Al-Mahdi - Gestalt och budskap : En litteraturstudie jämförande sudanesisk Mahdi och indisk Mahdi inom islam

Followers of three world religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are waiting for the Messiah. Muslims are even waiting for aspiritual leader al-Mahdi. Two different persons claimed the title of al-Mahdi, at the end of the nineteenth century. Theyappeared almost at the same time, at the totally different places of the earth, with a completely different message and underthe rule of the British colonial power. The aim of the study is to compare the both religious figures, Mirza Ghulam Ahmadfrom India and Muhammad Ahmad from Sudan regarding their different messages, to illustrate the social, political andreligious factors that lead to the entirely different profile and image of these two men and how their organizations havedeveloped after their death up till today. The result shows that the Sudanese Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad claimed hisMahdiship in the year 1881. He became a political leader in a time when Sudan was under the rule of a colonial power. Hetook advantage of the religion for personal purposes and tried to liberate his native country Sudan. The contemporaryMuslim clergy criticized him for his claim because the content of the Hadith traditions did not support his claim ofMahdiship. He maintained his sole right for the interpretation of religion and of the laws of Sharia. He made changes even inthe chief pillars of Islam by asserting that Jehad with sword was more imperative than the pilgrimage journey to Mecca. Heasserted that the Prophet Muhammad himself had entrusted him to launch the holy war against the non-believers. He hadimmense ambitions which were never fulfilled since he suddenly died four years after his claim for Mahdiship, in June 1885.This day his followers are organized as a political party in Sudan with a modest roll in the Sudanese politics. The IndianMahdi Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed in 1889 to be Mahdi, Mujaddid, Muhaddas, Messiah and a Prophet at a time of socialand political peace, though Islam as a religion was firmly pushed by the Hindu and Christian missionaries. He had no politicalambitions at all and was utterly loyal to the British colonial power. His mission was to crush the Cross and to demonstrateIslam’s excellence over all the religions of the world through overwhelming arguments. He proclaimed that Jesus was humanand a Prophet and not the son of God. Jesus survived from the cross and died a natural death after he had lived for manyyears. Ahmad claimed that God had commanded him to put stop to the religious wars. The contemporary Muslim clergyblamed him for being an imposter, melancholic and hypochondriac who had self invented the divine revelations. He died year1908, nineteen years after his claim and the communion he found is established today in more than hundred countries of theworld. Reasons for the breakdown of mission of the Sudanese Mahdi were that his objectives were political and he challengedthe colonial power with the sword. Another decisive factor was his sudden death merely four years after the beginning of hismission. Reasons for the success of Indian Mahdi were that his objectives were purely religious and he was wholly loyal to theforeign government. He survived nineteen years after the beginning of his mission which made it possible for him to create acommunion based on solid grounds. His followers continued on the same path and never engaged in local politics where everthey lived. For further studies it will be of great interest to study the life of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and objectively examine thearguments he presented in support of his divine appointment. Furthermore it is enriching to study the organization andactivities of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community to explore if they are in accordance with the basic principles of Ahmad.

Flerspråkighet i ett globaliserat samhälle : uppfattningar om minoritetsspråket som framtidsresurs

Multilingualism in a globalized society: The minority language as a future resource In this article the author investigates how the globalization of society is used as a reference in the discussion of future opportunities among minority language speaking youths in Sweden. A spatial typology of four different types of societies are constructed, the national, the multicultural, the diasporic and the transnational society, all giving the expression of different levels of globalization. These are used as layers of reference put upon the empirical data, functioning as a raster on a screen. The result is a pattern of expressions in three societal dimensions, the economic, the social and the cultural dimension. The findings of the investigation show that the minority language as a future resource of opportunities is anchored in all four societal types and in all three dimensions. In the empirical data (the youths interviewed) the ability of anchoring (finding stories, opportunities etc.) is less frequent when it comes to the diasporic and the transnational as a foundation for opportunity and more frequent when it comes to the national and the multicultural.

Den ofrånkomliga nationalismen

The necessary nationalism This article deals with the role of fictional narratives, especially the modern novel, in the formation of national identities. Naguib Mafouz’s Cairo trilogy is referred to as an example of how literature may both serve as the mirror image of national identities and as an agency in their formation. The sense of community attachment to a modern state is ”thinner” than to a family or traditional village and/or tribe, though no less vital. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s concept of ”survival unit,” Benedict Anderson’s ”imagined communities” and recent studies in the field of comparative literature by Gregory Jusdanis and Azade Seyhan, this article argues for the necessity of the nation – in spite of its unfavourable chauvinistic reputation. This contention is discussed in relation to recent literary developments in Turkey and recent debates on nationhood in a Swedish context.

