Articles

The article contains an excerpt from a letter by Vissarion Sartov, the nephew of the prominent pre-revolutionary orientalist Palladius (Kafarov) and the first psalmist of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Japan. The excerpt from a letter to an unknown person, dated July 28, 1873, was found in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and is published for the first time. It contains information about the early preaching of Orthodoxy in Japan: rivalry with Catholic missionaries in the former province of Sendai; features of Orthodox worship in Japanese; the organization of the church and the life of the Orthodox community in Hakodate; and Vissarion Sartov’s personal assessment of the prospects for Orthodoxy in Japan. It also mentions Nicholas of Japan, who had moved from Hakodate to Tokyo by the time Sartov wrote the letter.

This article is dedicated to the life and works of Uchida Masao (1839–1876), a Japanese writer, translator and teacher of the second half of the nineteenth century. The world geography encyclopedia “Yochi Shiryaku” (“Short Description of the World”, 1871–1880) is considered his main work. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), it was a bestseller. The encyclopedia was so popular that it was called “one of the three [outstanding] books of the Meiji period” (Meiji no sanshyo). Despite Uchida Masao’s rich literary legacy, his name is now practically unknown.

A set of XII century BC oracle bone inscriptions found in the ruins of the ancient Shang state capital narrates the bestowing of a title of hou of the place named Gan (genuine reading unknown) upon the person named Shang. The case of Gan-hou Shang cannot be explained by merely a formal recognition of the subjection of a previously independent peripheral chieftain; it must have been either a feudal-like enfeoffment or an assignment of an office. Some evidence suggests Gan was originally a part of the royal domain, granted later to hou Shang as a fief. Thus, the inscriptions shed light on the Shang period enfeoffment system, saying little of its actual scale and characteristics.

The monograph titled “From Lenin to Putin. Russia in the Middle and Near East” is presented to the judgment of professionals and a wide range of readers by the Academician A.M. Vasilyev, who is the patriarch of Russian Oriental and African studies. It covers an immense period (what is reflected in the title of the work) that witnessed political and economic relations of both the USSR and Russia with countries extended over the Middle and Near East surviving a lot of controversial events. In the course of that period not only the regimes changed and various military and political conflicts of diverse intensity have taken place, but the breakdown and unification of some of them has been seen, followed by transformation of ideologies, political systems etc. Obviously, the author aimed his efforts at analysing the great majority of these events stressing the role of both the USSR and Russia in them. The fundamental monograph by A.M. Vasilyev is of great interest for professionals and a wide range of readers from the educational and informational points of view.

A qualitative leap in knowledge about the Ottoman Empire and Islam achieved under Peter I was due not only to a subjective factor — the decision of such statesmen and scholars as P. A. Tolstoy, D. Kantemir, P. I. Yaguzhinsky and S. L. Vladislavich-Raguzinsky to join the tsar. In many ways, it was dictated by an objective factor, namely the practical need for knowledge of the Turks and Islam in the context of a military confrontation between two powers and two worlds: Russian Orthodox civilization and Muslim civilization in its Ottoman form.

This article dwells upon the language situation in Hyderabad, which is very diverse from the ethnolinguistic point of view. The author gives a historical description of the Urdu and Telugu languages and their relationship. The author also analyzes the evolution of the status of these languages and considers how their position has changed since the princely state of Hyderabad was integrated into the Indian Union in September 1948. The article examines the spheres in which Urdu and Telugu, though official languages, can be used, and the measures taken to promote and develop them. Special attention is paid to the correlation of ethnolinguistic and confessional aspects in the life of the Hindu and Muslim communities of Hyderabad, whose members are often bilingual. The author also raises the question of the relationship between Indian languages and English in various spheres of society and studies the resulting problems and possible solutions.

The article discusses the problem of enclave territories on the border between India and Bangladesh (East Pakistan in 1947–1971), known as chitmahals or chhits. The emergence of chitmahals can be traced through the history of the Cooch Behar princely state in the north-east of India. The XVII–XVIII centuries saw the decline of the princely state, which led to the ceding of a number of land parcels within its territory to the Mughal Empire. At the same time, the maharajas of Cooch Behar had land possessions outside their state. Later the actions of the East India Company, the new suzerain of the princely state, resulted in the emergence of new enclave territories. The problem of chitmahals was not resolved during the Partition of India in 1947, and Cooch Behar’s merger with India in 1949 turned it into a matter of international relations. The Agreements of 1958 and 1974 sanctioned the exchange of enclaves in order to preserve the integrity of the international border, but their timely implementation was delayed by politicization of the problem and India’s cumbersome bureaucracy. Corruption and the lax attitude of border guards helped enclave dwellers survive without access to their state’s infrastructure, economic system and social services up to 2015. The local population was hostile to people from chhits, which further exacerbated their hardships and impeded the implementation of the 1974 Agreement. Though the Agreement was ratified in full in 2015, there still are a few obstacles to clear on the way to resolving the enclaves issue.

This publication includes the introduction and the first 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 in Petrograd under the name “Fiqh al-Qurʼān” (The Understanding of the Qurʼān). The introduction to the translation briefly discusses the contribution of the theologian to Qurʼān studies, his scientific ties with renowned European and Russian Orientalists, as well as his methodology of interpretation. The first part of the translation covers the commentary to the first four (according to another numbering three) 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.

This article explores how women in contemporary China answer to unemployment challenges which have affected China after its shift towards the market oriented economy. The paper discusses the changing approach to body politics in China as an answer towards rising rate of unemployment among Chinese women. It traces the history of how market reforms and changes in educational policies have put Chinese women in a position where they have to seek help of plastic surgeons to increase their value on the job market. The author argues that due to a rapid economic development of China and rise of the middle class with a larger disposable income, competition for employment in China has increased dramatically, which made women highly vulnerable, pushing them to use body alterations to secure jobs.

