The cultural and linguistic policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran towards Afghanistan and Tajikistan Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan share twenty five centuries of political history, although nowadays they retain three distinct national identities. All their roots are related to Iranian religions such as Zoroastrianism as well as Persian literature, poetry and the Iranian culture of the Achaemenian empires and their successors. Nowadays, the official languages of these countries remain closely related to one another. Iran has attempted to boost its influence in the regions of Middle East, South and Central Asia and seeks to use its cultural and linguistic affinity to forge relations with other Persian-speaking countries. This factor is no less important than the religious aspect – Shia Islam, which is considered to have been the most important determinant of Iran’s foreign policy since 1979. The International Celebrations of Nouruz played a very important role in the process of integration.. The Iranian New Year, for some time has even become an occasion for trilateral meetings between the leaders of the countries engaged in the Persian Speaking Union project. However, over the last few years the integration process has slowed down. Despite many similarities, the cultures of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan are also different. The same can be said about the directions of foreign policies of these countries. Despite these facts, the shared cultural heritage and its usage by Iran is surely a topic worthy of inclusion in the discourse on the contemporary Iranian world.

Arab customary conflict resolution and the alternative Western approach to dispute resolution are both the result of a similar way of administering justice – a restorative justice paradigm. Thus, we argue that it is not a new or a strictly western concept given that its fundamental values or even structures have existed in the customary laws of different cultures, like Arab culture, for centuries. In this article, we compare Western restorative justice institutions with the Arab customary conflict resolution process (sulh) used in contemporary Palestine.

The Idea of Tsuchigumo as the Mythologisation of the Threat Tsuchigumo –that is, “ground spider” or “earth spider” – is a malevolent entity existing deep inside Japanese legends. Narratives about these bloodthirsty and violent spiders harassing Yamato soldiers appear as early as the 8th century, although their origins lie deeper. Tsuchigumo is not only a giant spider, vanquished by Emperors or warriors, but the name also signifies many ethnically heterogenous groups fighting the dominating Yamato group before the 8th century. Calling the unruly and defiant clans and ethnic groups tsuchigumo put the Yamato clans within the human sphere and their opponents outside of it. This process led to the demonisation of everything that lay beyond the familiar circle, labelling it as Other, Strange, and finally – Non-human, a Demon. Hence tsuchigumo became a demonic creature, existing on the fringe of civilisation, an unwanted and disruptive element that needed to be thrown into oblivion for the rest of the world to properly function. The article seeks to establish a connection between the roots of the concept of tsuchigumo and the process of demonising the Other as seen in Japanese culture.

In this article, a single poster of the Peopleʼs Democratic Party of Afghanistan is discussed. The starting point for the project is the statement that persuasion is more effective than compulsion and the fact that the Afghan communists did not find any formula to start an effective dialogue with their society. The primary question for the article is: what kind of communication, and what sort of themes and motifs played a significant role in conveying revolutionary ideology aimed at a society where a majority, with political potential, could not read or write?

This paper presents the background, ambitions and the initial achievements of the Elyonim veTachtonim research project aimed at constructing an electronic database of accounts involving angels, demons and ghosts in early rabbinic literature. The first part summarises the history and transformations of the project together with its principles, textual range and purposes. It scrutinises the methodology behind the study by presenting a broader context including the cognitive theory of religion, formal analysis of myth and cognitive and statistic linguistics. The second part contains the technical analysis of the data mining process and provides a user’s manual. The third part furnishes some early findings and observations based on both the qualitative and quantitative evidence gathered in the database: the domination of the pragmatic orientation, the correlation of particular entities and specific genres and the overwhelmingly negative attitude of demons towards humans. Finally, the fourth part points out the most important improvements which need to be made to the existing database and outlines some directions for development and possible applications.