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<p> In March 2016, the Syrian crisis entered its fifth year in war with no end in sight. While current strategies utilized by international aid agencies to address this humanitarian crisis have focused on short-term emergency relief, future considerations on its long-term management are lacking. Due in fact to people's pressing needs in war-torn areas, not enough development programs, plans and research on how to incorporate sustainable strategies has been placed into the management of the crisis. With particular focus on the role of developmental and relief aid workers in the management of the crisis in Syria, this paper aims to answer two questions: (1) how does one manage relief and recovery efforts looking towards the long term in a context of such short term pressing needs? (2) What role does management and lack thereof play in the subject of the effects of the Syrian war? In an effort to address these questions, interviews were conducted on 8 individuals from various professional backgrounds (i.e. medical, development, local councils etc...) who had significant field contributions/experiences in Syria. In addition, a literature review was carried out to examine existing research on the topics of sustainable development and development aid. Findings show that a shift is taking place in the frameworks of how aid workers are responding to the needs of people in the war. The aid system is starting to focus on instilling self-reliance, resilience and stability into communities, and assisting people with the tools to manage sustainable lives. However, it requires much needed management to achieve the desired sustainable outcomes. Moreover, this field still requires further research and considerations. A bitter reality of this context is that the war is political in nature and attempts for sustainable practices cannot serve as resolution to the situation but as means to restore dignity and livelihood back into the victims of a war.</p><p>

This dissertation examines the representation of space in the fiction of seven members of the sixties generation in Egypt. Focusing upon the novels of Jamal al-Ghitani, Muhammad al-Bisati, 'Abd al-Hakim Qasim, Baha' Tahir Yahya Tahir 'Abdallah, Ibrahim Aslan, and Sun'allah Ibrahim, I contend that the representation of urban, rural, and exilic space is a means to trace the social, political, and economic changes of the post-colonial period in Egypt. This exploration is framed by the theoretical work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre and seeks to show that the "spatial shift" that has occurred in the humanities and social sciences can enrich the understanding of the contribution of this literary generation. Emerging at a time of instability and uncertainty, the writers of jil al-sittinat (the sixties generation) moved away from the realist techniques of their predecessors, displaying new innovations in their work, in an ongoing struggle to convey their changing experience of reality. This shift away from realism can be registered in the representation of urban, rural, and exilic space and speaks to the writers' growing disillusionment with the post-colonial project in Egypt, in the years following the 1952 Revolution. Chapter One traces the emergence of the writers of the sixties generation onto the literary scene in Egypt, presenting both the aesthetic innovations with which they were associated, and the socio-economic and political context of which they were seen to be both a part and an expression. This chapter also pays attention to the "anxiety over categorization" that the appearance of this generation seems to have caused, an issue that has been overlooked by critics in the field, and which reveals a great deal about how power and authority is negotiated within the literary field in Egypt. Chapter Two moves to the focus upon literary texts, exploring the representation of the urban space of Cairo in the novels of Ibrahim, al-Ghitani, and Aslan. The three novels reveal a move away from the realist depictions of the popular quarters of Cairo, or of the alley as a cross-section of society; the novelists represent "new" spaces within the capital, or "old" spaces in new ways, showing the way in which the relationship between the individual and the state is based upon surveillance and control, providing virulent critiques of the regimes of Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir and Anwar al-Sadat. Chapter Three turns to an examination of the Egyptian countryside as it appears in the novels of Qasim and 'Abdallah, arguing that the move away from socialist realism resulted in the re-imagination of the village as mystical or mythic space. This chapter places these novels within the context of the agricultural reforms intended to improve the lives of the rural population, and that dominated political discussions in the decade of the fifties and sixties. Both novelists present villages that are separate from the rest of the country, calling into question the possibility of revolutionary change. The fourth and final chapter ends with the move beyond the borders of the Egyptian nation; the novels of Tahir and al-Bisati signal a shift to Europe and the Arab Gulf which appear as the spaces of political and economic dislocation. These novels are read in light of the transformations that resulted in migration, and that call into question both national and regional forms of belonging. This dissertation expands the understanding of the literary contribution of the sixties generation by bringing together the discussion of stylistic innovation and thematic preoccupation, while also insisting upon an approach that reads the production of the generation against the socio-economic and political changes that took place in the decades after their emergence on the literary scene.

