Articles

This article examines issues related to the ownership of peasants by the Georgian Orthodox Church in the 16th–17th centuries: the sources from which the social group of church peasants was formed, its size and categories, the kinds of quitrents and duties, and the role of peasants in the functioning of the Church.

The article analyses the reasons for the intensification of the missionary activity of the London Jewish Society in Jerusalem in the 1840s and its results. In this decade the Anglo-Prussian Bishopric was established and the Church of Christ was built. This became possible thanks to the support of Great Britain and Prussia, which used the missionaries in their policies.

A current problem of the modern Chinese language is the study of Internet vocabulary. Over the past decade, the Chinese language has become more diverse, incorporating numerous computer terms, borrowings and new words from the World Wide Web that reflect the mutual influence of different languages. The goal of this article is to describe the language of the Internet, blogs and chat rooms as a new form of communication.

The following article focuses on transformation of official view on Islam of Turkey’s Republican People’s Party after World War II. The author analyses shifts in kemalist concept of state secularism. Special attention is paid to the discussion of secularity during the seventh Republican People’s Party congress, proposals on introduction of Islam to social life and their further embodiment.

The conflict in the Arab countries was caused by a complex of socioeconomic, political, cultural and religious reasons. A specific role in the Arab events was played by the youth. It is well known that the youth as a sociodemographic group is determined by a complex of age characteristics, specifics of social status and particular sociopsychological traits. A typical characteristic of the youth is the formation of motives for political behavior and behavioral attitudes in its milieu. The function of political mobilization and socialization in the Arab protests was fulfilled by the Internet, which demonstrated a new form of political communication. Thus the role of the youth factor as an objective one has been increasing in the Arab protest movements.

The article concerns the analysis of the role and place of the Christians in the administration system of the Ottoman Syria and the degree of their involvement in the activities of the provincial governmental bodies. The study of this problem aims at showing the gradual changes in the position of the Christian population of the region in the framework of the multifaceted crisis, experienced by the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century.

During the Edo period (1603–1867), Japanese thinkers adopted some elements of European geographical thought. The new view of the world included both traditional and Western scientific knowledge. The treatise “Nihon Suido Ko:” by Nishikawa Joken (1648–1724) is one of the earliest examples of this kind of synthesis. The work was important not only for the development of geographical thought, but also for the Japanese people’s self-perception, as the synthesis of knowledge from different sources aimed to determine Japan’s position in the world.

The article is devoted to the interpretation of No 110 Sura Nasr of the Holy Muslim scripture – the Quran. Particular attention is paid to its eschatological significance and presence of authoritative interpreters of the Quran opinions in the past, relatively to the meaning of this sura. The results of the research have shown that proposed as the only correct traditional understanding of this sura may be revised as from the information that contained in the classical interpretations of the Quran point of view and of the Arabic language and the overall structure of the text.

The main achievements in the sphere of epistemology obtained in Jainism, one of the most interesting trends in religious and philosophical life of India in the 1st millennium BC, are briefly characterized in the paper. Two very important Jain theories of knowledge are analyzed: the seven-points scale of approaches towards a coordinated view upon objects, named ‘Naya-vaada’, and the relative-pluralistic doctrine of relations between the subject and object of cognition which is called ‘Syaad-vaada’ and which is based on seven fundamental assertions.

The article is devoted to the problem of transformation of the Qur‘anic story of Yusuf and its key motifs in Persian Classic poetry, both lyric and epic. On the basis of the examples from qasidas and ghazals composed by famous Persian poets like Khakani, ‘Attar, Sa‘di, Hafiz and some other the author of the article shows how the process of artistic transformation and canonization of key motifs of the Qur‘anic story took place. The citations of lyric poetry represent wide genre specter and specific individual interpretations of motifs connected with the story of Yusuf. Transformation of plot is shown on the example of Jami’s famous romance Yusuf and Zuleykha. All changes in the plot and in the list of personages are made in accordance with canon of Persian Classic verse romance.

The problem of our research is how the semantic field of thickness is divided by the lexemes in Russian and Chinese languages and what features can describe the difference between these lexemes. This study is performed within the framework of lexical typology. Methods used include context analysis of dictionary articles and corpora examples; questioning of native speakers informants. The goal of this study is to give a detailed analysis of the semantics of Chinese adjectives with initial meaning ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ and to give a comparison of systems of meanings between Chinese and Russian adjectives from the semantic field of thickness.

The article, based on a series of computations and models, shows that during the last thirty years developing countries, by applying their comparative and dynamic advantages (among them low, although rising, levels of wages and steeply increasing levels of educational attainment and investment rates), have on the whole substantially enlarged their positions in the world economy — in global GDP, industrial production, gross fixed capital formation, R&D expenditures, exports, and inflows of foreign direct investment. Despite acute ecological, financial, social and political problems that Asian, African and Latin American countries are grappling with, many (including the largest) of them, by implementing institutional reforms and rational economic policies, have by and large benefited from ongoing globalization and substantially progressed in catch-up development, productivity growth, reduction of poverty and reaching levels of global competitiveness which turned out to be considerably higher than could be expected judging by their GDP per capita standards.