The Arabn influence on Western European cooking

The importance of the spice trade to commercial development in Europe in the later middle ages has long been recognized, although the reasons for the demand for exotic condiments from the East have not been much considered. There seems little evidence to support the idea that spices were used either to mask the taste of rotting or “vulgar” food or as preservatives. There are sources, however, which do provide a basis for the unriddling of the taste for spices. Contained within the recipes of the period is evidence that the style of cooking was adopted from the Arabs, and that the heavy use of spices was but one of a cluster of characteristics of Arab food replicated in Europe. In order to establish the similarities between European and Arabic medieval cookery, a sample of French, Italian, Spanish, Flemish, English, and German texts is drawn upon and compared with the main features of the several Arabic works which have been translated into Spanish, French and English. Underlying the upheaval in the cooking of the élite in Europe from about 1300 was a changed attitude toward eating which was stimulated by the place of food in Moslem theology as represented in depictions of the Garden of Delights, a concept which is explored in its rather wide currency in Europe. I postulate that, intrigued with the sensual pleasures of eating as portrayed in the Garden, Europe began to associate luxurious dining with the food of the Arabs, and thus the passage of what was a strange and alien cuisine was facilitated.     

Language Policy and State in Morocco: The Status of Berber

Moroccan society has had a long tradition of multilingualism. It is socially and linguistically diverse, and its cultural makeup is one of the richest in North African countries. Its strategic location at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East has made Morocco open to a variety of linguistic influences. Morocco has been invaded by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greek, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spanish, and French. All these civilizations have deeply influenced Moroccan language policy and cultural diversity. The cultural and linguistic context of Morocco is characterized by the significant use of Arabic, as well as the presence of Berber, French, Spanish, and English. Berbers are the indigenous populations of Morocco and have existed in North Africa since time immemorial. Despite its complexity, the language policy of Morocco reveals an overarching monolingualism, with the hegemony of Classical Arabic as the only official language of the country. Recently, however, language education policy in Morocco has attempted to accommodate multilingualism. The linguistic situation of Berber has taken a new twist as it has been incorporated into the realm of Moroccan schools. The new Moroccan constitution also represents a historical turn in that it has acknowledged Berber as an official language, a move that has raised several questions with regard to the real motivation behind it. Berber implementation policy was based on an entirely top‐down bureaucratic model of language policy. Moroccan policymakers and the state seem to be aware of how other dramas are playing out in Morocco and around the world as theories of multiculturalism and effects of globalization are influencing their decisions. However, this language policy encounters many hurdles, from the improvisation to lack of qualified teachers. This article is an attempt to understand the intricate diversity and plurality of Moroccan language situation and the role of the state in Berber language policy. It also examines the invisible politics behind implementing it.     

Das Arabische als Vermittler und Anreger europäischer Wissenschaftssprache

The role played by the ‘Arabs’, i. e. the peoples of Arabic-Islamic civilization, in the transmission and development of the sciences — from Antiquity and into medieval Europe — is well known. In the present contribution it is discussed in which way the ‘Arabs’ formed their own scientific terminology and in which way they contributed to the formation and development of the Western, European scientific terminology. In the translations of scientific works from Arabic into Latin in the middle ages, mainly four ways of rendering the Arabic terminology are observed: simple transliteration; modified Latinized transliteration; literal translation; and free rendering by newly formed or inherited Latin or Greek terms. In the course of time, transliterated Arabic terms were more and more suppressed — though many of them live on among us until today — and supplied by corresponding Western terminology.     

A Play of Three Suitors: A Neglected Middle Dutch Version of the “Entrapped Suitors” Story (ATU 1730)

The wide diffusion of the “Entrapped Suitors” story-type has often been observed: examples are found in a remarkable number of literatures, ranging from English, French and Greek in the West, to Persian, Arabic and Kashmiri in the East. However, a text of this type that is often overlooked is the Middle Dutch play Een Speel Van Drie Minners (“A Play of Three Suitors”). This is despite the fact that it represents a highly idiosyncratic variation on the story, as it replaces the central moral with something more scabrous. We offer here a comprehensive discussion of this singular text and its narrative form, with an English verse-translation appended.     

Taking back taste: feminism,food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which people's beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.     

