The wave of revolutionary uprisings in a series of Arab countries in 2010/11 also encouraged a number of minorities in the MENA region to take to the streets and raise their voices against discrimination and marginalization. Parts of Kuwait’s stateless Bidun were among the subalterns who now began to call for their civil rights as long-term residents of the country. The protests began in 2011, were upheld sporadically until 2014, and resurfaced in mid-2019 following the suicide of a young Bidun. After a brief look at the historical background and context, this contribution will focus on the mobilization and activities of pro-Bidun organizations in recent years (2011–2014/15, 2018–19/20) and ask whether there are signs of a broader alliance between Bidun and Kuwaiti citizens to counter the increasingly authoritarian, anti-democratic governmental policies. It will be argued that as from 2018/19, a rapprochement of positions can be discerned. However, the year 2020 brought a new setback.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the political trajectory of changes in Saudi Arabia during the reign of Prince Muhammad Ibn Salman and the effects it has on the traditional and conservative values of the Saudi kingdom. The point of reference for the prince’s reform policy is the Vision 2030 project of changes announced in 2016, which aims to maintain a balance between modernization, including economic reforms, privatization and cultural initiatives, on the one hand, and Islam and political authoritarianism on the other. The structure of my article is built around the hypothesis that assumes that the reformist policy of Muhammad Ibn Salman is aimed at improving the economic and social conditions of Saudi Arabia in order to obtain social legitimization and loyalty and in the long term to ensure regime survival and its stability. I have posed three research questions which are as follows: 1) Can traditionalism and modernization be combined? 2) What is the impact of the authoritarian regime on modernization policy? 3) How has the relationship between the political authority and the Wahhabi establishment changed?

In his contribution, the author discusses the Yakut forms in the travelogue of the physician, botanist and geologist Johann Redowsky (1.1.1774–8.2.1807). The travelogue was recorded on the occasion of Count Yurii Aleksandrovich Golovkin’s diplomatic mission to China. Redowsky accompanied Golovkin representing the Academy of Sciences. The travel diary documents Redovsky’s journey from Irkutsk to Kamchatka in 1806–1807 and contains much ethnographic information about Tungus and Yakuts. Redowsky’s material is interesting because it contains lexemes that are not found elsewhere, or at least not in the form noted in the diary.

This paper comments on two Mesopotamian bricks belonging to collections of the Asia and Pacific Museum and the National Museum in Warsaw. Both bricks bear cuneiform inscriptions. The first was fashioned during the reign of the Ur king Amar-Suen (c. 2046–2038 BC) while the second is to be dated to the reign of the Neo-Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (858–824 BC). They commemorate building projects commissioned by these two Mesopotamian kings.

This paper is based on examining a limited number of Arab–Berber sources whose main objective is to highlight that the Muslim West (Maghreb – al-Andalus) constituted a multilingual geographical space. First, I will look at the question of the Almoravids and the mastery of languages in a context of power. Then, I will raise the question of the linguistic skills of the sovereigns in al-Andalus. After this, I will give some details on the Berber language in the Marinid Maghreb. Finally, I will propose some brief conclusions of a provisional nature, emphasizing the interest of the study of linguistic uses and cultural contacts in the Muslim West in the Middle Ages.

The article presents the two known Poland-related statements by the Hungarian Orientalist Arminius Vámbéry (1832–1913), who explained his opinion on the possible independence of a Polish state twice – in 1898 and 1906. In 1898, he was interviewed by the Budapest correspondent of the Kraków-based Polish newspaper Nowa Reforma. In 1906, he answered an international survey by the cultural journal Krytyka, based in Kraków as well. Vámbéry’s answer to the question of whether Poland should gain independence once again was positive. Still, he justified the necessity of Polish independence not with the interests of the Polish people but with Europe’s wish to be protected from the Russian Empire: to Vámbéry’s mind, an independent Poland should serve as Europe’s bulwark against the Russian enemy. Vámbéry’s fear of the Russian Empire might be in line with his previous views on the Great Game, the rivalry between the Russian Empire and Great Britain on influence in Central Asia, and the European public opinion at the end of the 19th century.

The Arab Republic of Egypt – the most important Middle Eastern Arabic country, is one of the oldest countries in the world, believed by some to be the cradle of civilization. Patriotic songs are very popular in it. They can be heard in times of peace and when the country may be facing some difficulties. They are shown on television, played on the radio, broadcast during official ceremonies, and used in social media, coffee shops, and weddings. In recent years, there has been something of a phenomenon around songs titled Taḥyā Maṣr. Notwithstanding the main messages – for Egypt to “live long” and show the artist’s love for their country – other messages and differences in how the singer expresses their love can be found. An analysis of six songs released in the years 2013–2018 under the same title, Taḥyā Maṣr, will be presented in this article. Any clear distinctions between them and the reasons for their being made under the same title will be shown.

