Articles

This article considers the biography of Hadzhi Zagidullovich Gabidullin, the first head of the Department of History of the Colonial and Dependent Countries of the Historical Faculty of the Moscow State University of M. V. Lomonosov. In the history of oriental studies H. Z. Gabidullin has got popularity as a researcher of Islam and Turcology. His work in co-authorship with A. Arsharuni “Sketches of Panturkism and Panislamism in Russia” even now represents considerable value because a large number of the most interesting archival documents on “Muslim affairs” from funds of the Department of Police of the imperial Ministry of Internal Affairs were published in it for the first time. H. Z. Gabidullin prepared a work on the history of the Young Turks’ revolution and supervised Russian-Turkish scientific communications at the level of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in the mid-thirties. H. Z. Gabidullin was one of the Soviet “responsible authorities” supervising the development and introduction in Russia of alphabets based on Latin script. In May 1937 he was accused of participation in a counterrevolutionary nationalist organization and helping “Trotskyists” and was soon subjected to repression. In 1957 H. Z. Gabidullin was rehabilitated. However, his name and activity were long consigned to oblivion.

The following article focuses on the state policy towards Islamic education in Turkey during the Ataturk era. The author analyses various governmental measures towards the Islamic educational system and the establishment of a secular educational system. Special attention is paid to the consistent deconstruction of traditional educational institutes.

The article concerns the processes of voluntary islamisation in the Bulgarian provinces of Ottoman Empire in XVII–XVIII cent. Using materials of the sharia courts registers (sicills) of Sofya the article tells us about probable motives and reasons of conversion to Islam, their life like “new Muslims” and integration to Ottoman society.

This article is devoted to one of the aspects of Early Afghan Literature studies — functioning of poetic incorporation in the first extant prosaic literature work in Pashto — “Dastar-nama” or “Book of Turban” by Khushkhal-khan Khattak (1613–1689). The aim of the article is to define main characteristics and functions of poetic inserts in “Dastar-nama” and determine the means of interaction between prose and poetry in a single artistic space. Such problem definition is quite actual as prose-and-poetic works are widely spread in all classic literatures of the Middle East (Arabic, Persian, Turkish etc.). Still, the problem of poetic inserts’ roles and objectives is insufficiently explored. Thus, this article analyzing the material of Afghan Literature contributes to the creation of instrumental basis for further medieval prose-and-poetic pieces’ functioning analysis.

This article is dedicated to insufficiently studied cultural and educational activities of Abdurrezak Bedirhan, one of the most influential Kurdish political figures at the end of the XIX – beginning of the XX centuries, a fervent supporter of strengthening of the Russian-Kurdish relations.

The paper centers on finding a “common ground” in the works of such authors working in the mainstream of postmodern and avant-garde trends as Vladimir Sorokin and Yu Hua. The analysis is conducted from the point of view of the general ontological foundations of their works, their aesthetic guidelines and the immediate implementation of afore-mentioned in the textual reality. Thus stable complexes with a clear predominance of artistic phenomena of the grotesque and the absurd are revealed.

This paper deals with adjectives describing slippery, smooth, and even surfaces in Chinese within the framework of lexical typology. The analysis is based on a typological research on language categorization of surface textures. After the discussion of semantic oppositions between the direct uses of the adjectives in question, the semantic map for Chinese is constructed and some suggestions for the further elaboration of the map based on Chinese data are made.

The paper covers political and legal aspects of the religious conflict in Ayodhya with a focus on 2010 verdict of the Allahabad High Court as well as the attitude of Indians to the conflict proper. The paper analyzes Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral campaign on the eve of 2014 parliamentary elections and its potential impact on the conflict.

The article proves, on the base of the comparative analysis of Elif Shafak’s two novels (“Pinkhan”, 1997 and “Love”, 2009), that post-modernist rizoma has been structured hardly by its own fundamental principles (discourse decentration, reality textualisation, images simulativity, denial of historism, etc.) and is realized in the writer’s texts through stereotype artistic devices (characters’ way-inicialization, recital “narrativization”, “déjà vu”, parallelism, hybrid “past-present-future” time and so on) which are intensively used by other Turkish post-modernist writers.

This article discusses the development of artistic principles Wang Anyi’s novels about Shanghai. Despite the emphasis on depicting everyday city life in accurate and historically authentic detail, analysis of the art features and “points of view” within the novels reveals a double-layered narrative structure in which describing real life coexists with depicting an illusory existence. Therefore we can make certain conclusions that artistic representation of Shanghai in late novels is leaning more towards non-realistic and subjective approach. The article also emphasizes constructive significance of the concept of dream in artistic world of Wang Anyi’s novels.

The article traces the history of the emergence and distribution Arab movies in the Soviet Union. It discloses the content of the melodramatic genre films and the reasons for their success with audiences. Also it reflects the radical changes and the current state of Russian film market, tells about the Arab feature films of recent years.

The paper analyses the dynamics of the transformation of Turkey’s party and political system from the 1980s to the early 2010s according to five variables: voter activity, electoral volatility, fragmentation of party system (effective number of parties), level of political competition, and proportionality of party representation in parliament. The growing stabilization of Turkey’s party and political system makes increasingly difficult for any new political party to find an electoral niche and facilitates the migration of electorate between old parties. Reformation of the party and political system and creation of a new matrix for political life forced the opposition to search both the new strategies of political struggle and new approaches towards electorate and to revise both party ideology and programs.