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Abstract
The central meaning of the relation to the Prophet Muḥammad has increasingly manifested itself on various levels in Muslim societies over the course of the early modern and modern periods and becomes even visible among secular and nationalist movements. This chapter investigates the changing representation of the Prophet Muḥammad in the public discourse of the Iraqi Arab Socialist Baʿth Party from 1943 till 2003. The investigation is based on a diachronic analysis of Iraqi daily newspapers, party publications, autobiographies, and qualitative interviews with former leading Baʿth cadres.
Recent scholarship debates as to whether the regime fulfilled with its increasing religious rhetoric an ideological U-turn from a staunch secularism to an Arab Islamism, or whether it did not so much Islamise but expand its ongoing policy to Baʿthise religion and to accelerate the spread of its original Baʿthist interpretation of an Arab Islam. Focussing on the role of the Prophetic figure in Baʿthist ideology and politics throughout this period, this chapter argues, in line with the latter interpretation, that in the core the Baʿth regime stuck to its secular principles till the end but gradually and tactically increased the incorporation of the Prophetic heritage into the official political discourse. This increasing political use of Islamic traditions and motifs can be explained as a tactical reaction to take advantage of and control the general Islamic or religious resurgence that can be observed throughout the Islamic world and beyond since the late 1960s; a political move that fuelled and promoted this resurgence even further.
Talmyʼs influential typology of verb-framed/satellite-framed languages has recently been shown to be insufficient (Strömquist and Verhoeven 2003), in particular with respect of serial-verb languages (Zlatev and Yangklang 2004; Slobin 2003). In this paper, we compare motion event constructions in three languages, where two are clear representatives of Talmyʼs two types: French and Swedish, and the third is a serial-verb language, Thai. As expected, Thai turns out to resemble French in some respects, Swedish in others but also to possess structural (i.e. syntactic and semantic) characteristics which distinguish it from the two Talmian types. This reinforces, but also clarifies, previous proposals for regarding serial-verb languages as belonging to a third “equipollent” type.
Song-type sharing and matching in a bird with very large song repertoires, the tropical mockingbird J. Jordan Price 1) & David H. Yuan (Department of Biology, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, 18952 E. Fisher Road, St. Mary’s City, MD 20686, USA) (Accepted: 12 March 2011) Summary Song-type matching, a behaviour of some songbirds in which one individual replies to an- other’s song with a matching song type, has been studied primarily in birds that have small to moderately sized song repertoires ( < 15 song types) and that share only a few song types with neighbours. Few previous studies have