'Our Spanish Brothers' or 'As at Plombieres'? France, The Legacy of Resistance and the Spanish Opposition to Franco, 1945-1948

The case of French relations with the semi-Fascist regime ofGeneral Francisco Franco of Spain after the Second World Waroffers historians the opportunity to explore various influenceson French foreign policy. This article examines France’sofficial policies towards the Spanish anti-Franco oppositionas an example of the impact that the legacy of the Resistancehad on postwar foreign affairs. Yet the French Foreign Ministryonly reluctantly embraced the Resistance vision of universalrepublicanism in Europe. Rather, the importance of keeping Frenchpolicy in line with that of the Western Alliance consistentlyshaped policy towards various Spanish groups. The result wasa significant Franco-American-British effort to unite the anti-Francoopposition in Spain 1945–1948 but one that was easilyabandoned once it proved impracticable. Resistance ideas ofa renewed foreign policy following liberation were thus limitedby the importance the government attributed to alliance politicsin the emerging Cold War atmosphere.     

Translation And The Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldûn Orientalist

Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth–century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères , the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post–colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation–in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields."     

The oldest mongoose of Europe

The Egyptian mongoose, Herpestes ichneumon, has no Pleistocene record in Europe. Consequently, it has been suggested that this animal was introduced to the Iberian Peninsula by the Arabs, who employed it for eliminating rodents and reptiles, as in the case of the genet, Genetta genetta. Here we describe a subfossil mongoose skull from the Cave of Nerja, southern Spain, which has been AMS dated 885 ± 40 years BP. This specimen constitutes the oldest record of mongooses in Europe, providing evidence that these animals were introduced during historical times in the South of the Iberian Peninsula.     

Slavery discourse before the Restoration: The Barbary coast,Justinian's Digest,and Hobbes's political theory

Seventeenth-century natural-law philosophers participated in colonizing and slave-trading companies, yet they discussed slavery as an abstraction. This dispassionate approach is commonly explained with the “distance thesis” that the practice of slavery was at some remove from Northwest Europe. I contest the thesis, with a specific focus on pre-Restoration English discourse and Hobbes's political theory. By laying out the salient context — English experience of Barbary-coast slavery and an inherited neo-Roman intellectual frame — I argue, first, that slavery was hardly a distant phenomenon and, second, that Hobbes's discussion of slavery expressed ideas familiar in ordinary discourse. The conclusion contrasts the English neo-Roman outlook with Spanish neo-Aristotelianism.     

Language and nation‐building in Israel: Hebrew and its rivals*

Abstract. The problem of language preceded the founding of Israel. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of political Zionism was accompanied by a revival of Hebrew. In the early years of Jewish resettlement in Palestine, Hebrew slowly emerged as the popular language, a compromise between the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European immigrants and the Arabic or Ladino current among many Middle Eastern Jews. After World War I, as educational institutions proliferated, the challenge of French and German as languages of instruction was blocked by teachers' strikes. With the establishment of the state and the massive influx of Jewish displaced persons, mostly speakers of Yiddish, that language, regarded as a potential threat to the primacy of Hebrew, was systematically fought by the country's political and cultural elite. Today, the position of Hebrew as the national language of Israel is secure. English, however, has been asserting its influence in an increasingly postindustrial and globalised society.     

Slavery discourse before the Restoration: The Barbary coast, Justinian's Digest, and Hobbes's political theory

Seventeenth-century natural-law philosophers participated in colonizing and slave-trading companies, yet they discussed slavery as an abstraction. This dispassionate approach is commonly explained with the “distance thesis” that the practice of slavery was at some remove from Northwest Europe. I contest the thesis, with a specific focus on pre-Restoration English discourse and Hobbes's political theory. By laying out the salient context — English experience of Barbary-coast slavery and an inherited neo-Roman intellectual frame — I argue, first, that slavery was hardly a distant phenomenon and, second, that Hobbes's discussion of slavery expressed ideas familiar in ordinary discourse. The conclusion contrasts the English neo-Roman outlook with Spanish neo-Aristotelianism.     

The Aims of Knowledge: Emile Durkheim's Critique of American Pragmatism

The lectures on American pragmatism given by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in 1913 in Paris were first published in French in 1955 and finally translated into English and published in 1983 as Pragmatism and Sociology. For obvious reasons they have attracted considerable attention from philosophers and sociologists, especially the latter, in both continental Europe and the English speaking world. Durkheim's motives in giving the lectures have been scrutinized, his interpretations of the pragmatists widely discussed and his criticisms of William James, John Dewey, and F. S. C. Schiller have met with mixed receptions. However, after years of scholarly discourse on his motives, interpretations and criticisms, there is no common agreement on the significance and meaning of Pragmatism and Sociology. We briefly address the disagreement over Durkheim's motives in the introductory section before turning to our interpretation in the body of the article. There we focus on his criticisms of the pragmatists’ views on the aims and nature of knowledge, which is a classic confrontation between French rationalism à la Durkheim and American pragmatism of the James/Dewey variant.     

