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c82547db0da04c5d3a8a32b8ceb9fa9c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islah | Iṣlāḥ | Iṣlāḥ
The Islamic Reform Grouping (Iṣlāḥ), the main organized opposition to the unification regime since 1990, and the YSP both won strong minority representation. Holding virtually all the seats, the three parties formed a coalition government in May 1993, amid some hope that the political crisis had passed.
…a senior member of the Iṣlāḥ (Reform) party, Yemen’s main Islamist opposition party, she occasionally clashed with the party’s religious conservatives. In 2010, for example, she criticized members of her own party for opposing legislation to raise the legal marriage age for women to 17.
…People’s Congress; other parties include Iṣlāḥ (the Yemeni Congregation for Reform), the Nasserite Unionist Party, and several socialist organizations.
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c5913dce2fc4138b43328c5cc81910d6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islam/Doctrines-of-the-Qur-an | Doctrines of the Qurʾān | Doctrines of the Qurʾān
The doctrine about God in the Qurʾān is rigorously monotheistic: God is one and unique; he has no partner and no equal. Trinitarianism, the Christian belief that God is three persons in one substance, is vigorously repudiated. Muslims believe that there are no intermediaries between God and the creation that he brought into being by his sheer command, “Be.” Although his presence is believed to be everywhere, he is not incarnated in anything. He is the sole creator and sustainer of the universe, wherein every creature bears witness to his unity and lordship. But he is also just and merciful: his justice ensures order in his creation, in which nothing is believed to be out of place, and his mercy is unbounded and encompasses everything. His creating and ordering the universe is viewed as the act of prime mercy for which all things sing his glories. The God of the Qurʾān, described as majestic and sovereign, is also a personal God; he is viewed as being nearer to one than one’s own jugular vein, and, whenever a person in need or distress calls him, he responds. Above all, he is the God of guidance and shows everything, particularly humanity, the right way, “the straight path.”
This picture of God—wherein the attributes of power, justice, and mercy interpenetrate—is related to the concept of God shared by Judaism and Christianity and also differs radically from the concepts of pagan Arabia, to which it provided an effective answer. The pagan Arabs believed in a blind and inexorable fate over which humans had no control. For this powerful but insensible fate the Qurʾān substituted a powerful but provident and merciful God. The Qurʾān carried through its uncompromising monotheism by rejecting all forms of idolatry and eliminating all gods and divinities that the Arabs worshipped in their sanctuaries (ḥarams), the most prominent of which was the Kaʿbah sanctuary in Mecca itself.
In order to prove the unity of God, the Qurʾān lays frequent stress on the design and order in the universe. There are no gaps or dislocations in nature. Order is explained by the fact that every created thing is endowed with a definite and defined nature whereby it falls into a pattern. This nature, though it allows every created thing to function in a whole, sets limits, and this idea of the limitedness of everything is one of the most fixed points in both the cosmology and theology of the Qurʾān. The universe is viewed, therefore, as autonomous, in the sense that everything has its own inherent laws of behaviour, but not as autocratic, because the patterns of behaviour have been endowed by God and are strictly limited. “Everything has been created by us according to a measure.” Though every creature is thus limited and “measured out” and hence depends upon God, God alone, who reigns unchallenged in the heavens and the earth, is unlimited, independent, and self-sufficient.
According to the Qurʾān, God created two apparently parallel species of creatures, human beings and jinn, the one from clay and the other from fire. About the jinn, however, the Qurʾān says little, although it is implied that the jinn are endowed with reason and responsibility but are more prone to evil than human beings are. It is with humanity that the Qurʾān, which describes itself as a guide for the human race, is centrally concerned. The story of the Fall of Adam (the first man) promoted in Judaism and Christianity is accepted, but the Qurʾān states that God forgave Adam his act of disobedience, which is not viewed in the Qurʾān as original sin in the Christian sense of the term.
In the story of the creation of humanity, Iblīs, or Satan, who protested to God against the creation of human beings, because they “would sow mischief on earth,” lost in the competition of knowledge against Adam. The Qurʾān, therefore, declares humanity to be the noblest of all creation, the created being who bore the trust (of responsibility) that the rest of creation refused to accept. The Qurʾān thus reiterates that all nature has been made subservient to humans, who are seen as God’s vice-regent on earth; nothing in all creation has been made without a purpose, and humanity itself has not been created “in sport” but rather has been created with the purpose of serving and obeying God’s will.
Despite this lofty station, however, the Qurʾān describes human nature as frail and faltering. Whereas everything in the universe has a limited nature and every creature recognizes its limitation and insufficiency, human beings are viewed as having been given freedom and therefore are prone to rebelliousness and pride, with the tendency to arrogate to themselves the attributes of self-sufficiency. Pride, thus, is viewed as the cardinal sin of human beings, because, by not recognizing in themselves their essential creaturely limitations, they become guilty of ascribing to themselves partnership with God (shirk: associating a creature with the Creator) and of violating the unity of God. True faith (īmān), thus, consists of belief in the immaculate Divine Unity and islām (surrender) in one’s submission to the Divine Will.
In order to communicate the truth of Divine Unity, God has sent messengers or prophets to human beings, whose weakness of nature makes them ever prone to forget or even willfully to reject Divine Unity under the promptings of Satan. According to the Qurʾānic teaching, the being who became Satan (Shayṭān or Iblīs) had previously occupied a high station but fell from divine grace by his act of disobedience in refusing to honour Adam when he was ordered to do so. Since then his work has been to beguile human beings into error and sin. Satan is, therefore, the contemporary of humanity, and Satan’s own act of disobedience is construed by the Qurʾān as the sin of pride. Satan’s machinations will cease only on the Last Day.
Judging from the accounts of the Qurʾān, the record of humanity’s acceptance of the prophets’ messages has been far from perfect. The whole universe is replete with signs of God. The human soul itself is viewed as a witness of the unity and grace of God. The messengers of God have, throughout history, been calling humanity back to God. Yet not all people have accepted the truth; many of them have rejected it and become disbelievers (kāfir, plural kuffār; literally, “concealing”—i.e., the blessings of God), and, when a person becomes so obdurate, his heart is sealed by God. Nevertheless, it is always possible for a sinner to repent (tawbah) and redeem himself by a genuine conversion to the truth. There is no point of no return, and God is forever merciful and always willing and ready to pardon. Genuine repentance has the effect of removing all sins and restoring a person to the state of sinlessness with which he started his life.
Prophets are men specially elected by God to be his messengers. Prophethood is indivisible, and the Qurʾān requires recognition of all prophets as such without discrimination. Yet they are not all equal, some of them being particularly outstanding in qualities of steadfastness and patience under trial. Abraham, Noah, Moses, and Jesus were such great prophets. As vindication of the truth of their mission, God often vests them with miracles: Abraham was saved from fire, Noah from the Deluge, and Moses from the pharaoh. Not only was Jesus born from the Virgin Mary, but God also saved him from crucifixion at the hands of the Jews. The conviction that God’s messengers are ultimately vindicated and saved is an integral part of the Qurʾānic doctrine.
All prophets are human and never part of divinity: they are the most perfect of humans who are recipients of revelation from God. When God wishes to speak to a human, he sends an angel messenger to him or makes him hear a voice or inspires him. Muhammad is accepted as the last prophet in this series and its greatest member, for in him all the messages of earlier prophets were consummated. The archangel Gabriel brought the Qurʾān down to the Prophet’s “heart.” Gabriel is represented by the Qurʾān as a spirit whom the Prophet could sometimes see and hear. According to early traditions, the Prophet’s revelations occurred in a state of trance when his normal consciousness was transformed. This state was accompanied by heavy sweating. The Qurʾān itself makes it clear that the revelations brought with them a sense of extraordinary weight: “If we were to send this Qurʾān down on a mountain, you would see it split asunder out of fear of God.”
This phenomenon at the same time was accompanied by an unshakable conviction that the message was from God, and the Qurʾān describes itself as the transcript of a heavenly “Mother Book” written on a “Preserved Tablet.” The conviction was of such an intensity that the Qurʾān categorically denies that it is from any earthly source, for in that case it would be liable to “manifold doubts and oscillations.”
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5e1081def0c116544044ec206dedb985 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islam/Shiism | Shiʿism | Shiʿism
Shiʿism is the only important surviving non-Sunni sect in Islam in terms of numbers of adherents. As noted above, it owes its origin to the hostility between ʿAlī (the fourth caliph, son-in-law of the Prophet) and the Umayyad dynasty (661–750). After ʿAlī’s death, the Shiʿah (“Party”; i.e., of ʿAlī) demanded the restoration of rule to ʿAlī’s family, and from that demand developed the Shiʿi legitimism, or the divine right of the holy family to rule. In the early stages, the Shiʿiah used this legitimism to cover the protest against the Arab hegemony under the Umayyads and to agitate for social reform.
Gradually, however, Shiʿism developed a theological content for its political stand. Probably under gnostic (esoteric, dualistic, and speculative) and old Iranian (dualistic) influences, the figure of the political ruler, the imam (exemplary “leader”), was transformed into a metaphysical being, a manifestation of God and the primordial light that sustains the universe and bestows true knowledge on humanity. Through the imam alone the hidden and true meaning of the Qurʾānic revelation can be known, because the imam alone is infallible. The Shiʿiah thus developed a doctrine of esoteric knowledge that was adopted also, in a modified form, by the Sufis. The Twelver Shiʿah recognize 12 such imams, the last (Muḥammad) having disappeared in the 9th century. Since that time, the mujtahids (i.e., the Shiʿi jurists) have been able to interpret law and doctrine under the putative guidance of the imam, who will return toward the end of time to fill the world with truth and justice.
On the basis of their doctrine of imamology, the Shiʿiah emphasize their idealism and transcendentalism in conscious contrast to Sunni pragmatism. Thus, whereas the Sunnis believe in the ijmāʿ (“consensus”) of the community as the source of decision making and workable knowledge, the Shiʿah believe that knowledge derived from fallible sources is useless and that sure and true knowledge can come only through a contact with the infallible imam. Again, in marked contrast to Sunnism, Shiʿism adopted the Muʿtazilah doctrine of the freedom of the human will and the capacity of human reason to know good and evil, although its position on the question of the relationship of faith to works is the same as that of the Sunnis.
Parallel to the doctrine of an esoteric knowledge, Shiʿism, because of its early defeats and persecutions, also adopted the principle of taqiyyah, or dissimulation of faith in a hostile environment. Introduced first as a practical principle, taqiyyah, which is also attributed to ʿAlī and other imams, became an important part of the Shiʿi religious teaching and practice. In the sphere of law, Shiʿism differs from Sunni law mainly in allowing a temporary marriage, called mutʿah, which can be legally contracted for a fixed period of time on the stipulation of a fixed dower.
From a spiritual point of view, perhaps the greatest difference between Shiʿism and Sunnism is the former’s introduction into Islam of the passion motive, which is conspicuously absent from Sunni Islam. The violent death (in 680) of ʿAlī’s son, Ḥusayn, at the hands of the Umayyad troops is celebrated with moving orations, passion plays, and processions in which the participants, in a state of emotional frenzy, beat their breasts with heavy chains and sharp instruments, inflicting wounds on their bodies. This passion motive has also influenced the Sunni masses in Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent, who participate in passion plays called taʿziyahs. Such celebrations are, however, absent from Egypt and North Africa.
Although the Shiʿah numbered approximately 130 million of some 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide in the early 21st century, Shiʿism has exerted a great influence on Sunni Islam in several ways. The veneration in which all Muslims hold ʿAlī and his family and the respect shown to ʿAlī’s descendants (who are called sayyids and sharīfs) are obvious evidence of this influence.
Besides the main body of Twelver (Ithnā ʿAsharī) Shiʿah, Shiʿism has produced a variety of more or less extremist sects, the most important of them being the Ismāʿīlī. Instead of recognizing Mūsā as the seventh imam, as did the main body of the Shiʿah, the Ismāʿīlīs upheld the claims of his elder brother Ismāʿīl. One group of Ismāʿīlīs, called Seveners (Sabʿiyyah), considered Ismāʿīl the seventh and last of the imams. The majority of Ismāʿīlīs, however, believed that the imamate continued in the line of Ismāʿīl’s descendants. The Ismāʿīlī teaching spread during the 9th century from North Africa to Sind, in India, and the Ismāʿīlī Fāṭimid dynasty succeeded in establishing a prosperous empire in Egypt. Ismāʿīlīs are subdivided into two groups—the Nizārīs, headed by the Aga Khan, and the Mustaʿlīs in Mumbai, with their own spiritual head. The Ismāʿīlīs are to be found mainly in East Africa, Pakistan, India, and Yemen.
In their theology the Ismāʿīlīs have absorbed relatively radical elements and heterodox ideas compared with other Shiʿis. The universe is viewed as a cyclic process, and the unfolding of each cycle is marked by the advent of seven “speakers”—messengers of God with scriptures—each of whom is succeeded by seven “silents”—messengers without revealed scriptures; the last speaker (the Prophet Muhammad) is followed by seven imams who interpret the Will of God to humanity and are, in a sense, higher than the Prophet because they draw their knowledge directly from God and not from the Angel of Inspiration. During the 10th century, certain Ismāʿīlī intellectuals formed a secret society called the Brethren of Purity, which issued a philosophical encyclopaedia, The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, aiming at the liquidation of positive religions in favour of a universalist spirituality.
Aga Khan III (1887–1957) took several measures to bring his followers closer to the main body of the Muslims. The Ismāʿīlīs, however, still have not mosques but jamāʿat khānahs (“gathering houses”), and their mode of worship bears little resemblance to that of the Muslims generally.
Several other sects arose out of the general Shiʿi movement—e.g., the Nuṣayrīs (ʿAlawites), the Yazīdīs, and the Druze—which are sometimes considered as independent from Islam. The Druze arose in the 11th century out of a cult of deification of the Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim.
During a 19th-century anticlerical movement in Iran, a certain ʿAlī Moḥammad of Shīrāz appeared, declaring himself to be the Bāb (“Gate”; i.e., to God). At that time the climate in Iran was generally favourable to messianic ideas. He was, however, bitterly opposed by the Shiʿi ʿulamāʾ (council of learned men) and was executed in 1850. After his death, his two disciples, Ṣobḥ-e Azal and Bahāʾullāh, broke and went in different directions. Bahāʾullāh eventually declared his religion—stressing a humanitarian pacificism and universalism—to be an independent religion outside Islam. The Bahāʾī faith won a considerable number of converts in North America during the early 20th century.
Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, emerged out of early ascetic reactions on the part of certain religiously sensitive personalities against the general worldliness that had overtaken the Muslim community and the purely “externalist” expressions of Islam in law and theology. These persons stressed the Muslim qualities of moral motivation, contrition against overworldliness, and “the state of the heart” as opposed to the legalist formulations of Islam.
In the latter half of the 19th century in Punjab, India, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed to be an inspired prophet. At first a defender of Islam against Christian missionaries, he then later adopted certain doctrines of the Indian Muslim modernist Sayyid Ahmad Khan—namely, that Jesus died a natural death and was not assumed into heaven as the Islamic orthodoxy believed and that jihad “by the sword” had been abrogated and replaced with jihad “of the pen.” His aim appears to have been to synthesize all religions under Islam, for he declared himself to be not only the manifestation of the Prophet Muhammad but also the Second Advent of Jesus, as well as Krishna for the Hindus, among other claims. He did not announce, however, any new revelation or new law.
In 1914 a schism over succession occurred among the Aḥmadiyyah. One group that seceded from the main body, which was headed by a son of the founder, disowned the prophetic claims of Ghulam Ahmad and established its centre in Lahore (now in Pakistan). The main body of the Aḥmadiyyah (known as the Qadiani, after the village of Qadian, birthplace of the founder and the group’s first centre) evolved a separatist organization and, after the partition of India in 1947, moved their headquarters to Rabwah in what was then West Pakistan.
Both groups are noted for their missionary work, particularly in the West and in Africa. Within the Muslim countries, however, there is fierce opposition to the main group because of its claim that Ghulam Ahmad was a prophet (most Muslim sects believe in the finality of prophethood with Muhammad) and because of its separatist organization. Restrictions were imposed on the Aḥmadiyyah in 1974 and again in 1984 by the Pakistani government, which declared that the group was not Muslim and prohibited them from engaging in various Islamic activities.
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0a9bdf55a2f8103dcb0f69355b5bef03 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islam/Sunnism | Sunnism | Sunnism
In the 10th century a reaction began against the Muʿtazilah that culminated in the formulation and subsequent general acceptance of another set of theological propositions, which became Sunni, or “orthodox,” theology. The issues raised by these early schisms and the positions adopted by them enabled the Sunni orthodoxy to define its own doctrinal positions in turn. Much of the content of Sunni theology was, therefore, supplied by its reactions to those schisms. The term sunnah, which means a “well-trodden path” and in the religious terminology of Islam normally signifies “the example set by the Prophet,” in the present context simply means the traditional and well-defined way. In this context, the term sunnah usually is accompanied by the appendage “the consolidated majority” (al-jamāʿah). The term clearly indicates that the traditional way is the way of the consolidated majority of the community as against peripheral or “wayward” positions of sectarians, who by definition must be erroneous.
With the rise of the orthodoxy, then, the foremost and elemental factor that came to be emphasized was the notion of the majority of the community. The concept of the community so vigorously pronounced by the earliest doctrine of the Qurʾān gained both a new emphasis and a fresh context with the rise of Sunnism. Whereas the Qurʾān had marked out the Muslim community from other communities, Sunnism now emphasized the views and customs of the majority of the community in contradistinction to peripheral groups. An abundance of tradition (Hadith) came to be attributed to the Prophet to the effect that Muslims must follow the majority’s way, that minority groups are all doomed to hell, and that God’s protective hand is always on (the majority of) the community, which can never be in error. Under the impact of the new Hadith, the community, which had been charged by the Qurʾān with a mission and commanded to accept a challenge, now became transformed into a privileged one that was endowed with infallibility.
At the same time, while condemning schisms and branding dissent as heretical, Sunnism developed the opposite trend of accommodation, catholicity, and synthesis. A putative tradition of the Prophet that says “differences of opinion among my community are a blessing” was given wide currency. This principle of toleration ultimately made it possible for diverse sects and schools of thought—notwithstanding a wide range of difference in belief and practice—to recognize and coexist with each other. No group may be excluded from the community unless it itself formally renounces Islam. As for individuals, tests of heresy may be applied to their beliefs, but, unless a person is found to flagrantly violate or deny the unity of God or expressly negate the prophethood of Muhammad, such tests usually have no serious consequences. Catholicity was orthodoxy’s answer to the intolerance and secessionism of the Khārijites and the severity of the Muʿtazilah. As a consequence, a formula was adopted in which good works were recognized as enhancing the quality of faith but not as entering into the definition and essential nature of faith. This broad formula saved the integrity of the community at the expense of moral strictness and doctrinal uniformity.
On the question of free will, Sunni orthodoxy attempted a synthesis between human responsibility and divine omnipotence. The champions of orthodoxy accused the Muʿtazilah of quasi-Magian dualism (Zoroastrianism) insofar as the Muʿtazilah admitted two independent and original actors in the universe: God and human beings. To the orthodox it seemed blasphemous to hold that humanity could act wholly outside the sphere of divine omnipotence, which had been so vividly portrayed by the Qurʾān but which the Muʿtazilah had endeavoured to explain away in order to make room for humanity’s free and independent action.
The Sunni formulation, however, as presented by al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī, Sunni’s two main representatives in the 10th century, shows palpable differences despite basic uniformity. Al-Ashʿarī taught that human acts were created by God and acquired by humans and that human responsibility depended on this acquisition. He denied, however, that humanity could be described as an actor in a real sense. Al-Māturīdī, on the other hand, held that although God is the sole Creator of everything, including human acts, nevertheless, a human being is an actor in the real sense, for acting and creating were two different types of activity involving different aspects of the same human act.
In conformity with their positions, al-Ashʿarī believed that a person did not have the power to act before he actually acted and that God created this power in him at the time of action; and al-Māturīdī taught that, before an action is taken, a person has a certain general power for action but that this power becomes specific to a particular action only when the action is performed, because, after full and specific power comes into existence, action cannot be delayed.
Al-Ashʿarī and his school also held that human reason was incapable of discovering good and evil and that acts became endowed with good or evil qualities through God’s declaring them to be such. Because humanity in its natural state regards its own self-interest as good and that which thwarts this self-interest as bad, natural human reason is unreliable. Independently of revelation, therefore, murder would not be bad nor the saving of life good. Furthermore, because God’s Will makes acts good or bad, one cannot ask for reasons behind the divine law, which must be simply accepted. Al-Māturīdī takes an opposite position, not materially different from that of the Muʿtazilah: human reason is capable of finding out good and evil, and revelation aids human reason against the sway of human passions.
Despite these important initial differences between the two main Sunni schools of thought, the doctrines of al-Māturīdī became submerged in course of time under the expanding popularity of the Ashʿarite school, which gained wide currency particularly after the 11th century because of the influential activity of the Sufi theologian al-Ghazālī. Because these later theologians placed increasing emphasis on divine omnipotence at the expense of the freedom and efficacy of the human will, a deterministic outlook on life became characteristic of Sunni Islam—reinvigorated by the worldview of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, which taught that nothing exists except God, whose being is the only real being. This general deterministic outlook produced, in turn, a severe reformist reaction in the teachings of Ibn Taymiyyah, a 14th-century theologian who sought to rehabilitate human freedom and responsibility and whose influence has been strongly felt through the reform movements in the Muslim world since the 18th century.
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3c0fc51f0228f8793c5bbd181b5d2382 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islam/The-teachings-of-Ibn-al-Arabi | The teachings of Ibn al-ʿArabī | The teachings of Ibn al-ʿArabī
The account of the doctrines of Ibn al-ʿArabī (12th–13th centuries) belongs properly to the history of Islamic mysticism. Yet his impact on the subsequent development of the new wisdom was in many ways far greater than was that of al-Suhrawardī. This is true especially of his central doctrine of the “unity of being” and his sharp distinction between the absolute One, which is undefinable Truth (ḥaqq), and his self-manifestation (ẓuhūr), or creation (khalq), which is ever new (jadīd) and in perpetual movement, a movement that unites the whole of creation in a process of constant renewal. At the very core of this dynamic edifice stands nature, the “dark cloud” (ʿamāʾ) or “mist” (bukhār), as the ultimate principle of things and forms: intelligence, heavenly bodies, and elements and their mixtures that culminate in the “perfect man.” This primordial nature is the “breath” of the Merciful God in his aspect as Lord. It “flows” throughout the universe and manifests Truth in all its parts. It is the first mother through which Truth manifests itself to itself and generates the universe. And it is the universal natural body that gives birth to the translucent bodies of the spheres, to the elements, and to their mixtures, all of which are related to that primary source as daughters to their mother.
Ibn al-ʿArabī attempted to explain how Intelligence proceeds from the absolute One by inserting between them a primordial feminine principle, which is all things in potentiality but which also possesses the capacity, readiness, and desire to manifest or generate them first as archetypes in Intelligence and then as actually existing things in the universe below. Ibn al-ʿArabī gave this principle numerous names, including prime “matter” (ʿunṣur), and characterized it as the principle “whose existence makes manifest the essences of the potential worlds.” The doctrine that the first simple originated thing is not Intelligence but “indefinite matter” and that Intelligence was originated through the mediation of this matter was attributed to Empedocles, a 5th-century-bce Greek philosopher, in doxographies (compilations of extracts from the Greek philosophers) translated into Arabic. It represented an attempt to bridge the gulf between the absolute One and the multiplicity of forms in Intelligence. The Andalusian mystic Ibn Masarrah (9th–10th centuries) is reported to have championed pseudo-Empedoclean doctrines, and Ibn al-ʿArabī (who studied under some of his followers) quotes Ibn Masarrah on a number of occasions. This philosophic tradition is distinct from the one followed by the Ismāʿīlī theologians, who explained the origination of Intelligence by the mediation of God’s will.
After Ibn al-ʿArabī, the new wisdom developed rapidly in intellectual circles in Eastern Islam. Commentators on the works of Avicenna, al-Suhrawardī, and Ibn al-ʿArabī began the process of harmonizing and integrating the views of the masters. Great poets made them part of every educated person’s literary culture. Mystical fraternities became the custodians of such works, spreading them into Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent and transmitting them from one generation to another. Following the Mongol khan Hülagü’s entry into Baghdad (1258), the Twelver Shiʿah were encouraged by the Il Khanid Tatars and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (the philosopher and theologian who accompanied Hülagü as his vizier) to abandon their hostility to mysticism. Muʿtazilī doctrines were retained in their theology. Theology, however, was downgraded to “formal” learning that must be supplemented by higher things, the latter including philosophy and mysticism, both of earlier Shiʿi (including Ismāʿīlī) origin and of later Sunni provenance. Al-Ghazālī, al-Suhrawardī, Ibn al-ʿArabī, and Avicenna were then eagerly studied and (except for their doctrine of the imamate) embraced with little or no reservation. This movement in Shiʿi thought gathered momentum when the leaders of a mystical fraternity established themselves as the Ṣafavid dynasty (1501–1732) in Iran, where they championed Twelver Shiʿism as the official doctrine of the new monarchy. During the 17th century, Iran experienced a cultural and scientific renaissance that included a revival of philosophic studies. There, Islamic philosophy found its last creative exponents. The new wisdom as expounded by the masters of the school of Eṣfahān radiated throughout Eastern Islam and continued as a vital tradition until modern times.
The major figures of the school of Eṣfahān were Mīr Dāmād (Muḥammad Bāqir ibn al-Dāmād, died 1631/32) and his great disciple Mullā Ṣadrā (Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, c. 1571–1640). Both were men of wide culture and prolific writers with a sharp sense for the history and development of philosophic ideas.
Mīr Dāmād was the first to expound the notion of “eternal origination” (ḥudūth dahrī) as an explanation for the creation of the world. Muslim philosophers and their critics had recognized the crucial role played by the question of time in the discussion of the eternity of the world. The proposition that time is the measure of movement was criticized by Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, who argued that time is prior to movement and rest, indeed to everything except being. Time is the measure or concomitant of being, lasting and transient, enduring and in movement or rest. It characterizes or qualifies all being, including God. God works in time, incessantly willing and directly creating everything in the world: his persistent will creates the eternal beings of the world, and his ever-renewed will creates the transient beings. The notion of a God who works in time was of course objectionable to theology, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī refused to accept this solution despite its attractions. Al-Rāzī also saw that it leads to the notion (attributed to Plato) that time is a self-subsistent substance, whose relation to God would further compromise his unity. Finally, al-Rāzī explained that this self-subsistent substance will have to be related to different beings in different ways. It is called “everlastingness” (sarmad) when related to God and the Intelligences (angels) that are permanent and do not move or change in any way, “eternity” (dahr) when related to the totality of the world of movement and change, and “time” (zamān) when related to corporeal beings that make up the world of movement and change.
Mīr Dāmād returned to Avicenna and sought to harmonize his views with those of al-Suhrawardī on the assumption that what Avicenna meant by his “Oriental” (mashriqiyyah) philosophy was identical with al-Suhrawardī’s wisdom of “illumination” (ishrāq), which he interpreted as a Platonic doctrine that asserted the priority of essence (form) over being (existence). Time, for Mīr Dāmād, was neither a mere being of reason nor an accident of existing things. It belongs to the essence of things and describes their mode and rank of being. It is a “relation” that beings have to each other because of their essential nature. There must, therefore, be three ranks of order of time corresponding to the three ranks of order of being. Considered as the relation of God to the divine names and attributes (Intelligences or archetypes), the relation is “everlastingness.” Considered as the relation between the Intelligences, or archetypes, and their reflections in the mutable things of the world below, the relation is “eternity.” And considered as the relation between these mutable things, the relation is “time.” Creation, or origination, is this very relation. Thus, the origination of the immutable Intelligences, or archetypes, is called “everlasting creation,” the origination of the world of mutable beings as a whole is called “eternal creation,” and the generation of mutable things within the world is called “temporal creation.”
Mullā Ṣadrā superimposed Ibn al-ʿArabī’s mystical thought (whose philosophic implications had already been exposed by a number of commentators) on the “Aristotelian”-illuminationist synthesis developed by Mīr Dāmād. Against his master, he argued with the Aristotelians for the priority of being (existence) over essence (form), which he called an abstraction; and, with Ibn al-ʿArabī, he argued for the “unity of being” within which beings differ only according to “priority and posteriority,” “perfection and imperfection,” and “strength and weakness.” All being is thus viewed as a graded manifestation, or determination, of absolute, or pure, Being, and every level of being possesses all the attributes of pure Being, but with varying degrees of intensity or perfection.
Mullā Ṣadrā considered his unique contribution to Islamic philosophy to be his doctrine of nature, which enabled him to assert that everything other than God and his knowledge—i.e., the entire corporeal world, including the heavenly bodies—is originated “eternally” as well as “temporally.” This doctrine of nature is an elaboration of the last manifestation of what Ibn al-ʿArabī called “nature” or prime “matter” and is articulated on philosophic grounds and within the general framework of Aristotelian natural science and defended against every possible philosophic and theological objection.
Nature for Mullā Ṣadrā is the “substance” and “power” of all corporeal beings and the direct cause of their movement. Movement (and time, which measures it) is therefore not an accident of substance or an accompaniment of some of its accidents. It signifies the very change, renewal, and passing of being—itself being in constant “flow,” or flux. The entire corporeal world, both the celestial spheres and the world of the elements, constantly renews itself. The “matter” of corporeal things has the power to become a new form at every instant; and the resulting matter–form complex is at every instant a new matter ready for, desiring, and moving toward another form. Human beings fail to observe this constant flux and movement in simple bodies not because of the endurance of the same form in them but because of the close similarity between their ever-new forms. What the philosophers call “movement” and “time” are not, as they believed, anchored in anything permanent—e.g., in what they call “nature,” “substance,” or “essence”; essence is permanent only in the mind, and nature and substance are permanent activity. Nature as permanent activity is the very being of natural things and identical with their substance. Because nature is “permanent” in this sense, it is connected to a permanent principle that manifests activity in it permanently. Because nature constantly renews itself, all renewed and emergent things are connected to it. Thus, nature is the link between what is eternal and what is originated, and the world of nature is originated both eternally and temporarily.
