Articles

The article examines early and child marriage in contemporary India’s Muslim community. It discusses the historical background, laws raising the minimum marriage age, and the influence of traditional family life, education and Muslim personal law.

The article examines Cao Zhi’s ‘Letter to Yang Dezu’ as a work of early Chinese epistolary prose. It considers the letter’s reflections on literature, thematic range, rhetorical strategies and value as a historical document.

This publication includes the second part of a translation into Russian of the commentary to the sūra “The Opening One” (al-Fātiḥa) and the first five ayats of the sūra “the Cow” (al-Baqara) by the Russian Muslim theologian Musa Jarullah Bigiyev (1874–1949) written in Arabic and published in 1915 year in Petrograd under the name “Fiqh al-Qurʼān” (The Understanding of the Qurʼān). It covers the commentary to the last three (according to another numbering four) ayats of the sūra “The Opening One” (al-Fātiḥa), which reflects the position of M. Bigiev concerning the history of the Qurʼān, its grammar and vocabulary, the differences between the readings (qirāʼat), and his hermeneutic reasoning, which is a synthesis of reformist and mystical approaches.

The article examines the adaptation of Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan in Delhi after the Partition of India in 1947. It considers housing and rehabilitation, the refugees’ role in the city’s growth, and their political preferences in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The final part of a Russian translation of Musa Jarullah Bigiev’s commentary on al-Fātiḥa and the opening verses of al-Baqara. It presents his treatment of Quranic history, grammar, vocabulary, variant readings and hermeneutics.

This paper explores the novel “Ten Nights of Dreams” which is a series of short dream stories written in 1908 by the famous Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). In this paper I explore Natsume’s technique called “dream” which employs images of Japanese folklore and world mythology. The dreams of the character of the “Ten Nights of Dreams” novel symbolize complexity and ambiguity of the human nature, and the world of the fantasy created by him demonstrates us both a unique stream of consciousness and the unconscious layer. I focus on the subjective attitude of the dreamer (dream-ego), as well as on images, symbols and motives of each dream. The whole series of the dreams is seen to have three levels of motives: 1) separation of man and woman by death; 2) confrontation with oneself; 3) tales concerning art and/or religion. Natsume Sōseki uses the following symbols in his novels: 1) number 100 as a symbol of eternity and wisdom in four novels and number 7 in two novels; 2) symbols of Buddhism and Shinto – in three novels; 3) animal as a symbol – once; 4) a flower as a symbol of pure eternal love – once; 5) allusions on the Japanese and world literature and folklore – in three novels.

The article examines relations between Moroccan sultans and Sufi brotherhoods in the 17th and 18th centuries. After the Alawis established their rule, they had to limit the power of Sufi orders while avoiding open conflict with influential shaykhs. Historical chronicles show a more complex relationship than a simple confrontation.

The article examines the structural and linguistic means used in Swahili mediatexts, drawing on the online Tanzanian newspaper Mtanzania. It considers how selection of information and lexical and grammatical choices serve to inform and influence readers.

The article examines the origins, assets and investments of sovereign wealth funds in the Arabian monarchies of the Persian Gulf. It discusses their role in economic reform, support for private enterprise and social stability.

This article describes the possibility of distinguishing the genre of the anecdote in Manden oral tradition and the specificity of the texts associated with the anecdote in bamana. In bamana and Maninka languages there is no special term for anecdotes, most often the words “joke” or “funny story” are used. The significance of bamana “funny stories” is in fact that the anecdote genre’s formation is taking place before our eyes. But so far, among these stories one can find full-fledged anecdotes as well as a large number of simple stories, from the point of view of the logic of their constructing, related to tales about animals or fools. First and foremost, such qualities as stupidity, laziness, cowardice, greed, and desire to gain one’s own profit are ridiculed. There are anecdotes that correspond to a visual-figurative type of thinking. They are based on comic situations, and represent the examples of stupidity, confusion, mistakes. Other anecdotes correspond to a verbal-logical type of thinking, the stories based on language errors, misreading, homonymy, etc.; as well as those that are based on various inconsistencies in the logic of action, on resourcefulness and wit and require the use of more complex logical chains, associations, concepts, etc. by the listener.

The article discusses the dispute over sharing the waters of the Teesta River between India and Bangladesh. It reviews efforts to establish rules for water use since 1972, the role of West Bengal political elites, and obstacles to a settlement after the change of government in India in 2014.

The article examines the ethnocultural, linguocultural and semantic properties of Chinese phraseological units with zoomorphic components. It identifies and systematizes these units and considers the role of zoomorphic components in their meaning.

The article compares the Russian spatial preposition “na” with the Chinese frame construction “在……上”, examining their prototypical meanings, image schemas, extended meanings and syntactic functions.