Suchergebnisse

"Few outsiders have any realistic sense of the innards, motives, rivalries, and fears of the Chinese Communist leadership. But we all know much more than before, thanks to Richard McGregor's illuminating and richly-textured look at the people in charge of China's political machinery.... Invaluable." - James Fallows, National Correspondent for The Atlantic The Party is Financial Times reporter Richard McGregor's eye-opening investigation into China's Communist Party, and the integral role it has played in the country's rise as a global superpower and rival to the United States. Many books have examined China's economic rise, human rights record, turbulent history, and relations with the U.S.; none until now, however, have tackled the issue central to understanding all of these issues: how the ruling communist government works. The Party delves deeply into China's secretive political machine.

Simon Holt's one-act opera The Nightingale's to Blame was written between 1996 and 1998 and given its first performance at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival the same year. For this first excursion into the realm of theatre Holt returned to the work of Federico García Lorca. He used David Johnston's translation of the source play, preserving its basic structure: a Prologue and three scenes. Holt's attraction to the dark, sensuous imagery of Lorca's poetry had resulted, over the previous fourteen years, in four works using words or images from the poems. The opera's title makes direct reference to the bird which the poet used as a symbol for illusion. Lorca's original title for the play was (in translation) The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in the Garden. As a musician himself, he built numerous musical allusions into the play, which has proved attractive to various composers as an opera subject, perhaps most notably Bruno Maderna, whose radiophonic work dates from 1962. Assassinated in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, Lorca did not live to see any of the operatic adaptions of his text. The work occupied him between 1926 and 1929, but fell foul of Spanish censors prior to its planned first performance in 1929, ostensibly because the theatre company had failed to observe mourning for the recently deceased Queen Mother, [but] in all likelihood it was because the role of a cuckold was to be acted by a retired army officer, which could have damaged the dignity of the military. It was finally given in 1933 during the period of the Second Republic.

This essay focuses on animals as a site for religion and identifies what McGregor calls the "religion of animals." The construction of the human-animal divide is explored through the Quran, Islamic theology, and philosophy, with particular attention paid to the encyclopedic epistle The Case of the Animals versus Man from tenth-century Iraq. The same human-animal divide is shown to be maintained variously among European philosophers. McGregor argues that both modern and medieval formulations are organized around a series of assumptions about language, the self, and the religious other. The study of comparative religion is thus usefully decentered by the question of the animal. The Case of the Animals versus Man, the essay contends, represents a solution to the challenges of comparison. The religion of others, then, along with the religion of animals creates a discursive gesture of openness: an opening that points beyond the exclusivity of communitarianism and the ego-centered limitations of religion.

In the following article, I present an account of the legacy of the famous saintly mystic Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1258). The parameters of the study will be narrowed geographically to Tunis and thematically to prayer. Tunis played an important role in the formation of the saint'sṭariqa(mystical order or brotherhood, pi.ṭuruq), and the city today still has a branch of the brotherhood and a number of sacred sites. The theme of prayer as used here includes prayer texts and a wide variety of activity, from popular devotions to spiritual discipline. As will become clear, this is a central element in any discussion of theṭariqa'sorganization, ritual, and literature. In addition to the brotherhood and the sites, there is a Tunisian edition of the only recordedcompositions of the saint, his prayers—known asaḥzāb(sing,ḥizb). This study will thus reflect the saint, his brotherhood, and the use of theaḥzābas integrated elements of the living Shadhili legacy in Tunis. This presentation will go beyond the usual academic treatments of Sufism, which rarely enter the modern period and are concerned mostly with the larger Sufi treatises. I hope not only to bring to light the importance of some lesser known liturgical and ritual practices, but also to begin to appreciate the "lesser tradition," as it were, of Sufi prayer texts.

Xi Jinping has transformed China at home and abroad with a speed and aggression that few foresaw when he came to power in 2012. Finally, he is meeting resistance, both at home among disgruntled officials and disillusioned technocrats, and abroad from an emerging coalition of Western nations that seem determined to resist China's geopolitical and high-tech expansion. With the United States and China at loggerheads, Richard McGregor outlines how the world came to be split in two