Mullā Ṣadrā distinguishes this primary “movement-in-substance” (al-ḥarakah fī al-jawhar) from haphazard, compulsory, and other accidental movements that lack proper direction, impede the natural movement of substance, or reverse it. Movement-in-substance is not universal change or flux without direction, the product of conflict between two equally powerful principles, or a reflection of the nonbeing of the world of nature when measured against the world of permanent forms. It is, rather, the natural beings’ innate desire to become more perfect, which directs this ceaseless self-renewal, self-origination, or self-emergence into a perpetual and irreversible flow upward in the scale of being—from the simplest elements to the human body–soul complex and the heavenly body–soul complex (both of which participate in the general instability, origination, and passing of being that characterizes the entire corporeal world). This flow upward, however, is by no means the end, for the indefinite “matter” (Ibn al-ʿArabī’s “cloud” and the mystics’ “created Truth”) is the “substratum” of everything other than its Creator, the mysterious pure Truth. It “extends” beyond the body–soul complex to the Intelligences (divine names) that are Being’s first, highest, and purest actualization or activity. This “extension” unites everything other than the Creator into a single continuum. The human body–soul complex and the heavenly body–soul complex are not moved externally by the Intelligences. Their movement is an extension of the process of self-perfection. Having reached the highest rank of order of substance in the corporeal world, they are now prepared, and still moved by their innate desire, to flow upward and transform themselves into pure intelligence.
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147dfb8fa9d9acb6b5467a58436ec32d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Dance-and-theatre | Dance and theatre | Dance and theatre
The performing arts have received comparatively little attention in the otherwise rich literature of the Islamic peoples. This is most probably a result of the suspicions entertained by some orthodox Muslim scholars concerning the propriety of dance and theatre. Because this applies particularly in relation to the vexing theological question of human portrayal and its connection with idolatry, the performing arts have traditionally been regarded by the faithful with more than usual caution. Even as late as the 19th and early 20th centuries, most research on the subject, in what may loosely be called the Islamic world, was carried out by Western scholars, chiefly from European nations, and only in the 20th century did indigenous scholars start publishing significant research on the subject.
There are no known references to dance or theatre in pre-Islamic Arabia, although nomad tribes were probably acquainted with dance. The Islamic peoples themselves seem to have developed this particular art form less than they did music or architecture, and, in addition to medieval Islam’s cool attitude toward dance and theatre as art forms, it must be added that most women, leading a life of seclusion, could hardly be expected to play an active part in them, except in private and exclusive gatherings. Nevertheless, there has been an active tradition of folk dance in most Islamic countries, in addition to dancing as an entertainment spectacle and, particularly in Persia, as an art form. A ritual dance was instituted in the Sufi mystical order of the Mawlawiyyah (Mevleviyah) in Turkey; performed by dervishes (members of the mystical order), it is considered to be a manifestation of mystical ecstasy rather than an entertainment or an expression of aesthetic urges.
The theatre has not flourished as a major art under Islam, although as a form of popular entertainment, particularly in mime and shadow puppet shows, it has persisted vigorously. Nevertheless, the theatre with live actors received support from the Ottomans in Turkey, and a live popular drama was strong in Persia, where a passion play also took root. Otherwise, the theatrical record of Islam is meagre. Moreover, few neighbouring peoples had a well-developed theatre of their own. Hence, outside stimulus was lacking, and the Islamic disapproval of idolatry was so intense that when the shadow theatre evolved in the East, in the late Middle Ages, the puppets were regularly punched with holes to show that they were lifeless. Nonetheless, drama has had some ties with religion, as in Iran and other areas where the Shīʿite branch of Islam is concentrated and a passion play developed, rooted in traumatic memories of the bloody warfare of Islam’s early years. This was a local phenomenon, uninfluenced by Christian Europe, and, though stereotyped, it movingly reenacted Shīʿite martyrdom.
A popular theatre, frequently including dance, evolved independently from about the 17th century in some Muslim countries. Western European and, later, U.S. influences were largely the main factors in the development of an artistic theatre in the 19th century and beyond. But conservative Muslims have consistently disapproved of theatre, and in Saudi Arabia, for example, no native theatrical establishment exists. In such an atmosphere, women’s roles were at first taken by men; later, Christian and Jewish women took the roles, and only in the 20th century did Muslim women begin to participate.
Folk dancing existed among medieval Islamic peoples, but the sources that record dancing are mainly concerned with artistic dance, which was performed chiefly at the caliph’s palace by skilled women. The aristocracy was quick to imitate this patronage by providing similar performances, its members vying with one another on festive occasions. One of those dances, the kurrağ (sometimes called kurra), developed into a song and dance festival held at the caliph’s court. Since the latter part of the 19th century, the dancing profession has lost ground to the performance of U.S., Latin American, and western European dances in cabarets. In a reaction that set in after World War II, fervent nationalists have tried to create native dance troupes, revive traditional motifs in costume and interpretation, and adapt tribal figures to modern settings. Few traditional dances have survived unchanged; among those that have are the dervish dances, performed mainly in Turkey.
Though now performed and fostered chiefly as an expression of national culture, folk dances were long regarded as pure entertainment and were either combined with theatrical shows or presented alone. Dance performances, accompanied by music, took place in a special hall or outdoors; many dancers, particularly the males, were also mimes. Sometimes the dance enacted a pantomime, as in Turkey, of physical love or of a stag hunt. Folk dance, except in Iran, has almost always been mimetic or narrative, a tradition still fostered by many tribes.
The Turks considered dancing a profession for the lowborn; as a result, most dancers were members of minority groups—mostly Greeks, Jews, and Armenians. This judgment has usually applied to the status of professional dancers and indeed to most professional entertainers at most periods and in most societies until modern times. In 19th-century Egypt both male and female dancers were regarded as public entertainers. Many of the women entertainers (ghawāzī) belonged to a single tribe and were usually considered little better than prostitutes. The erotic element in dancing became focused in the belly dance, which has become the leading form of exhibition dance in modern Turkey and the Arab countries.
The mimetic tradition of folk dance has blended well with comedy in countries of the Sunni persuasion and with the passion-play tragedy in Shīʿite countries. Yet in the late 20th century theatre was increasingly divorced from dance, most plays being consciously modeled on European patterns; only in the operetta does the old combination remain.
In pre-Islamic times in Iran, dance was both an art form and a popular entertainment. There are pictures of dancers in miniatures, on pottery, and on walls, friezes, and coins. Some of the ancient dances lived on partially in tribal dances, but again, under Islam’s restrictions on women, the art became a male monopoly. Women were permitted to dance in private, however, as in the harem. Iran is perhaps the only Muslim country with a tradition of dance regarded as an art form. When revived after World War II, folk dancing was encouraged and adapted for the foundation of a national ballet. Muslim orthodoxy’s very uncertainty over the exact status of the artistic dance ensured that it was always considered as an adjunct to music. Accordingly, although there are many detailed treatises on Islamic music, none is available on dance.
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f67ae0d6801969bf148dc89484d29652 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Early-period-the-Umayyad-and-Abbasid-dynasties | Early period: the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid dynasties | Early period: the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid dynasties
Of all the recognizable periods of Islamic art, this is by far the most difficult one to explain properly, even though it is quite well documented. There are two reasons for this difficulty. On the one hand, it was a formative period, a time when new forms were created that identify the aesthetic and practical ideals of the new culture. Such periods are difficult to define when, as in the case of Islam, there was no artistic need inherent to the culture itself. The second complication derives from the fact that Muslim conquest hardly ever destroyed former civilizations with its own established creativity. Material culture, therefore, continued as before, and archaeologically it is almost impossible to distinguish between pre-Islamic and early Islamic artifacts. Paradoxical though it may sound, there is an early Islamic Christian art of Syria and Egypt, and in many other regions the parallel existence of a Muslim and a non-Muslim art continued for centuries. What did happen during early Islamic times, however, was the establishment of a dominant new taste, and it is the nature and character of this taste that has to be explained. It occurred first in Syria and Iraq, the two areas with the largest influx of Muslims and with the two successive capitals of the empire, Damascus under the Umayyads and Baghdad under the early ʿAbbāsids. From Syria and Iraq this new taste spread in all directions and adapted itself to local conditions and local materials, thus creating considerable regional and chronological variations in early Islamic art.
From a historical point of view, two major dynasties are involved. One is the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled from 661 to 750 and whose monuments are datable from 680 to 745. It was the only Muslim dynasty ever to control the whole of the Islamic-conquered world. The second dynasty is the ʿAbbāsid dynasty; technically its rule extended as late as 1258, but in reality its princes ceased to be a significant cultural factor after the second decade of the 10th century. The ʿAbbāsids no longer controlled Spain, where an independent Umayyad caliphate had been established; and in Egypt as well as in northeastern Iran a number of more or less independent dynasties appeared, such as the Ṭūlūnids or the Sāmānids. Although research in the late 20th century tends to make the conclusion less certain than it used to be for the Sāmānids and northeast Iran, the initial impulse for the artistic creativity of those dynasties came from the main ʿAbbāsid centres in Iraq. While in detailed studies it is possible to distinguish between Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid art or between the arts of various provinces, the key features of the first three centuries of Islamic art (roughly through the middle of the 10th century) are the interplay between local or imperial impulses and the creation of new forms and functions.
It is possible to study those centuries as a succession of clusters of monuments, but, because there are so many of them, a study can easily end up as an endless list. It is preferable, therefore, to centre the discussion of Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid monuments on the functional and morphological characteristics that identify the new Muslim world and only secondarily be concerned with stylistic progression or regional differences.
The one obviously new function developed during this period is that of the mosque, or masjid. The earliest adherents of Islam used the private house of the Prophet in Medina as the main place for their religious and other activities and muṣallās without established forms for certain holy ceremonies. The key phenomenon of the first decades that followed the conquest is the creation outside Arabia of masjids in every centre taken over by the new faith. These were not simply or even primarily religious centres. They were rather the community centres of the faithful, in which all social, political, educational, and individual affairs were transacted. Among those activities were common prayer and the ceremony of the khuṭbah. The first mosques were built primarily to serve as the restricted space in which the new community would make its own collective decisions. It is there that the treasury of the community was kept, and early accounts are full of anecdotes about the immense variety of events, from the dramatic to the scabrous, that took place in mosques. Since even in earliest times the Muslim community consisted of several superimposed and interconnected social systems, mosques reflected this complexity, and, next to large mosques for the whole community, tribal mosques and mosques for various quarters of a town or city are also known.
None of those early mosques has survived, and no descriptions of the smaller ones have been preserved. There do remain, however, accurate textual descriptions of the large congregational buildings erected at Kūfah and Basra in Iraq and at Al-Fusṭāṭ in Egypt. At Kūfah a larger square was marked out by a ditch, and a covered colonnade known as a ẓullah (a shady place) was put up on the qiblah side. In 670 a wall pierced by many doors was built in place of the ditch, and colonnades were put up on all four sides, with a deeper one on the qiblah. In all probability the Basra mosque was very similar, and only minor differences distinguished the ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ mosque at Al-Fusṭāṭ. Much has been written about the sources of this type of building, but the simplest explanation may be that this is the very rare instance of the actual creation of a new architectural type. The new faith’s requirement for centralization, or a space for a large and constantly growing community, could not be met by any existing architectural form. Almost accidentally, therefore, the new Muslim cities of Iraq created the hypostyle mosque (a building with the roof resting on rows of columns). A flexible architectural unit, a hypostyle structure could be square or rectangular and could be increased or diminished in size by the addition or subtraction of columns. The single religious or symbolic feature of the hypostyle mosque was a minbar (a pulpit) for the preacher, and the direction of prayer was indicated by the greater depth of the colonnade on one side of the structure.
The examples of Kūfah, Basra, and Al-Fusṭāṭ are particularly clear because they were all built in newly created cities. Matters are somewhat more complex when discussing the older urban centres taken over by Muslims. Although it is not possible to generalize with any degree of certainty, two patterns seem to emerge. In some cases, such as Jerusalem and Damascus and perhaps in most cities conquered through formal treaties, the Muslims took for themselves an available unused space and erected on it some shelter, usually a very primitive one. In Jerusalem this space happened to be a particularly holy one—the area of the Jewish temple built by Herod the Great, which had been left willfully abandoned and ruined by the triumphant Christian empire. In Damascus it was a section of a huge Roman temple area, on another part of which there was a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist. Unfortunately, too little is known about other cities to be able to demonstrate that this pattern was a common one. The very same uncertainty surrounds the second pattern, which consisted in forcibly transforming sanctuaries of older faiths into Muslim ones. This was the case at Ḥamāh in Syria and at Yazd-e Khvāst in Iran, where archaeological proof exists of the change. There are also several literary references to the fact that Christian churches, Zoroastrian fire temples, and other older abandoned sanctuaries were transformed into mosques. Altogether, however, those instances probably were not too numerous, because in most places the Muslim conquerors were quite eager to preserve local tradition and because few older sanctuaries could easily serve the primary Muslim need of a large centralizing space.
During the 50 years that followed the beginning of the Muslim conquest, the mosque, until then a very general concept in Islamic thought, became a definite building reserved for a variety of needs required by the community of faithful in any one settlement. Only in one area, Iraq, did the mosque acquire a unique form of its own, the oriented hypostyle. Neither in Iraq nor elsewhere is there evidence of symbolic or functional components in mosque design. The only exception is that of the maqṣūrah (literally “closed-off space”), an enclosure, probably in wood, built near the centre of the qiblah wall. Its purpose was to protect the caliph or his replacement, for several attacks against major political figures had taken place. But the maqṣūrah was never destined to be a constant fixture of mosques, and its typological significance is limited.
During the rule of the Umayyad prince al-Walīd I (705–715), a number of complex developments within the Muslim community were crystallized in the construction of three major mosques—at Medina, Jerusalem, and Damascus. The very choice of those three cities is indicative: the city in which the Muslim state was formed and in which the Prophet was buried; the city held in common holiness by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, to which was rapidly accruing the mystical hagiography surrounding the Prophet’s ascension into heaven; and the ancient city that became the capital of the new Islamic empire. A first and essential component of al-Walīd’s mosques was thus their imperial character; they were to symbolize the permanent establishment of the new faith and of the state that derived from it. They were no longer purely practical shelters but willful monuments.
Although the plans of Al-Aqṣā Mosque in Jerusalem and of the mosque of Medina can be reconstructed with a fair degree of certainty, only the one at Damascus has been preserved with comparatively minor alterations and repairs. In plan the three buildings appear at first glance to be quite different from each other. The Medina mosque was essentially a large hypostyle with a courtyard. The colonnades on all four sides were of varying depth. Al-Aqṣā Mosque consisted of an undetermined number of naves (possibly as many as 15) parallel to each other in a north-south direction. There was no courtyard, because the rest of the huge esplanade of the former Jewish temple served as the open space in front of the building. The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus is a rectangle 515 by 330 feet (157 by 100 metres) whose outer limits and three gates are parts of a Roman temple (a fourth Roman gate on the qiblah side was blocked). The interior consists of an open space surrounded on three sides by a portico and of a covered space of three equal long naves parallel to the qiblah wall that are cut in the middle by a perpendicular nave.
The three buildings share several important characteristics. They are all large spaces with a multiplicity of internal supports, and although only the Medina mosque is a pure hypostyle, the Jerusalem and Damascus mosques have the flexibility and easy internal communication characteristic of a hypostyle building. All three mosques exhibit a number of distinctive new practical elements and symbolic meanings. Many of those occur in all mosques; others are known in only some of them. The mihrab, for example, appears in all mosques. This is a niche of varying size that tends to be heavily decorated. It occurs in the qiblah wall, and, in all probability, its purpose was to commemorate the symbolic presence of the Prophet as the first imam, although there are other explanations. It is in Damascus only that the ancient towers of the Roman building were first used as minarets to call the faithful to prayer and to indicate from afar the presence of Islam (initially minarets tended to exist only in predominantly non-Muslim cities). All three mosques are also provided with an axial nave, a wider aisle unit on the axis of the building, which served both as a formal axis for compositional purposes and as a ceremonial one for the prince’s retinue. Finally, all three buildings were heavily decorated with marble, mosaics, and woodwork. At least in the mosque of Damascus, it is further apparent that there was careful concern for the formal composition—a balance between parts that truly makes this mosque a work of art. This is particularly evident in the successful relationship established between the open space of the court and the facade of the covered qiblah side.
When compared with the first Muslim buildings of Iraq and Egypt, the monuments of al-Walīd are characterized by the growing complexity of their forms, by the appearance of uniquely Muslim symbolic and functional features, and by the quality of their construction. While the dimensions, external appearance, and proportions of any one of them were affected in each case by unique local circumstances, the internal balance between open and covered areas and the multiplicity of simple and flexible supports indicate the permanence of the early hypostyle tradition.
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919076703143b9270029d05afb796b71 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Imagery | Imagery | Imagery
In all forms of poetry and in most types of prose, writers shared a common fund of imagery that was gradually refined and enlarged in the course of time. The main source of imagery was the Qurʾān, its figures and utterances often divested of their sacred significance. Thus, the beautiful Joseph (sura 12) is a fitting symbol for the handsome beloved; the nightingale may sing the psalms of David (sura 21:79 a.o); the rose sits on Solomon’s wind-borne throne (sura 21:81 a.o), and its opening petals can be compared to Joseph’s shirt rent by Potiphar’s wife (sura 12:25 ff.), its scent to that of Joseph’s shirt, which cured blind Jacob (sura 12:94). The tulip reminds the poet of the burning bush before which Moses stood (sura 20:9 ff.), and the coy beloved refuses the lover’s demands by answering, like God to Moses, “Thou shalt not see me” (sura 7:143); but her (or his) kiss gives the dying lover new life, like the breath of Jesus (sura 3:49).
Classical Persian poetry often mentions knights and kings from Iran’s history alongside those from Arabic heroic tales. The cup of wine offered by the “old man of the Magians” is comparable to the miraculous cup owned by the Iranian mythical king Jamshīd or to Alexander’s mirror, which showed the marvels of the world; the nightingale may sing “Zoroastrian tunes” when it contemplates the “fire temple of the rose.” Central scenes from the great Persian mas̄navīs contributed to the imagery of later writers in Persian-, Turkish-, and Urdu-speaking areas. Social and political conditions are reflected in a favourite literary equation between the “beautiful and cruel beloved” and “the Turk”: because in Iran and India the military caste was usually of Turkish origin, and because the Turk was always considered “white” and handsome, in literary imagery he stood as the “ruler of hearts.” Minute arabesque-like descriptions of nature, particularly of garden scenes, are frequent: the rose and the nightingale have almost become substitutes for mythological figures.
The versatile writer was expected to introduce elegant allusions to classical Arabic and Persian literature and to folklore and to know enough about astrology, alchemy, and medicine to use the relevant technical terms accurately. Images inspired by the pastimes of the grandees—chess, polo, hunting, and the like—were as necessary for a good poem as were those referring to music, painting, and calligraphy. Similarly, allusions in poetic imagery to the Arabic alphabet—often thought to be endowed with mystical significance or magical properties—were very common in all Islamic literatures.
The poet had to follow strict rules laid down by the masters of rhetoric, rigidly observing the harmonious selection of similes thought proper to any one given sphere (four allusions to Qurʾānic figures, for example, or three garden images all given in a single verse). The poet was expected to invent new fantastic etiologies (ḥosn-e taʿīīl): he had to describe natural phenomena in some elegant and surprising metaphor. Thus, “The narcissus has strewn silver in the way of the bride rose” means simply “The narcissus has withered”—for when the rose (dressed in red, like an Eastern bride) appears in late spring, it is time for the narcissus to shed its white petals, just as people would shed silver coins in the way of a bridal procession.
The writer was also expected to use puns and to play with words of two or more meanings. He might write verses that could provide an intelligible meaning even when read backward. He had to be able to handle chronograms, codes based on the numerical values of a phrase or verse, which, when understood, gave the date of some relevant event. Later writers sometimes supplied the date of a book’s compilation by hiding a chronogram in its title. A favourite device in poetry was the question-and-answer form, employed in the whole poem or only in chosen sections.
Writers were expected to demonstrate talent at both improvisation and elaboration on any theme if they wished to attract the interest of a generous patron. Poetry was judged according to the perfection of its individual verses. Only in rare cases was the poem appreciated as a whole: the lack of coherent argument, which often puzzles the Western reader in ghazal poetry, is in fact deliberate.
It would be idle to look for the sincere expression of personal emotion in Arabic, Turkish, or Persian poetry. The conventions are so rigid that the reader is allowed only a rare glimpse into the poet’s feelings. Indeed, such feelings were put through the sieve of intellect, and personal experiences were thereby transformed into arabesque-like work of artistry, if not art. In the hands of mediocre versifiers and prose writers, however, literature became mannered and completely artificial. The reader soon tires of the constantly recurring moon faces, hyacinth curls, ruby lips, and cypress statures (that is, tall and slender). Yet the great masters of poetry and rhetoric (who all have their favourite imagery, rhymes, and rhythmical patterns) will sometimes allow the patient reader a glimpse into their hearts by a slight rhythmical change or by a new way of expressing a conventional thought.
These are, of course, quite crude generalizations. Folk poetry, for instance, has to be judged by different standards, though even here conventional forms and inherited imagery make it, on the whole, more standardized than might be wished. Only in the 20th century was a complete break with classical ideals made. Since then, sincerity instead of monotonous imitation, political and social commitment instead of empty panegyric, and realism instead of escapism have been the characteristic features of modern literatures of the Muslim countries.
The first known poetic compositions of the Arabs are of such perfect beauty and, at the same time, are so conventionalized that they raise the question as to how far back an actual poetic tradition does stretch. A great number of pre-Islamic poems, dating from the mid-6th century, were preserved by oral tradition. The seven most famous pieces are al-Muʿallaqāt (“The Suspended Ones,” known as The Seven Odes), and these are discussed more fully below. The term muʿallaqāt is not fully understood; later legend asserts that the seven poems had been hung in the most important Arab religious sanctuary, the Kaʿbah in Mecca, because of their eloquence and beauty and had brought victory to their authors in the poetical contests traditionally held during the season of pilgrimage. Apart from these seven, quite a number of shorter poems were preserved by later scholars. An independent genre in pre-Islamic poetry was the elegy, often composed by a woman, usually a deceased hero’s sister. Some of these poems, especially those by the poet al-Khansāʾ (died after 630) are notable for their compact expressiveness.
The poet (called a shāʿir, a wizard endowed with magic powers) was thought to be inspired by a spirit (jinn, shayṭān). The poet defended the honour of his tribe and perpetuated their deeds. Religious expression was rare in pre-Islamic poetry. In the main it reflects the sense of fatalism that was probably needed if the harsh circumstances of Bedouin life in the desert were to be endured.
The most striking feature of pre-Islamic poetry is the uniformity and refinement of its language. Although the various tribes, constantly feuding with one another, all spoke their own dialects, they shared a common language for poetry whether they were Bedouins or inhabitants of the small capitals of al-Ḥīrah and Ghassān (where the influence of Aramaic culture was also in evidence).
Arabic was even then a virile and expressive language, with dozens of synonyms for the horse, the camel, the lion, and so forth; and it possessed a rich stock of descriptive adjectives. Because of those features, it is difficult for foreigners and modern Arabs alike to appreciate fully the artistic qualities of early Arabic poetry. Imagery is precise, and descriptions of natural phenomena are detailed. The sense of universal applicability is lacking, however, and the comparatively simple literary techniques of simile and metaphor predominate. The imaginative power that was later to be the hallmark of Arabic poetry under Persian influence had not yet become evident.
The strikingly rich vocabulary of classical Arabic, as well as its sophisticated structure, is matched by highly elaborate metrical schemes, based on quantity. The rhythmical structures were analyzed by the grammarian Khalīl of Basra (died c. 791), who distinguished 16 metres. Each was capable of variation by shortening the foot or part of it, but the basic structure was rigidly preserved. One and the same rhyme letter had to be maintained throughout the poem. (The rules of rhyming are detailed and very complicated but were followed quite strictly from the 6th to the early 20th century.)
As well as rules governing the outward form of poetry, a system of poetic imagery already existed by this early period. The sequence of a poem, moreover, followed a fixed pattern (such as that for the qaṣīdah). Pre-Islamic poetry was not written down but recited, and sound and rhythm therefore played an important part in its formation, and the rāwīs (reciters) were equally vital to its preservation. A rāwī was associated with some famous bard and, having learned his master’s techniques, might afterward become a poet himself. This kind of apprenticeship to a master whose poetic style was thus continued became a common practice in the Muslim world (especially in Muslim India) right up to the 19th century.
From pre-Islamic times the seven authors of The Seven Odes, already described, are usually singled out for special praise. Their poems and miscellaneous verses were collected during the 8th century and ever since have been the subject of numerous commentaries in the East. They have been studied in Europe since the early 19th century.
The poet Imruʾ al-Qays (died c. 550 ce), of the tribe of Kindah, was foremost both in time and in poetic merit. He was a master of love poetry; his frank descriptions of dalliance with his mistresses are considered so seductive that (as orthodox Puritanism claims) the Prophet Muhammad called him “the leader of poets on the way to Hell.” His style is supple and picturesque. It grips the attention whether his poems sing of his love adventures or describe a seemingly endless rainy night. Of all classical Arabic poets he is probably the one who appeals most to modern taste. At the other extreme stands Zuhayr, praising the chiefs of the rival tribes of ʿAbs and Dhubyān for ending a long feud. He is chiefly remembered for his serious qaṣīdah in which, old, wise, and experienced, he meditates upon the terrible escalation of war. Various aspects of Bedouin life, as well as the attitude of the Arabs to the rulers of the small kingdom of Al-Ḥīrah on the Euphrates River, are reflected in the poems of al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī, ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm, and Ṭarafah ibn al-ʿAbd. The boastful pride of the self-centred Arab warrior can be observed best in the poems of al-Ḥārith, who became proverbial for his arrogance. ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, son of an Arab king and a black slave girl, won such fame on the battlefield and for his poetry that he later became the hero of the Romance of ʿAntar, an Arabic folk romance.
Two other masters can stand beside these seven. Exciting for their savagery and beauty are some poems by Taʾabbaṭa Sharran and al-Shanfarā, both outlaw warriors. Their verses reveal the wildness of Bedouin life, with its ideals of bravery, revenge, and hospitality. Taʾabbaṭa Sharran is the author of a widely translated “Song of Revenge” (for his uncle), composed in a short, sharp metre. Shanfarā’s lāmīyah (literally “poem rhyming in [the letter] l”) vividly, succinctly, and with a wealth of detail tells of the experiences to be had from life in the desert. This latter poem has sometimes been considered a forgery, created by a learned grammarian. The suggestion highlights the question, often posed, of how much pre-Islamic poetry is genuine and how much is the product of later scholars. Some modern critics—without proper justification—would dismiss the entire corpus as counterfeit.
While poetry forms the most important part of early Arabic literature and is an effective historical preservation of the Arab past glory, there is also a quantity of prose. Of special interest is the rhymed prose (sajʿ) peculiar to soothsayers, which developed into an important form of ornate prose writing in every Islamic country. Tales about the adventures and battle days of the various tribes (ayyām al-ʿArab, or “The Days of the Arabs”) were told and handed down from generation to generation, usually interspersed with pieces of poetry. Proverbs and proverbial sayings were as common as in most cultures at a comparable level of development. The “literary” genre most typical of Bedouin life is the musāmarah, or “nighttime conversation,” in which the central subject is elaborated not by plot but by verbal associations that direct the listener’s mind from topic to topic. Thus, the language as language played a most important role. The musāmarah form inspired the later maqāmah literature.
It has been said—and this certainly holds true for the musāmarah—that Arabic literature demands attention from its listeners only in short bursts, for listeners are carried from verse to verse, from anecdote to anecdote, from pun to pun, along a theme whose broad outline is entirely familiar. Western scholars of the East have for this reason spoken of the “molecular,” or “atomic,” structure both of classical Arabic literature and of traditional Islamic thought. An audience listening to one of the ancient bards—or to a modern poet or orator in the Muslim world—would be able to listen without tiring. The sheer emotive power of the Arabic language to enrapture and bewitch its listeners by sound alone should be kept in mind when any piece of Arabic literature is considered. Only a people endowed with peculiar sensibility to the word could properly appreciate the refinement of pre-Islamic poetry and be ready to accept the concept of divine revelation appearing through the word in the Qurʾān.
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957d283bdbf31407a2aa8c0dde696a94 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Islamic-literatures-and-the-West | Islamic literatures and the West | Islamic literatures and the West
Small fragments of Arabic literature have long been known in the West. There were cultural interrelations between Muslim Spain (which, like the Indus Valley, became part of the Muslim empire after 711) and its Christian neighbours, and this meant that many philosophical and scientific works filtered through to western Europe. It is also likely that the poetry of Muslim Spain influenced the growth of certain forms of Spanish and French troubadour poetry and provided an element, however distorted, for medieval Western romances and heroic tales.