This dissertation examines the representations of late Egyptian President Gamal `Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) in Egyptian literature and film. It focuses on how the historical character of Nasser has emerged in the Egyptian imaginary--novel, short stories, autobiographies, and films. Rather than engaging in historical arguments about the deeds and legacy of Nasser, my dissertation makes a case for literature and art as alternative archive that questions, erases, distorts, and adds to the official history of Nasser. Employing the famous Aristotelian differentiation between the historian and the poet, and building on Hayden White's argument about the relationship between history and fiction, I argue that the meaning(s) of Nasser for Egyptians must be sought less in recorded history than in fictional narratives. Unlike history, literature and film give voice to marginalized, voiceless witnesses of society. By creating fictional characters that interact with Nasser, these works constitute a space of knowledge, an invaluable window onto the ways people see, personalize, and negotiate their relationships with the President. As this dissertation shows, Nasser constitutes a perfect site for literary and cinematic approaches. Largely seen as the Arab world's most influential political figure of the past century, Nasser was a larger-than-life character, a legend whose image, voice, ideals, accomplishments, deeds and misdeeds, and defeats have been shaping Egyptian and Arabic life to date. Historians, however, often recognize the complexity of Nasser's character, his contradictory traits, and his sometime inexplicable decisions. Particularly ambiguous is how the relationship between Nasser and Egyptians was personalized and often romanticized, transforming a political leader into an attentive audience, a heartthrob lover, and an enigmatic father. Herein lies a major contribution of this dissertation. I argue that history falls short on capturing the centrality of Nasser in Egyptian life. As will be demonstrated, Nasser emerges as a site for plural interpretations, an instance where narratives compete over the meaning of the past. In other words, there is no monolithic discourse on Nasser, but rather various, at times contradictory views that fragment the man into multiple "Nassers." The historical paths and developments which the literary and cinematic Nasser has traversed bespeaks to the shifts in ideals, hopes, and realities that swept the Egyptian society over the past fifty years.

This study offers a dual aspect bridging Western and Eastern literary traditions, specifically the tragic-heroic literature of the British Renaissance and the prevailing Iranian tradition. This study demonstrates that the concept of the hero in both Western and Eastern traditions is an evolving one. Primarily, this work treats the Iranian heroic tradition. The several fantastic heroes selected for analysis have since been glorified in prayers, epics, novels, and in a tradition of sacred dramas, so much so as to appear almost legendary and mythological today. This paper suggests that these heroes developed in direct response to the most dire of human suffering, and miseries. This gradual development of the concept provides one kind of insight into the changing subtleties of mind and world view of each generation as traced through the three principal periods of Iran's literary tradition. The Pre-Islamic period includes an analysis of the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the Iranian national epic. The first chapter investigates several of the most significant stories and their prominant heroes. Chapter two further crystalizes the evolutionary thesis of this study by illustrating its contribution to the process of hero creation and emphasizes heroic elements drawn from Ta'ziyeh, the passion play tradition. Chapter three, the Modern period, analyzes a vastly popular tragic literary and film hero, Shir Mammad of Tangsir by Sadeq Chuback. Finally, the study projects a description of the next most likely phase in the evolution of the hero concept. Part II concludes the study with an exemplum of the central thesis in the form of an original play in English by the author. The plot of this original drama is based upon an ancient and popular tale, The Story of Sohrab and Rostam. Reflected in this new version of the ancient tale, the reader will find a new definition of the hero which expresses some of the aspirations of the contemporary Iranian mind. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-08, Section: A, page: 2690. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

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In the tenth century, a confluence of two unrelated events shaped the Twelver Shia community in Baghdad: the Occultation of the Twelfth Imam in 939/329 and the takeover of Baghdad in 945 by the Buyid princes, who were largely tolerant towards their Shia subjects. Twelver intellectual life flourished during this era, led by the exegetes who are the subject of this dissertation. Chief among them were al-Shaykh al-Tusi and al-Sharif al-Murtada, who - along with many of their contemporaries - comprised a "Baghdad school" of Twelver intellectuals. This dissertation analyzes the Qur'anic commentaries (tafsir) written by this core group of medieval Twelver exegetes, most of whom lived and wrote in Baghdad, although others - such as al-Ayyashi - remained on the margins.