The paper analyses Turkey’s foreign policy towards the Middle East in the 2000s and early 2010s in two interrelated aspects: as a complicated search for a mutually acceptable model of cooperation between Turkey and the West on international security, and as a problem of differences in their perspectives on international security and approaches to its implementation in Turkey, the EU and the US. The relatively successful period of cooperation in the global war on terrorism in the 2000s did not help Turkey and the West overcome these conceptual differences. First, this prevented the full integration of Turkey into the Western system of international security in the Middle East. Second, it deepened differences in perspectives on international security and the struggle against those accused of terrorism and radicalism by the West. The Arab Spring and the escalation of instability in the region since the early 2010s, related to new civil wars and the rise of the Islamic State, highlighted this divergence and accelerated Ankara’s ambitions to act as an independent regional power in the Middle East, with its own agenda and strategy for relations with both state and non-state actors.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of transnational Islamic movements’ expansion to Thailand, taking the case of such a transregional missionary movement as Jama’ah Tabligh. Wide-scale activities of various international Islamic movements in Thailand and their rising influence on political and social life there since the 1970s resulted in the growing complexity of the religious situation in Thailand in general and in its southern provinces in particular. The Muslim Brotherhood was the most influential among Islamic movements in Thailand in that period. Its ideological framework became the basis of the Young Muslims Association of Thailand’s activities. However, the impact of the transnational movement Jama’ah Tabligh originating from India and Salafi movements urging the clearing of Islam from local traditions on Thailand’s Muslims was also essential. Each of these movements has its own strategy of ideological expansion and its own model of social activity. Thus, new ideological constructions and cultural identities emerging from the expanding Islamic network structures originating from the Islamic reformist movements supplemented the patchwork constellation of Islamic movements historically established in Thailand in the Modern Times. These processes became most visible in Thailand’s Muslim south.

This article is devoted to the problem of the name of the Qing settlement, commonly referred to as Maymachen. The toponym Maymachen was one of the most well-known geographical names mentioned in various texts dedicated to Russian-Qing relations. It was usually used as the name of the settlement, which had been located on the Russian-Qing border on the opposite side of Russian towns of Kyakhta and Troitskosavsk. In the 18th century this area became the center of Russian-Qing trade and the place, where diplomatic contacts between Russian and Qing governments were conducted. As such, it was repeatedly described in travelogues and reference books, regularly mentioned in dictionaries and diplomatic correspondence; a number of articles and books devoted to local commerce and language contacts were compiled. However, the history of the local Qing settlement has been poorly studied to date and even its name has been incorrectly used in Russian texts, which referred to it as “Maymachen”. The real Chinese name of this place was “Qiaketu”, which also, like the Russian word “Kyakhta”, originated from the Mongolian toponym “Hyagt”. The name “Maymachen” (or maimaichen according to the modern norms of transcription) was used in Chinese for the trade settlements and there were several “maimaichens” in other Mongolian cities. Thus, in the case of Qiaketu, a generic term for a specific part of the town (maimaichen) was used as the name of the whole town. The article considers the circumstances that contributed to the emergence of this peculiar situation, and the resulting errors in the interpretation of the content of geographic and historical materials.

The article analyzes the restoration of the Buddhist sangha in Mongolia after 1990 in the context of theories of Buddhist modernization in the twentieth century. Many works discuss the interaction of Buddhism with Western teachings and culture, but Mongolian Buddhism has received insufficient attention in this regard. In recent decades, Mongolia’s role in Tibetan-Mongolian Buddhism has grown. Buddhism in contemporary Mongolia is connected to religious revival and is also an important part of national, ethnic, cultural and political processes. There is a tendency towards the modernization of Buddhism in Mongolia, while the state also regards Buddhism as a means of preserving national culture and traditions. Traditional and modern forms of Buddhism are not clearly separated in contemporary Mongolia; believers sometimes use traditional practices and views to address modern problems.

The article focuses on various contexts in India’s ancient didactic texts dealing with money. The issue under discussion is whether ritual pollution was transferred from person to person through money. Ancient Indian sources repeatedly state that property acquired at the expense of punished criminals necessarily needs ritual purification. The reason for this is explained by a “similarity relationship” between the property and its owner: a sin of the former owner gets transferred to the property recipient. In this case, it is necessary to explain the issue of punishments that prescribe property confiscation. According to India’s ancient didactic texts, confiscation is often replaced by a monetary fine. Does this mean that money does not transfer the ritual pollution of its former owner to a new owner? How can we explain this paradox? The article analyzes the vocabulary used in ancient Indian texts to denote money and examines various money-related contexts. Finally, it offers insights into a possible understanding of the role of money in ancient societies.

On the basis of analyzing the works of the Persian poets of the XI–XVII centuries, the author of the paper has made an attempt to trace the main stages of evolution of the genre of Shahrashub, which is little dealt with in Iranian studies. Such study is meant to throw some light upon the process of evolution of minor genres of Persian poetry throughout the classical (X–XV c.) and postclassical (XVI–XVII c.) periods. Revealing the generic forms used by Persian poets for writing Shahrashubs, the author has made a number of suggestions concerning the reasons for their choice of different poetic forms. The main stress is made upon the analysis of verses of two outstanding poets – Mas‘ud Sa‘d Salman (1046–1121) and Sayido Nasafi (d. 1711), whose works have served as basic landmarks on the way of the evolution of the genre.