Investigation of Eastern literatures by Western scholars did not begin until the 16th century in the Netherlands and England. First attempts toward an aesthetic understanding of Arabic and Persian poetry came even later: they were made by the British scholars of Fort William, Calcutta (now Kolkata), and by German pre-Romantics of the late 18th century. In the first half of the 19th century the publication of numerous translations of Eastern poetry, especially into German, began to interest some Europeans. The poetical translations from Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit made by the German poet Friedrich Rückert can scarcely be surpassed, either in accuracy or in poetical mastery. The Persian poet Ḥāfeẓ became well known in German-speaking countries, thanks to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s enchanting West-östlicher Divan (1819; “The Parliament of East and West”; Eng. trans. Poems of the East and West), a collection of self-consciously Persian-style poetry, which represented the first Western response to and appreciation of the character of Middle Eastern poetry by an acknowledged giant of European literature. An “Orientalizing style,” which employed Arabo-Persian literary forms such as the ghazal (a short graceful poem with monorhyme), became fashionable at times in Germany. Later, Edward FitzGerald aroused new interest in Persian poetry with his free adaptations of Omar Khayyam’s robāʿīyāt (The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1859). The fairy tales known as The Thousand and One Nights, first translated in 1704, provided abundant raw material for many a Western writer’s play, novel, story, or poem about the Islamic East.
In order to understand and enjoy Eastern literature, one must study its external characteristics most carefully. The literatures of the Islamic peoples are “intellectual”; in neither poetry nor prose are there many examples of subjective lyricism as it is understood in the West. The principal genres, forms, and rules were inherited from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry but were substantially elaborated afterward, especially by the Persians.
Arabic poetry is built upon the principle of monorhyme, and the single rhyme, usually consisting in one letter, is employed throughout every poem, long or short. The structure of the Arabic language permits such monorhymes to be achieved with comparative ease. The Persians and their imitators often extended the rhyming part over two or more syllables (radīf) or groups of words, which are repeated after the dominant rhyming consonant. The metres are quantitative, counting long and short syllables (ʿarūḍ). Classical Arabic has 16 basic metres in five groupings; they can undergo certain variations, but the poet is not allowed to change the metre in the course of the poem. Syllable-counting metres, as well as strophic forms, are used in popular, or “low,” poetry; only in postclassical Arabic were some strophic forms introduced into “high” poetry. Many modern Islamic poets, from Pakistan to Turkey and North Africa, have discarded the classical system of prosody altogether. In part they have substituted verse forms imitating Western models such as strophic poems with or without rhyme; since about 1950 free verse has almost become the rule, although a certain tendency toward rhyming or to the use of alliterative quasi-rhymes can be observed.
The chief poetic genres, as they emerged according to traditional rules, are the qaṣīdah, the ghazal, and the qiṭʿah; in Iran and its adjacent countries there are, further, the robāʿī and the mas̄navī.
The qaṣīdah (literally “purpose poem”), a genre whose form was invented by pre-Islamic Arabs, has from 20 to more than 100 verses and usually contains an account of the poet’s journey. In the classic pattern, the parts followed a fixed sequence, beginning with a love-poem prologue (nasīb), followed by a description of the journey itself, and finally reaching its real goal by flattering the poet’s patron, sharply attacking some adversaries of his tribe, or else indulging in measureless self-praise. Everywhere in the Muslim world the qaṣīdah became the characteristic form for panegyric. It could serve for religious purposes as well: solemn praise of God, eulogies of the Prophet, and songs of praise and lament for the martyr heroes of Shīʿite Islam were all expressed in this form. Later, the introductory part of the qaṣīdah often was taken up by a description of nature or given over to some words of wisdom, or the poet took the opportunity to demonstrate his skill in handling extravagant language and to show off his learning. Such exhibitions were made all the more difficult because, though it varied according to the rank of the person to whom it was addressed, the vocabulary of each type of qaṣīdah was controlled by rigid conventions. This type of poetry, however, could obviously lend itself easily to empty verbosity or to pedantry.
The ghazal possibly originated as an independent elaboration of the qaṣīdah’s introductory section, and it usually embodies a love poem. Ideally, its length varies between 5 and 12 verses. It can be used for either religious or secular expression, the two often being blended indistinguishably. Its diction is light and graceful, its effect comparable to that of chamber music, whereas the qaṣīdah writer employs, so to speak, the full orchestral resources.
Monorhyme is used in both the qaṣīdah and ghazal. But while these two forms begin with two rhyming hemistiches (half lines of a verse), in the qiṭʿah (“section”) the first hemistich does not rhyme, and the effect is as though the poem had been “cut out” of a longer one (hence its name). The qiṭʿah is a less-serious literary form that was used to deal with aspects of everyday life; it served mainly for occasional poems, satire, jokes, word games, and chronograms.
The form of the robāʿī, which is a quatrain in fixed metre with a rhyme scheme of a a b a, seems to go back to pre-Islamic Persian poetical tradition. It has supplied the Persian poets with a flexible vehicle for ingenious aphorisms and similarly concise expressions of thought for religious, erotic, or skeptical purposes. The peoples who came under Persian cultural influence happily adopted this form.
Epic poetry was unknown to the Arabs, who were averse to fiction, whether it was expressed in poetry or in prose. The development of epic poetry was thus hindered, just as was the creation of novels or short stories. Nevertheless, mas̄navī—which means literally “the doubled one,” or rhyming couplet, and by extension a poem consisting of a series of such couplets—became a favourite poetical form of the Persians and those cultures they influenced. The mas̄navī enabled the poet to develop the thread of a tale through thousands of verses. Yet even in such poetry only a restricted number of metres were employed, and no metre allowed more than 11 syllables in a hemistich. Metre and diction were prescribed in accordance with the topic; a didactic mas̄navī required a style and metre different from a heroic or romantic one. The mas̄navī usually begins with a praise of God, and this strikes the keynote of the poem.
There are a variety of other forms that are more or less restricted to folk poetry, such as the sīḥarfī (“golden alphabet”), in which each line or each stanza begins with succeeding letters of the Arabic alphabet. In Muslim India the bārāĩāsa (“12 months”) is a sort of lovers’ calendar in which the poet, assuming the role of a young woman of longing, expresses the lover’s feelings in accord with the seasons of the year. Apart from these, later writers tried to develop strophic forms. Sometimes ghazals with the same metre were bound together as “stanzas” to form a longer unit through the use of a linking verse. When the linking verse was recurrent, the poem was called a tarjīʿ-band (literally “return-tie”); when the linking verse was varied, the poem was called a tarkīb-band (literally “composite-tie”). True stanzas of varying lengths were also invented. Among these, mainly in Urdu and Turkish, a six-line stanza known as musaddas became the form used for the mars̄īyeh (dirge for the martyrs of Karbalāʾ). Because it had come to be associated with lofty feeling and serious thought, musaddas later was used for the first reformist modern poems.
The Arabs inherited a love for rhymed prose from pre-Islamic Arabia. Although the extent of prose literature, even in the field of belles lettres, is very large, the novel and novella were introduced only after contact with European literatures.
The most typical expression of the Arabic—and Islamic—spirit in prose is the maqāmah (meaning “gathering,” “assembly”), which tells basically simple stories in an extremely and marvelously complicated style (abounding in word plays, logographs, double entendres, and the like) and which comes closest to the Western concept of the short story.
The versatility and erudition of the classical maqāmah authors is dazzling, but the fables and parables that, during the first centuries of Islam, had been told in a comparatively easy flowing style later became subject to a growing trend toward artificiality, as did almost every other literary genre, including expository prose. Persian historiographers and Turkish biographers, Indo-Muslim writers on mysticism, and even writers on science all indulged in a style in which rhyme and rhetoric often completely obscured the meaning. It is only since the late 19th century that a matter-of-fact style has slowly become acceptable in literary circles; the influence of translations from European languages, the role of journalism, and the growing pride in a pure language freed from the cobwebs of the past worked together to make Islamic languages more pliable and less artificial.
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9245f1b42f54a006e619fa81a5829d93 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Mongol-Iran-Il-Khanid-and-Timurid-periods | Mongol Iran: Il-Khanid and Timurid periods | Mongol Iran: Il-Khanid and Timurid periods
Seen from the vantage point of contemporary or later chronicles, the 13th century in Iran was a period of destructive wars and invasions. Such cities as Balkh, Nīshāpūr, and Rayy, which had been centres of Islamic culture for nearly six centuries, were eradicated as the Mongol army swept through Iran. The turning point toward some sort of stability took place in 1295 with the accession of Maḥmūd Ghāzān to the Mongol throne. Under him and his successors (the Il-Khan dynasty), order was reestablished throughout Iran, and cities in northeastern Iran, especially Tabrīz and Solṭānīyeh, became the main creative centres of the new Mongol regime. At Tabrīz, for example, the Rashīdīyeh (a sort of academy of sciences and arts to which books, scholars, and ideas from all over the world were collected) was established in the early 14th century.
Existing under the Mongol rulers were a number of secondary dynasties that flourished in various provinces of Iran: the Jalāyirid dynasty, centred in Baghdad, controlled most of western Iran; the Moẓaffarid dynasty of southwestern Iran contained the cities of Eṣfahān, Yazd, and Shīrāz; and the Karts reigned in Khorāsān. Until the last decade of the 14th century, however, all the major cultural centres were in western Iran. Under Timur (1336–1405) and his successors (the Timurid dynasty), however, northeastern Iran, especially the cities of Samarkand and Herāt, became focal points of artistic and intellectual activity. But Timurid culture affected the whole of Iran either directly or through minor local dynasties. Many Timurid monuments, therefore, are found in western or southern Iran.
Stylistically, Il-Khanid architecture is defined best by buildings such as the mosque of Varāmīn (1322–26) and the mausoleums at Sarakhs, Merv, Rād-Kān, and Marāgheh. In all those examples, the elements of architectural composition, decoration, and construction that had been developed earlier were refined by Il-Khanid architects. Eyvāns were shallower but better integrated with the courts, facades were more thoughtfully composed, the muqarnas became more linear and varied, and coloured tiles were used to enhance the building’s character.
The architectural masterpiece of the Il-Khanid period is the mausoleum of Öljeitü at Solṭānīyeh. With its double system of galleries, eight minarets, large blue-tiled dome, and an interior measuring 80 feet (25 metres), it is clear that the building was intended to be imposing. Il-Khanid attention to impressiveness of scale also accounted for the ʿAlī Shāh mosque in Tabrīz, whose eyvān measuring 150 by 80 by 100 feet (45 by 25 by 30 metres) was meant to be the largest ever built. The eyvān vault collapsed almost immediately after it had been constructed, but its walls, 35 feet (10 metres) thick, remain as a symbol of the grandiose taste of the Il-Khanids. In the regions of Eṣfahān and Yazd numerous smaller mosques (often with unusual plans) and less ostentatious mausoleums, as well as palaces with elaborate gardens, were built in the 14th century. Those buildings were constructed to provide a monumental setting for the Islamic faith and to demonstrate the authority of the state.
The Timurid period began architecturally in 1390 with the sanctuary of Aḥmad Yasavī in Turkistan. Between 1390 and the last works of Sultan Ḥusayn Bāyqarā almost a century later, hundreds of buildings were constructed at Herāt, many of which have been preserved. The most spectacular examples of Timurid architecture are found in Samarkand, Herāt, Mashhad, Khargird, Tayābād, Baku, and Tabrīz, although important Timurid structures were also erected in southern Iran.
Architectural projects were well patronized by the Timurids as a means to commemorate their respective reigns. Every ruler or local governor constructed his own sanctuaries, mosques, and, especially, memorial buildings dedicated to holy men of the past. While the Shāh-e Zendah in Samarkand—a long street of mausoleums comparable to the Mamlūk cemetery of Cairo—is perhaps the most accessible of the sites of Timurid commemorative architecture, more spectacular ones are to be seen at Mashhad, Torbat-e Jām, and Mazār-e Sharīf. The Timurid princes also erected mausoleums for themselves, such as the Gūr-e Amīr and the ʿIshrat-Khāneh in Samarkand.
Major Timurid buildings—such as the mosque of Bībī Khānom and the Gūr-e Amīr mausoleum, both in Samarkand; the mosque of Gowhar Shād in Mashhad; or the madrasahs at Khargird and Herāt—are all characterized by strong axial symmetry. Often the facade on the inner court repeats the design of the outer facade, and minarets are used to frame the composition. Changes took place in the technique of dome construction. The muqarnas was not entirely abandoned but was often replaced by a geometrically rigorous net of intersecting arches that could be adapted to various shapes by modifying the width or span of the dome. The Khargird madrasah and the ʿIshrat-Khāneh mausoleum in Samarkand are particularly striking examples of this structural development. The Timurids also made use of double domes on high drums.
In the Timurid period the use of colour in architecture reached a high point. Every architectural unit was divided, on both the exterior and interior, into panels of brilliantly coloured tiles that sometimes were mixed with stucco or terra-cotta architectural decorations.
A new period of Persian painting began in the Mongol era; even though here and there one can recognize the impact of Seljuq painting, on the whole it is a limited one. Although the new style was primarily expressed in miniature painting, it is known from literary sources that mural painting flourished as well. Masterpieces of Persian literature were illustrated: first the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”) by the 11th-century poet Ferdowsī and then, from the second half of the 14th century, lyrical and mystical works, primarily those by the 12th-century poet Neẓāmī. Historical texts or chronicles such as Rashīd al-Dīn’s Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh (“The Collection of Chronicles”) were also illustrated, especially in the early Mongol period.
The first major monument of Persian painting in the Mongol period is a group of manuscripts of the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. The miniatures are historical narrative scenes. Stylistically, they are related to Chinese painting—an influence introduced by the Mongols during the Il-Khanid period.
Chinese influence can still be discovered in the masterpiece of 14th-century Persian painting, the so-called Demotte Shāh-nāmeh (named for the French dealer Georges Demotte who destroyed the binding in the early 20th century), also called the Great Mongol Shāh-nāmeh. Illustrated between 1320 and 1360, its 56 preserved miniatures have been dispersed all over the world. The compositional complexity of those paintings can be attributed to the fact that several painters probably were involved in the illustration of the manuscript and that the artists drew from a wide variety of different stylistic sources (e.g., Chinese, European, local Iranian traditions). Its main importance lies in the fact that it is the earliest known illustrative work that sought to depict in a strikingly dramatic fashion the meaning of the Iranian epic. Its battle scenes, its descriptions of fights with monsters, its enthronement scenes are all powerful representations of the colourful and often cruel legend of Iranian kingship. The artists also tried to express human powerlessness when confronted by fate in a series of mourning and death scenes.
The Demotte Shāh-nāmeh is but the most remarkable of a whole series of 14th-century manuscripts, all of which suggest an art of painting in search of a coherent style. At the very end of the period, a manuscript such as that of the poems of Sultan Aḥmad still exhibits an effective variety of established themes, while some of the miniatures of the period illustrate the astounding variety of styles studied or copied by Persian masters.
A more organized and stylistically coherent period in Persian painting began about 1396 with the Khwāju Kermānī manuscript and culminated between 1420 and 1440 in the paintings produced by the Herāt school, an academy created by Timur’s son Shāh Rokh and developed by Shāh Rokh’s son Baysunqur Mīrzā to codify, copy, and illustrate classical Iranian literature. Although several Shāh-nāmehs are known from this time, the mood of those manuscripts is no longer epic but lyrical. Puppetlike figures almost unemotionally engage in a variety of activities always set in an idealized garden or palace depicted against a rich gold background. It is a world of sensuous pleasure that also embodies the themes of a mystically interpreted lyrical poetry, for what is represented is not the real world but a divine paradise in the guise of a royal palace or garden. Those miniatures easily became clichés, for later artists endlessly repeated stereotyped formulas. But at its best, as in the illustrated manuscripts of Neẓāmī (Niẓāmī) held by New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, this style of Persian painting succeeds in defining something more than mere ornamental colourfulness. It expresses in its controlled lyricism a fascinating search for the divine, similar to the search of such epic characters as those presented in the works of Neẓāmī, Rūmī, or Ḥāfeẓ, at times earthly and vulgar, at other times quite ambiguous and hermetic, but often providing a language for the ways in which human beings can talk about God.
Another major change in Persian painting occurred during the second half of the 15th century at Herāt under Ḥusayn Bāyqarā. This change is associated with the first major painter of Islamic art, Behzād. Many problems of attribution are still posed about Behzād’s art. In the examples that follow, works by his school, as well as images by the master’s own hand, are included. In the Garrett Ẓafar-nāmeh (c. 1490, housed at Princeton University), the Egyptian Cairo National Library’s Būstān (1488), or the British Museum’s Neẓāmī (1493–94), the stereotyped formulas of the earlier lyric style were endowed with new vitality. Behzād’s interest in observing his environment resulted in the introduction of more realistic poses and the introduction of numerous details of daily life or genre elements. His works also reflect a concern for a psychological interpretation of the scenes and events depicted. It is thus not by chance that portraits have been attributed to Behzād.
Persian art of the Mongol period differs in a very important way from any of the other traditions of the middle period of Islamic art. Even though Iran, like all other areas at that time, was not ethnically homogeneous, its art tended to be uniquely “national.” In architecture, nationalism was mostly a matter of function, for during this period the Shīʿites grew in importance, and new monumental settings were required for their holy places. Iranian individualism is especially apparent in painting, in which Chinese and other foreign styles were consistently adapted to express intensely Iranian subjects, thereby creating a uniquely Persian style.
The last period of an Islamic artistic expression created within a context of political and intellectual independence was centred in the Ottoman, Ṣafavid, and Mughal empires. Although culturally very different from each other, those three imperial states shared a common past and a common consciousness of the nature of their ancestry and of the artistic forms associated with it. Painters and architects moved from one empire to the other, especially from Iran to India; Ottoman princes wrote Persian poetry, and Ṣafavid rulers spoke Turkish. But most of all, they were aware of the fact that they were much closer to each other than to any non-Islamic cultural entity. However different their individual artistic forms may have been, they collected each other’s works, exchanged gifts, and felt that they belonged to the same world.
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d9a2ad10cd21685badb6a0aab0f1f2ad | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Ottoman-art | Ottoman art | Ottoman art
The Ottomans were originally only one of the small Turkmen principalities (beyliks) that sprang up in Anatolia about 1300, after the collapse of Seljuq rule. In many ways, all the beyliks shared the same culture, but it was the extraordinary political and social attributes of the Ottomans that led them eventually to swallow up the other kingdoms, to conquer the Balkans, to take Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, and to control almost the whole of the Arab world by 1520. Only in the 19th century did this complex empire begin to crumble. Thus, while Ottoman art, especially architecture, is best known through the monuments in Turkey, there is, in fact, evidence of Ottoman art extending from Algiers to Cairo in North Africa, to Damascus in the Levant, and in the Balkans from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Sofia, Bulgaria.
The grand tradition of Ottoman architecture, established in the 16th century, was derived from two main sources. One was the rather complex development of new architectural forms that occurred all over Anatolia, especially at Manisa, İznik, Bursa, and Selçuk in the 14th and early 15th centuries. In addition to the usual mosques, mausoleums, and madrasahs, a number of buildings called tekkes (Arabic zāwiyahs, Persian khānqāhs) were constructed to house dervishes (members of mystical fraternities) and other holy men who lived communally. The tekke (or zeviye) was often joined to a mosque or mausoleum. The entire complex was then called a külliye. All those buildings continued to develop the domed, central-plan structure constructed by the Seljuqs in Anatolia.
The other source of Ottoman architecture is Christian art. The Byzantine tradition, especially as embodied in Hagia Sophia, became a major source of inspiration. Byzantine influence appears in such features as stone and brick used together or in the use of pendentive dome construction. Also artistically influential were the contacts that the early Ottomans had with Italy. Thus, in several mosques at Bursa, Turkey, there are stylistic parallels in the designs of the exterior facade and of windows, gates, and roofs to features found in Italian architecture. A distinctive feature of Ottoman architecture is that it drew from both Islamic and European artistic traditions and was, therefore, a part of both.
The apogee of Ottoman architecture was achieved in the great series of külliyes and mosques that still dominate the Istanbul skyline: the Fatih külliye (1463–70), the Bayezid Mosque (after 1491), the Selim Mosque (1522), the Şehzade külliye (1548), and the Süleyman külliye (after 1550). The Şehzade and Süleyman külliyes were built by Sinan, the greatest Ottoman architect, whose masterpiece is the Selim Mosque at Edirne, Turkey (1569–75). All those buildings exhibit total clarity and logic in both plan and elevation; every part has been considered in relation to the whole, and each architectural element has acquired a hierarchic function in the total composition. Whatever is unnecessary has been eliminated. This simplicity of design in the late 15th and 16th centuries has often been attributed to the fact that Sinan and many other Ottoman architects were first trained as military engineers. Everything in those buildings was subordinated to an imposing central dome. A sort of cascade of descending half domes, vaults, and ascending buttresses leads the eye up and down the building’s exterior. Minarets, slender and numerous, frame the exterior composition, while the open space of the surrounding courts prevents the building from being swallowed by the surrounding city. These masterpieces of Ottoman architecture seem to be the final perfection of two great traditions: a stylistic and aesthetic tradition that had been indigenous to Istanbul since the construction of the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia in the 6th century and the other Islamic tradition of domical construction dating to the 10th century.
The tragedy of Ottoman architecture is that it never managed to renew its 16th-century brilliance. Later buildings, such as the impressive Sultan Ahmed mosque in Istanbul, were mostly variations on Sinan’s architecture, and sometimes there were revivals of older building types, especially in the provinces. Occasionally, as in the early 18th-century Nûruosman mosque in Istanbul, interesting new variants appear illustrating the little-known Turkish Baroque style. The latter, however, is more visible in ornamental details or in smaller buildings, especially the numerous fountains built in Istanbul in the 18th century. The sources of the Turkish Baroque are probably to be sought in the Baroque architecture of Vienna and the bordering Austro-Hungarian states. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, a consistent Europeanization of a local tradition occurs in the Ottoman Empire.
While mosques and külliyes are the most characteristic monuments of Ottoman architecture, important secular buildings were also built: baths, caravansaries, and especially the huge palace complex of Topkapı Saray at Istanbul, in which 300 years of royal architecture are preserved in its elaborate pavilions, halls, and fountains.
Architectural decoration was generally subordinated to the structural forms or architectonic features of the building. A wide variety of themes and techniques originating from many different sources were used. One decorative device, the Ottoman version of colour tile decoration, deserves particular mention, for it succeeds in transforming smaller buildings such as the mosque of Rüstem Paşa in Istanbul into a visual spectacle of brilliant colours. The history and development of this type of ceramic decoration is intimately tied to the complex and much-controverted problem of the growth of several distinctive Ottoman schools of pottery: İznik, Rhodian, and Damascus ware. Both in technique and in design, Ottoman ceramics are the only major examples of pottery produced in the late Islamic period.
Ottoman miniature painting does not compare in quality to Persian painting, which originally influenced the Turkish school. Yet Ottoman miniatures do have a character of their own, either in the almost folk art effect of religious images or in the precise depictions of such daily events as military expeditions or great festivals. Among the finest examples of the latter is the manuscript Surname-i Vehbi painted by Abdülcelil Levnî in the early 18th century.
The production of metalwork, wood inlaid with ivory, Ushak carpets, and textiles flourished under the Ottomans, both in Istanbul workshops sponsored by the sultan and in numerous provincial centres. The influence of those ornamental objects on European decorative arts from the 16th through the 19th century was considerable.
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c6e4d52a179725c5abb94577fef681bc | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Poetry-of-Fuzuli-of-Baghdad | Poetry of Fuzuli of Baghdad | Poetry of Fuzuli of Baghdad
Much greater than most of these minor poets, however, was a writer living outside the capital, Fuzuli of Baghdad (died 1556), who wrote in Arabic, Persian, and Azeri Turkish. Apart from his lyrics, his Turkish mas̄navī on the traditional subject of the lovers Majnūn and Laylā is admirable. From earliest times, Turkish poets had emulated the classical Persian romantic mas̄navīs, sometimes surpassing their models in expressiveness. Fuzuli’s diction is taut, his command of imagery masterful. His style unfortunately defies poetical translation, and his complicated fabric of plain and inverted images, of hidden and overt allusions, is well-nigh impossible for all but the initiated Muslim reader to disentangle. Fuzuli, moreover, like his fellow poets, would blend Arabic, Persian, and Turkish constructions and words to make up a multifaceted unit. The same difficulty is found in Turkish prose literature of the same period. It is a major task to unravel the long trailing sentences of a writer such as Evliya Çelebi (died c. 1684), who, in an account of his travels (Seyahatname), has left extremely valuable information about the cultural climate in different parts of the Ottoman Empire.
Growing interest in the Indo-Persian style, particularly in ʿUrfī’s qaṣīdahs, led the 17th-century Ottoman poets to a new integrated style and precision of diction. An outstanding representative was Nefʾi, whose bent for merciless satire made him dreaded in the capital and eventually led to his assassination. At the start of the 18th century, a marked but short-lived movement in Turkish art known as the “Tulip Period” was the Ottoman counterpart of European Rococo. The musical poems and smooth ghazals of Ahmed Nedim (died 1730) reflect the manners and style of the slightly decadent, relaxed, and at times licentious high society of Istanbul and complement the miniatures of his contemporary Abdülcelil Levnî (died 1732). Good Turkish poetry is characterized by an easy grace, to be found even in such mystically tinged poems (thousands of which were written throughout the centuries) as those of Niyazî Misrî (died 1697). The Mevlevî (Mawlawī) poet Gâlib Dede (died 1799) was already standing at the threshold of what can now be recognized as modern poetical expression in some of the lyrical parts of his mas̄navī, called Hüsn ü aşk (“Beauty and Love”), which brought fresh treatment to a well-worn subject of Iran’s philosophical and secular literature. His work cannot be properly understood, however, without a thorough knowledge of mystical psychology, expressed in multivalent images.
One branch of literature, however, was totally neglected by the sophisticated inhabitants of the Ottoman capital. Nobody thought much of the folk poets who wandered through the forgotten villages of Anatolia singing in simple syllable-counting verses of love, longing, and separation. The poems of the mid-17th-century figure Karacaoğlan, one of the few historically datable folk poets, give a vivid picture of village life, of the plight of girls and boys in remote Anatolian settlements. This kind of poetry was rediscovered only after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and then became an important influence on modern lyric poetry.
For the Islamic countries, the 19th century marks the beginning of a new epoch. Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, as well as British colonialism, brought the Muslims into contact with a world whose technology was far in advance of their own. The West had experienced the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, whereas the once-flourishing Muslim civilization had for a long while been at a near stagnation point despite its remarkable artistic achievements. The introduction of Muslim intellectuals to Western literature and scholarship—the Egyptian al-Ṭahṭāwī (died 1873), for example, studied in France—ushered in a new literary era the chief characteristic of which was to be “more matter, less art.” The literatures from this time onward are far less “Islamic” than those of the previous 1,000 years, but new intellectual experiences also led to “the liberation of the whole creative impulse within the Islamic peoples” (James Kritzeck). The introduction of the printing press and the expansion of newspapers helped to shape a new literary style, more in line with the requirements of modern times, when, as one scholar put it, “the patron prince has been replaced by a middle-class reading public.”
Translations from Western languages provided writers with the model examples of genres previously unknown to them, including the novel, the short story, and dramatic literature. Of those authors whose books were translated, Guy de Maupassant, Sir Walter Scott, and Anton Chekhov were most influential in the development of the novel and the novella. Important also was the ideological platform derived from Leo Tolstoy, whose criticism of Western Christianity was gratefully adopted by writers from Egypt to Muslim India. Western influences can further be observed in the gradual discarding of the time-hallowed static (and turgid) style of both poetry and prose, in the tendency toward simplification of diction, and in the adaptation of syntax and vocabulary to meet the technical demands of emulating Western models.
Contact with the West also encouraged a tendency toward retrospection. Writers concentrated their attention on their own country and particular heritage, such as the “pharaoic myth” of Egypt, the Indo-European roots of Iran, and the Central Asian past of Turkey. In short, there was an emphasis on differentiation, inevitably leading to the rise of nationalism, instead of an emphasis on the unifying spirit and heritage of Islam.
Characteristically, therefore, given this situation, the heralds of Arab nationalism (as reflected in literature) were Christians. The historical novels of Jurjī Zaydān (died 1914), a Lebanese living in Egypt, made a deep impression on younger writers by glorifying the lionhearted national heroes of past times. Henceforth, the historical novel was to be a favourite genre in all Islamic countries, including Muslim India. The inherited tradition of the heroic or romantic epic and folktale was blended with novelistic techniques learned from Sir Walter Scott. Two writers in the front rank of Arab intellectuals were Amīr Shakīb Arslān (died 1946), of Druze origin, and Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī (died 1953), the founder of the Arab Academy of Damascus, each of whom, by encouraging a new degree of awareness, made an important contribution to the education of modern historians and persons of letters. An inclination toward Romanticism can be detected in prose writing but not, surprisingly, in poetry; thus, the Egyptian Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī (died 1924) poured out his feelings in a number of novels that touch on Islamic as well as national issues.
It is fair to say of this transition period that the poetry being written was not as interesting as the prose. The qaṣīdahs of the “Prince of Poets,” Aḥmad Shawqī (died 1932), are for the most part ornate imitations of classical models. Even the “Poet of the Nile,” Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (died 1932), who was more interested in the real problems of the day, was nonetheless content to follow conventional patterns. In his poems, Khalīl Muṭrān (died 1949) attempted to achieve a unity of structure hitherto almost unknown, and he also adopted a more subjective approach to expressive lyricism. Thus, he can be said to have inaugurated an era of “Romantic” poetry, staunchly defended by those writers and scholars who had come under English rather than French influence. These included the poet and essayist Ibrāhīm al-Māzinī (died 1949) and the prolific writer of poetry and prose ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād (died 1964).
