title: History of Islam

text: The Umayyad Caliphate collapsed in 1031 due to political divisions and civil unrest during the rule of Hicham II who was ousted because of his indolence. Al-Andalus then broke up into a number of states called "taifa kingdoms" (Arabic, "Muluk al-ṭawā'if"; English, Petty kingdoms). The decomposition of the Caliphate into those petty kingdoms weakened the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula "vis-à-vis" the Christian kingdoms of the north. Some of the "taifas", such as that of Seville, were forced to enter into alliances with Christian princes and pay tributes in money to Castille.


title: History of Islam

text: Abd al-Rahman I and Bedr (a former Greek slave) escaped with their lives after the popular revolt known as the Abbasid Revolution. Rahman I continued south through Palestine, the Sinai, and then into Egypt. Rahman I was one of several surviving Umayyad family members to make a perilous trek to Ifriqiya at this time. Rahman I and Bedr reached modern day Morocco near Ceuta. Next step would be to cross to sea to al-Andalus, where Rahman I could not have been sure whether he would be welcome. Following the Berber Revolt (740s), the province was in a state of confusion, with the Ummah torn by tribal dissensions among the Arabs and racial tensions between the Arabs and Berbers. Bedr lined up three Syrian commanders – Obeid Allah ibn Uthman and Abd Allah ibn Khalid, both originally of Damascus, and Yusuf ibn Bukht of Qinnasrin and contacted al-Sumayl (then in Zaragoza) to get his consent, but al-Sumayl refused, fearing Rahman I would try to make himself emir. After discussion with Yemenite commanders, Rahman I was told to go to al-Andalus. Shortly thereafter, he set off with Bedr and a small group of followers for Europe. Abd al-Rahman landed at Almuñécar in al-Andalus, to the east of Málaga.


title: History of Islam

text: During his brief time in Málaga, he quickly amassed local support. News of the prince's arrival spread throughout the peninsula. In order to help speed his ascension to power, he took advantage of the feuds and dissensions. However, before anything could be done, trouble broke out in northern al-Andalus. Abd al-Rahman and his followers were able to control Zaragoza. Rahman I fought to rule al-Andalus in a battle at the Guadalquivir river, just outside Córdoba on the plains of Musarah (Battle of Musarah). Rahman I was victorious, chasing his enemies from the field with parts of their army. Rahman I marched into the capital, Córdoba, fighting off a counterattack, but negotiations ended the confrontation. After Rahman I consolidated power, he proclaimed himself the al-Andalus emir. Rahman I did not claim the Muslim caliph, though. The last step was to have al-Fihri's general, al-Sumayl, garroted in Córdoba's jail. Al-Andalus was a safe haven for the house of Umayya that managed to evade the Abbasids.


title: History of Islam

text: In Baghdad, the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur had planned to depose the emir. Rahman I and his army confronted the Abbasids, killing most of the Abbasid army. The main Abbasid leaders were decapitated, their heads preserved in salt, with identifying tags pinned to their ears. The heads were bundled in a gruesome package and sent to the Abbasid caliph who was on pilgrimage at Mecca. Rahman I quelled repeated rebellions in al-Andalus. He began the building of the great mosque [cordova], and formed ship-yards along the coast; he is moreover said to have been the first to transplant the palm and the pomegranate into the congenial climate of Spain: and he encouraged science and literature in his states. He died on 29 September 788, after a reign of thirty-four years and one month.


title: History of Islam

text: Rahman I's successor was his son Hisham I. Born in Córdoba, he built many mosques and completed the Mezquita. He called for a jihad that resulted in a campaign against the Kingdom of Asturias and the County of Toulouse; in this second campaign he was defeated at Orange by William of Gellone, first cousin to Charlemagne. His successor Al-Hakam I came to power and was challenged by his uncles, other sons of Rahman I. One, Abdallah, went to the court of Charlemagne in Aix-la-Chapelle to negotiate for aid. In the meantime Córdoba was attacked, but was defended. Hakam I spent much of his reign suppressing rebellions in Toledo, Saragossa and Mérida.


title: History of Islam

text: Abd ar-Rahman II succeeded his father and engaged in nearly continuous warfare against Alfonso II of Asturias, whose southward advance he halted. Rahman II repulsed an assault by Vikings who had disembarked in Cádiz, conquered Seville (with the exception of its citadel) and attacked Córdoba. Thereafter he constructed a fleet and naval arsenal at Seville to repel future raids. He responded to William of Septimania's requests of assistance in his struggle against Charles the Bald's nominations.


