2024.1

After gaining independence from Great Britain in 1947, the territory of Hindustan still encompassed small colonial enclaves — French and Portuguese. The issue of their joining India was a matter of time. French possessions included Chandernagore in Bengal; Pondicherry, Yanaon and Karikal on the east coast; and Mahe on the west coast. Population of the French-owned territories was basically represented by Bengalis, Tamils and Malayalis; their ethnic identity played a decisive role in the integration of the former French possessions into the Republic of India. This article examines the stages and ethnocultural nuances of the integration process.

The Muˁdjam al-buldān (Reference-Book on Countries and Settlements), a mediaeval geographical encyclopaedia by Yāḳūt (1178–1129), contains a story in which Sasanid king Shapur ‘Piercer of the Shoulders’ moved Arabs from the region of al-Anbār (near present-day al-Fallujah), built there the town of Pērōz-Shāhpūhr (Peroz-Shapur) and appointed a certain Shīr Farrokhzādān as its governor. There are grounds to believe that the story in question was a part of a family history which descendants of Shīr Farrokhzādān kept through centuries, including in Islamic times. Yāḳūt quotes the story on the authority of Abū-l-Faḍl al-Ṣūlī who wrote at the end on the 9th or in the first half of the 10th century and was, by the criteria of mediaeval Islamic literature, a fairly early writer. The fact that story goes back to Sasanid times and is related by a relatively early writer seems to indicate its general reliability in the presentation of the events. However, the story also shows that it was re-worked in the Arabic cultural milieu. Shapur I, who actually built Misikhē (Pērōz-Shāhpūhr), is replaced by King Shapur II ‘Piercer of the Shoulders’ (307/8–379/80), probably because the latter, known by his fierce struggle against Arabic tribes, seemed to Arab story-tellers to be the one who would cause the forced migration in question rather than anyone else.

Realization of the central Zionist idea, known in Judaism as the “gathering of the exiles” (קיבוץ גלויות), caused one million Jews’ immigration to Israel in the 1950s and became a significant challenge for the country: Jews who came from different countries did not have a single culture and language, a common historical memory and generally accepted social habits. The way to achieve national unity was the “Melting Pot” policy, known in Israeli discourse as “mizug galuyot” (מיזוג גלויות) — “the mixing of exiles”, — aimed at forming a single Israeli nation. Despite the declared nature of the policy of cultural mixing, the practice of implementing “mizug galuyot” continues to be criticized by many researchers, who often characterize it as the forced assimilation of new immigrants by old-timers — the Jews, who arrived before 1948. This article aims to contribute to the study of Israel’s nation-building policy in the 1950s. based on archival documents.

The article focuses on the analysis of the impact of the Wahhabi movement on the emergence of the First Saudi State in the 1740s. Special attention is paid to the investigation of the distinctive features of the Wahhabi doctrine and the socio-political transformation of the Emirate of Diriyah under its direct influence. The study is based on the chronicles of the early Wahhabi theologians and historians — Hussein ibn Ghannam (d. 1811) and Usman ibn Bishr (d. 1871/72), as well as the anonymous work “The Shine of the Meteor in the Life of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab”. The treatises of the founder of Wahhabism Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) serve as a source of information about the early ideology of the movement. A comprehensive study of the listed sources makes it possible to reconstruct the social and political processes in Najd of the mentioned period, and also to draw a conclusion about the leading role of the Wahhabi doctrine in the emergence of Saudi statehood and the absence of other socio-political factors in this process.

The article deals with a notable episode within the phenomenon of the so-called “itinerant court” that includes performing pilgrimages (ziyarat) to the shrines of Muslim saints by the Timurid ruler Shahrukh. The study is based on the materials of dynastic chronicles and considers the most significant pilgrimage routes for the sovereign, its stages, as well as the purposes of these visits. Priority is given to the most frequently visited Sufi communities and the peculiarities of Shahrukh’s interaction with their leaders and other inhabitants. At this point an important question considering what was primary for him — the idea of ruler’s personal piety or utilitarian motives — arises. A thorough analysis of the chronicles demonstrates that the pilgrimage not only provided spiritual satisfaction, but also contributed to the growth of the ruler’s political significance.

The article centers upon the final, third, period of biography of outstanding Dutch Javanist Johann Gericke. It summarizes the results of his scientific and social activity, influencing a lot on the formation of Javanese studies as an academic discipline in the Netherlands in the first half of the 19th century. This subject is yet to be studied in our country being an extremely important matter for understanding the specifics of the development of Indonesian studies within Oriental studies in Russia and abroad.

Based on the materials from Pakistani military journals the article analyzes strategies used by the Pakistan Army in Kashmir from 1947 to the present. Indian-Pakistani disagreements over the territory of Kashmir have caused large-scale wars as well as local border conflicts and still remain a source of tension between the two nuclear powers. A new round of tension in Indian-Pakistani relations is associated with revocation of article 370 of the Constitution of India in 2019, which provided the state of Jammu and Kashmir with the autonomy. However, due to the military superiority of India Pakistan has focused on non-traditional methods of solving the Kashmir problem since the early years of independence. Irregular forces became her main weapon and the methods of using them have been improving over decades. Great importance was also given to the buildup of conventional weaponry and the development of nuclear weapons. Thus, the Pakistan Army has shown interest in such strategies as guerrilla warfare, asymmetric conflict, state terrorism, proxy war, low-intensity conflict, limited and non-kinetic warfare. One of the results of the application of these strategies was the growth of terrorism not only in India but in the region as well. However, in recent years, in the conditions of hybrid warfare nuclear weapons as well as superiority in conventional weapons have ceased to be considered by the Pakistan military leadership as necessary factors for achieving victory in Kashmir. This initiated the search for new approaches to confrontation with India. Military experts consider non-kinetic methods of hybrid warfare to be the most advantageous strategy for the Pakistan Army.