A major contribution to the development of modern prose in the Arabic language was made by a number of writers born between 1889 and 1902. One of them, the “humanist” Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, became well known in the West as a literary critic who attacked the historical authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry and stressed the importance of Greek and Latin for the literatures of the modern Middle East. He was also the author of a successful novel called The Tree of Misery, but his best creative writing is in his fictionalized autobiography, Al-Ayyām (1929–67; The Days), the three parts of which describe in simple language the life of a blind Egyptian village boy. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s generation became more and more absorbed by the problems of the middle classes (to which most of them belonged), and this led them to realism in fiction. Some turned to fierce social criticism, depicting in their writings the dark side of everyday life in Egypt and elsewhere. The leading writer of this group was Maḥmūd Taymūr, who wrote short stories, a genre developed in Arabic by a Lebanese Christian who settled in the United States, the noted and versatile poet Khalil Gibran (died 1931). Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (died 1956), a leading figure of Egyptian cultural and political life and the author of numerous historical studies, touched on the difficulties of Egyptian villagers for the first time, in his novel Zaynab (1913). This subject became fashionable quickly afterward, although not all the writers had firsthand knowledge of the feelings and problems of the fellahin. The most fertile author of this group was al-ʿAqqād, who tirelessly produced biographies, literary criticism, and romantic poetry. The Islamic reform movement led by Muḥammad ʿAbduh (died 1905) and his disciples, which centred on the journal Al-Manār (“The Lighthouse”), influenced Arabic prose style across the 20th century and was important in shaping the religious outlook of many authors writing in the 1920s and ’30s.
A considerable amount of Arabic literature was produced during the 20th century by numerous writers who settled in non-Islamic countries, especially in the United States and Brazil. Most of these writers came from Christian Lebanese families. A feeling of nostalgia often led them to form literary circles or launch magazines or newspapers. (The Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hudā [or Al-Hoda, “The Guidance”], established in 1898, was published in New York City as Al-Hudā al-jadīdah [Al-Hoda Aljadidah; “The New Al-Hoda,” or “The New Guidance”].) It was largely because of their work that the techniques of modern fiction and modern free verse entered Arabic literature and became a decisive factor in it.
One of the best-known authors in this group was Ameen Rihani (died 1941), whose descriptions of his journeys through the Arab world are informative and make agreeable reading. The fact that so many Lebanese emigrated led to the creation of a standard theme in Lebanese fiction: emigrants returning to their villages. Modern Iraqi literature is best represented by “the poet of freedom” Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī (died 1945), and Jamīl Sidqī al-Zahāwī (died 1936), whose satire “Thawrah fī al-Jaḥīm” (“Rebellion in Hell”) incurred the wrath of the traditionalists.
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edc378e365156f5caf96eacd60ad7fe8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Safavid-art | Ṣafavid art | Ṣafavid art
The Ṣafavid dynasty was founded by Ismāʿīl I (ruled 1501–24). The art of this dynasty was especially noteworthy during the reigns of Ṭahmāsp I (1524–76) and ʿAbbās I (1588–1629). This phase of the Ṣafavid period also marked the last significant development of Islamic art in Iran, for after the middle of the 17th century original creativity disappeared in all mediums. Rugs and objects in silver, gold, and enamel continued to be made and exhibited a considerable technical virtuosity, even when they were lacking in inventiveness.
The Ṣafavids abandoned Central Asia and northeastern Iran to a new Uzbek dynasty that maintained the Timurid style in many buildings (especially at Bukhara) and briefly sponsored a minor and derivative school of painting. Only the great sanctuary of Mashhad was being kept up and built up, but, like many of the other religious sanctuaries of the time—Qom, Al-Najaf, Karbalāʾ—it is still far too little known to lend itself to coherent analysis. This was the time when Shīʿism became a state religion, and for the first time in Islam there appeared an organized ecclesiastical system rather than the more or less loose spiritual and practical leadership of old. The main centres of the Ṣafavid empire were Tabrīz and Ardabīl in the northwest, with Kazvin in the central region and, especially, Eṣfahān in the west. The Ṣafavid period, like the Ottoman era, was an imperial age, and therefore there is hardly a part of Iran where either Ṣafavid buildings or major Ṣafavid restorations cannot be found. The dynasty spent much money and effort on the building of bridges, roads, and caravansaries to encourage trade.
The best-known Ṣafavid monuments are located at Eṣfahān, where ʿAbbās I built a whole new city. According to one description, it contained 162 mosques, 48 madrasahs, 1,802 commercial buildings, and 283 baths. Most of those buildings no longer survive, but the structures that remain constitute some of the finest monuments of Islamic architecture.
At the centre of Eṣfahān is the Maydān-e Shāh (now Maydān-e Emām), a large open space, about 1,670 by 520 feet (510 by 158 metres), originally surrounded by trees. Used for polo games and parades, it could be illuminated with 50,000 lamps. Each side of the maydān was provided with the monumental facade of a building. On one of the smaller sides was the entrance to a large mosque, the celebrated Masjed-e Shāh (now Masjed-e Emām). On the other side was the entrance into the bazaar or marketplace. On the longer sides were the small funerary mosque of Shaykh Luṭf Allāh and, facing it, the ʿAlī Qāpū, the “Lofty Gate,” the first unit of a succession of palaces and gardens that extended beyond the maydān, most of which have now disappeared except for the Chehel Sotūn (“Forty Columns”), a palace built as an audience hall. The ʿAlī Qāpū was, in its lower floors, a semipublic place to which petitions could be brought, while its upper floors were a world of pure fantasy—a succession of rooms, halls, and balconies overlooking the city, which were purely for the prince’s pleasure.
The Maydān-e Emām unites in a single composition all the concerns of medieval Islamic architecture: prayer, commemoration, princely pleasure, trade, and spatial effect. None of the hundreds of other remaining Ṣafavid monuments can match its historical importance, and in it also are found the major traits of Ṣafavid construction and decoration. The forms are traditional, for the most part, and, even in vaulting techniques and the use of coloured tiles, it is to Timurid art that the Ṣafavids looked for their models. The Persian architects of the early 17th century sought to achieve a monumentality in exterior spatial composition (an interesting parallel to the interior spaciousness created at the same time by the Ottomans); a logical precision in vaulting, which was successful in the Masjed-e Emām but rapidly led to cheap effects or to stucco imitations; and a coloristic brilliance that has made the domes and portals of Eṣfahān justly famous.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, possibly for the first time in Islamic art, painters were conscious of historical styles—even self-conscious. Miniatures from the past were collected, copied, and imitated. Patronage, however, was fickle. A royal whim would gather painters together or exile them. Many names of painters have been preserved, and there is little doubt that the whim of patrons was being countered by the artists’ will to be socially and economically independent as well as individually recognized for their artistic talents. Too many different impulses, therefore, existed in Ṣafavid Iran for painting to follow any clear line of development.
Three major painting styles, or schools (excluding a number of interesting provincial schools), existed in the Ṣafavid period. One school of miniature painting is exemplified by such masterpieces as the Houghton Shāh-nāmeh (completed in 1537), the Jāmī Haft owrang (1556–1665), and the illustrations to stories from Ḥāfeẓ. However different they are from each other, those large, colourful miniatures all were executed in a grand manner. Their compositions are complex, individual faces appear in crowded masses, there is much diversification in landscape, and, despite a few ferocious details of monsters or of strongly caricatured poses and expressions, these book illustrations are concerned with an idealized vision of life. The sources of this school lie with the Timurid academy. Behzād, Sulṭān Muḥammad, Sheykhzādeh, Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī, Āqā Mīrak, and Maḥmūd Muṣavvīr continued and modified, each in his own way, the ideal of a balance between an overall composition and precise rendering of details.
The miniatures of the second tradition of Ṣafavid painting seem at first to be like a detail out of the work of the previously discussed school. The same purity of colour, elegance of poses, interest in details, and assertion of the individual figure is found. Rezā ʿAbbāsī (active in the late 16th and early 17th century) excelled in these extraordinary portrayals of poets, musicians, courtiers, and aristocratic life in general.
In both traditions of painting, the beautiful personages depicted frequently are satirized; this note of satirical criticism is even more pronounced in portraiture of the time. But it is in pen or brush drawings, mostly dating from the 17th century, that the third aspect of Ṣafavid painting appeared: an interest in genre, or the depiction of minor events of daily life (e.g., a washerwoman at work, a tailor sewing, an animal). With stunning precision, Ṣafavid artists showed a whole society falling apart with a cruel sympathy totally absent from the literary documents of the time.
While architecture and painting were the main artistic vehicles of the Ṣafavids, the making of textiles and carpets was also of great importance. It is in the 16th century that a thitherto primarily nomadic and folk medium of the decorative arts was transformed into an expression of royal and urban tasks by the creation of court workshops. The predominantly geometric themes of earlier Iranian carpets were not abandoned entirely but tended to be replaced by vegetal, animal, and even occasional human motifs. Great schools of carpet making developed particularly at Tabrīz, Kāshan̄, and Kermān.
Because the culture of the Mughals was intimately connected with the indigenous Hindu traditions of the Indian subcontinent, their art will be treated only synoptically in this article. (For a more-detailed account, the reader should see the sections on Mughal art in the visual arts of the Indian subcontinent portion of the article South Asian arts, notably Islamic architecture in India: Mughal style and Indian painting: Mughal style).
The art of the Mughals was similar to that of the Ottomans in that it was a late imperial art of Muslim princes. Both styles were rooted in several centuries (at least from the 13th century onward) of adaptation of Islamic functions to indigenous forms. It was in the 14th-century architecture of South Asian sites such as Tughluqabad, Gaur, and Ahmadabad that a uniquely Indian type of Islamic hypostyle mosque was created, with a triple axial nave, corner towers, axial minarets, and cupolas. It was also during those centuries that the first mausoleums set in scenically spectacular locations were built. By then the conquering Muslims had fully learned how to utilize local methods of construction, and they adapted South Asian decorative techniques and motifs.
Mughal art was in continuous contact with Iran or, rather, with the Timurid world of the second half of the 15th century. The models and the memories were in Herāt or Samarkand, but the artists were raided from Ṣafavid Iran, and the continuous flow of painters from Iran to the Mughal Empire is a key factor in understanding Mughal painting.
The mausoleum of Humāyūn in Delhi (1570; in 1993 designated a UNESCO World Heritage site), the city of Fatehpur Sikri (founded 1569; in 1986 designated a World Heritage site), and the Taj Mahal at Agra (1631–53; in 1983 designated a World Heritage site) summarize the development of Mughal architecture. In all three examples it can be seen that what Mughal architecture brought to the Islamic tradition (other than traditional Indian themes, especially in decoration) was technical perfection in the use of red sandstone or marble as building and decorative materials.
In Mughal painting, the kind of subject that tended to be illustrated was remarkably close to those used in Ṣafavid history books—legendary stories, local events, portraits, genre scenes. What evolved quickly was a new manner of execution, and this style can be seen as early as about 1567, when the celebrated manuscript Dāstān-e Amīr Ḥamzeh (“Stories of Amīr Ḥamzeh”) was painted (some 200 miniatures remain and are found in most major collections of Indian miniatures, especially at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Traditional Iranian themes—battles, receptions, feasts—acquired monumentality, not only because of the inordinate size of the images but also because almost all of the objects and figures depicted were seen in terms of mass rather than line. Something of the colourfulness of Iranian painting was lost, but instead images acquired a greater expressive power. Mughal portraiture gave more of a sense of the individual than did the portraits of the Ṣafavids. As in a celebrated representation of a dying courtier in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Mughal drawings could be poignantly naturalistic. Mood was important to the Mughal artist; in many paintings of animals there is a playful mood, and a sensuous mood is evident in the first Muslim images to glorify the female body and the erotic.
In summary it can be said that the Mughals produced an art of extraordinary stylistic contrasts that reflected the complexities of its origins and of its aristocratic patronage.
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f82c6a527e2b171515757237a44c1655 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/The-Abbasids | The ʿAbbāsids | The ʿAbbāsids
It was not until the ʿAbbāsids assumed power in 750, settling in Baghdad, that the golden age of Arabic literature began. The influx of foreign elements added new colour to cultural and literary life. Hellenistic thought and the influence of the ancient cultures of the Middle East, for example, contributed to the rapid intellectual growth of the Muslim community. Its members, seized with insatiable intellectual curiosity, began to adapt elements from all the earlier high cultures and to incorporate them into their own. They thus created the wonderful fabric of Islamic culture that was so much admired in the Middle Ages by western Europe. Indian and Iranian threads were also woven into this fabric, and a new sensitivity to beauty in the field of poetry and the fine arts was cultivated.
The classical Bedouin style was still predominant in literature and was the major preoccupation of grammarians. These men were, as the modern critic Sir Hamilton Gibb emphasized, the true humanists of Islam. Their efforts helped to standardize “High Arabic,” giving it an unchangeable structure once and for all. By then the inhabitants of the growing towns in Iraq and Syria were beginning to express their love, hatred, religious fervour, and frivolity in a style more appealing to their fellow townsmen. Poets no longer belonged exclusively to what had been the Bedouin aristocracy. Artisans and freed slaves, of non-Arab origin, were included among their number. Bashshār ibn Burd (died c. 784), the son of a Persian slave, was the first representative of the new style. This ugly, blind workman excelled as a seductive love poet and also as a biting satirist—“Nobody could be secure from the itch of his tongue,” it was later said—and he added a new degree of expressiveness to the old forms. The category of zuhdiyyah (ascetic poems) was invented by the poet Abū al-ʿAtāhiyyah (died 825/826) from Basra, the centre of early ascetic movements. His pessimistic thoughts on the transitory nature of this world were uttered in an unpretentious kind of verse that rejected all current notions of style and technical finesse. He had turned to ascetic poetry after efforts at composing love songs.
The same is said of Abū Nuwās (died c. 813/815), the most outstanding of the ʿAbbāsid poets. His witty and cynical verses are addressed mainly to handsome boys; best known are his scintillating drinking songs. His line “Accumulate as many sins as you can” seems to have been his motto, and, compared with some of his more lascivious lines, even the most daring passages of pre-Islamic poetry sound chaste. Abū Nuwās had such an incomparable command over the language, however, that he came to be regarded as one of the greatest Arabic poets of all time. Nevertheless, orthodox Muslims would quote of him and of his imitators the Prophet’s alleged saying that “poetry is what Satan has spit out,” since he not only described subjects prohibited by religious law but praised them with carefree lightheartedness.
The new approach to poetry that developed during the 9th century was first accorded scholarly discussion in the Kitāb al-badī ʿ (The Book of Tropes) by Ibn al-Muʿtazz (died 908), caliph for one day, who laid down rules for the use of metaphors, similes, and verbal puns. The ideal of these “modern” poets was the richest possible embellishment of verses by the use of tropes, brilliant figures of speech, and far-fetched poetic conceits. Many later handbooks of poetics discussed these rules in minute detail, and eventually the increasing use of rhetorical devices no longer produced art but artificiality. (Ibn al-Muʿtazz was himself a fine poet whose descriptions of courtly life and nature are lovely; he even tried to compose an epic poem, a genre otherwise unknown to the Arabs.) The “modern” poets, sensitive to colours, sounds, and shapes, were also fond of writing short poems on unlikely subjects: a well-bred hunting dog or an inkpot; delicious sweetmeats or jaundice; the ascetic who constantly weeps when he remembers his sins; the luxurious garden parties of the rich; an elegy for a cat; or a description of a green ewer. Their amusing approach, however, was sooner or later bound to lead to mannered compositions. The growing use of colour images may be credited to the increasing Persian influence upon ʿAbbāsid poetry, for the Persian poets were, as has been often observed, on the whole more disposed to visual than to acoustic imagery.
New attitudes toward love, too, were being gradually developed in poetry. Eventually, what was to become a classic theme, that of ḥubb ʿudhrī (“ʿUdhrah love”)—the lover would rather die than achieve union with his beloved—was expounded by the Ẓāhirī theologian Ibn Dāʾūd (died 910) in his poetic anthology Kitāb al-zahrah (The Book of the Flower). This theme was central to the ghazal poetry of the following centuries. Although at first completely secular, it was later taken over as a major concept in mystical love poetry. (The first examples of this adoption, in Iraq and Egypt, took place in Ibn Dāʾūd’s lifetime.) The wish to die on the path that leads to the beloved became commonplace in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu poetry, and most romances in these languages end tragically. Ibn Dāʾūd’s influence also spread to the western Islamic world. A century after his death, the theologian Ibn Ḥazm (died 1064), drawing upon personal experiences, composed in Spain his famous work on “pure love” called Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah (The Ring of the Dove). Its lucid prose, interspersed with poetry, has many times been translated into Western languages.
The conflict between the traditional ideals of poetry and the “modern” school of the early ʿAbbāsid period also led to the growth of a literary criticism, the criteria of which were largely derived from the study of Greek philosophy.
Traditional poetry, meanwhile, was not neglected, but its style was somewhat modified in accordance with the new ideas. Two famous anthologies of Bedouin poetry, both called Ḥamāsah (“Poems of Bravery”), were collected by the Syrian Abū Tammām (died c. 845) and his disciple al-Buḥturī (died 897), both noted classical poets in their own right. They provide an excellent survey of those poems from the stock of early Arabic poetry that were considered worth preserving. A century later Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (died 967), in a multivolume work entitled Kitāb al-aghānī (“Books of Songs”), collected a great number of poems and biographical notes on poets and musicians. This material gives a colourful and valuable panorama of literary life in the first four centuries of Islam.
In the mid-10th century a new cultural centre emerged at the small court of the Ḥamdānids in Aleppo. Here the Central Asian scholar al-Fārābī (died 950) wrote his fundamental works on philosophy and musical theory. Here too, for a while, lived Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī (died 965), who is in the mainstream of classical qaṣīdah writers but who surpasses them all in the extravagance of what has been called his “reckless audacity of imagination.” He combined some elements of Iraqi and Syrian stylistics with classical ingredients. His compositions—panegyrics of rulers and succinct verses (which are still quoted)—have never ceased to intoxicate the Arabs by their daring hyperbole, their marvelous sound effects, and their formal perfection. Western readers are unlikely to derive as much aesthetic pleasure from Mutanabbī’s poetry as do native speakers of Arabic. They will probably prefer the delicate verses about gardens and flowers by Mutanabbī’s colleague in Aleppo, al-Ṣanawbarī (died 945), a classic exponent of the descriptive style. This style in time reached Spain, where the superb garden and landscape poetry of Ibn Khafājah (died 1139) displayed an even higher degree of elegance and sensitivity than that of his Eastern predecessors.
Before turning to the development of prose, it is necessary to mention a figure unique among those writing in Arabic. This was al-Maʿarrī (died 1057), a blind poet of Syria, the sincerity and humanity of whose verses continue to appeal greatly to young Arabs. But al-Maʿarrī’s vocabulary is so difficult, his verses, with their double rhymes, are so compressed in meaning, that even his contemporaries, flocking to his lectures, had to ask him to interpret their significance. His outlook is deeply pessimistic and skeptical. Although his poems display a mastery of the Arabic traditional stylistic devices, they run counter to the conventional ideals of Arab heroism by speaking of bitter disappointment and emphasizing asceticism, compassion, and the avoidance of procreation.
says Reynold A. Nicholson, al-Maʿarrī’s foremost interpreter in the West, who also translated his Risālat al-ghufrān (“The Epistle of Forgiveness”; Eng. trans. Risalat ul Ghufran: A Divine Comedy), which describes a visit to the otherworld. Maʿarrī’s extremely erudite book also contains sarcastic criticism of Arabic literature. His Al-Fuṣūl wa al-ghāyāt (“Paragraphs and Periods”) is an ironic commentary on humanity and nature but is presented as a sequence of pious exhortations in rhymed prose. It has scandalized the pious, some of whom see it as a parody of the Qurʾān. Maʿarrī’s true intention in writing this book is unknown.
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c657cd4adc415c0a087ab918feaf3588 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/The-mystical-poem | The mystical poem | The mystical poem
Whereas the mystical thought stemming from Iran had formerly been written in Arabic, writers from the 11th century onward turned to Persian. Along with works of pious edification and theoretical discussions, what was to be one of the most common types of Persian literature came into existence: the mystical poem. Khwajah ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī of Herāt (died 1088), a prolific writer on religious topics in both Arabic and Persian, first popularized the literary “prayer,” or mystical contemplation, written in Persian in rhyming prose interspersed with verses. Sanāʾī (died 1131?), at one time a court poet of the Ghaznavids, composed the first mystical epic, the didactic Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqat wa sharī ʿat al-ṭariqah (“The Garden of Truth and the Law of the Path”), which has some 10,000 verses. In this lengthy and rather dry poem, the pattern for all later mystical mas̄navīs is established: wisdom is embodied in stories and anecdotes; parables and proverbs are woven into the texture of the story, eventually leading back to the main subject, although the argument is without thread and the narration puzzling to follow. Among Sanāʾī’s smaller mas̄navīs, Sayr al-ʿibād ilā al-maʿād (“The Journey of the Servants to the Place of Return”) deserves special mention. Its theme is the journey of the spirit through the spheres, a subject dear to the mystics and still employed in modern times as, for example, by Iqbāl in his Persian Jāvīd-nāmeh (1932; “The Song of Eternity”).
Sanāʾī’s epic endeavours were continued by one of the most prolific writers in the Persian tongue, Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (died c. 1220). He was a born storyteller, a fact that emerges from his lyrics but even more so from his works of edification. The most famous among his mas̄navīs is the Manṭeq al-ṭayr (The Conference of the Birds), modeled after some Arabic allegories. It is the story of 30 birds who, in search of their spiritual king, journey through seven valleys. The poem is full of tales, some of which have been translated even into the most remote Islamic languages. (The story of the pious Sheykh Ṣanʿān, who fell in love with a Christian maiden, is found, for example, in Kashmiri.) ʿAṭṭār’s symbolism of the soul-bird was perfectly in accord with the existing body of imagery beloved of Persian poetry, but it was he who added a scene in which the birds eventually realize their own identity with God (because they, being sī morgh, or “30 birds,” are identified with the mystical Sīmorgh, who represents God). Also notable are his Elāhī-nāmeh (“The Book of God”), an allegory of a king and his six sons, and his profound Moṣībat-nāmeh (“Book of Affliction”), which closes with its hero’s being immersed in the ocean of his soul after wandering through the 40 stages of his search for God. The epic exteriorizes the mystic’s experiences in the 40 days of seclusion.
The most famous of the Persian mystical mas̄navīs is by Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (died 1273) and is known simply as the Mas̄navī. It comprises some 26,000 verses and is a complete—though quite disorganized—encyclopaedia of all the mystical thought, theories, and images known in the 13th century. It is regarded by most of the Persian-reading orders of Sufis as second in importance only to the Qurʾān. Its translation into many Islamic languages and the countless commentaries written on it up to the present day indicate its importance in the formation of Islamic poetry and religious thought. Jalāl al-Dīn, who hailed from Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan) and settled in Konya (in present-day Turkey), the capital of the Rūm, or Anatolian Seljuqs (and hence was surnamed “Rūmī”), was also the author of love lyrics whose beauty surpasses even that of the tales in the Mas̄navī. Mystical love poetry had been written since the days of Sanāʾī, and theories of love had been explained in the most subtle prose and sensitive verses by the Sufis of the early 12th century. Yet Rūmī’s experience of mystical love for the wandering mystic, Shams al-Dīn of Tabrīz, was so ardent and enraptured him to such an extent that he identified himself completely with Shams, going so far as to use the beloved’s name as his own pen name. His dithyrambic lyrics, numbering more than 30,000 verses altogether, are not at all abstract or romantic. On the contrary, their vocabulary and imagery are taken directly from everyday life, so that they are vivid, fresh, and convincing. Often their rhythm invites the reader to partake in the mystical dance practiced by Rūmī’s followers, the Mawlawiyyah (the name is derived from the honorific “Mawlānā”—meaning “Our Lord”—often bestowed on Rūmī). His verses sometimes approach the form of popular folk poetry. Indeed, Rūmī is reputed to have written mostly under inspiration, and, despite his remarkable poetical technique, the sincerity of his love and longing is never overshadowed, nor is his personality veiled. In these respects he is unique in Persian literature.
During the 13th century the Islamic lands were exposed, on the political plane, to the onslaught of the Mongols and the abolition of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate, while vast areas were laid to waste. Yet this was in fact the period in which Islamic literatures reached their zenith. Apart from Rūmī’s superb poetry, written in the comparative safety of Konya, there was also the work of the Egyptian Ibn al-Fārīd (died 1235), who composed some magnificent, delicately written mystical poems in qaṣīdah style, and that of Ibn al-ʿArabī, who composed love lyrics and numerous theosophical works that were to become standard.
In Iran one of the greatest literati, Saʿdī, (died 1291), returned about 1256 to his birthplace, Shīrāz, after years of journeying, and his Būstān (The Orchard) and Gulistān (The Rose Garden) have been popular ever since. The Būstān is a didactic poem telling wise and uplifting moral tales, written in polished, easy-flowing style and a simple metre. The Gulistān, completed one year later, in 1258, has been judged “the finest flower that could blossom in a Sultan’s garden” (Johann Gottfried von Herder). Its eight chapters deal with different aspects of human life and behaviour. At first sight its prose and poetical fragments appear to be simple and unassuming, but not a word could be changed without destroying the perfect harmony of the sound, imagery, and content. Saʿdī’s Gulistān is thus essential in discovering the nature of the finest Persian literary style. Since the mid-17th century its moralizing stories have been translated into many Western languages. Saʿdī was likewise the author of some spirited ghazals; he may have been the first writer in Iran to compose the sort of love poetry that is now thought of as characteristic of the ghazal. A few of his qaṣīdahs are also of note, although he is at his best in shorter forms. His elegant aphoristic poems, words of wisdom, and sensible advice all display what has been called the philosophy of common sense—how to act in any given situation so as to make the best of it both for oneself and others, basing one’s conduct on the virtues of gentleness, elegance, modesty, and polite behaviour.
The influence of mysticism, on the one hand, and of the elaborate Persian poetical tradition, on the other, is apparent during the later decades of the 13th century, both in Anatolia and in Muslim India. The Persian mystic ʿIrāqī (died 1289), a master of delightful love lyrics, lived for almost 25 years in Multan (in present-day Pakistan), where his lively ghazals are still sung. His short treatises, in a mixture of poetry and prose (and written under Ibn al-ʿArabī’s influence), have been imitated often.
While in Multan he may have met the young Amīr Khosrow of Delhi (died 1325), who was one of the most versatile authors to write in Persian, not only in India but in the entire realm of Persian culture. Amīr Khosrow, son of a Turkish officer but whose mother was Indian, is often styled, because of the sweetness of his speech, “the parrot of India.” (In Persian, it should be noted, parrots are always “sugar-talking”; they are, moreover, connected with paradise and are thought of as wise birds—thus models of the sweet-voiced sage.) He wrote panegyrics of seven successive kings of Delhi and was also a pioneer of Indian Muslim music. Imitating Neẓāmī’s Khamseh, Khosrow introduced a novelistic strain into the mas̄navī by recounting certain events of his own time in poetical form, some parts of which are lyrics. His style of lyrical poetry has been described as “powdered,” and his ghazals contain many of the elements that in the 16th and 17th centuries were to become characteristic of the “Indian” style. Khosrow’s poetry surprises the reader in its use of unexpected forms and unusual images, complicated constructions and verbal plays, all handled fluently and presented in technically perfect language. His books on the art of letter writing prove his mastery of high-flown Persian prose. Khosrow’s younger contemporary, Ḥasan of Delhi (died 1328), is less well known and had a more simple style. He nevertheless surpassed Khosrow in warmth and charm, qualities that earned him the title of “the Saʿdī of Hindustan.”
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10713b2f3463f27a856dc3e8e57dec4c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts/Western-Islamic-art-Moorish | Western Islamic art: Moorish | Western Islamic art: Moorish
The 11th to 13th centuries were not peaceful in the Maghrib. Amazigh (Berber) dynasties overthrew each other in Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula. The Christian Reconquista gradually diminished Muslim holdings in Spain and Portugal, and Tunisia was ruined during the Hilālī invasion when Bedouin tribes were sent by the Fāṭimids to prevent local independence.
Two types of structures characterize the Almoravid (1056–1147) and Almohad (1130–1269) periods in Morocco and Spain. One comprises the large, severely designed Moroccan mosques such as those of Tinmel, of Ḥasan in Rabat, or of the Kutubiyyah (Koutoubia) in Marrakech. They are all austere hypostyles with tall, massive, square minarets. The other distinctive type of architecture was that built for military purposes, including fortifications and, especially, massive city gates with low-slung horseshoe arches, such as the Oudaia Gate at Rabat (12th century) or the Rabat Gate at Marrakech (12th century). Palaces built in central Algeria by minor dynasties such as the Zīrids were more in the Fāṭimid tradition of Egypt than in the Almoravid and Almohad traditions of western Islam. Almost nothing is known or has been studied about North African arts other than architecture, because the puritanical world of the Berber dynasties did not foster the arts of luxury.
In North Africa the artistic milieu did not change much in the 14th and 15th centuries. Hypostyle mosques such as the Great Mosque of Algiers continued to be built. Madrasahs were constructed with more elaborate plans; the Bū ʿInānīyah madrasah at Fès is one of the few monumental buildings of the period. A few mausoleums were erected, such as the so-called Marīnid tombs near Fès (second half of the 14th century) or the complex of Chella at Rabat (mostly 14th century). Architectural decoration in stucco or sculpted stone was usually limited to elaborate geometric patterns, epigraphic themes, and a few vegetal motifs.
A stunning exception to the austerity of North African architecture exists in Spain in the Alhambra palace complex at Granada. The hill site of the Alhambra had been occupied by a citadel and possibly by a palace since the 11th century, but little of those earlier constructions has remained. In the 14th century two successive princes, Yūsuf I and Muḥammad V, transformed the hill into their official residence. Outside of a number of gates built like triumphal arches and several ruined forecourts, only three parts of the palace remain intact. First there is the long Court of the Myrtles, leading to the huge Hall of the Ambassadors, located in one of the exterior towers. This was the part of the Alhambra built by Yūsuf I. Then there is the Court of the Lions, with its celebrated lion fountain in the centre. Numerous rooms open off this court, including the elaborately decorated Hall of the Two Sisters and the Hall of the Abencerrajes. The third part, slightly earlier than the first two, is the Generalife; it is a summer residence built higher up the hill and surrounded by gardens with fountains, pavilions, and portico walks.
