The version of ‘‘Two Eclipses’’ reproduced here is a modern English translation of a poem written by a Spaniard in Hebrew a millennium ago. Any translator of such a poem has to make a number of decisions and compromises in making it accessible to a modern reader while retaining essential qualities of the original. One…
Tag: Spain
Two Eclipses by Shmuel Hanagid: Summary
Lines 1–15 The speaker in ‘‘Two Eclipses’’ begins by addressing an unseen friend who appears to still be sleeping in the morning. He urges the friend to wake up, to wake up the dawn, and to look at the sky, which has the mottled appearance of the skin of a leopard. He notes that the…
Umar Faruq Abdallah’s and Tariq Ramadan’s views on the relationship between culture and religion in Islam
One of the misconceptions in the Occidental discourse on Islam is that the latter is a monolithic entity. Islam has spread far and wide across the planet. It has a significant presence from China in the East to Spain and Northern Africa toward the West. And through this broad range, there is considerable diversity and…
The most important considerations in the U.S. government’s decision to go to war with Spain in 1898
The tariff imposed by the American government, commonly referred to as the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894 was an important contributing factor to the Spanish-American war of 1898. The conditions imposed by this tariff acutely damaged the economy of Cuba, which was then a Spanish colony. As the political and economic condition of Cuba was deteriorating,…
A Socio-Political Critique of Barn Burning by William Faulkner
The main focus of the story is on the moral dilemmas confronting the young boy Sarty, who is torn apart between his loyalty to his violent and anti-social father and the tendency to abide by the norms of the society at large. But, around that scaffold, Faulkner builds his statements depicting serious discords within the…
Forces behind English overseas colonization in the late 16th and 17th centuries
At its peak, the British Empire covered one-fifth of the globe and ruled 400 million subjects belonging to various religious and ethnic groups. It acted as the “centre of the world” for trade, communications, migrations and naval-military power. In other words, it had become the Empire on which “the sun never set”. 1 The foundation…