Suchergebnisse

Aviva Butt has just finished translating in collaboration with the author, Salim Barakat's first novel Fuqahā' al-Ẓalām (Sages of Darkness) written in 1985. The translation was done from a later original Arabic manuscript roughly the same as the 1994 Baghdadi edition. Sages of Darkness is a Kurdish Sufi novel depicting Kurdish life in late Ottoman times. It is, in fact, a philosophical novel with a strong dose of psychological realism, written in a style derived from Classical Modernism. And so, it is mainstream literature, an achievement in view of the late start in novel-writing by the Kurdish far-flung writers' community. The action line, full of suspense, violence, and murder, is greatly about the tribal notable "Avdei Sarei," who does everything he can to ensure the survival of his business and the economic health of his endeavors. In this article, the translator of Sages of Darkness analyzes Barakat's novelistic techniques for the purpose of prompting a better understanding of the novel, and by-the-by, if possible, to solve the enigma of the meaning of the title.

Why were Christian democratic unions (CDUs) among workers and farmers more proactive in some Western European states than in others? Marxist theories explain union activity by industrialization. However, CDUs were not the most active in the late 19th century in rapidly industrializing states, e.g., Italy and Germany. Using social identity theory and Lipset's & Rokkan's cleavage theory, this paper conducts process tracing on the German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Belgian cases to test the following argument: CDUs were more likely to develop in states where anticlerical attacks unleashed a center-periphery conflict. CDUs are less likely to expand in states where anticlerical attacks precipitated a church-state conflict. The presence of a Catholic minority moderated this relationship. In the Protestant-dominant states, Catholicism allowed for mobilizing individuals and maintaining cohesion. The Lutheran states' hostility toward Catholic activism and the regional concentration of the minority accentuated this denominational difference, which catalyzed CDU development.