In the case of al-Qaida, the organization has carefully elaborated a robust metanarrative that has proved to be remarkably successful as a recruitment tool, in identity formation for adherents, as public apologia and hermeneutic, and as a weapon of war—the so-called media jihad. In the wake of the upheaval of the Arab Spring, al-Qaida and its adherents have redeployed the narrative, promising a new social order to replace the region's anciens régimes. Delegitimization would have the United States and its friends and allies use al-Qaida's own narrative against it by targeting and degrading the ideological motivation that guides support for and participation in terrorism.


1971 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 207-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry R. Targ

Author(s):  
D.M. Belousov ◽  

Analysis of the economic and social situation allows for the conclusion that the world is entering an era of global instability and contradictions. There is clearly a crisis of compensatory and basic institutions. Humans cease to be the subjects of the historical process and instead are becoming the object of control. Contradictions are sharply increasing at different levels. We are witnessing the conflict between labor and capital related to the national nature of labor and the global nature of capital. Production, security and regional applied science are changing, but financial and institutional systems remain global. Information and trade wars are intensifying. During a multi-level crisis, it is difficult to predict what a new social order will be like, but the transition to it will be difficult and highly possibly rife with (macro-) regional conflicts.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathilde Barbier ◽  
Grégory Lo Monaco ◽  
Sylvain Delouvée

The present study was carried out in December, 2018 and aimed at exploring the “Yellow Vests” movement when the revolts were in full swing. It involved 260 French participants (Mage = 42.9 years, SDage 14.6, Min = 18 to Max = 88). Results confirmed our hypotheses. The people who most identified with the “Yellow Vests” are those who perceive the system to be less fair and more illegitimate, and who express more dissatisfaction with the democratic regime and are generally more politically cynical. They feel more alienated and affirm that they would be more likely to resort to violence in order to introduce a new social order. They adhere more to conspiracy theories. Finally, we found greater identification of the “Yellow Vests” with extreme compared to moderate political parties. We discuss these results from the defence of the moral economy principle.


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