title: History of Islam

text: Muhammad I's reign was marked by the movements of the Muwallad (ethnic Iberian Muslims) and Mozarabs (Muslim-Iberia Christians). Muhammad I was succeeded by his son Mundhir I. During the reign of his father, Mundhir I commanded military operations against the neighbouring Christian kingdoms and the Muwallad rebellions. At his father's death, he inherited the throne. During his two-year reign, Mundhir I fought against Umar ibn Hafsun. He died in 888 at Bobastro, succeeded by his brother Abdullah ibn Muhammad al-Umawi.


title: History of Islam

text: Umawi showed no reluctance to dispose of those he viewed as a threat. His government was marked by continuous wars between Arabs, Berbers and Muwallad. His power as emir was confined to the area of Córdoba, while the rest had been seized by rebel families. The son he had designated as successor was killed by one of Umawi's brothers. The latter was in turn executed by Umawi's father, who named as successor Abd ar-Rahman III, son of the killed son of Umawi.


title: History of Islam

text: The Umayyad conquest of North Africa continued the century of rapid Muslim military expansion following the death of Muhammad in 632. By 640 the Arabs controlled Mesopotamia, had invaded Armenia, and were concluding their conquest of Byzantine Syria. Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad caliphate. By the end of 641 all of Egypt was in Arab hands. A subsequent attempt to conquer the Nubian kingdom of Makuria was however repelled.


title: History of Islam

text: Kairouan in Tunisia was the first city founded by Muslims in the Maghreb. Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi erected the city (in 670) and, in the same time, the Great Mosque of Kairouan considered as the oldest and most prestigious sanctuary in the western Islamic world.


title: History of Islam

text: This part of Islamic territory has had independent governments during most of Islamic history. The Idrisid were the first Arab rulers in the western Maghreb (Morocco), ruling from 788 to 985. The dynasty is named after its first sultan Idris I.


title: History of Islam

text: The Almoravid dynasty was a Berber dynasty from the Sahara flourished over a wide area of North-Western Africa and the Iberian Peninsula during the 11th century. Under this dynasty the Moorish empire was extended over present-day Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Gibraltar, Tlemcen (in Algeria) and a part of what is now Senegal and Mali in the south, and Spain and Portugal in the north.


title: History of Islam

text: The Almohad Dynasty or "the Unitarians", were a Berber Muslim religious power which founded the fifth Moorish dynasty in the 12th century, and conquered all Northern Africa as far as Egypt, together with Al-Andalus.


title: History of Islam

text: The history of Islam in the Horn of Africa is almost as old as the faith itself. Through extensive trade and social interactions with their converted Muslim trading partners on the other side of the Red Sea, in the Arabian peninsula, merchants and sailors in the Horn region gradually came under the influence of the new religion.


title: History of Islam

text: Early Islamic disciples fled to the port city of Zeila in modern-day northern Somalia to seek protection from the Quraysh at the court of the Emperor of Aksum. Some of the Muslims that were granted protection are said to have then settled in several parts of the Horn region to promote the religion. The victory of the Muslims over the Quraysh in the 7th century had a significant impact on local merchants and sailors, as their trading partners in Arabia had by then all adopted Islam, and the major trading routes in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea came under the sway of the Muslim Caliphs. Instability in the Arabian peninsula saw further migrations of early Muslim families to the Somali seaboard. These clans came to serve as catalysts, forwarding the faith to large parts of the Horn region.


title: History of Islam

text: Islam came to the Great Lakes region of South Eastern Africa along existing trade routes. They learned from them the manners of the Muslims and this led to their conversion by the Muslim Arabs.


title: History of Islam

text: Local Islamic governments centered in Tanzania (then Zanzibar). The people of "Zayd" were Muslims that immigrated to the Great Lakes region. In the pre-colonial period, the structure of Islamic authority here was held up through the "Ulema" ("wanawyuonis", in Swahili language). These leaders had some degree of authority over most of the Muslims in South East Africa before territorial boundaries were established. The chief Qadi there was recognized for having the final religious authority.


title: History of Islam

text: On the Indian subcontinent, Islam first appeared in the southwestern tip of the peninsula, in today's Kerala state. Arabs traded with Malabar even before the birth of Muhammad. Native legends say that a group of Sahaba, under Malik Ibn Deenar, arrived on the Malabar Coast and preached Islam. According to that legend, the first mosque of India was built by Second Chera King Cheraman Perumal, who accepted Islam and received the name "Tajudheen". Historical records suggest that the Cheraman Perumal Mosque was built in around 629.


