Commenting on his novel Riḥlat Gandhī al-Ṣaghīr (The Journey of Little Gandhi), Elias Khoury has made two conflicting assertions. At a gathering held to discuss the book shortly after it was published, Khoury reaffirmed his political and ideological stance in relation to the war in Lebanon. While acknowledging that Gandhi, the protagonist, is a victim of violence and poverty, Khoury said that he regards war as a necessity, a passage to a higher and nobler aim:

I am not one of those who preach against violence, nor do I claim that I am against the war.

I have participated in the war, and I remain true to my original choice, and loyal to my comrades who died the death of martyrs. I refuse to go along with the popular “anti-war” fad. At the same time, I remain faithful to the truth and the goal for which we started the war: the creation of another more just and democratic society⃜ [U]nfortunately, we have not succeeded, but at least, it is our duty to tell the truth and… what actually happened.

The Lebanese war revealed man to me. It revealed to me that there was no end to evil. Man's capacity to suffer and cause suffering is endless too. War is the cloth which weaves relationships amongst men and nations. When I write, “From your absence comes the evening,” I express the anguish of losing my beloved. This anguish is similar to that caused by war. Fear and anguish provoked by war have also at their root jealousy, desire, ambition, money, success. What is specific about war is that it strips down man and shows him in his absolute nakedness.

When Rashīd al-Daʿīf (henceforth, plain text) expressed himself in this fashion in an interview in 1989, several of his novels and poems had already appeared in Beirut. His original voice had started to spread in the intellectual circles of Lebanon and abroad. Al-Daʿif's originality lies precisely in this stripping of human beings, feelings, and things down to absolute nakedness in the midst of a war that tore apart the artist'snation. He expresses himself in a language stripped to its bare essentials, as well, breaking away from the traditional Arabic mode, in which rhetoric and lyricism dominated.

The poet known as Bâkî (d. 1600), the “King of Poets” of Sultan Suleiman I (1520–66), is generally acknowledged as the leading figure of the so-called “classical age” of Ottoman poetry (roughly from the mid-15th to the beginning of the 17th century), while the poet known as Nâʾilî (d. 1666) was a pivotal figure in the break between this classical age and the “post-classical age,” roughly the early modern era extending from 1600 to 1800. On the broadest level this break was signaled by a change in the use of metaphorical language. This paper will contrast the treatment of one series of metaphors common in the lyric gazels within the divâns of both poets, although further examples could be found within other poetic genres, especially the panegyric kasîde. It will also attempt to interpret the significance of these metaphors in Nâʾilî's poetry and to demonstrate their distance from the usage of the classical Ottoman period, exemplified by Bâkî.

The rise and spread of Islamist political movements have been topics of focal concern for scholars and analysts in recent decades. Since Richard Mitchell's seminal work on the Muslim Brotherhood, a plethora of writers have analyzed the attributes of both Sunni and Shiʿa revivalist movements and the policies of Arab regimes and the West toward the Islamist phenomenon. Yet scant attention has been paid to the reactions generated within the larger Islamic community toward the Islamist groups and their militant offshoots. One such unnoticed source of reaction to political Islamism is the nebulous confraternity of Sufi orders (ṭuruq) whose mysticism and esoteric beliefs and practices have set them apart from the exoteric revivalism and political activism of the Islamist societies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its many affiliates.

Against a historical background marked by “the most radical secular revolution of any state in the Muslim world,” the Turkish state over the past decade has faced an Islamic fundamentalist challenge to its secular basis. The Turkish version of radical Islam, like that elsewhere in the Middle East, has asserted itself effectively in all aspects and at all levels of society, making a stark contrast between the sixty years of the republic and the period since 1980. It is not surprising, therefore, that the causes for the emergence of Islamic political radicalism, its nature, and its possible effects on the system have aroused scholarly interest.