Pan-Arabism v. Pan-Africanism in the Sudan: The Crisis of Divergent Ethnic Ideologies

This article examines the nature and the extent of political and cultural conflict between Northern and Southern Sudanese. It describes and analyzes various attempts by Arab dominated regimes in the Sudan, since independence from Britain, to achieve national intergration[integration] through Pan-Arabist policies that seek to Islamize and Arabize the African and largely Christian South. The current military regime dominated by Muslim fundamentalists is trying to turn the Sudan into an Islamic republic. Not only has this brought about a civil war, but it has also alienated other Muslims in the North who favor a secular government

Art for Social Change: Supporting Art for Community Building, New Philanthropic Orientations in Egypt

Taking stock of recent developments in the field of philanthropy concerning the theme of Art for Social Change, this paper shall analyze the new cultural and artistic trends in civic participation and social engagement in Egypt that take their root well before the revolution and could be further emphasized following the Uprisings. The focus will be on new philanthropic orientations fostering community based cultural expressions rather than 'elitist' art forms or already recognized performing artists (concerts, opera, and blockbuster films)

Literary Modernity between Arabic and Persian Prose: Jurji Zaydan's Riwayat in Persian Translation

Our understanding of nineteenth-century literary practice is often mediated by the national literature model of study that continues to govern discussions of modern literature. Put differently, contemporary evaluations of literary texts of the nineteenth century are often arrived at by using the national literature models that remain ascendant. This results in particular from the interplay of two concepts, 'nationalism' and 'novelism', and the role that these ideological agendas play in establishing the frameworks for literary study that predominate in today's academy. Novelism is defined by Clifford Siskin as 'the habitual subordination of writing to the novel' —it is the prevalent tendency to approach prose writing in general using a framework of value derived from criticism of the novel.1 Rather than evaluating texts of the period in question by using criteria that can be validly ascribed to the sites of their production, we often tend to employ instead criteria derived from the novel as a currently-ascendant form of writing. Together with the tendency to read literature as defined exclusively by the trajectories offered in national-literature frameworks, this dual agenda has come to represent the most widespread tendency in literary historical scholarship, that of the nationalist-novelist paradigm, which presumes national literatures to be its subject matter, and which evaluates (non-European) prose writing largely through the critical tools developed for assessing the European novel

Extramuros’: Spanish arabism and european orientalism

El arabismo español fue casi el único orientalismo que existió en España a lo largo de todo el siglo XIX y arranque del XX. La ausencia de una dimensión exterior hacia Oriente de la política extranjera de España –dejando a un lado el caso excepcional de Filipinas-, la carencia de una expansión colonial hacia esos territorios y de una acción arqueológica en los mismos, que tanto estimuló en otros países el horizonte orientalista, privó a la academia hispana de estudiosos de disciplinas relacionadas con todo este mundo oriental. La existencia de un rico pasado arabo-musulmán en España convirtió a Al Andalus en “nuestro Oriente doméstico”, tema central del arabismo español. El arabismo hispano se mantuvo alejado de los centros del orientalismo europeo a lo largo del siglo XIX y sólo en las primeras décadas del XX logró insertarse en circuitos internacionales pero sólo en el ámbito estricto de los estudios andalusíesSpanish Arabism was almost the only branch of Orientalism that existed in Spain during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Spanish foreign policy almost ignored the East, with the exception of the Philippines. The lack of colonial expansion towards the East, an element that greatly stimulated Orientalism in other countries, deprived Spanish academia of scholars specialising in Oriental studies. The existence of a rich Arab-Muslim past in Spain made al-Andalus ‘our own domestic Orient’, the central focus of Spanish Arabism. During the 19th century Spanish Arabism maintained its distance from European Orientalist centres and it was only in the first decades of the 20th century that it managed to find its place in international circuits, although within the strict scope of Andalusian studie

Uncovering the nexus between attitudes, preferences, and behavior in sociological applications of stated choice experiments

Multifactorial survey experiments such as stated choice experiments are used more and more frequently in social science research. In this article, based on an experimental study on ethical and political consumption, we explore the potential of hybrid choice models to explicitly model latent psychological factors such as attitudes, overcoming a possible endogeneity bias and misrepresentation of causality. To this end, we employ a hybrid latent class choice model (HLCCM) in which the latent class structure allocates individuals to classes according to underlying latent attitudes that also influence the answers to attitudinal questions. This allows, in line with sociological action theories, a theory-guided testing of preference segmentation and modification caused by attitudes. We compare the complex HLCCM with less complex models that do not take the latent variable nature of attitudes into account and discuss in which cases less complex models might be more appropriate. However, the HLCCM always has the advantage of providing structure for theory testing and is therefore a useful tool to uncover preference heterogeneity, preference modification, and decision-making processes in sociological and other social science research

Christian political participation in the Arab world

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Linguistic policies and Language Issues in the Middle East

The paper analyzes the relationship between Islam, nationalism and linguistic policies towards minorities. It compares the linguistic policies toward minority languages during the pre-modern period and the modern one with focus on Egypt and the Suda