The position of the 19 million Kurds is an extremely complex one. Their territory is divided between 5 sovereign states, none of which have a Kurdish majority. They speak widely divergent dialects, and are also divided by religious affiliations and social factors. It has taken the tragic and horrifying events in Iraq this year to bring the Kurds to the centre of the world stage, but their particular problems, and their considerable geo-political importance, have been the source of growing concern and interest during the last two to three decades. There is a remarkable dearth of reliable and up-to-date information about the Kurds, which this book remedies. Its contributors cover social and political issues, legal questions, religion, language, and the modern history of Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Soviet Union. The Kurds will be an invaluable source of reference for students and specialists in Middle East studies, and those concerned with wider questions of nationalism and cultural identity. It also offers extremely useful background information for those with a professional concern for the numerous Kurdish immigrants and asylum seekers in Western Europe and North America.

This book attempts to identify elements of mannerism and classicism in medieval Arabic poetry. Mannerism in Arabic has usually been linked with the appearance of an ornate rhetorical style called badi which became characteristic of poetry and prose from the fifth century AH/ninth century AD onwards. This study, however, is not so much concerned with the discussion of rhetorical devices as manifest in selected passages and individual lines of poetry; rather, it seeks to attain its objective through a structuralist analysis of complete poems. After the formulation of a hypothesis on the structural coherence of a cardinal form of poetic expression, the panegyric, structuralist analyses of selected poems from the medieval era follow, and the final chapter describes mannerism and classicism as contrasting styles in which the individual poem relates in fundamentally different ways to the literary convention from which it arises and the subject matter it portrays.

The position of the 19 million Kurds is an extremely complex one. Their territory is divided between 5 sovereign states, none of which have a Kurdish majority. They speak widely divergent dialects, and are also divided by religious affiliations and social factors. It has taken the tragic and horrifying events in Iraq this year to bring the Kurds to the centre of the world stage, but their particular problems, and their considerable geo-political importance, have been the source of growing concern and interest during the last two to three decades. There is a dearth of reliable and up-to-date information about the Kurds, which this book aims to address. Its contributors cover social and political issues, legal questions, religion, language, and the modern history of Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Soviet Union. "The Kurds" is intended to be a useful source of reference for students and specialists in Middle East studies, and those concerned with wider questions of nationalism and cultural identity. It also offers useful background information for those with a professional concern for the numerous Kurdish immigrants and asylum seekers in Western Europe and North America. Th

Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophy of Late Antiquity, inspired not only the intellectual traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but also their arts. Neoplatonic notions of the ascent of the soul, the nature of love and beauty, divine immanence and transcendence, and the interplay between the many and the One, have for centuries left comparable marks on the poetry of Western Asia, North Africa and Europe. This volume focuses on the Greater Mediterranean and discusses authors who wrote in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Persian, Spanish and Turkish, from medieval times to the present day. Among them are many celebrated exponents of their respective classical traditions, including Dante, Ibn Arabi and Ibn Gabirol. Major contemporary poets writing in these languages have continued to engage with the Neoplatonic heritage assimilated by their forbears. Particular attention is therefore given also to the modern period. The findings gathered here demonstrate that Neoplatonism is a cross-cultural phenomenon of outstanding importance which has given rise to a distinct 'Neoplatonic poetics' and remains relevant by pointing the way towards an inclusive sense of identity commensurate with a pluralist world.

Sperl's study questions whether mannerism and classicism can be applied to the analysis of Arabic poetry. While mannerism in Arabic literature has traditionally been associated with an excessive use of rhetorical devices and illustrated with reference to poetic fragments and extracts, Sperl approaches the question through a structuralist examination of poems as a whole. The texts selected range from the 9th to the 11th centuries AD and are drawn from the works of Abu l-Atahiya, Buhturi, Mihyar al-Daylami and Maarri. The poems which are studied in detail in successive chapters exhibit profound stylistic differences in sound, imagery, and composition. In the light of structuralist analysis, these differences do indeed appear to conform to a characteristic classicist/mannerist continuum also observed in other literatures. The structuralist approach moreover leads to a broader reevaluation of these terms in the final chapter.