The Alhambra is especially important because it is one of the few palaces to have survived from medieval Islamic times. It illustrates superbly a number of architectural concerns occasionally documented in literary references: the contrast between an unassuming exterior and a richly decorated interior to achieve an effect of secluded or private brilliance; the constant presence of water, either as a single, static basin or as a dynamic fountain; the inclusion of oratories and baths; and the lack of an overall plan (the units are simply attached to each other).
The architectural decoration of the Alhambra was mostly of stucco. Some of it is flat, but the extraordinarily complex cupolas of muqarnas, as in the Hall of the Two Sisters, appear as huge multifaceted diadems. The decoration of the Alhambra becomes a sort of paradox as well as a tour de force. Weighty, elaborately decorated ceilings, for example, are supported by frail columns or by walls pierced with many windows (light permeates almost every part of the large, domed halls). Much of the design and decoration of the Alhambra is symbolically oriented. The poems that adorn the Alhambra as calligraphic ornamentation celebrate its cupolas as domes of heaven rotating around the prince sitting under them.
Islamic art as such ceased to be produced in Spain after 1492, when Granada, the last Moorish kingdom in Spain, fell to the Christians, but the Islamic tradition continued in North Africa, which remained Muslim. In Morocco the so-called Sharīfian dynasties from the 16th century onward ornamentally developed the artistic forms created in the 14th century.
Most of the best-known monuments of western Islamic art are buildings, although a very original calligraphy was developed. The other arts cannot be compared in wealth and importance either to what occurred elsewhere in Islam at the same time or to earlier objects created in Spain. There are some important examples of metalwork, wood inlaid with ivory, and a lustre-glaze pottery known as Hispano-Moresque ware. The fact that the latter was made in Valencia or Málaga after the termination of Muslim rule demonstrates that Islamic traditions in the decorative arts continued to be adhered to, if only partially. The term Mudéjar, therefore, is used to refer to all the things made in a Muslim style but under Christian rule. Numerous examples of Mudéjar art exist in ceramics and textiles, as well as in architectural monuments such as the synagogues of Toledo and the Alcazba in Sevilla (Seville), where even the name of the ruling Christian prince, Don Pedro, was written in Arabic letters. The Mudéjar spirit, in fact, permeated most of Spanish architectural ornament and decorative arts for centuries, and its influence can even be found in Spanish America.
Mudéjar art must be carefully distinguished from Mozarabic art, the art of Christians under Muslim rule. Mozarabic art primarily flourished in Spain during the earlier periods of Muslim rule. Its major manifestations are architectural decorations, decorative objects, and illuminated manuscripts. Dating mostly from the 10th and 11th centuries, the celebrated illuminations for the commentary on the Revelation to John by an 8th-century Spanish abbot, Beatus of Liébana, are purely Christian subjects treated in styles possibly influenced by Muslim miniature painting or book illustration. The most-celebrated example, known as the Saint-Sever Apocalypse, is in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
The Mamlūks were originally white male slaves, chiefly Turks and Circassians from the Caucasus and Central Asia, who formed the mercenary army of the various feudal states of Syria and Egypt. During the 13th century the importance of this military caste grew as the older feudal order weakened and military commanders took over power, generally as nonhereditary sultans. They succeeded in arresting the Mongol onslaught in 1260 and, through a judicious but complicated system of alliance with the urban elite class, managed to maintain themselves in power in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria until 1517.
During the Mamlūk period Egypt and Syria were rich commercial emporiums. This wealth explains the quality and quantity of Mamlūk art. Most of the existing monuments in the old quarters of Cairo, Damascus, Tripoli, and Aleppo are Mamlūk; in Jerusalem almost everything visible on the Ḥaram al-Sharīf, with the exception of the Dome of the Rock, is Mamlūk. Museum collections of Islamic art generally abound with Mamlūk metalwork and glass. Some of the oldest remaining carpets are Mamlūk. This creativity required, of course, more than wealth. It also required a certain will to transform wealth into art. This will was in part the desire of parvenu rulers and their cohorts to be remembered. Furthermore, architectural patronage flourished because of the institutionalization of the waqf, an economic system in which investments made for holy purposes were inalienable. This law allowed the wealthy to avoid confiscation of their properties at the whim of the caliph by investing their funds in religious institutions. In the Mamlūk period, therefore, there was a multiplication of madrasahs, khānqāhs, ribāṭs, and mosques, often with tombs of founders attached to them. The Mamlūk establishment also repaired and kept up all the institutions, religious or secular, that had been inherited by them, as can be demonstrated by the well-documented repairs carried on in Jerusalem and Damascus.
The Mamlūks created a monumental setting for Syria and Egypt that has lasted into the 21st century. It was at its most remarkable in architecture, and nearly 3,000 major monuments have been preserved or are known from texts in cities from the Euphrates to Cairo. No new architectural types came into being, although many more urban commercial buildings and private houses have been preserved than from previous centuries. The hypostyle form continued to be used for mosques and oratories, as in the Cairene mosques of Baybars I (1262–63), Nāṣir (1335), and Muʾayyad Shaykh (1415–20). Madrasahs used eyvāns, and the justly celebrated madrasah of Sultan Ḥasan in Cairo (1356–62) is one of the few perfect four-eyvān madrasahs in the Islamic world. Mausoleums were squares or polygons covered with domes. In other words, there were only minor modifications in the typology of architecture, and even the 15th-century buildings with interiors totally covered with ornamentation have possible prototypes in the architecture of the Seljuqs. Yet there are formal and functional features that do distinguish Mamlūk buildings. One is the tendency to build structures of different functions in a complex or cluster. Thus, the Qalāʾūn mosque (1284–85) in Cairo has a mausoleum, a madrasah, and a hospital erected as one architectural unit. Another characteristic is the tendency of Mamlūk patrons to build their major monuments near each other. As a result, certain streets of Cairo, such as Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, became galleries of architectural masterpieces. The plans of those buildings may have had to be adapted to the exigencies of the city, but their spectacular facades and minarets competed with each other for effect. From the second half of the 14th century onward, building space for mausoleums began to be limited in Cairo, and a vast complex of commemorative monuments was created in the city’s western cemetery. In Aleppo and Damascus similar phenomena can be observed.
Although Mamlūk architecture was essentially conservative in its development of building types, more originality is evident in the constructional systems used, although traditional structural features continued to be employed—e.g., cupolas raised on squinches, or more commonly, pendentives, barrel and groin vaults, and wooden ceilings covering large areas supported by columns and piers. The main innovations are of three kinds. First, minarets became particularly elaborate and, toward the end of the period, almost absurd in their ornamentation. Facades were huge, with overwhelming portals 25 to 35 feet (7.5 to 10.5 metres) high.
A second characteristically Mamlūk feature was technical virtuosity in stone construction. At times this led to a superb purity of form, as in the Gate of the Cotton Merchants in Jerusalem or the complex of the Barqūq mosque in Cairo. At other times, as in the Mamlūk architecture of Baybars and Qāʾit Bāy, there was an almost wild playfulness with forms. Another aspect of Mamlūk masonry was the alternation of stones of different colours to provide variations on the surfaces of buildings.
The third element of change in Mamlūk art was perhaps the most important: almost all formal artistic achievements rapidly became part of the common vocabulary of the whole culture, thus ensuring high quality of construction and decorative technique throughout the period.
With the exception of portals and qiblah walls, architectural decoration was usually subordinated to the architectural elements of the design. Generally, the material of construction (usually stone) was carved with ornamental motifs. Stucco decoration was primarily used in early Mamlūk architecture, while coloured tile was a late decorative device that was rarely employed.
Like architecture, the other arts of the Mamlūk period achieved a high level of technical perfection but were often lacking in originality. The so-called Baptistère de Saint Louis (c. 1310) is the most impressive example of inlaid metalwork preserved from this period. Several Mamlūk illustrated manuscripts, such as the Maqāmāt (1334) in the National Library, Vienna, display an amazing ornamental sense in the use of colour on gold backgrounds. Mamlūk mosque lamps provide some of the finest examples of medieval glass. The wooden objects made by Mamlūk craftsmen were widely celebrated for the quality of their painted, inlaid, or carved designs. And the bold inscriptions that decorate the hundreds of remaining bronzes testify to the Mamlūk mastery of calligraphy.
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0a9a433a17088818807d82216e424090 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-bath | Islāmic bath | Islāmic bath
Islāmic bath, Arabic Ḥammān, public bathing establishment developed in countries under Islāmic rule that reflects the fusion of a primitive Eastern bath tradition and the elaborate Roman bathing process. A typical bath house consists of a series of rooms, each varying in temperature according to the height and shape of the domed roof and to the room’s distance from the furnace. Each series of rooms is composed of a warm room, a hot room, and a steam room, corresponding roughly to the tepidarium, caldarium, and laconicum of the Roman thermae. In some bathhouses, the cold room, or frigidarium, is replaced by a basin of cold water at one end of the warm room. In addition to these vaulted chambers, there are dressing rooms and frequently a luxurious rest area, where refreshments are served after bath and massage. Separate facilities for men and women are provided.
Some Islāmic baths are opulently decorated with mosaics, fountains, and pools. Excellent examples can be seen in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (1358); the Citadel at Aleppo, Syria (1367); and the Haseki Hürrem Ḥammān in Istanbul (1556).
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45f9dde666077e53f11d1b352903e30a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-fundamentalism | Islamic fundamentalism | Islamic fundamentalism
Because the term fundamentalism is Christian in origin, because it carries negative connotations, and because its use in an Islamic context emphasizes the religious roots of the phenomenon while neglecting the nationalistic and social grievances that underlie it, many scholars prefer to call…
Islamic fundamentalism has been increasing in strength since the late 1970s in reaction to this. Muslim extremist groups periodically have clashed with both left-wing students and emancipated women’s groups, while fundamentalist imams (prayer leaders) have gained influence in many of the country’s major mosques.
” After the Persian Gulf War, Saudi Arabia’s Islamist opposition grew more influential. It was not made up of extremists like Juhaymān. Instead, highly educated academics and Islamic preachers from the lower ranks of the establishment ʿulamāʾ formed its core. It was a loose…
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18246fd33704b5e4b14d7a7166018808 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-Group | Islamic Group | Islamic Group
…EIJ was largely overshadowed by al-Jamāʿah al-Islāmiyyah, which waged a far-bloodier campaign inside Egypt, killing numerous officials, civilians, and foreign tourists.
…however, including EIJ and the Islamic Group, continued to resort to terrorism against political leaders, secularist writers, Copts, and even foreign tourists, the last-named being a major source of Egypt’s foreign exchange.
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dba63438b628a5d81c027e71251f9258 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-National-Front | Islamic National Front | Islamic National Front
…of the party, renamed the Islamic National Front (NIF). Turābī methodically charted the Brotherhood and the NIF on a course of action designed to seize control of the Sudanese government despite the Muslim fundamentalists’ lack of popularity with the majority of the Sudanese people. Tightly disciplined, superbly organized, and inspired…
…was a vehicle for the National Islamic Front (NIF), an Islamist political party with a fundamentalist agenda. Bashir and his colleagues ruthlessly imprisoned hundreds of political opponents and vigorously continued the war in the south, limited in their efforts only by the constraints of the deteriorating national economy. The army…
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8b0c15b6409aef32e572ef42fb9f71d7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ismailite | Ismāʿīliyyah | Ismāʿīliyyah
Ismāʿīliyyah, sect of Shiʿah Islam that was most active as a religiopolitical movement in the 9th–13th century through its constituent movements—the Fāṭimids, the Qarāmiṭah (Qarmatians), and the Nīzarīs. In the early 21st century it was the second largest of the three Shiʿah communities in Islam, after the Twelver Shiʿah and before the Zaydi Shiʿah (Zaydis).
The Ismāʿīliyyah came into being after the death in 765 ce of Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad, the sixth imam in the line of the Prophet Muhammad via the latter’s grandson al-Ḥusayn (died 680). Some believed that Imam Jaʿfar’s eldest son, Ismāʿīl, who predeceased his father, was the final imam and that he was in occultation (Arabic: ghaybah)—that is, he was alive, with a material body, but was not immediately recognizable and would one day reveal himself and thus return to the world. Others believed that the imamate had passed to Ismāʿīl’s son Muḥammad. In 899 in North Africa ʿAbd Allāh (or ʿUbayd Allāh), a descendant of Muhammad linked to the Prophet’s daughter Fāṭimah, proclaimed the Ismāʿīlī imamate in Syria. He later moved to North Africa, from which base the later Fāṭimids conquered Egypt in 969 and founded Cairo. The Fāṭimid dynasty ruled Egypt until 1171 and established a network of missionaries across the Muslim world, especially in Iraq and across the Iranian plateau. These missionaries were at their most active during the reign of the eighth Fāṭimid caliph, al-Mustanṣir (reigned 1036–94).
After the death of al-Mustanṣir, the Fāṭimid Ismāʿīlīs split into two groups, based on different understandings of the succession. The Mustaʿlīs, comprising most Egyptian, Yemeni, and Indian Ismāʿīlīs, accepted the claims of the caliph’s younger son of the same name and his successors. The Nizārīs, based in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, accepted as imam al-Mustanṣir’s elder brother, Nizār, the caliph’s official heir. Led by Ḥasan-e Ṣabbāḥ, the Nizārīs later became famous in the West as the Assassins. Their mountain fortress Alamut, in the Elburz Mountains about 37 miles (60 km) northeast of the modern Iranian city of Qazvīn, was destroyed by the invading Mongols in 1256. The Nizāris then scattered throughout the region. In 1838 Ḥasan ʿAlī Shāh, the first Aga Khan (a title bestowed by the Iranian Qājār dynasty) led a revolt against the shah of Iran but was defeated. Fleeing to India, he eventually (1844) settled in Bombay (now Mumbai). In the early 21st century Ismāʿīlī communities existed in Pakistan and India, central Asia, the Middle East and eastern Africa, and Europe and North America. The community numbered between 5 and 15 million.
Classic Ismāʿīlī theology, developed from the 8th century, understood that there was both an external (ẓāhir) exoteric dimension and a further hidden (bāṭin) esoteric dimension to scripture. The Prophet Muhammad revealed the former. The imam’s missionaries were the network by which the imam, through graded levels or stages of understanding, instructed the ordinary believer in the hidden truth.
Those Ismāʿīlīs who did not accept Fāṭimid claims to the imamate also included the Qarāmiṭah, who were active in Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, and Iran from the 9th to the 11th century. The two groups clashed after the Fāṭimid conquest of Egypt.
The Druze, who live mostly in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, are also Ismāʿīlī in origin.
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73e7e3c2b72ebed01a1466347b771760 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Isnt-It-Romantic | Isn’t It Romantic | Isn’t It Romantic
…revised and expanded, 1977) and Isn’t It Romantic (1981), which explore women’s attitudes toward marriage and society’s expectations of women. In The Heidi Chronicles a successful art historian discovers that her independent life choices have alienated her from men as well as women. The Sisters Rosensweig (1992) continues the theme…
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f107a6bfa3e3fea5e8af2030f9dc726b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Isnt-Life-Wonderful | Isn’t Life Wonderful? | Isn’t Life Wonderful?
…feature was the independent semidocumentary Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1925), which was shot on location in Germany and is thought to have influenced both the “street” films of the German director G.W. Pabst and the post-World War II Italian Neorealist movement.
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ea5f481b7bebb5599d3e5a47ebc709fd | https://www.britannica.com/topic/isolating-language | Isolating language | Isolating language
Isolating language, a language in which each word form consists typically of a single morpheme. Examples are Classical Chinese (to a far greater extent than the modern Chinese languages) and Vietnamese. An isolating language tends also to be an analytic language (q.v.), so that the terms isolating and analytic are often used interchangeably in linguistics.
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7f7440587ffdf9e37c746314b785244d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Israel-Why | Israel, Why | Israel, Why
Lanzmann’s first film, Israel, Why—a collection of in-depth interviews that offer a glimpse of the state 25 years after its establishment—was released in 1973. That film was the stepping-stone to Shoah, his most-acclaimed work. After Israel, Why was released, the Foreign Ministry in Israel asked him to create…
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68e1ec25618b6a25c34a39cd2fb44836 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/It-Catches-My-Heart-in-Its-Hands | It Catches My Heart in Its Hands | It Catches My Heart in Its Hands
…1963, the year he published It Catches My Heart in Its Hands—a collection of poetry about alcoholics, prostitutes, losing gamblers, and down-and-out people—Bukowski had a loyal following. Notable later poetry collections include Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972), Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977), War All the Time (1984), and…
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6f0d07f096d1c3e39393b822072c07f8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/It-Happened-One-Night-film-by-Capra | It Happened One Night | It Happened One Night
Capra’s “golden period” began with It Happened One Night (1934), the first motion picture to win an Academy Award in five major categories: best picture, best actor, best actress, best director, and best adapted screenplay. The making of this enduring romantic comedy about a runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert) and the…
… (Lady for a Day, 1933; It Happened One Night, 1934; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), Hawks (Twentieth Century, 1934; Bringing Up Baby, 1938), Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, 1936), Mitchell Leisen (Easy Living, 1937), and Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937).
…whose cheerful screwball comedies (It Happened One Night, 1934) and populist fantasies of good will (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) sometimes gave way to darker warnings against losing faith and integrity (It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946). Other significant directors with less-consistent thematic or visual styles were William Wyler…
…1934 Capra made the hit It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert; it won the Academy Award for best picture of 1934. Capra’s other comedies for Columbia include Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). During this same period, Howard Hawks…
…and Capra’s classic screwball comedy It Happened One Night, in which she played opposite Clark Gable. Colbert had been initially reluctant to appear in the slight comedy, but her sparkling performance as a runaway heiress became her most famous and won her an Academy Award. All three films were nominated…
…row”—for the Frank Capra comedy It Happened One Night (1934). The punishment turned out to be a coup for Gable, as the film—the story of a spoiled runaway heiress (portrayed by Claudette Colbert) and the newspaper reporter (Gable) who tries to exploit her story—swept the Academy Awards in all five…
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36165098e27e2c207b7f649affc2478d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Italian-Campaign | Italian Campaign | Italian Campaign
From Sicily, the Allies had a wide choice of directions for their next offensive. Calabria, the “toe” of Italy, was the nearest and most obvious possible destination, and the “shin” was also vulnerable; and the “heel” was also very attractive. The two…
The Allies’ northward advance up the Italian peninsula to Rome was still blocked by Kesselring’s Gustav Line, which was hinged on Monte Cassino. To bypass that line, the Allies landed some 50,000 seaborne troops, with 5,000 vehicles, at
On the Italian front, the Allied armies had long been frustrated by the depletion of their forces for the sake of other enterprises; but early in 1945 four German divisions were transferred from Kesselring’s command to the Western Front, and in April the thin German defenses in…
…forces (1943–44) during the successful Italian campaign against the Axis powers.
…was limited because the northern Italian factories were subject to heavy Allied bombing, especially in 1942–43. Heavy attacks destroyed the iron ore production capacities on Elba, off the Tuscan coast, and damaged several industrial zones, particularly in northern Italian cities such as Genoa, La Spezia, Turin, and Milan. Naples and…
…of heavy fighting late in World War II. On January 22, 1944, the Allies achieved what probably was their most complete tactical surprise of the war by landing in excess of 36,000 troops and 3,000 vehicles before midnight, securing a beachhead only 37 miles (60 km) from Rome. However, the…
…event in the history of Italian architecture. In 1349 the buildings suffered from a severe earthquake, and the church and monastery were almost entirely rebuilt in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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470e3935c3b7999d5a3e9f66015fd637 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Italian-language | Italian language | Italian language
Italian language, Italian Italiano, Romance language spoken by some 66,000,000 persons, the vast majority of whom live in Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia). It is the official language of Italy, San Marino, and (together with Latin) Vatican City. Italian is also (with German, French, and Romansh) an official language of Switzerland, where it is spoken in Ticino and Graubünden (Grisons) cantons by some 666,000 individuals. Italian is also used as a common language in France (the Alps and Côte d’Azur) and in small communities in Croatia and Slovenia. On the island of Corsica a Tuscan variety of Italian is spoken, though Italian is not the language of culture. Overseas (e.g., in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina) speakers sometimes do not know the standard language and use only dialect forms. Increasingly, they only rarely know the language of their parents or grandparents. Standard Italian was once widely used in Somalia and Malta, but no longer. In Libya too its use has died out.
Although Italian has a standard literary form, based on the dialect of Florence, the common speech is dialectal or a local variant of Standard Italian. The following dialect groups are distinguished: Northern Italian, or Gallo-Italian; Venetan, spoken in northeastern Italy; Tuscan (including Corsican); and three related groups from southern and eastern Italy—(1) the dialects of the Marche, Umbria, and Rome, (2) those of Abruzzi, Puglia (Apulia), Naples, Campania, and Lucania, and (3) those of Calabria, Otranto, and Sicily.
The sound system of Italian is quite similar to that of Latin or Spanish. Its grammar is also similar to that of the other modern Romance languages, showing agreement of adjectives and nouns, the use of definite and indefinite articles, loss of noun declension for case, two genders (masculine and feminine), and an elaborate system of perfect and progressive tenses for the verb. The most notable difference between Italian and French or Spanish is that it does not use -s or -es to form the plural of nouns but instead uses -e for most feminine words and -i for masculine words (and some feminine words).
Outside Italy, Italian dialects are heavily influenced by contact with other languages (English in New York; Spanish in Buenos Aires). Judeo-Italian (Italkian) is nearly extinct; an entire colony of 6,000 Corfu Jews, who used a Venetan dialect as a home language, was exterminated during World War II.
Early texts from Italy are written in dialects of the language that only later became standard Italian. Possibly the very first text is a riddle from Verona, dating from perhaps the 8th century, but its language is Latinized. More surely Italian are some 10th-century documents from Montecassino (testimonies in court—e.g., Placiti [decrees] of Capua, of Sessa, and so on), after which there are three central Italian texts of the 11th century. The first literary work of any length is the Tuscan Ritmo Laurenziano (“Laurentian Rhythm”) from the end of the 12th century, which was followed soon by other compositions from the Marches and Montecassino. In the 13th century lyric poetry was first written in a conventionalized Sicilian dialect that influenced later developments in Tuscany.
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a4d91f86cb89f9f506d5f454807575f8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Italian-Mannerism | Italian Mannerism | Italian Mannerism
The first reaction against Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto occurred in Florence between 1515 and 1524, during which time the painters Giovanni Battista (called Rosso Fiorentino) and Jacopo Carrucci Pontormo
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81ada7c71b531172d1e49ac8a09dbfe0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Italian-people | Italian | Italian
Italians cannot be typified by any one physical characteristic, a fact that may be explained by the past domination of parts of the peninsula by different peoples. The Etruscans in Tuscany and Umbria and the Greeks in the south preceded the Romans, who “Latinized” the…
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f2ed047afbcf6a954554f4c2350ae792 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Italian-Symphony | Italian Symphony | Italian Symphony
Italian Symphony, byname of Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90, orchestral work by German composer Felix Mendelssohn, so named because it was intended to evoke the sights and sounds of Italy. Its final movement, which is among the most strongly dramatic music the composer ever wrote, even uses the rhythms of Neapolitan dances. The symphony premiered in London on March 13, 1833.
In 1830–31 Mendelssohn, barely into his twenties, toured Italy. He had gone south from Germany to enjoy the climate and the art, both of which he apparently found satisfactory. The region’s music, however, was a different story, as Mendelssohn vented in letters to friends and relatives: “I have not heard a single note worth remembering.” The orchestras in Rome, he reported, were “unbelievably bad,” and “[i]n Naples, the music is most inferior.” Despite these negative reactions, or perhaps in hopes of erasing them, Mendelssohn began his Italian Symphony while still on tour. The piece was completed in the fall of 1832, on a commission from the Philharmonic Society of London, and the composer himself conducted its premiere. The work was a tremendous success, and Mendelssohn described it as “the jolliest piece I have so far written…and the most mature thing I have ever done.”
Despite the audible delights of the piece, the Italian Symphony was not easy in the making. Even its creator admitted that it had brought him “some of the bitterest moments” that he had ever experienced. Most of those trying times seem to have been spent with an editor’s pen in hand, looking for ways to make the piece better. In 1834, over a year after the work’s public premiere, Mendelssohn began extensive revisions on the second, third, and fourth movements. The following year he reworked the first movement, and he was sufficiently satisfied with the result to allow another London performance in 1838. Yet Mendelssohn still withheld the composition from publication and refused to permit its performance in Germany. He continued tinkering with it until he died in 1847. Four years after Mendelssohn’s death, Czech pianist Ignaz Moscheles, who had been one of Mendelssohn’s teachers and had conducted the 1838 London performance, edited an “official” edition that finally appeared in print.
Musicologists have offered many interpretations of the Italian Symphony. For example, the extroverted opening movement might call to mind a lively urban scene, perhaps of Venice. The reverent second movement likely represents Rome during Holy Week, for Mendelssohn’s letters reveal that he was impressed by the religious processions he witnessed. The third movement, a graceful minuet distantly reminiscent of Mozart, is suggestive of an elegant Florentine Renaissance palace. Neither these nor any other interpretations of the first three movements are definitive, however.
By contrast, the fourth, and final, movement needs no speculation. It depicts without a doubt a rural scene in southern Italy, for it blends two lively folk dance styles: the saltarello and the tarantella. The dances, different in rhythmic structure, are alike in general character. Both are wild and swirling, abundantly energetic (bordering on frenetic), and unquestionably Italian. In the symphony’s uninhibited finale, Mendelssohn, so deeply displeased with Italian concert music, showed his favourable reaction to the country’s folk music. He also demonstrated that Italian regional music styles could be used to great effect in an orchestral composition.
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df355131eaaf0220151dabbe80b99cb2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/ITAR-TASS | ITAR-TASS | ITAR-TASS
ITAR-TASS, abbreviation ofInformatsionnye Telegrafnoye Agentstvto Rossii–Telegrafnoe Agentstvo Sovetskovo Soyuza, (Russian: “Information Telegraph Agency of Russia–Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union”), Russian news agency formed in 1992 after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. ITAR reports on domestic news, while TASS reports on world events, including news from the other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Russia’s first news agency, the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency, was formed under the direction of Emperor Nikolai II in 1904. It was renamed the Petrograd Telegraph Agency in 1914. From 1918 to 1925 it served as the first revolutionary news agency and was known as the Russian Telegraph Agency, or ROSTA. Renamed TASS in 1925, the organization was the official news agency of the Soviet Union until 1991. It also was one of the world’s major international wire services, distributing news throughout the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. Until the breakup of the Soviet Union, TASS was responsible to the Council of Ministers. Its extensive national news networks were the main source of news for all Soviet newspapers and radio and television stations. It had news bureaus and correspondents in more than 100 countries, and its international clients included the wire services of most developed Western nations as well as eastern European and developing countries. Around the world, news was transmitted in Russian, English, French, German, Spanish, and Arabic. TASS dispatched on matters of public policy, and its coverage of international affairs reflected the official position of the state.
After it was renamed ITAR-TASS in 1992, the agency continued to operate more than 130 news bureaus or offices in Russia and around the world. The agency also maintains an electronic data bank, INFO-TASS, which processes current and historical material on Russia and CIS member states.
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630e418fb3a1d9afac0d68fa9808e398 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Its-a-Mad-Mad-Mad-Mad-World | It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World | It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, American screwball comedy film, released in 1963, that featured an all-star cast of comedic actors directed by Stanley Kramer, who was known primarily for his dramas dealing with controversial topics.
The dying words of a career thief (played by Jimmy Durante) to a group of disparate strangers set off a madcap race to find his loot, which is supposedly hidden under a “big W” somewhere in a California park. Ethel Merman, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, and Peter Falk are among those who portrayed the treasure hunters. Spencer Tracy was cast as a police detective.
The film features a number of memorable comic moments, including the one-man demolition of a gas station by Jonathan Winters. There are also cameo appearances by the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, and Buster Keaton. The film was cut substantially from its original roadshow release. Although a good deal of footage was later restored, it is not complete.
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448f63d363af55525c2eed85c40be0c1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Its-Impossible-to-Learn-to-Plow-by-Reading-Books | It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books | It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books
…of his first feature film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988). His second film, Slacker (1991), is a narrative-free piece that meanders across mostly unconnected vignettes featuring Austin bohemians over the course of a single day. It was a film-festival hit and helped launch the American…
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73c88832b425640894fd235a2f6b8bb1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/ITT-Corporation | ITT Corporation | ITT Corporation
ITT Corporation, also called (until 1983) International Telephone And Telegraph Corporation, , former American telecommunications company that grew into a successful conglomerate corporation before its breakup in 1995.
ITT was founded in 1920 by Sosthenes Behn and his brother Hernand Behn as a holding company for their Caribbean-based telephone and telegraph companies; it received its name in imitation of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Throughout the 1920s ITT expanded into the still-undeveloped European telephone market, obtaining the concession for telephone service in Spain in 1924. In 1925 the company purchased AT&T’s large foreign manufacturing subsidiary, International Western Electric, and renamed it ITT Standard Electric Corporation; this move made ITT a major telecommunications manufacturer in 11 countries.
Sosthenes Behn was succeeded by Harold Sydney Geneen, who ran the company from 1959 to 1978. Under Geneen, ITT became an aggressive conglomerate and underwent a second period of rapid expansion, acquiring 275 other companies and increasing its annual sales nearly 20-fold. Among its purchases were the Sheraton Corporation, one of the largest American hotel chains, in 1968, and one of the nation’s leading insurance firms, the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, in 1970.