人文地理学视角下的国外饮食文化研究进展

随着人文地理学的文化转向,以及跨学科的研究趋势,有关饮食、饮食文化体系和饮食活动的研究成为了地理学的研究对象之一。人文地理学视角下国外饮食文化研究主要集中在饮食的象征意义、饮食的文化经济、饮食的文化政治以及饮食与认同的相关研究四个方面。而国外的饮食文化研究趋势主要表现在(1)强调饮食全球化和跨国现象及其带来的影响;(2)关注饮食的意义以及人、饮食、物质环境和社会之间关系的探讨;(3)从探讨饮食和饮食文化本身的地理学研究,转向对饮食空间问题的探讨。在此基础上,从人地关系、跨地方以及文化政治三个方面对人文地理学视角下国内饮食文化研究提出了展望。     

Colonial Dreams and Nightmares: British and French Perceptions of Republican Policies in Spanish Morocco (1931–1936)

Historians’ continuing interest in the origins of the Spanish Civil War has recently extended to the colonial policies of the Spanish Second Republic in Morocco, a relatively unexplored issue in previous decades, which has informed new approaches to the military uprising of July 1936. Foreign sources and archives, however, have been generally overlooked in this context. This article claims that British and French delegates in Morocco made critical observations about republican reforms in Spanish Morocco, which have much to add to this debate. They raised questions regarding the continuity of republican policies in Morocco and the anti-republican attitudes within the Army of Africa. They also challenged conventional knowledge concerning the difficulties encountered by alternative colonial projects in Morocco. In the end, their reports not only questioned metropolitan options but also anticipated the attitudes of the British and French governments, vis-à-vis the military rebellion.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Arabic and Islamic Themes: Historical, Educational and Literary Studies. By A. L. Tibawi.
Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World. By Jean Gibran and Kahlil Gibran.
The Classical Heritage In Islam. By Franz Rosenthal.
Islamic Historiography: The Histories of Mas'ūdi. By Tarif Khalidi.
Islamic History A. D. 600–750 (A. H. 132): A New Interpretation. By M. A. Shaban.
The 'Abbāsid Revolution. By M. A. Shaban.
A History of Islamic Sicily. By Aziz Ahmad.
The Zirids of Granada. By Andrew Handler.
The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe. By Norman Daniel.
A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730. Edited by M. A. Cook.
Gurtaf Raquette and Qasim Akhun's Letters to Kamil Effendi. Ethnological and Folkloristic Materials from Southern Sinkiang. Edited and translated with explanatory notse by Gunner Jarring.     

Beyond the ration: sharing and scrounging on the western front

The assumption to date has been that military provisioning was an unmitigated success for the British Army of the First World War; a judgement not reflected in the accounts of many of the rank and file soldiers on the Western Front. The men were often disappointed not merely by shortfalls, but also by rations that, though high in calories, failed to tempt the palate or reflect the civilian meals that had shaped their eating preferences. Whether driven by hunger or boredom, supplementing the official diet was a regular occupation for the men, through parcels from home, visits to the canteens or less legitimate means. Scrounging opportunities ranged from apples scrumped in a French orchard and an opportunistic raid on a chicken coop, to the pilfering of army stores. This article demonstrates the extent of the role played by this extra food in the men's diet and explores the significance of the way in which it was obtained and consumed. Whatever the source of the food, its even-handed division was a subject repeatedly referenced in the soldiers' diaries, letters, and memoirs. The sharing of food between pals in a just and proper fashion re-created, to some small degree, a microcosm of an ordered, civilized world in the ranks.     

Spain and the Partition Treaties (1697–1700)

This study takes an analytical approach to the diplomatic strategy adopted by the Spanish monarchy in confronting the challenge it faced associated with the Partition Treaties that were signed by Louis XIV, William III and the United Provinces in 1698 and 1700. By consulting Spanish sources to complete the understanding of the diplomatic process, this study analyses the political action that Spain mobilized in its defence around 1700 and describes the evolution of Spain's foreign policy as the product of the mistrust that had developed between the main powers of Europe. This mistrust was politically answered by Madrid with Carlos II's last will and other planned measures to ensure the viability of the project that contained a turning point in the policy underlying the alliances of the monarchy. Although, like that of the other powers, Spain's manoeuvrability was restricted, this study concludes that Spain was able to create policy action plans and rationally implement them; moreover, the dynamics resulting from the negotiation and signing of the Partition Treaties led the monarchy to oppose them at all costs and naturally led to the choice of a French heir as its only solution.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Crisis in the Arabian Gulf. An Independent Iraqi View.
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century.
The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims.
Searching for Solace: A Biography of 'Abdullah Ytlsuf All Interpreter of the Qur'W.
Short History of Modern Arabic Literature.