Suchergebnisse

It's a sad fact, but too few Americans are aware that their nation's capital is a colony within the mainland of our country. Since the District of Columbia's founding more than two centuries ago, the city's residents have been denied the democratic rights that Americans living in the 50 states take for granted, including voting representation in Congress and control over their own legislation, budgets, courts, and prison system. Among all countries with elected national legislatures, only the United States denies voting representation to the citizens of its nation's capital. While the budget deal was the trigger for the April demonstrations, two centuries of disenfranchisement were the fuel. And for Mayor Gray and many of the other protestors, the demonstration was not only to register outrage but also to promote a solution: making DC the 51st state. Adapted from the source document.

In this retrospective of the works of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the author questions the fundamental difference in the Arab or Muslim mind from its western counterpart. In his personal reflections of reading Palace Walk, the first volume of the Cairo Trilogy, the reader experienced conflict of an utterly different world that was resolved with real & familiar characters. The saga of the stern paterfamilia is written in a westernized realistic style that drew on the oral & allegorical traditions of Arabic literature. In contrast, the non-realistic novel Children of Gebelaawi placed Mahfouz in the center of controversy as it predecessor to Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. The wartime setting of the Trilogy depicts the combination of social change & the author's own aging in the breaking of a father's once supreme command over his family. Further societal changes are represented in Sugar Street as the protagonist questions his received beliefs to embrace atheism & skepticism, & the subtle rebellion of the confined daughters. The understanding of another culture made available in the Cairo Trilogy reveals that there is no Arab or Muslim way of thinking, any more than there is an American, Christian, or Jewish of thinking. J. Harwell