Under the leadership of Rand Araskog from 1980, however, ITT sold off many of the companies it had acquired earlier under Geneen, including its Continental Baking subsidiary. In 1987 it divested its telecommunications businesses by forming a joint venture, Alcatel N.V., with France’s Cie. Générale d’Electricité, which held a controlling interest in the venture. In 1995 it sold its financial-service businesses and acquired Madison Square Garden in New York City and Caesars World, Inc., a large casino operator. Later that year ITT split itself into three separate companies: ITT Hartford Group Inc., consisting of insurance companies; ITT Industries Inc., defense-electronics and automotive-parts companies; and a ‘new’ ITT Corporation consisting of the Sheraton Hotel chain, Caesars World, and Madison Square Garden. In 1998 this new ITT Corporation was acquired by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.
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88752ce38530b4064b147569424a2b9c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Itza | Itzá | Itzá
…invasion of Yucatán by the Itzá, a tribe that showed strong Toltec features. Quetzalcóatl’s calendar name was Ce Acatl (One Reed). The belief that he would return from the east in a One Reed year led the Aztec sovereign Montezuma II to regard the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and his…
…chi (“mouths”), chen (“wells”), and Itzá, the name of the Maya tribe that settled there. Chichén Itzá was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988.
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1ac3537b0711b5ecaf903c88481ec67b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/iuno | Iuno | Iuno
…the Roman housefather and the iuno, or juno, of the housemother were worshiped. These certainly were not the souls of the married pair, as is clear both from their names and from the fact that in no early document is there mention of the genius or iuno of a dead…
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ec511b777ac6e4ba6a8bef0e252c360c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ivanhoe-film-by-Thorpe | Ivanhoe | Ivanhoe
In Ivanhoe (1952) her character and Elizabeth Taylor’s compete for the affections of the titular Saxon knight. Fontaine appeared as the elder sister of a mental patient in the 1962 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and as a terrorized schoolteacher in the…
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dc687f7b494b6588e70f4dd2839f43f0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ixion-Greek-mythology | Ixion | Ixion
Ixion, in Greek legend, son either of the god Ares or of Phlegyas, king of the Lapiths in Thessaly. He murdered his father-in-law and could find no one to purify him until Zeus did so and admitted him as a guest to Olympus. Ixion abused his pardon by trying to seduce Zeus’s wife, Hera. Zeus substituted for her a cloud, by which Ixion became the father of Centaurus, who fathered the Centaurs by the mares of Mount Pelion. Zeus, to punish him, bound him on a fiery wheel, which rolled unceasingly through the air or, according to the more common tradition, in the underworld.
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7bea94d75964e816bda57d9355795f05 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/J-Edgar-Hoover-on-the-FBI-1984379 | J. Edgar Hoover on the FBI | J. Edgar Hoover on the FBI
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 to 1972, is remembered for transforming the “Bureau” into a professional and effective investigative police force but also for using its power against those seen as political subversives. In an article on the FBI first published in 1956 in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Hoover chronicled its different achievements under his leadership, from its pursuit of John Dillinger and other famous American gangsters to its efforts to prevent the infiltration of the federal government by “persons whose loyalty was subject to question,” notably suspected communists. For the 1961 version of the article, reproduced in full below, Hoover updated the statistics in his account of the FBI’s accomplishments. He was also the author of the article on fingerprints in the 14th edition, proof of his personal investment in leveraging science and technology in the service of policing.
Established in 1908 as the investigative arm of the U.S. department of justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a fact-finding agency which does not evaluate the results of its investigations or recommend prosecutive action. In general, it is responsible for the enforcement of all federal criminal statutes except those specifically delegated to other federal agencies. In 1958 there were approximately 140 federal matters over which it had investigative jurisdiction. The two primary areas of FBI activity are general investigations and security operations. Within the latter field, it has jurisdiction over espionage, sabotage and subversive activities on a nation-wide scale.
In addition to investigating violations of laws of the United States, the FBI is charged with collecting evidence in cases in which the United States is or may be a party in interest and with other duties imposed by law. It reports the results of its investigation to the attorney general, chief legal officer of the United States, his assistants and the various U.S. attorneys in federal districts throughout the United States for decisions as to prosecutive action. The FBI is also a service agency which assists law enforcement agencies in identification, technical and training matters.
Originally known as the Bureau of Investigation, the FBI was created by the then attorney general Charles J. Bonaparte on July 26, 1908. The internationally known name, Federal Bureau of Investigation, was adopted on July 1, 1935.
In 1924 John Edgar Hoover was appointed director of the bureau by Harlan Fiske Stone, then attorney general, and he was reappointed by each succeeding head of the department of justice. Hoover inaugurated the policies which constitute the foundation of the present organization. Political considerations were divorced from personnel appointments, and promotions were placed on a merit basis.
Less than a decade after this reorganization, the FBI was faced with enlarged responsibilities. A wave of lawlessness in the early 1930s aroused considerable public concern. Local police officers, often inadequately trained and hampered by the restrictions imposed by state boundaries, were unable to cope effectively with the modern weapons and transportation available to organized criminal gangs. To meet this situation, congress passed a number of laws which extended the jurisdiction of the FBI. In 1932 the federal kidnapping statute was enacted, making unlawful the interstate transportation of a kidnapped person. All kidnapping cases referred to the FBI the following year were solved. The federal Bank Robbery act was passed in 1934 to stem the rising tide of bank robberies. Again in 1934, special agents of the FBI were authorized by congress to carry firearms and to make arrests. With the passage of these and other crime bills, the FBI was given authority to act against the criminal gangs which previously had met little effective opposition. In 1934 alone, three vicious fugitives who had gained national notoriety were killed. John Dillinger, Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd and Lester Gillis, alias “Baby Face” Nelson, met death while resisting arrest. In 1935 Russell Gibson and Kate and Fred Barker fell before the guns of special agents. The arrest of Alvin Karpis by Hoover in 1936 marked the end of the powerful Barker-Karpis gang, while Alfred James Brady and an accomplice were killed in a gun battle with FBI agents in 1937. Numerous other kidnappers, bank robbers and lesser criminals were sent to federal penitentiaries during this period.
The war on crime was not halted but was overshadowed as the international developments leading to World War II placed additional responsibilities on the FBI. During this period, federal statutes relating to subversive activities were the basis for counteraction by the bureau against intelligence operations of foreign powers. Several espionage agents were arrested before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. On Sept. 6, 1939, a presidential directive was issued providing that the FBI should take charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage, sabotage, subversive activities and related matters. The president also called upon all enforcement officers, both federal and state, to report all information in these fields promptly to the FBI, which was charged with the responsibility of correlating this material and referring matters under the jurisdiction of any other federal agency with responsibilities in this field to the appropriate agency. The FBI’s responsibility in these matters was reiterated by presidential directives of Jan. 8, 1943, and July 24, 1950. By agreement, the armed forces handle investigations concerning their uniformed personnel. This action by the president obviated the confusion experienced in World War I when more than 20 agencies investigated security in the United States.
The scientific techniques which had been developed by the FBI in its war against organized gangsterism were employed to thwart the spy and the saboteur. In June 1941 the FBI climaxed its investigation of a Nazi espionage ring in New York city with the arrest of 33 persons. All pleaded guilty or were convicted in federal court.
An effective pan-American intelligence force was created under the bureau’s leadership to oppose the activities of Axis spy and sabotage rings in the western hemisphere. From July 1, 1940, through June 30, 1946, more than 15,000 Axis operators and sympathizers in South America were expelled, interned or rendered harmless. More than 460 spies, saboteurs and propaganda agents were apprehended, and 30 secret radio transmitters were eliminated.
In 1939 the FBI undertook a program of surveying industrial plants engaged in the manufacture of strategic war material. Before it had concluded its responsibility in this program, more than 2,300 plants had been surveyed and recommendations made for their protection. In the period preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor new field offices were opened in the continental United States and its territorial possessions. Additional personnel was trained by the FBI to investigate the flood of complaints regarding suspicious activities which citizens were encouraged to report, and its rolls of clerical and investigative employees reached an allotted peak of 14,300.
A mass of intelligence information had been accumulated by Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor. By the following day, 1,771 potentially dangerous enemy aliens had been arrested and detained. As formal declarations of war were made, German and Italian aliens, known or suspected to be dangerous, were arrested. In all, more than 16,000 such apprehensions were made by the FBI with the assistance of local law enforcement authorities in an orderly manner and in marked contrast with the disorganized vigilante activities of World War I. Precautions against espionage and sabotage were increased.
In 1942 eight saboteurs, landed by submarine from Germany, were quickly taken into custody. German plans to send such groups to the United States every six weeks were thwarted. Two additional saboteurs were dispatched by Germany in 1944 and were quickly apprehended. The normal channels for enemy agents to enter the country were closed, and spies were then sent to the United States as refugees. Spies intercepted by the FBI often became double agents, identifying other espionage agents and transmitting misleading information to their principals.
After the war the nation found itself confronted with a crime wave of serious proportions. In 1945 major crimes increased 12.3% over 1944. Crime in 1946 continued its upward trend, increasing 7.6% over 1945. The war-born scarcity of consumer goods created a lucrative market for stolen merchandise and contributed to the reactivation of old criminal gangs. The finely geared machinery of the FBI was able to face this condition without pause.
During the postwar period there was increased public concern in matters relating to Communism and the infiltration of government and essential industry by persons whose loyalty was subject to question. On Aug. 1, 1946, congress passed the Atomic Energy act, charging the FBI with the responsibility of determining the character, associations and loyalty of employees of the Atomic Energy commission and of all persons having access to restricted atomic energy data. Following the issuance by the president on March 21, 1947, of executive order 9835, the FBI was given the duty of investigations concerning the loyalty of employees and applicants for positions in the executive branch of the federal government. The result was to increase greatly the investigative work of the FBI.
On April 5, 1952, congress transferred responsibility for the bulk of applicant-type investigations to the United States civil service commission, and provided that the FBI should handle those cases where information indicated questionable loyalty or where the position involved was sensitive and important.
On July 20, 1948, 12 leaders of the Communist party were indicted under the Smith act as members of a conspiracy teaching and advocating the overthrow of the constitutional form of government of the United States by force and violence. Following the trial and conviction of 11 of these leaders, the FBI arrested other Communist officials. Other investigations by the FBI in the security field developed evidence of plots to transmit government secrets and information relating to atomic energy and other secret projects to foreign nations. It scrutinized even more closely organizations which advocated policies not in keeping with the United States’ constitutional form of government.
The effectiveness of FBI operations is indicated by the statistics reflecting its accomplishments through the years. In the five-year period which ended June 30, 1952, 34,629 fugitives had been located in cases investigated by the FBI. Fines, savings and recoveries in bureau cases totalled more than $227,400,000, and there were 44,746 convictions in cases which were presented in court during that five-year period.
The close of the 1952 fiscal year brought to 438 the number of cases investigated by the FBI under the federal kidnapping statute. Of these, 436 were solved. In the 1952 fiscal year alone there were 156 convictions in bank robbery cases investigated by the FBI. These convictions resulted in sentences totaling 1,533 years and fines and recoveries amounting to $253,369.
Six years later, during the 1958 fiscal year, convictions in cases investigated by the FBI rose to 11,457, resulting in sentences totaling more than 30,000 years and fines totaling more than $1,666,000. Also more than 9,000 fugitives were apprehended and recoveries resulting from FBI investigations totaled more than $130,000,000, including 16,500 stolen automobiles. Not shown in statistical data, however, are the accomplishments of the FBI in the area of security and counterespionage investigations.
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3dd3d7e252d79fb62901f51f2f46c087 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/J-Edgar-Hoover-on-the-FBI-1984379/Co-operative-Services | Co-operative Services | Co-operative Services
On Nov. 24, 1932, the FBI laboratory was established to provide scientific crime detection facilities to authorized law enforcement agencies. Services of the FBI laboratory are available cost-free to state and municipal law enforcement agencies, as well as to other government agencies. Its technical equipment ranges from simple laboratory instruments to complicated spectrographs and huge copying cameras. Its technicians, who represent many fields of chemistry, physics and engineering, include experts in firearms identification, serology, spectrography, metallurgy, explosives, hair and fibre analyses and handwriting identification. During the fiscal year which ended June 30, 1958, the laboratory completed 165,462 scientific examinations of 137,142 specimens of evidence. Examinations in the laboratory clear the innocent as well as convict the guilty. Laboratory experts are available to testify without charge in state courts concerning the results of their examinations.
A national fingerprint file was established on July 1, 1924, when the FBI was given custody of 810,188 fingerprint cards previously maintained by the U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kan., and by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Approximately 20,000 fingerprint cards are received each working day for processing at the Identification division. By July 1958 the FBI had more than 149,000,000 fingerprint cards in its continuously increasing identification files. In addition to fingerprints submitted on criminal charges, these included fingerprints of military personnel, government employees, aliens, prisoners of war and private citizens who voluntarily submitted their fingerprints for protection against loss of identity in the event of amnesia or disfiguring fatal accidents.
In 1935 the FBI National academy was established to train selected members of law enforcement agencies as police executives and instructors for their local departments. The 12-week training course is conducted at Washington, D.C., and at the FBI academy on the U.S. marine base in Quantico, Va., by members of the FBI training staff and recognized outside experts. No tuition or fees are charged. The two sessions of the National academy, completed during the 1958 fiscal year, raised the total of graduates to more than 3,500. Among these graduates were police officers and officials from every state as well as several other countries and U.S. territorial possessions. The benefits of their training had been transmitted to thousands of their fellow police officers. Approximately 25% of these graduates were the heads of their law enforcement agencies.
At the request of local authorities, the FBI co-operates in police training schools, affording training in such matters as firearms, fingerprint classification, traffic control, defensive tactics and other courses of value to law enforcement. In its annual conferences with state and local law enforcement agencies, the FBI provides a medium for the discussion of common problems related to law enforcement in the various local areas. Such publications as the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin and the Uniform Crime Reports bulletin further aid in keeping law enforcement officers abreast of developments in crime detection and trends in crime. Published monthly, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin provides a medium for exchange of ideas between law enforcement agencies. The Uniform Crime Reports bulletin is a statistical analysis of local crime on an annual and semiannual basis. Tabulations on offenses committed are submitted to the FBI monthly and annually by more than 5,500 law enforcement agencies throughout the United States.
Headquarters of the FBI are maintained in Washington, D.C., where all administrative and investigative functions are co-ordinated. Serving under the director are an associate director, two assistants to the director and several assistant directors who control such activities as the domestic intelligence, investigative, training and inspection, records and communications, administrative and identification divisions and the FBI laboratory. In 1958 there were 53 field offices of the FBI in key cities of the United States and its territories. Each field office was headed by a special agent in charge who was responsible to the director for the supervision of the bureau’s activities in his field division. Under his direction were varying numbers of special agents, assigned according to the needs of the service.
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f6299388991acc427eb1ebdb8f6fc2b6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jack-Maggs | Jack Maggs | Jack Maggs
…Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Jack Maggs (1997), and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000; film 2019), a fictional account of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. My Life as a Fake (2003) and Theft (2006) explore issues of authenticity in literature and art. His Illegal Self (2008)
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bc8bac04b54a523296ab4b20af82781c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jacksonian-Democracy | Jacksonian Democracy | Jacksonian Democracy
Nevertheless, American politics became increasingly democratic during the 1820s and ’30s. Local and state offices that had earlier been appointive became elective. Suffrage was expanded as property and other restrictions on voting were reduced or abandoned in most states.…
The election of 1828 is commonly regarded as a turning point in the political history of the United States. Jackson was the first president from the area west of the Appalachians, but it was equally significant that the initiative in launching his candidacy…
…political movement later called “Jacksonian Democracy” to denote the change from gentry control of American politics to broader popular participation. As president, Jackson enlarged the power and scope of the office with the innovative use of the veto power. He earned plaudits for quashing a serious sectional threat to…
…that in 1829 triumphed in Andrew Jackson’s inauguration as president. In part it was because, in this Romantic period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many literatures, they put much of America into their books.
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fd69a3b8f171773d9a9fbef24dfb54da | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jacksons-Dilemma | Jackson’s Dilemma | Jackson’s Dilemma
Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was not well received; some critics attributed the novel’s flaws to the Alzheimer’s disease with which she had been diagnosed in 1994. Murdoch’s husband, the novelist John Bayley, chronicled her struggle with the disease in his memoir, Elegy for Iris (1999; adapted…
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70e65cd6fb46e9e53bd220477eb1d5f5 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/jade-gemstone | Jade | Jade
Jade, either of two tough, compact, typically green gemstones that take a high polish. Both minerals have been carved into jewelry, ornaments, small sculptures, and utilitarian objects from earliest recorded times. The more highly prized of the two jadestones is jadeite; the other is nephrite.
Jadeite and nephrite differ in both chemical composition and crystalline structure. Jadeite is a silicate of sodium and aluminum and is classed as a pyroxene. Nephrite is a silicate of calcium and magnesium belonging to the amphibole group of minerals and is properly regarded as tremolite. In both types, the microscopic crystals are tightly interlocked to form a compact aggregate. Both jadestone types may be white or colourless, but colours such as red, green, violet, and gray may occur owing to the presence of iron, chromium, or manganese impurities, respectively. The most highly prized variety is jadeite of an emerald-green hue.
The two different types of jade, when worked and polished, can usually be distinguished by their appearance alone. The fine lustre of polished nephrite is oily rather than vitreous (glassy), while that of jadeite is the reverse. Some colours are also peculiar to one stone or the other; for example, the popular apple- and emerald-green jewelry jades are invariably jadeite. There are also wide variations of translucency in both stones. The area around the city of Mogaung in northern Myanmar (Burma) has long been the main source of gem-quality jadeite. Occurrences of nephrite are more numerous and geographically more widespread.
Over the course of history, jade has been successively cut and shaped with sandstone, slate, and quartz sand (as an abrasive); by tools made of bronze; by tools of iron, using manually operated lathes; and finally, beginning in the 19th century, by machine-powered lathes, steel saws, and diamond-pointed drills. Carborundum and diamond dust have replaced crushed garnets and corundum (emery) as abrasives.
Both jadestones were worked into implements by Neolithic peoples in many parts of the world. The best-known finds are from the lake dwellings of Switzerland, western France, Central America, Mexico, and China. Jade is hard, tough, and heavy, and it takes and keeps a good edge, while its fine colours and warm polish must have greatly appealed to Neolithic craftsmen. When the stone-based Neolithic cultures were succeeded by ones using bronze and iron, however, jade gradually lost its industrial value and fell from favour as a gemstone in all but a few regions.
Jade and jade carving are associated preeminently with China, since in no other region of the world has this obdurate material been worked with such skill in such a long and unbroken tradition (see Chinese jade). For millennia the jade carved by the Chinese consisted of nephrite from the region of Hotan (Khotan) and Yarkand in what is now Sinkiang. Jadeite does not appear to have been worked by them until the 18th century ce, when large quantities of that jadestone began entering the country from Myanmar via Yunnan province.
As early as the Neolithic period the Chinese were carving jade into tools and simple cult objects in the form of flat disks with circular orifices at their centre. During the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 bce), they began making small ornamental plaques with decorative designs of animals incised on them in low relief. From the later part of the Zhou dynasty (about 500 bce), the introduction of iron tools made more accomplished carvings possible, and jade began to be made into a wide variety of utilitarian and luxury objects, such as belt hooks and ornaments, sword and scabbard accoutrements, hollow vessels, and, most importantly, sculpture in the round. The craft of jade carving in China attained maturity toward the close of the Zhou dynasty in 256 bce, with designs of unsurpassed excellence and beauty, and the tradition continued for the next 2,000 years.
The reign (1735–96) of the great Qing-dynasty emperor Qianlong was a particularly important period for jade carving. Under his patronage and in those times of exceptional prosperity and luxury, thousands of carved jades were added to the imperial collections, and the material was applied to countless new decorative, ceremonial, and religious uses in the Forbidden City at Beijing and in the homes of nobles and officials. Greater quantities of jade were entering China than ever before, and emerald-green jadeite from Myanmar became as highly esteemed as the finest nephrite from Xinjiang. Fabulous prices were paid for high-quality carvings of people, animals, and plants; bottles, urns, vases, and other vessels; and all sorts of personal accessories.
The Aztecs, Mayas, and other pre-Columbian Indian peoples of Mexico and Central America carved jadeite for use as ornaments, amulets, and badges of rank. Nearly all of these Mesoamerican jades are of various shades of green, with emerald green the most highly prized colour among the Aztecs; their jade carvings comprise plaques, figurines, small masks, pendants, and implements. The appreciation of jade died out in Mesoamerica after the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, however. The source for all Mesoamerican jade is the Motagua Valley in Guatemala.
Until the landing of Europeans there in the 18th century, the Maoris of New Zealand were entirely ignorant of metals, and the most highly prized of their industrial stones was nephrite, from which they made axes, knives, chisels, adzes, and the short swords, or mere, of their chiefs. These jade swords served not only as weapons but as symbols of authority and were usually worked from stone of specially fine colour or distinctive marking.
Several varieties of the mineral serpentine superficially resemble nephrite and are sometimes fraudulently sold as such, but they can be distinguished by their relative softness. Another deceptive practice is that of dyeing colourless pieces of jade green to simulate high-quality stone. The most successful imitations of jadeite are completely artificial and consist of a heavy lead glass that has been cleverly tinted to imitate jadeite’s distinctive apple-green colour.
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dff6b4a6be833f82be550a20f16c6fc3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jadidist | Jadidist | Jadidist
…the reform movement known as Jādid temporarily found an outlet for its political aspirations in the Muslim Group in the Duma. With the new electoral law of 1907, however, nearly all Muslims lost their representation in the house. Many of their leaders subsequently emigrated to Turkey, encouraged by the Young…
Jadids organized New Method schools at the primary and secondary level, teaching pupils by modern pedagogical methods rather than by the rote learning that had been used in traditional schools. For the literate, Jadids published numerous short-lived newspapers and lithographed or printed many booklets. To…
The Uzbek reformers, known as Jadids, advocated the introduction of a modern educational system as a prerequisite for social change and cultural revitalization; despite intense opposition from the clerical classes, they opened their first school in Tashkent in 1901 and by 1914 had established more than 100. After 1908, influenced…
The leaders of the Jadids, as they called themselves, included Munawwar Qari in Tashkent, Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy in Samarkand, Sadriddin Ayniy in Bukhara, and ʿAshur ʿAli Zahiriy in Kokand (Qŭqon). They exerted a strong influence on education during the initial decades of the Soviet period, and their methods and…
Jadids, as the reformers called themselves, were inspired and assisted by Crimean Tatar reformers such as Ismail Gasprinski (Ismail Bey Gaspirali). The Jadids enjoyed sporadic protection by tsarist governors in Turkistan, and they were able to prepare numbers of young urban intellectuals for moderate change…
…of the 20th century the Jadid reform movement, consisting of followers of the Turkish journalist Ismail Gasprinski, gained influence in Uzbekistan and throughout Central Asia. The Jadids’ primary concern was a new approach to education through so-called New Method (usul-i jadid) schools. (See Sidebar: Activities of the Jadid Reformers.) Among…
…Central Asian communities where the Jadid reformist movement had installed its New Method schools received the rudiments of a modern, though still Muslim, education. The educational establishment was dominated until the 1920s by the standard network of Muslim maktabs and madrasahs, however. Soviet efforts eventually brought secular education to the…
…established by Muslim reformers (Jadids) early in the 20th century in such towns as Kerki and Chardzhou (now Türkmenabat). Only after 1928 did the Soviet school system begin to displace these Muslim educational institutions, with the result that literacy rates remained low for many years. By the 1960s and…
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f4b9c30a2926fcb94d0b8a7abc1fe896 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jagiellon-dynasty | Jagiellon dynasty | Jagiellon dynasty
Jagiellon dynasty, family of monarchs of Poland-Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary that became one of the most powerful in east central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. The dynasty was founded by Jogaila, the grand duke of Lithuania, who married Queen Jadwiga of Poland in 1386, converted to Christianity, and became King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. Thus both Poland and Lithuania were united in the person of their sovereign (who soon, however, appointed a grand duke to rule for him in Lithuania). Together they constituted a formidable power, which defeated their major common enemy, the Knights of the Teutonic Order, at the Battle of Tannenberg (Grünfelde; July 15, 1410).
The dynasty was threatened with division into separate houses and disruption of the federation after Władysław’s brother Swidrygiełło was named to replace his cousin Vytautas (Witold) as grand prince of Lithuania (1430). But Vytautas’ brother Sigismund defeated Swidrygiełło and became the grand duke (1434). Then, rather than become divided, the dynasty extended its power; Władysław III Warneńczyk, who succeeded his father as king of Poland in 1434, also assumed the throne of Hungary (as Ulászló I) in 1440. After Władysław was killed fighting the Turks at the Battle of Varna (1444), the Poles elected as their king his brother, Casimir IV, who had succeeded the assassinated Sigismund as grand duke of Lithuania in 1440.
Largely sympathetic to the Lithuanian desire for autonomy and determined to create a strong, central royal power, Casimir clashed with the Polish magnates, large landowners who had dominated the earlier Jagiellon reigns, by granting extensive and exclusive rights and privileges to the gentry in order to gain their political and financial support for his active foreign policy. As a result, Casimir was able not only to engage successfully in the Thirteen Years’ War (1454–66) against the Teutonic Knights, by which he acquired a large portion of their territory, but also to place his son Władysław on the thrones of Bohemia (as Vladislav II; 1471) and Hungary (as Ulászló II; 1490) and to fight the Turks (1485–89), who had disrupted his kingdom’s trade by seizing control of the mouths of the Dniester and Danube rivers.
During the reigns of Casimir’s sons John Albert and Alexander I, however, the Jagiellon rulers lost a large degree of their power in Poland to the nobility (as did Władysław in Bohemia and Hungary); and, by weakening their realm, they exposed it to the aggression of the Teutonic Knights and the state of Muscovy, which expanded into Lithuanian territory.
When Sigismund I the Old succeeded his brother Alexander in 1506, the Polish–Lithuanian federation was seriously threatened by foreign invasion as well as by internal decay. Gradually strengthening his government (although not diminishing gentry power), Sigismund used diplomatic means to come to terms with the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I, who had been encouraging the Teutonic Order and Muscovy to attack Poland and Lithuania. He defeated the Muscovite army at Orsha (1514) and successfully contended with the Teutonic Order so that in 1525 it converted its lands into the secular Duchy of Prussia, which became a Polish fief.
Sigismund’s nephew Louis II succeeded Władysław as king of Bohemia and Hungary in 1516, but his death at the Battle of Mohács (at which the Turks destroyed the Hungarian monarchy; 1526) brought an end to Jagiellon rule there. Sigismund, on the other hand, improved the political stability of Poland and Lithuania, incorporated Mazovia into his realm (1526), and also promoted the development of Renaissance culture in Poland.
Nevertheless, the Polish monarchy continued to lose power to the magnates and gentry, which contended with each other for political dominance; and when Sigismund II Augustus ascended the throne (1548), he was obliged to manoeuvre between the magnates and the gentry while maintaining his father’s policy of avoiding foreign conflict. But when Livonia sought his protection from Muscovy and incorporation into his realm (1561), he allied with the gentry to finance the major war against Muscovy, which he entered to secure his control over Livonia and the Baltic seacoast. Since Lithuania could not bear the major burden of the war, he tried to create a firmer union between Poland and Lithuania. In 1569 he arranged for the two countries to enter the Union of Lublin and form a Polish–Lithuanian commonwealth. Three years later Sigismund II Augustus died, leaving no heirs, thereby ending the Jagiellon dynasty.
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5fdb3a3135dd398a107ac1ad4dd407a2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/jagirdar-system | Jāgīrdār system | Jāgīrdār system
Jāgīrdār system, form of land tenancy developed in India during the time of Muslim rule (beginning in the early 13th century) in which the collection of the revenues of an estate and the power of governing it were bestowed on an official of the state. The term was derived by combining two Persian words: jāgīr (“holding land”) and dār (“official”). The bestowal of a jāgīr on a jāgīrdār could be either conditional or unconditional. A conditional jāgīr required in reciprocity from the beneficiary some form of public service, such as the levying and maintaining of troops for the benefit of the realm. An iqta (assignment of land) was usually made for life, and the jāgīr would revert to the state on the death of the holder, though it was possible for the heir to renew it on payment of a fee.
The system was an adaptation of an existing agrarian system by the early sultans of Delhi. Being feudalistic in character, it tended to enfeeble the central government by setting up quasi-independent baronies. The practice was slowed by Sultan Ghiyās̄ al-Dīn Balban (reigned 1266–87) and abolished by Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khaljī (1296–1316), only to be revived again by Sultan Fīrūz Shah Tughluq (1351–88), from which time it continued. The early Mughal emperors (16th century) wished to abolish it, preferring to reward their officials with cash salaries, but it was reintroduced by the later emperors and contributed greatly to the weakening of the Mughal state. The British East India Company was given a jāgīr by the nawab Muḥammad ʿAlī of Arcot in present-day Tamil Nadu state 120 miles (190 km) in length along the Bay of Bengal and 47 miles (76 km) in width inland; it became the nucleus of the Madras Presidency. Under the British the old jāgīrdār holdings were largely considered the properties of individual families, particularly in the area of Maharashtra. With Indian independence, legislative measures were taken to abolish the system of absentee landownership.
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5bd79ac25754a1b4f274531043020565 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/jaguar-cult | Jaguar cult | Jaguar cult
…usually was a hybrid between jaguar and human infant, often crying or snarling with open mouth. This “were-jaguar” is the hallmark of Olmec art, and it was the unity of objects in this style that first suggested to scholars that they were dealing with a new and previously unknown civilization.…
…old men often embellished with jaguar emblems, the jaguar being associated with the night and the nether regions.
…are referred to as “were-jaguars” because the image of this mythological or quasi-symbolic supernatural being is a humanoid type thought by many to combine human aspects with the jaguar concept.
…towns and settlements, so the jaguar probably represents the control of society as well as of nature. Jaguars are carved on axes, pots, and human likenesses; men wear jaguar skins; and human faces are depicted with jaguar-like mouths.
