Articles

The article examines a stage of geopolitical rivalry in Central Eurasia in connection with the centenary of the Moscow treaties of 1921.

The article analyzes the artistic features of Halit Kakınç’s fantastic narrative and its engagement with contemporary social and political issues.

The article reviews studies of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy published over the last twenty years and groups them according to their research methods.

The Nusantara folklore studies are included into the basic course for IAAS students of Indonesian language groups. The renewed course of folklore paves the way for the future deeper understanding of Indonesian literature and culture. The course titled ‘Indonesian Folklore Guide’ is planned to be published. Its main topics are myths and rituals, folk tales, minor folklore genres, ghost-lore and modern forms of Indonesian folklore. Ten lectures are devoted to the following subjects: 1) Spirits, Shamans and Were-Demons: Spells and Incantations; 2) Gods and Heroes: Mythological texts; 3) Shadows, Puppets, Masks and People: Rituals, Sacred Performances and Story-Telling; 4) Giants, Hermits and the Royals: Wonder Tales; 5) Indonesian Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties: Folktale Motifs and Archaic Reconstructions; 6) The Cunning Mouse-Deer Kancil and the Lazy Man Si Kabayan: Tales about Tricksters; 7) Minor Folklore Genres: Riddles, Pantuns, Jokes and Proverbs; 8) Ghosts and Ghouls: Indonesian Demonology; 9) Child-lore, Urban-lore & Internet-lore; 10) The Future of the Folklore. The course includes group discussions and creative homework assignments. The bibliography and recommendations for students include Indonesian and Malay original sources, translated texts as well as theoretical works by prominent folklorists, philologists and anthropologists.

The article studies the ulama of Ottoman Syria within the system of interconfessional relations from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

The article studies the first classical theory of Qur’anic interpretation in the introduction to the tafsir of Ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839–923).

The article analyzes Chinese authors’ experiments with the recitation and performance of modern poetry in the 1920s and 1930s and the relation between oral and written forms.

The collection of legal documents of the Lingga Sharia court (Mahkamah Syariah Kerajaan Lingga) from the Daik museum (Lingga island, modern Indonesia) is a collection of court judgments regarding various types of commercial acts, financial obligations and disputes over property. The collection contains about 350 documents written in the Malay Jawi language and dating back to the early 20th century (from 1905 to 1909). Among documents there are: promissory notes, judgments on the imposition of fines, claims for the payment of alimony/maintenance, claims, disputes over property, documents on the purchase and sale of goods and property; waqf documents etc. A preliminary review of the documents helps to identify personalities among the participants in the court proceedings: their race, cultural and religious background, social status, places of origin etc. Texts mention Muslims and also non-Muslims, first of all, Chinese, Indian and a number of European names. Apparently the Lingga Sharia Court was engaged in the implementation of legal proceedings and the consideration of cases not only for Muslims, but also for other groups of the population. Hence textual analysis of documents will help to reconstruct various legal, socio-economic and cultural aspects of life in Johor. The application of an integrated systematic scientific approach to the studies of these new mass historical sources will reveal new material on the regional history and historical realities of the Malay society in the late 19th – early 20th centuries.

The article examines the work of the Tranquebar missionaries and its significance for the study of South Indian languages.

The article uses construction grammar to analyze the meaning and origin of the elements of the Chinese successive construction “一X就Y”.

The article analyzes the position of Ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839–923) on the language of the Qur’an in the introduction to his commentary.

The paper claims that tracing Philippine literature back to the pre-colonial epics is an extrapolation of the European model, paradoxically supported by the ideology of nationalism. Russian essays on the history of Philippine literature share the same drawbacks: they claim the existence of pre-colonial written literature, including epics, and trace the genesis of Philippine literature to them. There is no doubt that the archipelago was rich in oral epics, it is documented in early Spanish sources. However, epics were wiped out in the process of Christianization, not a single text in the vernacular has survived. The existence of a vast body of ancient manuscripts written in syllabic scripts in pre-colonial times, as shown by A. Ocampo, is a romantic idea that dates back to presumptions made by Jose Rizal and has never been proved. Written literature with a novel as its pinnacle was formed in medieval Europe on the basis of Greco-Roman heritage, local oral traditions and Christianity. Early written Philippine literature, on the contrary, has excluded local folklore as a pagan lore. Only poetic elements of rhyme and rhythm were preserved, but not the contents. Written literature has evolved during the 17–18 cc. in a society oriented on Christian values and Spanish culture under the influence of borrowed ecclesiastic and lay literary genres of European origin. It is only recently that the rich Philippine oral literature starts to find its way into urban forms of art through theatre, ballet, dance, cinema, TV, comics and horror stories. It presently dominates the last of those ‘democratic genres’. The author’s field materials (1995–2020) on the present-day living epics of several mountain areas of the archipelago are used.

The article studies Zoroastrian Arabs in pre-Islamic Arabia and their place in the region’s religious history.

The article examines the morphemic structure of the infinitive in Eastern and Southeastern Bantu languages and the semantics of derivative suffixes.

The paper explores the biography and academic career of Professor Mikhail Meyer, a distinguished historian of Ottoman and Turkish studies and President of the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University.