In and around the 13th century, two eastern authors describe the island of Sicily from different perspectives but with the common purpose of linking it to the Arab and Islamic world it had belonged to. Both describe the place with varied images which combine the real physical aspects with fantasy, and which show natural landscapes, both urban and rural, dominated by the presence of the great volcano. The study of this island using its landscapes as a key allows us to investigate the ideological processes of the authors who describe it. Al-Qazwīnī and Al-Harawī undertake a literary itinerary in which the images of idealization and Islamization or sanctification of the island are crystallised.

The purpose of this article is to present and count the North Korean population living in Beijing. The North Korean people in Beijing do not constitute a united community but rather citizens from the same country who are in transit in the Chinese capital. The spatial dimensions of residence of North Koreans in Beijing and the issue of North Korean refugees based in the Chinese capital are emphasized in this paper.

This is a preliminary analysis of issues resulting from comparing two images present in the Indian tradition, in their Buddhist (‘device’ guarding the relics of the Buddha) and Epic (‘device’ guarding the Elixir of Immortality) variants. Both images are located within the range of the notions of the sacred. That complicates but does not prevent the reconstruction of ideological messages directed to their prospective recipients. They are illustrated by the fate of the ‘holy substance’ obtained after breaking into and destroying both devices. The first one sanctifies the principles of free access and free participation, the second – of inherited privilege and inherited exclusion.

In recent years, a number of Iraqi intellectuals have participated in a discourse on pluralism in Iraq that includes a call to address the traumatic collective experiences of the country’s ethno-religious minorities. Such a confrontation with the “wounded memory” of these minority groups – along with a rewriting of the modern history of Iraq to incorporate their stories – would be an important step in creating a new collective memory, one of cultural pluralism, that could lead to a true coexistence among all Iraqis. Since it is very difficult to carry out this process due to deep sectarian divisions within Iraqi society, literature provides an alternative cultural field for the deconstruction and reformulation of existing “master narratives”. The purpose of the article is to examine literary representations of the “wounded memory” of minorities in Iraq. The examples used here are related to the 1915–1916 Armenian genocide in the former Ottoman Empire and the 1933 massacre of Assyrians in the northern Iraqi village of Simele. They can be found in the following novels written in Arabic by Iraqi authors of Christian origin: At-Tuyūr al-‘amyā’ (The Blind Birds, 2016) by Laylā Qasrānī, Sawāqī al-qulūb (The Streams of Hearts, 2005) by In‘ām Kaǧaǧī, ‘Irāqī fī Bārīs: sīra dātiyya riwā’iyya (An Iraqi in Paris: An Autobiographical Novel, 2005) by Samū‘īl Šam‘ūn, and Fī intizār Faraǧ Allāh al-Qahhār (Waiting for Farag Allah al-Qahhar, 2006) by Sa‘dī al-Mālih. This article is divided into three sections. An introduction is devoted to the aforementioned discourse. The second and solely descriptive section consists of three subsections focusing on literary characters who experience and/ or witness the tragic events and/or tell others about them. The third section contains concluding remarks and refers to several concepts formulated by researchers in cultural memory studies.

This article provides an isnād cum matn analysis of a hadīt transmitted by Hudayfa Ibn Asīd describing how an angel visits the unborn in the womb. During the visit, several things are predestined. The hadīt has a prominent position at the beginning of the chapter on predestination in the hadīt collection of Muslim. The article shows, how the arrangement of the material in that opening section, which has to be dated to the 9th century CE, had the effect of closing a debate whether the individual’s destiny in the hereafter is predestined.

This paper describes a unique memoir written by a soldier about his experiences during the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905. The memoir is written in the Krimchak ethnolect of Crimean Tatar using Hebrew letters. This memoir changes our notion about the Krimchaks as a group of quiet, religious people, indifferent to their surroundings. The memoir’s author, Menahem Berman, appears as a person who takes an active part in different historical events of his stormy life, both in peacetime in Odessa before the war and after he was called up and during his journey through Siberia to fight in the war. He describes life in field conditions during the war in Manchuria and his life after the war in captivity in Japan. He is an observant man, taking notice of all that is around him and recording all the details and his impression of them. In this paper the content of the memoir will be discussed, and the quality of the manuscript is described. In a linguistical overview, the Krimchak ethnolect used in the memoir is shown to have an Oghuz grammatical form prevailing over the Kypchak form, and hence the ethnolect can be regarded as a patois of the basic southern dialect of Crimean Tatar. This paper also presents 100 initial sentences of the text in transcription and with translation and glossary.

Tunisian Arabic, in addition to words inherited and borrowed from Arabic, has a considerable number of loanwords taken from such languages as Berber, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, French, and English. The main purpose of this paper is the inquiry into the words of French origin, since it is from French that Tunisian Arabic has borrowed a considerable amount of loanwords, a process that continues especially in the fields of technology, medicine, and internet communication. Although French loanwords have already been subjected to various and even detailed investigations, it does not seem that this problem has been sufficiently elucidated, in particular from a theoretical point of view. Several proposals for different approaches to French loanwords in Tunisian are offered here for consideration.