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1e24212bfc6b248e5a29647c3832578e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/jahiliyah | Jāhiliyyah | Jāhiliyyah
Jāhiliyyah, in Islam, the period preceding the revelation of the Qurʾān to the Prophet Muhammad. In Arabic the word means “ignorance,” or “barbarism,” and indicates a negative Muslim evaluation of pre-Islamic life and culture in Arabia as compared to the teachings and practices of Islam. The term has a positive connotation only in regard to Arabic literature; pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is esteemed by Muslims for its precise and rich vocabulary, sophisticated metrical structures, and fully developed systems of rhyme and thematic sequence.
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8b785864ffc95e149a18dddd52b3f2ae | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jahrbuch-fur-Philosophie-und-phanomenologische-Forschung | Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung | Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung
…in the publication of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1913–30), a phenomenological yearbook with Husserl as its main editor, the preface of which defined phenomenology in terms of a return to intuition (Anschauung) and to the essential insights (Wesenseinsichten) derived from it as the ultimate foundation of all…
With the appearance of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1913–30; “Annual for Philosophical and Phenomenological Research”) under Husserl’s chief editorship, his philosophy flowered into an international movement. Its most-notable adherent was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose masterpiece, Being and Time, appeared in the Jahrbuch in 1927. The influence of…
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6d0ffbaab0db6354e825e1e5e290ac60 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jalayirid | Jalāyirid | Jalāyirid
Jalāyirid, Mongol tribe that supported the Il-Khan Hülegü’s rise to power and eventually provided the successors to the Il-Khan dynasty as rulers of Iraq and Azerbaijan. A Jalāyirid dynasty made its capital at Baghdad (1336–1432).
Ḥasan Buzurg, founder of the dynasty, had served as governor of Anatolia (Rūm) under the Il-Khan Abū Saʿīd (reigned 1317–35). Following the death of Abū Saʿīd, Ḥasan Buzurg competed for real control of the empire with his rival, the Chūpānid amīr Ḥasan Küčük (“the Small,” so designated to distinguish him from Ḥasan Buzurg, “the Great”); they set up rival khanates. Soon afterward the empire broke down into local dynasties in Anatolia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia.
Ḥasan Buzurg had, meanwhile, established his line in Baghdad, from which he conducted his agitation against the Chūpānids. His son Uways I (reigned 1356–74) enlarged Jalāyirid domains by seizing Azerbaijan (1360) and placing the Moẓaffarid principality of Fārs under his suzerainty (1361–64). The dynasty, however, was beset by the westward migrations and invasions of various Turkic and Mongol tribes. The khans of the Golden Horde, successors of Batu, unsuccessfully attempted the conquest of Azerbaijan in 1356–59, while the Timurids routed Aḥmad (reigned 1382), forcing him to leave Baghdad and seek the protection of the Mamlūks of Egypt until Timur’s death in 1405. The Kara Koyunlu (q.v.) Turkmens, initially in Jalāyirid service, eventually overwhelmed Azerbaijan and western Iran, executed Aḥmad (1410), and captured Baghdad.
A subsidiary line of Jalāyirids maintained itself as vassals of the Timurids in lower Iraq until it was conquered by the Kara Koyunlu in 1432.
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ffc30b6cd9ff980a506c610bc669b0f2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/James-and-the-Giant-Peach | James and the Giant Peach | James and the Giant Peach
James and the Giant Peach (1961; film 1996), written for his own children, was a popular success, as was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), which was made into the films Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005).…
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953950bac68644f7fc623c3be88e2b87 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/James-Walker-American-attorney | James Walker | James Walker
A white lawyer, James Walker, finally agreed to take the case in December 1891. Martinet did not consider any of the Black lawyers in New Orleans competent to raise a constitutional question, since, as he explained, they practiced almost entirely in the police courts.
…Martinet, and the local attorney, James Walker, filed a “plea of jurisdiction,” arguing that since Desdunes was a passenger in interstate commerce, he had the right and privilege to travel free from any governmental regulation save that of the Congress. Tourgée also introduced his claim that the determination of race…
…again his trio of attorneys—Martinet, Walker, and Tourgée—entered a plea claiming that the act was unconstitutional and therefore the court did not have jurisdiction to hear or determine the facts. And again they claimed that the matter of race, both as to fact and to law, was too complicated to…
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663f65a60be896a44ffdf8b7799f94b1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jan-and-Dean | Jan and Dean | Jan and Dean
As Jan and Dean, Jan Berry (b. April 3, 1941, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—d. March 26, 2004, Los Angeles) and Dean Torrence (b. March 10, 1941, Los Angeles) gave voice to surf music with distinctive falsetto harmonies, especially on “Surf City” (1963). It was the Beach…
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beb5f1889ed53eddfb4cc2cd4f70500b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Janata-Dal-Secular | Janata Dal (Secular) | Janata Dal (Secular)
Janata Dal (Secular), JD(S) English People’s Party (Secular), regional political party primarily in Karnataka state, southern India. It also has a presence in adjoining Kerala state and in national politics.
The party, formed in 1999, had its origins in the Janata (People’s) Party, founded in 1977 as a coalition of several smaller parties that combined forces to oppose the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). In 1988 the Janata Party and other smaller parties merged to form the Janata Dal (JD), which was part of a renewed opposition to the Congress Party called the United Front (UF). Eight years later the JD’s H.D. Deve Gowda was able to form a short-lived (June 1996–April 1997) UF coalition government, with himself as prime minister. In 1999, however, the JD underwent a major split over the question of the party’s becoming allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government. The faction opposed to that alliance, led by Deve Gowda, formed a new party that came to be called the Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S), while the remainder of the JD was designated the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), and became a part of the NDA. Initially, after its formation, the JD(S) subsequently kept its distance politically from both the Congress Party and the BJP.
The JD(S) had a lacklustre beginning at the polls. In the 1999 elections to the Karnataka state legislative assembly, it won only 10 of the 203 seats it contested in the 224-member chamber. The party fared much better five years later, when it garnered 58 seats in the assembly. It then entered into an alliance with Congress (thus repudiating its policy against collaboration) to form the first-ever coalition government in the state. Congress’s Dharam Singh served as chief minister (head of the government).
The coalition lasted only 20 months, however, after which the JD(S) withdrew its support and formed another coalition government with the BJP. Under the terms of the agreement between the two parties, each would head the government for 20 months. H.D. Kumaraswamy, son of Deve Gowda and head of the JD(S), served as chief minister between February 2006 and October 2007. At that point, however, Kumaraswamy refused to vacate the chief minister’s chair, and the BJP responded by withdrawing its support. The assembly was dissolved, and the central government in New Delhi took over administration of the state. The JD(S) could win only 28 seats when new assembly elections were held in 2008, which precluded the party from either forming a government or influencing its formation. The BJP, which won 110 seats, put together another coalition government with support from independent candidates.
Nonetheless, the JD(S) retained a significant support base among members of the landowning and farming Vokkaliga caste in southern Karnataka, who constituted about 15 percent of the state’s population. In the run-up to the 2013 state assembly elections, the party proposed a range of pro-farmer measures, and it promised to waive all loans to farmers, weavers, fishermen, and artisans. The party improved on its 2008 performance, increasing its seat total to 40. Congress, which won 121 seats, however, formed the government.
The JD(S) remained a small player on the national political scene, in spite of its past alliances with Congress and the BJP in Karnataka. It was, however, a key constituent of the so-called “Third Front” grouping of leftist and left-leaning political parties. The party won one seat in the 1999 elections to the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament), three each in the 2004 and 2009 polls, and two in the 2014 contest.
The JD(S) also had a small political presence in the adjoining state of Kerala as part of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) coalition there, winning three and five seats, respectively, in the 2001 and 2006 state assembly elections. Before the 2011 assembly polls, however, the party split when some of its leaders quit the LDF after negotiations failed regarding the allocation of seats. In that year’s elections, the JD(S) faction that remained with the LDF won four seats in the assembly.
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ed4816dac005299ba1459f156d678a97 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japan-Airlines | Japan Airlines | Japan Airlines
Japan Airlines (JAL), (Japanese: Nihon Kōkū) in fullJapan Airlines International Co., Ltd., Japanese airline that became one of the largest air carriers in the world. Founded in 1951, it was originally a private company. It was reorganized in 1953 as a semigovernmental public corporation and was privatized in 1987. It is headquartered in Tokyo.
At first a domestic carrier, JAL became an international airline in 1954, when it inaugurated flights to San Francisco. In the next 10 years it expanded its service to other cities in the United States and to Southeast Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and Australia. In the late 1960s JAL began round-the-world service, and in 1970 it became the first non-Soviet airline to fly a regular route over Siberia. In the 1980s its route network was extended to cover several cities in China. JAL also has affiliates that operate hotels and that offer package tours. In 1987 the Japanese government decided to sell off its shares in JAL, thus releasing the airline from government control.
JAL and the air carrier Japan Air System (JAS) agreed to merge in 2002. In 2004 JAL became Japan Airlines International (JAL International), and JAS became Japan Airlines Domestic (JAL Domestic). JAL International and JAL Domestic were unified in 2006 to form a single corporation, JAL International. In 2005 it joined oneworld, a global airline alliance. JAL filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010.
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8072955eecd38827446ca01066fbf7cf | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japan-Railways-Group | Japan Railways Group | Japan Railways Group
Japan Railways Group, Japanese Nihon (or Nippon) Tetsudō Gurūpu, byname JR Group, formerly Japanese National Railways, principal rail network of Japan, consisting of 12 corporations created by the privatization of the government-owned Japanese National Railways (JNR) in 1987.
The first railroad in Japan, built by British engineers, opened in 1872, between Tokyo and Yokohama. After some initial opposition to foreign influence, Japanese engineers began building railroads at a rapid rate, and the railways’ expansion was promoted as part of national policy. In 1906 the state began buying up private lines, and out of these efforts emerged the JNR in 1949. By the mid-1980s JNR’s rail lines provided passenger and freight service over more than three-fourths of Japan’s track mileage. The remainder was operated by a number of privately owned intercity passenger railway companies.
In 1964 the first section of the Shinkansen, a high-speed passenger line, was opened between the cities of Tokyo and Ōsaka, and the line was later extended until it became one of the mainstays of the railway’s operations. It was also in 1964, however, that JNR first began to lose money on its operations, and these losses continued over the next two decades until the corporation had amassed a huge long-term debt. In response, it was decided in 1987 that the JNR would be privatized and broken up into 12 interdependent companies: 6 regional railways, the Shinkansen lines, a nationwide cargo railway corporation, and four other companies. The JR Group has a total route length of about 12,500 miles (20,100 km), of which about half is electrified.
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a0d11011a1640116af3eb02dd42f020e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-American-internment-in-pictures-2146743 | Japanese American internment in pictures | Japanese American internment in pictures
On February 19, 1942, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, giving the U.S. military the authority to exclude any persons from designated areas. Although the word Japanese did not appear in the order, it was clear that Japanese Americans were the focus of the initiative. On March 18, 1942, the federal War Relocation Authority (WRA) was established to “take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land, and return them to their former homes at the close of the war.”
In the 1943 edition of the Britannica Book of the Year, Earl G. Harrison, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, described the affected population:
Between 1942 and 1945 approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were detained in 10 camps for varying periods of time in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas.
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0072e39dc6574afa80b17da320d96aae | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-baseball-leagues | Japanese baseball leagues | Japanese baseball leagues
Japanese baseball leagues, professional baseball leagues in Japan. Baseball was introduced to Japan in the 1870s by teachers from the United States, and, by the end of the century, it had become a national sport. The first professional leagues were organized in 1936, but the current league structure dates to 1950.
The two main leagues in Japan are the Central League and the Pacific League. Each league is composed of six teams and plays a 144-game schedule beginning in late March and ending in early October. Each major league club has a minor league affiliate, and the 12 minor league teams are divided into two divisions—Eastern and Western—and play an 80-game schedule. The rosters of the major league clubs are replenished with high-school, college, and semiprofessional players by an annual player draft. Each team is allowed to have four import (non-Japanese) players. After the season the champions of the Central and Pacific leagues meet in the best-of-seven Japan Series.
The Japanese Central League comprises the Chūnichi Dragons, Hanshin Tigers, Hiroshima Tōyō Carp, Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants, Yakult Swallows, and Yokohama BayStars. In the Japanese Pacific League are the Chiba Lotte Marines, Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, Orix Buffaloes, Seibu Lions, and Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.
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437e6c5a964ad1e86959b443f18329c2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-by-Spring | Japanese by Spring | Japanese by Spring
…sequel The Terrible Threes (1989), Japanese by Spring (1993), Juice! (2011), and Conjugating Hindi (2018). He also wrote numerous volumes of poetry and collections of essays, the latter of which included Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (2010) and Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown (2012). Six…
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11f1b3f0e85b446747dbd4de2f58e5f5 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-Civil-Code | Japanese Civil Code | Japanese Civil Code
Japanese Civil Code, Japanese Mimpō, body of private law adopted in 1896 that, with post-World War II modifications, remains in effect in present-day Japan. The code was the result of various movements for modernization following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. A legal code was required that would fill the needs of the new free-enterprise system that predominated with the dissolution of feudal landholdings. At the same time, the Japanese desired to present themselves to the world as a more modern nation in hope of renegotiating certain unfavourably balanced and often even humiliating treaties with Western nations. The resulting code was modeled on the first draft of the German Civil Code, itself very Roman in structure and substance.
The code is divided into five books. Those on family and succession retain certain vestiges of the old patriarchal family system that was the basis of Japanese feudalism. It was in these sections that most of the postwar revisions were made. At that time it was considered no longer necessary or desirable to pay such homage to the past, and the sections dealing with family law and succession were brought closer to European civil law.
The writing of the code provoked considerable disagreement among segments of the Japanese legal and commercial communities, largely over how much Japanese custom should be included. There was also disagreement as to whether the code should be based on the French or the English system of law. This disagreement arose from the rather strange position of both those systems in Japanese law schools and courts. After the restoration, law schools had been set up that gave courses in both English and French law. Because of the way the courses and examinations were constructed, it was possible to become a lawyer or judge by knowing only one system of law. In their courtrooms, some judges administered only French law and others only English.
After the first Japanese Civil Code had been adopted in 1890, with very little debate, a storm of criticism arose from the legal community. This code had been the work of a French jurist, Gustave-Emil Boissonade, who also had written the criminal and penal codes of 1882. Opponents argued that, if the civil code were to be based upon French law, then Japanese lawyers trained in the French system would have an advantage over those trained in the English. Further, the proposed commercial code was based on German laws, and there were many lawyers and persons engaged in commerce who felt there would be confusion if the two codes were based upon different laws.
The code was made into a political issue by those wishing to preserve the old feudalism, who charged that the old customs, particularly the patriarchal family system, had been ignored in the individualistic code of Boissonade. A revised code was produced, based on the first draft of the German Civil Code but giving considerable weight to the old customs, particularly in family and inheritance law. The final German-based code was very similar in most respects to that of Boissonade, both including strong protection for landed property. The code was promulgated in 1896 and went into effect in 1898.
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c42e4223198ae150771055628aeea09c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-language/Grammatical-structure | Grammatical structure | Grammatical structure
The first major part-of-speech division in Japanese falls between those elements that express concrete concepts (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives) and those that express relational concepts (particles and suffixal auxiliary-like elements). The former elements may stand alone, constituting one-word sentences, whereas the latter always are attached to nouns and verbs and express grammatical concepts such as tense, the grammatical relations of subject and object, and the speaker’s attitudes toward the proposition and toward the listener. Japanese verbs and adjectives conjugate and function as predicates without involving a copula (linking verb), whereas non-conjugating nouns and adjectival nominals (e.g., ganko ‘stubborn’) require the copula da in their predication function—e.g., Tarō-ga ringo-o kau (literally, Taro-[nominative] apple-[accusative] buy [present]) ‘Taro buys an apple,’ Yama-ga taka-i (literally, mountain-[nominative] high-[present]) ‘The mountain is high,’ Tarō-wa sensei-da (literally, Taro-[topic] teacher-[copula present]) ‘Taro is a teacher,’ Tarō-wa ganko-da (literally, Taro-[topic] stubborn-[copula present]) ‘Taro is stubborn.’ Predicates show no agreement for person, number, and gender. Nouns do not decline and do not indicate number or gender, while case distinctions are marked by enclitic particles (that is, particles attached to the end of the previous word), as in the examples above.
Japanese, as a consistent subject–object–verb (SOV) language, places modifiers before the modified, so that adjectives and relative clauses precede the modified nouns and adverbs come before verbs. A predicate complex consists of the stem followed by various suffixal elements expressing relational concepts. The order of these and other end-of-sentence, or sentence-final, elements reflect the ordering of meaning types from concrete to subjective to interpersonal; e.g., Ik-ase-rare-ru darō ka ne (literally, go-[causative]-[passive]-[present], [conjecture], [question particle], [final particle]) ‘Will (I) be made to go? What do you think?’
Elements recoverable from the context are freely omitted from Japanese, so that conversation abounds with sentence fragments, which may convey various meanings depending on the context—e.g., Kaita (literally, write [past]) can mean ‘I (he/she/they) wrote (a book, letters, etc.),’ Tarō to Jirō desu (literally, Taro and Jiro [copula polite]) can mean ‘Taro and Jiro came/played,’ ‘I met Taro and Jiro,’ and so on. Some clues for recovering missing elements are provided for by means of honorific forms. When, for example, the verb kaku ‘to write’ is used in its subject honorific form—kakareru or o-kaki-ni naru—the writer referred to is not the speaker, but someone honoured as superior to the speaker. On the other hand, when the humble form o-kaki suru is used, the referent is likely to be the speaker. The addressee honorific form kakimasu is an index of the social relationship of the speaker to the listener, whereas the plain form kaku is used in addressing an equal, a social inferior, or an indefinite audience (as would be used, for example, in newspaper articles and books). The use of honorifics extends to the forms of personal address; one especially avoids use of anata ‘you,’ even in its honorific form anata-sama, when addressing a superior. The reference is usually omitted altogether, and the subject honorific form of the verb in combination with the addressee honorific form may simply be used, as in O-iki-ni narimasu ka ‘Are [you] going?’ If one must address a superior, that person’s title or a kinship term is used, as in Sensei-wa o-iki-ni narimasu ka ‘Are you going, Teacher?’ Personal terms referring to the first person and particles that end the sentence also indicate the speaker’s sex; opposed to the sex-neutral term watakushi for the first person are male forms boku and ore and typically female forms watashi and atashi. Ze and zo are final particles used by male speakers, while wa and wa yo are used exclusively by females.
The Japanese language exhibits a number of characteristic grammatical constructions not found in English and other European languages. An English sentence such as John came translates into two different expressions in Japanese. The sentence exhibiting the topic construction John-wa kita (John-[topic] came) contrasts with the basic sentence John-ga kita (John-[nominative] came), and the former is used when the referent of the wa-marked nominal (i.e., John) is the topic of discussion, whereas the nontopic sentence simply describes the event in a neutral manner. The structure A-wa B-da (A-[topic] B-[copula]) bears a heavy functional load in Japanese. In addition to its basic identificational function (e.g., Kore-wa hon-da ‘This is a book’), the construction, supported by its context, is used to express a variety of meanings; e.g., Boku-wa ringo da (literally, ‘I am an apple’) can mean ‘I have decided to eat an apple,’ ‘I am going to pick apples,’ and so on; Boku-wa Kōbe-da (literally, ‘I am Kōbe’) can mean ‘I am going to Kōbe,’ ‘I am from Kōbe,’ ‘I am a fan of Kōbe,’ ‘I live in Kōbe,’ ‘I get off the train in Kōbe,’ and so on.
Japanese also makes intransitive verbs passive; a passive sentence, such as Boku-wa haha-ni shin-are-ta (literally, I-[topic] mother-[dative] die-[passive-past]) ‘I suffered from Mother’s dying,’ characteristically expresses the adversative meaning of suffering or inconvenience experienced by the subject referent (here, the male “I”). In addition to the regular passive of the type found in English, transitive verbs also produce adversative passive sentences—e.g., Boku-wa Hanako-ni piano-o hik-are-ta (literally, I-[topic] Hanako-[dative] piano-[accusative] play-[passive-past]) ‘I suffered from Hanako’s piano-playing.’
Repetitive expressions abound in Japanese, and they profoundly affect both morphology and syntax. Examples of repetition include the use of syllable reduplication in various onomatopoeic expressions (e.g., ton-ton symbolizes a light knocking sound, don-don symbolizes a heavy banging noise), the formation of plurals for certain nouns (e.g., yama-yama ‘mountains,’ hito-bito ‘people’), and the use of doubling in adverbial phrases for emphasis (e.g., hayaku-hayaku ‘quickly, quickly’). Additionally, the repetition of phrases yields a number of characteristic constructions of Japanese—e.g., yome-ba yomu-hodo omoshiroi (literally, read-if read-to-the-extent interesting) ‘the more (I) read, the more interesting it is,’ katta-ra katta-de ato-ga komaru (literally, bought-if bought-at afterward-[nominative] suffer) ‘If [I] bought [it] after all, then it would become troublesome afterward [I would regret it].’
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3a560ca720a46a59eb8038f3378ffef6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-law | Japanese law | Japanese law
Japanese law, the law as it has developed in Japan as a consequence of a meld of two cultural and legal traditions, one indigenous Japanese, the other Western. Before Japan’s isolation from the West was ended in the mid-19th century, Japanese law developed independently of Western influences. Conciliation was emphasized in response to social pressures exerted through an expanded family unit and a close-knit community. Few rules prescribed how disputes should be resolved. The closest counterpart to the Western lawyer was the kujishi, an innkeeper who developed a counseling function. Remarkably little law in the modern sense existed; a static society, which officially discouraged commercial activity, apparently neither desired nor needed a developed legal order.
Fundamental changes inevitably followed Japan’s sudden involvement with the Western world after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Japan sought to construct an economic, political, and legal structure capable of commanding respect internationally, ending extraterritoriality, and preserving national independence. The introduction of Western law was one element in a wholesale importation of things Western.
In legal matters the Japanese took for models the systems of continental Europe, especially the German. The drafters of the Japanese Civil Code (q.v.) of 1896 surveyed many legal systems, including the French, Swiss, and common laws, taking something from each. Their final product is, however, best characterized as following the first draft of the German Civil Code. In its subsequent development the Japanese legal system remained true to these sources. The 1947 revisions of the code provisions dealing with relatives and succession, which had reflected traditional Japanese attitudes, completed the transition of Japanese civil law to the continental European family of laws.
On some points, however, Japanese law is closer to that of the United States than to European models, largely as a result of the post-World War II occupation and of later contacts with U.S. legal thinking and education. The examination of witnesses in civil cases is now (at least theoretically) modeled on U.S. procedure. The absence of a special hierarchy of administrative courts is consistent with U.S. ideas. Many aspects of labour and corporation law are U.S.-inspired.
Nevertheless, in its rules and institutions, the Japanese legal system is closer to the civil law of Europe than to the common law. In many ways, moreover, the Japanese legal order differs markedly from all Western legal orders. Most importantly, law in Japan plays a far less pervasive role in resolving disputes and creating and adjusting rules regulating conduct. The paucity of Japanese decisions involving automobile accidents, manufacturer’s liability for defective products, and nuisance may be surprising to Westerners, who also may note the small size of the Japanese bar and the persistence of extralegal methods of resolving disputes. Local police stations provide conciliation rooms. Elders act as go-betweens. For many purposes a family transcending the nuclear family still exists. The notion that a business is analogous to a family unit persists and typically influences labour relations, especially in small- and middle-sized firms. In the relatively homogeneous Japanese society, social status carries heavy obligations, and community pressure is extremely powerful.
Now that Japan has become a dominant world economic power and has increased its global geopolitical presence, law may come to play a role there more akin to its role in the West. In addition, the sociological supports essential to the continued vitality of the Japanese conception of law are being undercut by the shift from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, mechanized society.
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3f5312c663a754e786fba646e90245f3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-people | Japanese | Japanese
The Japanese people constitute the overwhelming majority of the population. They are ethnically closely akin to the other peoples of eastern Asia. During the Edo (Tokugawa) period (1603–1867), there was a social division of the populace into four classes—warrior, farmer, craftsman, and merchant—with a peer class…
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f3a06ce1739048517350d23eeed5c069 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Japanese-philosophy | Japanese philosophy | Japanese philosophy
Japanese philosophy, intellectual discourse developed by Japanese thinkers, scholars, and political and religious leaders who creatively combined indigenous philosophical and religious traditions with key concepts adopted and assimilated from nonnative traditions—first from greater East Asia and then from western Europe and the United States—beginning about the 7th century ce.
Like their Western counterparts, Japanese philosophers have pursued answers to questions about knowledge (epistemology), moral action (ethics), the relationship between art and beauty (aesthetics), and the nature of reality (metaphysics). The distinction between them lies in their different assumptions about how to approach answers to such questions. Western philosophers posit a pair of opposites—mind and matter, self and other, artist and medium, reality and appearance—and seek to bridge the distance between them. Japanese philosophers, by contrast, strive to understand the ways in which such apparent opposites overlap. The result is that Japanese philosophy does not address independent substances or entities; rather, it foregrounds interdependent processes and complexes that include apparent opposites.
The evolution of Japanese philosophy may be traced through five periods: ancient, classical, medieval, early modern, and modern.
The ancient period, spanning the 7th through 9th centuries ce, was an age of Sinicization and state organization. Two major intellectual systems—Confucianism and Buddhism—were imported from Korea and China. Whereas Confucianism addressed the “social self,” influencing government structure and patterns of formal behaviour, Buddhism provided psychological insight into the workings of the inner self. Through introspection and the disciplined practice of self-cultivation, Buddhist adherents sought to develop both charismatic power for wonderwork and creative resources for artistic expression. Confucianism and Buddhism coexisted with indigenous myths that emphasized both the divine origin of the imperial line and a native animism that stressed the mutual responsiveness between people and nature. Some of these indigenous ideas and values became important to the tradition later called Shintō.
The early philosophizing of the ancient period was aimed primarily at assimilating and classifying ideas and practices imported from the Asian mainland. As reflected in the Seventeen Article Constitution (604), a code of moral precepts for the ruling class enacted by the crown prince and regent Shōtoku Taishi, the goal of philosophy as well as government was harmony, rather than competition or separation, between the traditions. Buddhism more thoroughly penetrated the culture in the 7th and 8th centuries, and several of its key themes had an enduring impact on the Japanese worldview. Such Buddhist notions as dependent co-origination, emptiness, impermanence, and the insubstantiality of the self inspired a vision of the universe as an ever-emerging, dynamic process and an understanding of the self as interdependent with the social and natural worlds rather than independent of them. Philosophers influenced by Buddhist concepts also posited the limitations of words or concepts to represent reality perfectly and emphasized the role of mind in constructing reality.
The classical period began about the early 9th century, during the Heian period (794–1185), and ended in the late 12th century. This was an era of systemization and Japanization of philosophy. Through the writings and efforts of such thinkers as Kūkai (774–835) and Saichō (767–822), the Shingon and Tendai Buddhist schools constructed sophisticated systems of doctrine and practice. The dominant philosophical esotericism promoted by these Buddhist thinkers contributed at least two ideas that would have a lasting impact on Japanese thought. The first was the belief that every phenomenon was an expression of the activity of the cosmos, which itself was identified with a buddha (enlightened one) known as Dainichi Nyorai. The whole cosmos is, therefore, fully expressed in every phenomenon. Second, classical Japanese Buddhism maintained that enlightenment, the insight into how things really are, could not be attained merely conceptually but was an act of the full complex of mind, body, and spirit as transformed through ritual practice. Insight in this tradition was thus an incarnate activity as well as an intellectual function.
A distinctive aesthetic emerged in conjunction with these metaphysical and epistemological perspectives. No longer wishing merely to mirror the glory of the Chinese court, Japanese aristocrats developed their own aesthetic themes. Such themes as elegance (miyabi) and the charming (okashi) reflected a distinctively Japanese sense of courtly refinement. Others drew directly on Buddhist sensitivities to impermanence (mujō) and ontological depth or mystery (yōgen). Further, values such as poignancy (mono no aware) and sensitivity (ushin) were blended with ancient animistic sympathies with natural phenomena.
The medieval phase of Japanese philosophy extended from the late 12th century through the 16th century, an era of social and political upheaval. With the dissolution of the aristocracy’s power and the rise of the samurai class to political and military dominance, the court life so central to the classical period lost its allure. Facing recurrent warfare and an unusual series of natural disasters, many Japanese lost interest in the cosmic visions of Shingon and Tendai. They hoped instead for a religious philosophy directed toward leading a peaceful everyday life in what had become an increasingly turbulent world. Buddhist splinter groups (e.g., Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren) took root outside established institutions.
During the Kamakura period (1185–1333)—when feudalism, the shogunate (military dictatorship), and the samurai warrior class were established in Japan—new Buddhist schools coalesced around a series of thinkers that included Hōnen (1133–1212), Shinran (1173–1263), Dōgen (1200–53), and Nichiren (1222–82). Hōnen and Shinran, the founders of the two main Pure Land forms of Japanese Buddhism, analyzed human weakness and the need for trusting in the redemptive power of Amida Buddha, the buddha of light who promised rebirth in the Pure Land to the faithful. Dōgen used Zen meditation as a means of analyzing philosophical problems related to consciousness and the self. Nichiren extolled the power of devotion to the Lotus Sutra and its ideal of the bodhisattva, or “buddha-to-be.” In support of that practice he elaborated a philosophy of history and a critique of other Buddhist schools.
Despite their differences, the Kamakura philosophers shared a concern for simplifying Buddhist practice and making it accessible to laypersons of all classes. Even today most Japanese Buddhists practice forms of religious life developed in the Kamakura period. The philosophies of those thinkers also continue to influence many Japanese cultural assumptions. Zen brought a focus on discipline not as a means to enlightenment but as an end in itself, whereas Pure Land critiques of spiritual self-reliance reinforced a mistrust of the conception of the self as an isolated ego. Japanese aesthetic theories continued to develop in the medieval period and increasingly reflected Buddhist themes of detachment, strict praxis, and celebration of the everyday. During medieval times, Shintō thought and practice were substantially absorbed into the Buddhist religious hegemony. There was little critical development of Confucian philosophy during this period.