title: History of Islam

text: Islamic rule first came to the Indian subcontinent in the 8th century, when Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh, though this was a short-lived consolidation of Indian territory. Islamic conquests expanded under Mahmud of Ghazni in the 12th century CE, resulting in the establishment of the Ghaznavid Empire in the Indus River basin and the subsequent prominence of Lahore as an eastern bastion of Ghaznavid culture and rule. Ghaznavid rule was eclipsed by the Ghurid Empire of Muhammad of Ghor and Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad, whose domain under the conquests of Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji extended until the Bengal, where Indian Islamic missionaries achieved their greatest success in terms of dawah and number of converts to Islam. Qutb-ud-din Aybak conquered Delhi in 1206 and began the reign of the Delhi Sultanate, a successive series of dynasties that synthesized Indian civilization with the wider commercial and cultural networks of Africa and Eurasia, greatly increased demographic and economic growth in India and deterred Mongol incursion into the prosperous Indo-Gangetic plain and enthroned one of the few female Muslim rulers, Razia Sultana.


title: History of Islam

text: Many prominent sultanates and emirates administered various regions of the Indian subcontinent from the 13th to the 16th centuries, such as the Qutb Shahi, Gujarat, Kashmir, Bengal, Bijapur and Bahmani Sultanates, but none rivaled the power and extensive reach of the Mughal Empire at its zenith. The Bengal Sultanate in particular was a major global trading nation in the world, described by the Europeans to be the "richest country to trade with". while the Shah Mir dynasty ensured the gradual conversion of Kashmiris to Islam.


title: History of Islam

text: Persian culture, art, language, cuisine and literature grew in prominence in India due to Islamic administration and the immigration of soldiers, bureaucrats, merchants, Sufis, artists, poets, teachers and architects from Iran and Central Asia, resulting in the early development of Indo-Persian culture.


title: History of Islam

text: Islam first reached Maritime Southeast Asia through traders from Mecca in the 7th century, particularly via the western part of what is now Indonesia. Arab traders from Yemen already had a presence in Asia through trading and travelling by sea, serving as intermediary traders to and from Europe and Africa. They traded not only Arabian goods but also goods from Africa, India, and so on which included ivory, fragrances, spices, and gold.


title: History of Islam

text: According to T. W. Arnold in "The Preaching of Islam", by the 2nd century of the Islamic Calendar, Arab traders had been trading with the inhabitants of Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka. The same argument has been told by Dr. B.H. Burger and Dr. Mr. Prajudi in "Sedjarah Ekonomis Sosiologis Indonesia" (History of Socio Economic of Indonesia) According to an atlas created by the geographer Al-Biruni (973–1048), the Indian or Indonesian Ocean used to be called the Persian Ocean. After Western Imperialist rule, this name was changed to reflect the name used today; the Indian Ocean.


title: History of Islam

text: Soon, many Sufi missionaries translated classical Sufi literature from Arabic and Persian into Malay; a tangible product of this is the Jawi script. Coupled with the composing of original Islamic literature in Malay, this led the way to the transformation of Malay into an Islamic language. By 1292, when Marco Polo visited Sumatra, most of the inhabitants had converted to Islam. The Sultanate of Malacca was founded on the Malay Peninsula by Parameswara, a Srivijayan Prince.


title: History of Islam

text: Through trade and commerce, Islam then spread to Borneo and Java. By the late 15th century, Islam had been introduced to the Philippines via the southern island of Mindanao. The foremost socio-cultural Muslim entities that resulted form this are the present-day Sultanate of Sulu and Sultanate of Maguindanao; Islamised kingdoms in the northern Luzon island, such as the Kingdom of Maynila and the Kingdom of Tondo, were later conquered and Christianised with the majority of the archipelago by Spanish colonisers beginning in the 16th century.


title: History of Islam

text: As Islam spread, societal changes developed from the individual conversions, and five centuries later it emerged as a dominant cultural and political power in the region. Three main Muslim political powers emerged. The Aceh Sultanate was the most important, controlling much of the area between Southeast Asia and India from its centre in northern Sumatra. The Sultanate also attracted Sufi poets. The second Muslim power was the Sultanate of Malacca on the Malay Peninsula. The Sultanate of Demak on Java was the third power, where the emerging Muslim forces defeated the local Majapahit kingdom in the early 16th century. Although the sultanate managed to expand its territory somewhat, its rule remained brief.