The present dissertation examines the legacy and contribution of Yaḥyā b. Sharaf Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Nawawī (d. 631-76/1233-77), who attained a reputation in Muslim jurisprudence as the mainstay of the doctrines of the Shāfiʿī school of law. This status was constructed during a time in which the Muslim community needed to anchor legal authority in an eponymous figure given that the ruling powers did not produce or promulgate law. Eschewing intellectual idealism, pragmatic considerations demanded certain measures that were in keeping with day-to-day legal reality, i.e., structured authority and a sense of determinacy in law. Al-Nawawī's juristic legacy suited these requirements and in fact served well those Muslims who had chosen to settle ultimate legal authority on al-Shāfiʿī, the supposed founder of the school of law named after him. As demonstrated in his major, substantive legal works, al-Nawawī effectively reduced the inherent plurality of methods of reasoning (ṭarīqa) and legal opinions among jurists, a situation that had often prevented jurists from discovering the authoritative solution to a given case. Al-Nawawī's achievement was to investigate the existing doctrine of the school and extract from them a set of canonical doctrines as followed by the Shāfiʿī school of law. This selection of canonical doctrine in turn became the primary set of rules by which jurists were enabled to discover authoritative legal solutions to cases, and at the same time provided a road map for further development of legal doctrine under the skilful guidance of later jurists. Furthermore, in addition to providing later jurists with a greater sense of certainty, al-Nawawī's juristic project also sought to vindicate the Shāfiʿī school of law as the most faithful to the legal tradition of the Prophet. By virtue of these practical innovations, al-Nawawī became an extended axis of authority, who managed to reconnect later Shāfiʿite jurists with the authority of al-Shāfiʿī and the legal tradition of his school of law. / La présente thèse porte sur l'héritage et la contribution de Yaḥyā b. Sharaf Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Nawawī (d. 631-76/1233-77), qui a acquis une réputation dans la jurisprudence musulmane en tant que pilier des doctrines de l'école de droit de Chāfiʿī. Ce statut a été établi à l'époque où il était nécessaire pour la communauté musulmane d'ancrer l'autorité judiciaire dans un personnage éponyme étant donné que le pouvoir en place n'avait pas établi ou promulgué de loi. Évitant l'idéalisme intellectuel, les considérations pragmatiques exigeaient des mesures cohérentes avec la réalité juridique quotidienne, à savoir, une autorité structurée et un sentiment de détermination dans la loi. L'héritage juridique d'al-Nawawī répondait à ces exigences et servait aussi bien les musulmans qui avaient choisi d'établir l'ultime autorité judiciaire sur al-Chāfiʿī, le supposé fondateur de l'école de droit qui porte son nom. Comme il l'a prouvé dans ses principaux ouvrages juridiques de fond, al-Nawawī a effectivement réduit la multiplicité des avis juridiques parmi les juristes, une situation qui les a souvent empêchés de découvrir la solution faisant autorité dans certaines affaires. La réussite d'al-Nawawī a été d'enquêter sur la doctrine actuelle de l'école et d'en extraire un ensemble de doctrines canoniques suivies par l'école de droit de Chāfiʿī. Cette sélection d'une doctrine canonique est devenue à son tour le premier ensemble de règles grâce auxquelles les juristes ont permis de découvrir des solutions juridiques faisant autorité pour certaines affaires et de fournir en même temps une feuille de route pour le développement ultérieur d'une doctrine juridique, sous la direction sage et éclairée de juristes plus contemporains. Par ailleurs, en plus de fournir un plus grand sentiment de certitude aux juristes plus contemporains, le projet juridique d'al-Nawawī a également cherché à montrer que l'école de droit de Chāfiʿī était la plus fidèle à la tradition juridique du Prophète. En vertu de ces innovations pratiques, al-Nawawī est devenu un pilier prolongé de l'autorité, qui est parvenu à rassembler plus tard les juristes Chāfiʿī avec l'autorité de al-Chāfiʿī et la tradition juridique de son école de droit.