Suchergebnisse

Interview in Arabic

The ICRC announces the publication of a new work in Arabic, "Course of Five Lesson on the Geneva Conventions" by Henri Coursier, translated by the Saudi Arabian Red Crescent Society and priced at 10 Swiss francs. In order to disseminate broader understanding throughout the Arab world of the humanitarian principles and activities of the Red Cross movement, the ICRC Documentation and Dissemination Division, in cooperation with the various Red Crescent Societies, has published some 15 works in Arabic.

The last fifteen years have witnessed rapid growth in the number of students studying Arabic and of programs concerned with the teaching of the language. This is directly attributable to the awakened interest in the United States in the Middle East in general, and the Arab world in particular, as a result of the entry of the U.S. in World War II and its emergence as a global power with strategic, economical, and political interests in the area. This is not to say that the teaching of Arabic is a new phenomenon in the U.S. As an indespensible tool of Orientalistic scholarship, Arabic was taught for many years in a few institutions which offered programs in Oriental and Semitic Studies.

Diglossia has been the subject of attention of many linguists and philologists dealing with Arabic for many decades. The term itself was coined by W. Marçais (1930) and was brought to the attention of general linguists and ethnologists (socio-linguists in particular) by Ferguson in 1959. Diglossia is also a well-known phenomenon in Modern Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. Fishman (1967) and Valdman (1968) deal with it in terms of methodology and theory. Kaye (1970, 1972a) deals with it in the light of modern linguistic theory and is restricted (not entirely though) to a discussion of Arabic. The monograph under review is an attempt to survey the diglossia situation using Classical Arabic and colloquial Iraqi (almost entirely Baghdadi) data. Much of the work can already be found in Altoma (1957, 1966).

The Arabic version of Red Cross Principles has just been issued by the ICRC. This work, which first appeared in French in 1955 and has also been translated into English, German, Japanese and Spanish, is of fundamental importance and should, as Max Huber wrote in his preface to the French edition, be not only read but meditated upon. The author, Mr. Jean Pictet, is Vice-President of the ICRC, Director of the Henry Dunant Institute and Associate Professor at the University of Geneva.

The International Review has in the past announced the publication by the ICRC of books in Arabic. In 1972, for example, the Review mentioned three booklets: one of thirteen pages containing a summary of the draft Protocols which have since been submitted to the Diplomatic Conference; another of 22 pages containing the articles of the 1949 Geneva Conventions relating to the display of the red cross and red crescent emblems; finally, a study of 14 pages in which the author demonstrated that some of the principles underlying the Geneva Conventions were recognized and affirmed in the Koran.

In a study of 80 middle sized pages, Dr. Latifeh ez-Zayyat, Head of the English Department at Ain-Shams University, Egypt, presents the image of woman in the Arabic novels and short stories which appeared during the second half of the 20th century, particularly between 1960 and 1980, i.e. the period which was marked by important political and social changes in the Arab East.