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5eb0e54b4620658749a2fd10bc308423 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jason-Greek-mythology | Jason | Jason
Jason, in Greek mythology, leader of the Argonauts and son of Aeson, king of Iolcos in Thessaly. His father’s half-brother Pelias seized Iolcos, and thus for safety Jason was sent away to the Centaur Chiron. Returning as a young man, Jason was promised his inheritance if he fetched the Golden Fleece for Pelias, a seemingly impossible task. After many adventures (see Argonaut) Jason abstracted the fleece with the help of the enchantress Medea, whom he married. On their return Medea murdered Pelias, but she and Jason were driven out by Pelias’ son and had to take refuge with King Creon of Corinth. Later Jason deserted Medea for Creon’s daughter; this desertion and its consequences formed the subject of Euripides’ Medea.
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c23a4f753aaf57eccb3832527d8995c6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Java-man | Java man | Java man
Java man, extinct hominin (member of the human lineage) known from fossil remains found on the island of Java, Indonesia. A skullcap and femur (thighbone) discovered by the Dutch anatomist and geologist Eugène Dubois in the early 1890s were the first known fossils of the species Homo erectus.
Dubois traveled to Southeast Asia with the hope of finding an ancestor of modern man. After searching for fossils on the island of Sumatra, he moved to Java in 1890. With the help of two army sergeants and a number of convict labourers, he began work in August 1891 along the Solo River at Trinil. The skullcap appeared in October, and the femur was recovered later from the same pit. With the partial cranium as evidence for a small brain and the modern-looking femur as an indication of upright posture, Dubois was able to argue that he had found a “missing link,” a creature intermediate in its evolutionary position between apes and humans. Dubois originally classified his find as Pithecanthropus erectus.
For more than three decades, Dubois did not allow other scientists to examine the skullcap and femur. Although he finally yielded in 1923, his secretive behaviour surrounding the remains—combined with insinuations made in his letters written shortly before his death in 1940 that the remains may have belonged to a primitive creature that was possibly more apelike or gibbonlike than humanlike—caused some of his critics to claim that Java man was a hoax. However, after subsequent investigations of the remains by American biologist Ernst Mayr in 1944, Java man was classified as a member of H. erectus.
Java man was characterized by a cranial capacity averaging 900 cubic cm (smaller than those of later specimens of H. erectus), a skull flat in profile with little forehead, a crest along the top of the head for attachment of powerful jaw muscles, very thick skull bones, heavy browridges, and a massive jaw with no chin. The teeth are essentially human though with some apelike features, such as large, partly overlapping canines. Thighbones show that Java man walked fully erect, like modern man, and attained a height of about 170 cm (5 feet 8 inches). Other fossils were later found at Sangiran and Modjokerto. The Modjokerto infant (about five years old at death) was found in 1936 and has a skull with large browridges and a retreating forehead.
Java man predates Peking man (which was also placed in H. erectus by Mayr in 1944) and is usually considered somewhat more primitive. H. erectus is thought to have occupied Java from about one million to 500,000 years ago. However, radiometric dates obtained for volcanic minerals at Sangiran indicate that some Javan fossils may be substantially older, perhaps approaching 1.5 million to 1.8 million years in age.
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a49c31f0652a78eb725ddac7fc36fee7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Javanese-language | Javanese language | Javanese language
Javanese language, member of the Western, or Indonesian, branch of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language family, spoken as a native language by more than 68 million persons living primarily on the island of Java. The largest of the Austronesian languages in number of speakers, Javanese has several regional dialects and a number of clearly distinct status styles. Of the latter the greatest difference is between the ngoko (informal) and the krama (deferential) styles. When neither of these is suitable, the madya (middle) style is used; other styles, less often used, are the krama inggil (highly deferential) and the basa kedaton (palace language).
Javanese has a written tradition dating from about 750, influenced by Indian and Islāmic literatures and in turn influencing Malay, Balinese, and other Indonesian literatures. It is written in an alphabet derived from the southern Pallava script. Little has been published in Javanese because of efforts to develop literature in Bahasa Indonesia (Malay), after its adoption as the national language of the Republic of Indonesia, of which Java is a part.
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53924890d7d90caadfea6d46181afe40 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Javanese-people | Javanese | Javanese
Javanese, Indonesian Orang Jawa, largest ethnic group in Indonesia, concentrated on the island of Java and numbering about 85 million in the early 21st century. The Javanese language belongs to the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) family. Islam is the predominant religion, though Hindu traditions of an earlier era are still evident in many areas, and relatively few Javanese strictly observe Muslim precepts. Belief in assorted local spirits is widespread.
Historically, Javanese social organization varied in structure from relatively egalitarian rural communities to the highly stratified society of the cities, with their complex court life. These differences found linguistic expression in distinct styles of speech that shifted according to status differences between the persons speaking. Today the most commonly used styles are ngoko (informal), krama (polite or deferential), and madya (between informal and polite), although there are also several others.
The growth of large cities in Java produced an urban proletariat, mostly of rural origin, who live in makeshift huts in enclosed neighbourhoods called—like their counterparts in the countryside—kampongs (villages). Rural Javanese villages are compact groups of single-family houses, traditionally built of bamboo, surrounding a central square. Though rice is the main food crop, a variety of others are produced, including corn (maize), cassava, peanuts (groundnuts), and soybeans.
The Javanese family is typically composed of parents and dependent children, though it may include other close relatives. First marriages are often arranged by the parents, but divorce is easy, and women are relatively free to leave their husbands.
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fe9330c7a06fce98bca51fbb6a8feb8d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jedburgh-project | Jedburgh project | Jedburgh project
…selected to participate in the Jedburgh project, an Allied program that brought together American, Belgian, British, Dutch, and French special forces personnel to conduct small unit operations in occupied Europe. In July 1944 he dropped into occupied France as commander of a three-man Jedburgh team, along with a French officer…
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9d20e5a6f4b1eb4efae44c6db5ca74af | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jesus-Christ-Superstar-rock-opera-by-Lloyd-Webber-and-Rice | Jesus Christ Superstar | Jesus Christ Superstar
In Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) the covering of the orchestra pit, the permanent amplification of instruments, and the use of voices entirely dependent on microphones amounts to a replacement of the illusion of theatre in any traditional sense with the actuality of a modern recording studio…
That same year, Jesus Christ Superstar, the British rock musical written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, was staged in the United States. First produced as an internationally successful album, it featured two songs, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and “Superstar,” that were pop hits…
…Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ, Superstar (1971) and Stephen Schwartz and John Michael Tebelak’s Godspell (1971). Although those films do not escape the narrative and interpretive problems noted above, the format of the musical has a way of translating Jesus’ story into a lilting account of happy make-believe.…
…followed by the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (1971; film 1973 and TV special 2018), an extremely popular though controversial work that blended classical forms with rock music to tell the story of Jesus’ life. That show became the longest-running musical in British theatrical history. Lloyd Webber’s last major collaboration…
…innovative yet controversial rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar was released as a concept album in 1970 and was staged the following year. It met with resounding international acclaim and enjoyed long runs both in London and in New York City on Broadway; a film version appeared in 1973. Rice’s last…
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b3ffdc6b32b79dd932232c34977c5c2b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jesus-prayer | Jesus Prayer | Jesus Prayer
Jesus Prayer, also called Prayer of the Heart, in Eastern Christianity, a mental invocation of the name of Jesus Christ, considered most efficacious when repeated continuously. The most widely accepted form of the prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” It reflects the biblical idea that the name of God is sacred and that its invocation implies a direct meeting with the divine.
The tradition of the Jesus Prayer goes back to the “prayer of the mind,” recommended by the ancient monks of the Egyptian desert, particularly Evagrius Ponticus (died 339). It was continued as the “prayer of the heart” in Byzantine Hesychasm, a monastic system that seeks to achieve divine quietness. Since the 13th century, mental prayer was frequently connected with psychosomatic methods, such as a discipline of breathing. In modern times the practice of the Jesus prayer was popularized by the publication of the Philokalia (1782), an anthology of texts by various authors on mental prayer. The Jesus Prayer is commonly recited with the aid of a prayer rope.
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defdbdc8ca93ef97d003b6ad95a6c876 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jew-religious-adherent | Jew | Jew
…in Islamic thought, those religionists—Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, as well as the imprecisely defined group referred to as Sabians—who are possessors of divine books (i.e., the Torah, the Gospel, and the Avesta), as distinguished from those whose religions are not based on divine revelations.
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aa9c4a860e6c134a88031fe50516e5d3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jewish-Fighting-Organization | Jewish Fighting Organization | Jewish Fighting Organization
A newly formed group, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ŻOB), slowly took effective control of the ghetto.
…his view and created the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ŻOB) under the leadership of Anielewicz. Zuckerman became one of his three co-commanders and also helped lead a political affiliate founded at the same time, the Jewish National Committee (Żydowski Komitet Narodowy). With numerous contacts in the underground resistance…
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1810714514bf4167d371c6c5fd65866a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jewish-Museum-Berlin | Jewish Museum Berlin | Jewish Museum Berlin
Jewish Museum Berlin, German Jüdisches Museum Berlin, museum in Berlin showcasing German Jewish cultural history and works of art. The Jewish Museum is among Germany’s most visited museums and commemorates the history of German Jews.
The original Jewish Museum existed from 1933 until 1938, when it was closed by the Gestapo and its works were confiscated. In the 1970s interest in a museum documenting Jewish art and culture grew, and a series of related exhibits eventually led to the planning of the Jewish Museum. Originally conceived as a division of the Berlin Museum, the project expanded, and in 2001 the Jewish Museum opened as an independent museum. In addition to displaying art and relics, the Jewish Museum stresses the cultural, social, and political history of Germany’s Jews. An architectural attraction in itself, the museum comprises two primary structures: the Old Building, which houses the Berlin Museum, and the Libeskind (or New) Building, which houses the Jewish Museum. The Old Building, a fine example of Baroque architecture, was originally built in 1735 and was rebuilt after its destruction in World War II. It serves as the sole entrance to the Jewish Museum and houses temporary exhibitions, event spaces, and a gift shop. The adjoining Libeskind, named for the building’s architect, Daniel Libeskind, can only be reached by means of a descending stairwell in the Old Building.
The Jewish Museum’s atypical zig-zag shape suggests a lightning bolt, and its zinc plating gives the exterior a reflective sheen. The structure’s unique contours and spaces were designed to challenge the viewer’s perceptions while symbolizing the German Jewish experience.
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ef970a344551bf3e111ceb0cacd11d09 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/JFK | JFK | JFK
…viewing the Oliver Stone movie JFK (1991) increased belief in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and decreased belief in the official account that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. A further outcome was that, compared with people who were about to view the movie, those who had seen it expressed less…
…touchstone for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK (1991).
…release and popularity of Stone’s JFK in 1991 sparked a new round of conspiracy speculation, to which Congress responded with the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 and the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (the members of which were not sworn…
…saw the release of both JFK, a polarizing investigation of the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy, and The Doors, a stylish account of the rise and fall of the titular American rock band. In Heaven & Earth (1993), Stone approached the Vietnam War and its
…Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) and starred opposite Whitney Houston in the romance The Bodyguard (1992). Subsequent acting credits in the 1990s included Clint Eastwood’s drama A Perfect World (1993); the postapocalyptic Waterworld (1995) and The Postman
Kennedy in JFK (1991); the role earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. His turn as a deputy U.S. marshall pursuing a doctor (played by Harrison Ford) wrongfully accused of murder in The Fugitive (1993) earned Jones an Academy Award and a Golden Globe…
…assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK (1991) and as the title character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Oldman’s cameo as a patois-spouting, dreadlocked drug dealer in the Tony Scott bloodbath True Romance (1993) helped solidify his American following. He won further praise for his restrained portrayal of Ludwig van Beethoven…
>JFK (1991) and starred with Marisa Tomei in the hit comedy My Cousin Vinny (1992). Following appearances in the sequels Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Pesci chose to largely retire from acting. He…
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3d1eaa12f66d9839c8e59dfb8db3ec92 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jibril | Jibrīl | Jibrīl
Jibrīl, also spelled Jabrāʾīl or Jibreel, in Islam, the archangel who acts as intermediary between God and humans and as bearer of revelation to the prophets, most notably to Muhammad. In biblical literature Gabriel is the counterpart to Jibrīl.
Muhammad was not initially aware that Gabriel was his intermediary, and the Qurʾān mentions him by name only three times. It is clear from the Sunnah and tafsīr literature, however, that Jibrīl became Muhammad’s constant helper. He and the archangel Mīkāl purified Muhammad’s heart in preparation for the Prophet’s ascension to heaven (Miʿrāj), and then Jibrīl guided him through the various levels until they reached the throne of God. Jibrīl also helped Muhammad in times of political crises, coming to his aid at the Battle of Badr (624) with thousands of angels, and then telling him to attack the Jewish tribes of Banū Qaynuqāʿ and Banū Qurayẓah, who had resisted Muhammad’s leadership in Medina.
Muhammad generally only heard the voice of his inspiration, but, according to ʿĀʾishah, his wife, he saw Jibrīl twice “in the shape that he was created,” and on other occasions he took on a form resembling Diḥyah ibn Khalīfah al-Kalbī, an extraordinarily handsome disciple of Muhammad. Others have described the archangel as having 600 wings, each pair so enormous that they crowd the space between East and West. Jibrīl has also been depicted as sitting on a chair suspended between heaven and earth. The popular image of Jibrīl is of an ordinary turbaned man, dressed in two green garments, astride a horse or a mule.
Islamic traditions concerning Jibrīl largely concur with biblical accounts of Gabriel, but his special relationship with Muhammad has inspired a mass of mythical detail. Jibrīl is said to have appeared at Adam’s side after his expulsion from paradise and shown him how to write, work iron, and raise wheat. Jibrīl later appeared in Egypt to help Moses and to deceive the Egyptians into entering the Red Sea in pursuit of the Jews. The invocation of Jibrīl and the other archangels also figures prominently in certain folk practices.
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149dc3a418d0ce20797bb2cdc596201c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jimmy-Kimmel-Live | Jimmy Kimmel Live! | Jimmy Kimmel Live!
…launched its own late-night comedy, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which began airing after Nightline in 2003. The Fox network, which commenced operation in 1986, also tried a late-night talk show, The Late Show (Fox, 1987), which briefly starred Joan Rivers and then introduced Arsenio Hall, TV’s first African American late-night talk…
Jimmy Kimmel Live! debuted in 2003 after Kimmel was selected over several other popular potential hosts to fill the ABC television network’s 12:05 am time slot. The show was slow to take off, initially suffering from low ratings and difficulty attracting guests, as Kimmel worked…
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5d53ca8d704faed4adbf8ed1ea30a5bb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jin-Mao-Tower | Jin Mao Tower | Jin Mao Tower
Jin Mao Tower, mixed-use skyscraper in Shanghai, China. Designed by the American architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, of Chicago, Illinois, it has 88 stories and reaches a height of 1,380 feet (420.5 metres). At the time of its official opening in January 1999, it was one of the tallest buildings in the world—exceeded in height only by the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago—but it subsequently was surpassed by a number of taller buildings, including the Shanghai World Financial Center, its neighbour in the Pudong district of Shanghai. The Chinese term jin mao, used for the building’s name, means “golden prosperity” or “golden luxuriance.”
Construction of the Jin Mao Tower got under way in 1994; the structural framework was topped out in mid-1997; and work was completed the following year. The design of the building is similar to that of the two Petronas structures in its use of the number eight (that being an auspicious number in both countries) as a motif, while it also evokes elements of traditional Chinese architecture. Beginning with a square base of 16 floors, the building’s 88 occupied floors rise in a series of 16 tiers. Each of the first 11 of these tiers above the base has progressively fewer floors than the one below and flares outward slightly at its top in the manner of a pagoda-style roof. These tiers also begin to taper inward from the exterior corners of the building, forming setbacks, and the exterior wall gradually takes on an eight-lobed pattern near the top of the building. The final four tiers, containing mechanical equipment, step back more dramatically in a four-sided pyramidical pattern, from which rises an elaborate spire structure.
The building’s foundation consists of a concrete slab 13 feet (4 metres) thick atop hundreds of steel pilings sunk some 260 feet (80 metres) into the ground below. Support for the building includes 16 large exterior columns, composed of a combination of 8 steel and 8 steel and reinforced-concrete columns, and an octagonal-shaped inner reinforced-concrete core, the two structures connected through a series of radiating beams, forming trusslike structures. The exterior is sheathed in a glass curtain wall, over which is a lattice of metal pipes. The building is designed to withstand both earthquakes and the high winds of typhoons (tropical cyclones).
The lower stories up to the 50th floor are devoted to office space, and above that a hotel occupies 35 more floors. There is an observation deck on the 88th floor. An adjacent six-story structure called the Podium Building houses shops, restaurants, an art exhibition space, and a 395-seat concert hall.
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4c182ff9d335545a6943d84093e1e34e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jingu | Jingū | Jingū
Jingū, also spelled Jingō, in full Jingū Kōgō, also called Okinagatarashi-hime No Mikoto, (born 170? ce, Japan—died 269?, Japan), semilegendary empress-regent of Japan who is said to have established Japanese hegemony over Korea.
According to the traditional records of ancient Japan, Jingū was the wife of Chūai, the 14th sovereign (reigned 192–200), and the regent for her son Ōjin. Aided by a pair of divine jewels that allowed her to control the tides, she is said to have begun her bloodless conquest of Korea in 200, the year in which her husband died. According to legend, her unborn son Ōjin, later deified as Hachiman, the god of war, remained in her womb for three years, giving her time to complete the conquest and return to Japan.
Although the traditional chronology of the period is doubtful and many of the deeds ascribed to Jingū are undoubtedly fictitious, it is certain that by the 4th century ce the Japanese had established some control over southern Korea.
There is no way of verifying the existence of a specific empress named Jingū, but it is thought that a matriarchal society existed in western Japan during this period. Chinese and Korean records, considered to be more accurate than contemporary Japanese accounts, refer to the Japanese country of Wa as the Queen Country and place it in close contact with China and Korea.
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a7b039585b7e6d3a5740226df70a0d33 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jitterbug-Perfume | Jitterbug Perfume | Jitterbug Perfume
…Still Life with Woodpecker (1980); Jitterbug Perfume (1984), which centres on a medieval king who lives for 1,000 years before becoming a janitor in Albert Einstein’s laboratory; Skinny Legs and All (1990), a fantastical novel that follows five inanimate objects on a journey to Jerusalem while exploring the Arab-Israeli conflict…
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ab8fcf560765fa9dc4ffa231e11068fe | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jocelyn-poem-by-Lamartine | Jocelyn | Jocelyn
…it appeared in 1836 as Jocelyn. It is the story of a young man who intended to take up the religious life but instead, when cast out of the seminary by the Revolution, falls in love with a young girl; recalled to the order by his dying bishop, he renounces…
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865d88d4cebe599f42f0de772e47f9fe | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jocko-Henderson-1688361 | Jocko Henderson | Jocko Henderson
For seven years beginning in the mid-1950s, Douglas (“Jocko”) Henderson commuted daily between Philadelphia, where he broadcast on WDAS, and New York City, where his two-hour late-evening Rocket Ship Show on WLIB was a particularly wild ride. “Hey, mommio, hey, daddio,” he announced, “this is your spaceman Jocko . . . three, two, one: blast-off time!” At a time when many black rhythm-and-blues disc jockeys were urged by their station owners to rant and rave, Henderson delivered smooth, finger-snapping rhymes following the model of deejay Maurice (“Hot Rod”) Hulbert, who had done a stint in Henderson’s hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.
Henderson also staged rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll concerts at the Apollo Theatre and Loew’s State Theater—holding his own with Alan Freed, who promoted similar shows—and he became the first African-American host of a live TV show from New York City. Henderson, who also worked at stations WADO and WOV in New York City, continued his Philadelphia show into the 1970s, and he appeared on the New York City oldies station WCBS well into the ’90s.
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0feec88953039c617a4093d82c07b363 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jodo | Jōdo | Jōdo
Jōdo, (Japanese: Way to the Pure Land), devotional sect of Japanese Buddhism stressing faith in the Buddha Amida and heavenly reward. See Pure Land Buddhism.
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4ac592951b3a523a49e332504fc0ae0e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jodrell-Bank-Observatory | Jodrell Bank Observatory | Jodrell Bank Observatory
Jodrell Bank Observatory, formerly Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories or Jodrell Bank Experimental Station, location of one of the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescopes, which has a reflector that measures 76 metres (250 feet) in diameter. The telescope is located with other smaller radio telescopes at Jodrellbank (formerly Jodrell Bank), about 32 kilometres (20 miles) south of Manchester in the county of Cheshire, Eng. Immediately after World War II the British astronomer Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, working at the University of Manchester’s botanical site at Jodrell Bank with war-surplus radar equipment, began research in radio and radar astronomy. Construction of the telescope began in 1952. Operation began shortly before the launching, on Oct. 4, 1957, by the Soviet Union of the first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik I); and the satellite’s carrier rocket was tracked at Jodrell Bank by radar. Most of the operational time at Jodrell Bank is devoted to astronomy rather than to tracking and communication, but the telescope has been part of the tracking network for the United States program of space exploration and monitored most of the Soviet accomplishments. The Jodrell Bank telescope transmitted the first photographs from the surface of the Moon, received Feb. 6, 1966, by the Soviet Luna 9 probe. In 1987 the 76-metre telescope was renamed the Lovell Telescope. It and another telescope at Jodrell Bank are two elements of a seven-telescope array, the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN), which uses microwave links to connect the individual telescopes into a radio interferometer 217 kilometres (135 miles) in diameter.
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960e956db3be1f781765c3e0b5c6f8d0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Joe-Turners-Come-and-Gone | Joe Turner's Come and Gone | Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, play in two acts by August Wilson, performed in 1986 and published in 1988. Set in 1911, it is the third in Wilson’s projected series of plays depicting African American life in each decade of the 20th century.
The play is set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse whose inhabitants are all from the rural South, new to the industrial North, separated from their families and from their heritage. Each is engaged in a search for identity and equilibrium; all maintain links with African traditions as they try to find their places in post-Civil War society.
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e3946bcbc8ceadedbdcf79e81f3939fa | https://www.britannica.com/topic/John-Birch-Society | John Birch Society | John Birch Society
John Birch Society, private organization founded in the United States on Dec. 9, 1958, by Robert H.W. Welch, Jr. (1899–1985), a retired Boston candy manufacturer, for the purpose of combating communism and promoting various ultraconservative causes. The name derives from John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer who was killed by Chinese communists on Aug. 25, 1945, making him, in the society’s view, the first hero of the Cold War. The society publishes the biweekly magazine The New American and the JBS Bulletin, a monthly newsletter for members. The Blue Book (1959; also published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society), a transcript of Welch’s presentation at the organization’s founding meeting in 1958, outlines the nature and purposes of the society. Its headquarters are in Appleton, Wis.
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8ffb6dea92666f6530c7eaa06057ba55 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/John-F-Kennedy-Profile-in-Courage-Award | John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award | John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award
…Peace Prize in 1975, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Spingarn Medal in 2002. In 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His memoirs are Walking with the Wind (1998; cowritten with Michael D’Orso)…
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35a2ef5e921d2457b85c6732c29f4b8e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Johnny-Guitar | Johnny Guitar | Johnny Guitar
…project, the perverse Freudian western Johnny Guitar (1954), which some film historians have seen as a commentary on the Joseph McCarthy era of anticommunist hysteria. Shot in highly saturated Trucolor and awash in the sort of hand-wringing melodrama that became Ray’s calling card, Johnny Guitar featured Joan Crawford as a…
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64f7484bd29d00916b74c3f687f9dab3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/joint-applications-development | Joint applications development | Joint applications development
…developers and users, such as joint applications development (JAD), have been introduced by some firms. Sometimes RAD and life-cycle development are combined: a prototype is produced to determine user requirements during the initial system analysis stage, after which life-cycle development takes over. A version of RAD known as agile development…
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fcd233fb9776e17f657246917d35f319 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/joker | Joker | Joker
…the choice of the term joker for the extra card introduced into American euchre in the 1860s to act as the “best bower,” or topmost trump; bower is from German Bauer, literally “farmer” but also meaning “jack.” Euchre is therefore the game for which the joker was invented—the joker being,…
Standard decks normally contain two or more additional cards, designated jokers, each depicting a traditional court jester. Few games employ them, and those that do use them in different ways. In rummy games, such as canasta, they are “wild” and may be used to…
The most popular are:
Two jokers, if available, rank as the highest cards, and one outranks the other if they are distinguishable. (For example, black joker beats red joker.) Second highest are the 2s, which, like jokers, may also be used as wild cards to a limited extent. These are…
…54-card pack that includes two jokers marked or otherwise differentiated as “big” and “little.” The remaining six cards go facedown as a “kitty.”
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5c151df068b462dba1f1a2c1f3da901d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jord | Jörd | Jörd
Jörd, (Old Norse: “Earth”, ) also called Fjörgyn, or Hlódyn, in Norse mythology, a giantess, mother of the deity Thor and mistress of the god Odin. In the late pre-Christian era she was believed to have had a husband of the same name, perhaps indicating her transformation into a masculine personality. Her name is connected with that of the Lithuanian thunder god Perkun; both are thought to be related to Old High German forha, “oak” (also “fir”), and Latin quercus, “oak.”
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2798436c393133e0a763cfa719364b16 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Joseph-and-the-Amazing-Technicolor-Dreamcoat | Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat | Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Their first notable venture was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968), a pop oratorio for children that earned worldwide popularity in a later full-length version. It was followed by the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (1971; film 1973 and TV special 2018), an extremely popular though controversial work that…
The biblically inspired oratorio Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968) was their next production. Composed originally for a school chorus at the request of a family friend of Lloyd Webber, the work met with unexpected success and later, as an expanded stage show, became a smash hit in…
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56b3d9b6acd341165ded49e3dc621847 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jota-aragonesa | Jota aragonesa | Jota aragonesa
…the capriccio brillante on the Jota aragonesa (1845; “Aragonese Jota”) and Summer Night in Madrid (1848). Between 1852 and 1854 he was again abroad, mostly in Paris, until the outbreak of the Crimean War drove him home again. He then wrote his highly entertaining Zapiski (Memoirs; first published in St.…
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4a9593e34a6144f16dc956b39b35a18c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/journal-accounting | Journal | Journal
A journal contains the daily transactions (sales, purchases, and so on), and the ledger contains the record of individual accounts. The daily records from the journals are entered in the ledgers. Each month, as a general rule, an income statement and a balance sheet are prepared…
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04f53fa8a0957d5c4c2618674b1280de | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Journey-American-rock-group | Journey | Journey
Journey, Kansas, the Alan Parsons Project, Queen, Steely Dan, Styx, and Supertramp and the Canadian band Rush. “Arty” 1970s and ’80s British pop rock artists such as
…Rolie and Schon, who formed Journey. Influenced in part by the philosophy of Sri Chinmoy, Carlos Santana continued excursions into jazz-rock with various musicians for several years before returning, on Amigos (1976), to the formula that brought his initial success. Moonflower, a best-selling double album that included a hit remake…
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1646d3e3c4060655e802d1f649e292f3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/journeyman | Journeyman | Journeyman
…years, an apprentice became a journeyman, i.e., a craftsman who could work for one or another master and was paid with wages for his labour. A journeyman who could provide proof of his technical competence (the “masterpiece”) might rise in the guild to the status of a master, whereupon he…
… (of highest accomplishment and status), journeymen (at a middle level), and apprentices (beginners). The medieval master was typically many things at once: a skilled workman himself; a foreman, supervising journeymen and apprentices; an employer; a buyer of raw or semifinished materials; and a seller of finished products. Because medieval craftsmen…
…of making the transition from journeyman to master was diminishing. Both the rising demand for their labour and their emerging status as permanent employees were essential elements in this early development of labour organization. An additional factor, related to the rise of capitalism, was the progressive withdrawal of the state…
As journeymen artisans moved out of what has been called “economic clientage” to master craftsmen, they found their interests in conflict with those of their employers. Only through collective effort could workers enforce the list of “prices” they established for their work and defend their trades…
…ranked according to experience: masters, journeymen, and apprentices. The guild structure started to disintegrate as some masters discovered that they could earn more from trading in raw materials and finished products than from pursuing their traditional crafts. Others discovered that they could secure greater profits by refusing to promote journeymen…
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c7605748492d2a49f38d67ddf741fe5a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Joyeuse-Entree-royal-visitation | Joyeuse Entrée | Joyeuse Entrée
Joyeuse Entrée, (French: “Joyous Entry”), during the European Middle Ages and the ancien régime, the ceremonial first visit of a prince to his country, traditionally the occasion for the granting or confirming of privileges.
Most famous is the charter of liberties, confirmed on Jan. 3, 1356, and called the Joyeuse Entrée, which was presented to the duchy of Brabant (in the Low Countries) by Johanna, daughter and heiress of Brabant’s Duke John III (d. 1355), and her husband Wenceslas, duke of Luxembourg, brother of the Holy Roman emperor Charles IV. The occasion was the fear of the Brabançons that Wenceslas, a foreigner, might ignore their traditional liberties. The charter confirmed Brabant’s liberties, stipulating that it could not be divided, that public offices were open only to Brabançons, and that Brabant must be consulted on coinage of money, on foreign alliances, and on declarations of war. The Joyeuse Entrée became the model for the charters of other Low Country provinces and the bulwark of their liberties. The ill-advised attempt of the emperor Joseph II to abrogate this charter led to Brabant’s revolt under Henri van der Noot in 1789–90.
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