Teaching Intercultural Communication in Foreign Language Education through Video Conferencing

Since 1980s, Western linguists and specialists on second language acquisition have emphasized the importance of enhancing students’ intercultural communication competence in foreign language education. At the same time, the demand for intercultural communicative competence increased along with the advances of communication technology with its increasingly global reach and the process of globalization itself.In the field of distance language education, these changes have resulted in a shift of focus from the production and distribution of learning materials towards communication and learning as a social process, facilitated by various internet-based platforms. The current focus on learners interacting and communicating synchronously trough videoconferencing is known as the fourth generation of distance language education. Despite the fact that teaching of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) faces the same or even greater challenges as teaching other languages, the intercultural communication perspective is still quite a new trend in CFL and its implementation and evaluation are still under development. Moreover, the advocates of the new trends in CFL have so far focused almost exclusively on classroom-based courses, neglecting the distance mode of CFL and leaving it as an open field for others to explore. In this under-researched context, Dalarna University (Sweden), where I currently work, started to provide web-based courses of the Chinese language in 2007. Since 2010, the Chinese language courses have been available only in the distance form, using the same teaching materials as the previous campus-based courses. The textbooks used in both settings basically followed the functional nationalism approach. However, in order to catch up with the main trend of foreign-language education, we felt a need to implement the cross-cultural dimension into the distance courses as well. Therefore in 2010, a pilot study has been carried out to explore opportunities and challenges for implementing a cross-cultural perspective into existing courses and evaluating the effectiveness of this implementation based on the feedback of the students and on the experience of the teacher/researcher.

Europeisk familjelycka : Om användandet av familjemetaforen i EU

The re-unification of a family of nations: usages of the family metaphor in the EU This article analyses usages of the family metaphor in the EU. It starts up with a scrutiny of feminist theories of the nation-as-family metaphor. Introducing the concept of domopolitics, the author infers that the family, on the one hand, connotes to feelings of security and homelyness and, on the other hand, fears of the well-known, of immanent threats to in-group cohesion. The significance of the family metaphor in the EU rhetoric connects to a renewed emphasis on distinct values, principles and norms that balance the otherwise technocratic image of the EU. He further applies the nation-as-family metaphor to contemporary EU rhetoric. In the analysis, he infers that all three dimensions of the metaphor (ethnic, civil and hierarchic) are manifest in the EU political language making its use an enterprise that strives at moving beyond, but not completely away from the nation-state paradigm.

»Måtte också våra kapitalister vakna upp…« Svenska exportproblem i relation till marknaderna i Södra Afrika 1894–1908

De svenska exportsträvandena kring sekelskiftet 1900 har belysts i några studier. Trots det vet vi lite om hur de svenska varorna mottogs och vilka problem som uppstod när Sverige på allvar gav sig ut på den globala marknaden. Denna artikel syftar till att avhjälpa denna brist genom att lyfta fram svenska exportproblem i relation till marknaderna i Södra Afrika vid sekelskiftet 1900. Det huvudsakliga materialet i artikeln består av 27 rapporter som skrevs av en exportagent och fem handelsstipendiater. Vad berättade de om problemen och hur reagerade man i samtiden på vad de berättade? I rapporterna från Södra Afrika beskrivs en rad utmaningar som den svenska exportsektorn var tvungen att övervinna för att kunna konkurrera på marknaderna. Dessa utmaningar har i artikeln sorterats in i tre olika kategorier. Varje kategori består av ett större problemkomplex som utgår från orsaker respektive lösningar på problemen. De tre kategorierna är de marknadsekonomiska problemen, de organisatoriskaproblemen och de nationella varumärkesrelateradeproblemen. Under perioden 1894-1908 skedde det en viss förskjutning från att bara marknadsekonomiska problem betonas till att de organisatoriska och nationellt varumärkesrelaterade problemen framträder. Denna förskjutning sammanfaller med det ”nationella uppvaknandet” i Sverige och framväxten av en ny nationalism fokuserad på industrialisering och modern teknologi. I artikeln framkommer det även att de problem och lösningar som lyftes fram i rapporterna från Södra Afrika inte var unika på något vis. I tidskriften Svensk Export, som gavs ut av Sveriges Allmänna Exportförening, publicerades det många artiklar och rapporter – både svenska och utländska - i vilka likartade problem och lösningar presenterades. Det handlade till exempel om att rätta sig efter efterfrågan, att skicka kunniga personer som kunde undersöka marknaderna, att göra reklam, att trycka kataloger på försäljningsmarknadens språk, att förbättra exportorganisationen och att industriidkare borde slå sig samman och arbeta tillsammans i form av handelsbolag.