title: History of Islam

text: Portuguese forces captured Malacca in 1511 under naval general Afonso de Albuquerque. With Malacca subdued, the Aceh Sultanate and Bruneian Empire established themselves as centres of Islam in Southeast Asia. The Sultanate's territory, although vastly diminished, remains intact to this day as the modern state of Brunei Darussalam.


title: History of Islam

text: In China, four Sahabas (Sa'ad ibn abi Waqqas, Wahb Abu Kabcha, Jafar ibn Abu Talib and Jahsh ibn Riyab) preached in 616/17 and onwards after following the Chittagong–Kamrup–Manipur route after sailing from Abyssinia in 615/16. After conquering Persia in 636, Sa'ad ibn abi Waqqas went with Sa'id ibn Zaid, Qais ibn Sa'd and Hassan ibn Thabit to China in 637 taking the complete Quran. Sa'ad ibn abi Waqqas headed for China for the third time in 650–51 after Caliph Uthman asked him to lead an embassy to China, which the Chinese emperor received.


title: History of Islam

text: In the 15th and 16th centuries three major Muslim empires formed: the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa; the Safavid Empire in Greater Iran; and the Mughal Empire in South Asia. These imperial powers were made possible by the discovery and exploitation of gunpowder and more efficient administration.


title: History of Islam

text: The Seljuq Turks declined in the second half of the 13th century, after the Mongol invasion of Anatolia. This resulted in the establishment of multiple Turkish principalities, known as beyliks. Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, assumed leadership of one of these principalities (Söğüt) at the end of the 13th century, succeeding his father Ertuğrul. Osman I afterwards led it in a series of battles with the Byzantine Empire. By 1331, the Ottoman Turks had captured Nicaea, the former Byzantine capital, under the leadership of Osman's son and successor, Orhan I. Victory at the Battle of Kosovo against the Serbian Empire in 1389 then facilitated their expansion into Europe. The Ottomans were established in the Balkans and Anatolia by the time Bayezid I ascended to power in the same year, now at the helm of a growing empire.


title: History of Islam

text: Growth halted when Mongol warlord Timur (also known as ""Tamerlane"") captured Bayezid I in the Battle of Ankara in 1402, beginning the Ottoman Interregnum. This episode was characterized by the division of the Ottoman territory amongst Bayezid I's sons, who submitted to Timurid authority. When a number of Ottoman territories regained independent status, ruin for the Empire loomed. However, the empire recovered as the youngest son of Bayezid I, Mehmed I, waged offensive campaigns against his ruling brothers, thereby reuniting Asia Minor and declaring himself sultan in 1413. Around 1512 the Ottoman naval fleet developed under the rule of Selim I, such that the Ottoman Turks were able to challenge the Republic of Venice, a naval power which established its thalassocracy alongside the other Italian maritime republics upon the Mediterranean Region. They also attempted to reconquer the Balkans. By the time of Mehmed I's grandson, Mehmed II (ruled 1444–1446; 1451–1481), the Ottomans could lay siege to Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. A factor in this siege was the use of muskets and large cannons introduced by the Ottomans. The Byzantine fortress succumbed in 1453, after 54 days of siege. Without its capital the Byzantine Empire disintegrated. The future successes of the Ottomans and later empires would depend upon the exploitation of gunpowder.


title: History of Islam

text: In the early 16th century, the Shiʿite Safavid dynasty assumed control in Persia under the leadership of Shah Ismail I, defeating the ruling Turcoman federation Aq Qoyunlu (also called the "White Sheep Turkomans") in 1501. The Ottoman sultan Selim I sought to repel Safavid expansion, challenging and defeating them at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514. Selim I also deposed the ruling Mamluks in Egypt, absorbing their territories in 1517. Suleiman I (nicknamed ""Suleiman the Magnificent""), Selim I's successor, took advantage of the diversion of Safavid focus to the Uzbeks on the eastern frontier and recaptured Baghdad, which had fallen under Safavid control. Despite this, Safavid power remained substantial, rivalling the Ottomans. Suleiman I advanced deep into Hungary following the Battle of Mohács in 1526 — reaching as far as the gates of Vienna thereafter, and signed a Franco-Ottoman alliance with Francis I of France against Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire 10 years later. While Suleiman I's rule (1520–1566) is often identified as the apex of Ottoman power, the empire continued to remain powerful and influential until a relative fall in its military strength in the second half of the 18th century.