In the article some features of the development of the territorial problem in Indonesia — Malaysia relations in the late XX — early XXI centuries are revealed, in particular the recent dispute over the islands of Sipadan and Ligitan is reviewed. The author emphasizes the importance of the issue for the development of bilateral cooperation between Indonesia and Malaysia and for the process of interstate border final delimitation in today’s conditions. In conclusion, the author attempts to identify possible ways to solve the problem taking into consideration its historical and legal background.

In this article we study gestures and facial gestures as cultural-specific elements of a foreign culture in translation. When translating kinetic idioms, which are verbal description of gestures, facial gestures or postures and simultaneously emotions and feelings they express, a translator chooses the most adequate strategy which depends on existence of full or partial equivalents, absence of equivalents or existence of gaps in target language and culture. Ways and techniques used in every separate case, in the whole coincide with those described in the theory of translation.

The article examines the peripheral actants in Japanese utterance on the degree of expression of their prototypical agentive characteristics: volition, affectedness, ability to control, individuality, etc. The research was based on the material of author’s parallel Russian-Japanese fiction corpus. While analyzing cases of permutative voice in Japanese it is revealed that cases of anthropo-oriented impact of an inanimate subject are characterized by a focus shift from a human as a causation object and bringing him to the syntactic periphery with the raising of a means/instruments or somatics to an object position. A specific type of syntactic transformation is revealed: the movement of the possessor from the original dative to the attributive non-agentive position in possessive constructions, which contributes to the proof of the theoretical thesis about the restriction of the dative coding of the external possessor in Japanese. As a result of a complex study of the agentive potential of peripheral actants it is confirmed that the processes of actant-predicate interaction are largely determined by the semantic features of not only the core, but also of the peripheral syntactic and semantic participants.

The process of studying modern Iranian literature has just begun. This article is the first attempt in Russian and foreign Iranian philology to systematize and analyze a representative block of modern women’s prose works. The scale of this phenomenon, which got a special impetus for development in the republican period, deserves to be in the focus of research, taking into consideration both the vector of development of Iranian literature and its non-literary role as an important social factor. The main features of women’s prose are the expansion of the thematic range and expressive means used by the authors. The stylistic diversity of women’s prose (social realism, fiction, magical realism) is combined with the similarity of its topic — the denial of the woman’s image in its traditional interpretation.

With the expanding influence of China, the competition between the PRC and the US is intensifying. As an important regional organization in the Asia-Pacific region, ASEAN has close economic ties with both China and the U.S., and the conflict between China and the U.S. inevitably occurs in Southeast Asia, which has made ASEAN once again face direct competition from major powers. Under the current regional situation and to maintain the stability and development of the Southeast Asian region, ASEAN countries have chosen a more rational strategy of balancing the great powers in their foreign policy.

The article analyzes the scale, dynamics, and structure of incorrectly issued trade invoices, which are a key channel for illegal cash flows in the Arab region. International trade increasingly occurs within complex supply networks and value chains. In such circumstances, misreporting and incorrect invoicing can occur at any stage. Due to incorrect issuance of trade invoices in 2008–2015. in the Arab region, $482.7 billion were “missed,” which is equivalent to a fifth of total GDP in 2016. Every year, $60.3 billion “went into the shadows.” However, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Jordan accounted for 80% of illegal cash flows in the region associated with trade misinvoicing. Countries not primarily involved in the export of natural resources are more susceptible to misinvoicing practices (10.4%) than countries with resource-dependent economies (7.4%). Informal cross-border trade is a major challenge for customs authorities in some Arab countries. It represents the largest part of the trade flow on Sudan’s border with Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The book by the leading Russian scholar in Oriental and Literary studies academician A.B. Kudelin “The Life of the Prophet as a monument of medieval Arabic literature” sums up the author’s long-term involvement with one of the most famous literary achievements in Arab-Muslim culture. The book introduces the reader to this work, the history of its writing and editing, its content, composition and poetics. The narrative, which is a fusion of hagiography, historical writing and poetry, has always been a subject of interest to Islamic scholars, historians and, to a lesser extent, literary critics. The book by A.B. Kudelin combines all these approaches to the text, but the main emphasis is placed on the literary side of this masterpiece. This is the novelty of the reviewed book. The new approach allowed the author to make a number of observations and conclusions. This is, firstly, the formation of a long prose narrative in historical and adab works, arising on the basis of a mosaic of isolated brief testimonies and stories, and secondly, the growth of elements of fiction within functional prose. Thirdly, the chosen angle of view allowed the author to re-evaluate the role of poetry in the structure of “Biography”, which was previously often perceived as a purely decorative, ornamental element, to see in it a continuation of pre-Islamic oral literature, which was characterized by prosimetry. The conclusions drawn by A.B. Kudelin go beyond the scope of the topic and highlights a number of important theoretical and methodological issues. The book is useful to anyone interested in Arab-Muslim culture and literature, students of Oriental studies, not to mention researchers on a wide range of issues.

Review of the book: Сhang Jisŏng. Hangug-ŭi Hwahweyŏngmohwa [Korean Painting of Flowers, Birds, and Animals]. Seoul: Ankhŭphiksŭ, 2020. 419 p., ISBN: 978.89.7059.1 (936000). (In Korean).