title: History of Islam

text: The Shīʿīte Safavid dynasty rose to power in Tabriz in 1501 and later conquered the rest of Iran. They were of mixed ancestry, originally Kurdish, but during their rule intermarried with Turcomans, Georgians, Circassians, and Pontic Greeks. The Safavid dynasty had its origin in the Safavid order of Sufism, while the Iranian population was largely composed by Sunni Muslims. After their defeat at the hands of the Sunni Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran, to unite the Persians behind him, Shah Ismail I made conversion mandatory for the largely Sunni population of Iran to the Twelver sect of Shīʿa Islam so that he could get them to fight against the Sunni Ottomans.


title: History of Islam

text: This resulted in the Safavid conversion of Iran to Shīʿa Islam. Iranian Zaydis, the largest group amongst the Shīʿa Muslims before the Safavid rule, were also forced to convert to the Twelver denomination of Shīʿa Islam. The Zaydis at that time subscribed to the Hanafi jurisprudence, as did most Sunnis, and there were good relations between them. Abu Hanifah and Zayd ibn Ali were also very good friends. The Safavid dynasty from Azarbaijan ruled from 1501 to 1736; they established Twelver Shīʿīsm as the official religion of Safavid Iran and united its provinces under a single sovereignty, thereby reigniting the Persian identity.


title: History of Islam

text: In 1524, Tahmasp I acceded to the throne, initiating a revival of the arts. Carpetmaking became a major industry. The tradition of Persian miniature painting in manuscripts reached its peak, until Tahmasp turned to strict religious observance in middle age, prohibiting the consumption of alcohol and hashish and removing casinos, taverns, and brothels. Tahmasp's nephew Ibrahim Mirza continued to patronize a last flowering of the arts until he was murdered, after which many artists were recruited by the Mughal dynasty.


title: History of Islam

text: Tahmasp's grandson, Shah Abbas I, restored the shrine of the eighth Twelver Shīʿīte Imam, Ali al-Ridha at Mashhad, and restored the dynastic shrine at Ardabil. Both shrines received jewelry, fine manuscripts, and Chinese porcelains. Abbas moved the capital to Isfahan, revived old ports, and established thriving trade with Europeans. Amongst Abbas' most visible cultural achievements was the construction of "Naqsh-e Jahan Square" ("Design of the World"). The plaza, located near a Friday mosque, covered . The Safavid dynasty was toppled in 1722 by the Hotaki dynasty, which ended their forceful conversion of Sunni areas to Twelver Shīʿīsm.


title: History of Islam

text: Mughal Empire was a power that comprised almost all of South Asia, founded in 1526. It was established and ruled by the Timurid dynasty, with Turco-Mongol Chagatai roots from Central Asia, claiming direct descent from both Genghis Khan (through his son Chagatai Khan) and Timur, and with significant Indian Rajput and Persian ancestry through marriage alliances; the first two Mughal emperors had both parents of Central Asian ancestry, while successive emperors were of predominantly Rajput and Persian ancestry. The dynasty was Indo-Persian in culture, combining Persianate culture with local Indian cultural influences visible in its court culture and administrative customs.


title: History of Islam

text: The beginning of the empire is conventionally dated to the victory by its founder Babur over Ibrahim Lodi, the last ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, in the First Battle of Panipat (1526). During the reign of Humayun, the successor of Babur, the empire was briefly interrupted by the Sur Empire established by Sher Shah Suri, who re-established the Grand Trunk Road across the northern Indian subcontinent, initiated the rupee currency system and developed much of the foundations of the effective administration of Mughal rule. The "classic period" of the Mughal Empire began in 1556, with the ascension of Akbar to the throne. Some Rajput kingdoms continued to pose a significant threat to the Mughal dominance of northwestern India, but most of them were subdued by Akbar. All Mughal emperors were Muslims; Akbar, however, propounded a syncretic religion in the latter part of his life called Dīn-i Ilāhī, as recorded in historical books like "Ain-i-Akbari" and "Dabistān-i Mazāhib". The Mughal Empire did not try to intervene in native societies during most of its existence, rather co-opting and pacifying them through concilliatory administrative practices and a syncretic, inclusive ruling elite, leading to more systematic, centralized and uniform rule. Traditional and newly coherent social groups in northern and western India, such as the Marathas, the Rajputs, the Pashtuns, the Hindu Jats and the Sikhs, gained military and governing ambitions during Mughal rule which, through collaboration or adversity, gave them both recognition and military experience.


title: History of Islam

text: The reign of Shah Jahan (1628–1658) represented the height of Mughal architecture, with famous monuments such as the Taj Mahal, Moti Masjid, Red Fort, Jama Masjid and Lahore Fort being constructed during his reign.


title: History of Islam

text: The sharia reign of Muhammad Auranzgeb witnessed the establishment of the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, The Muslim India became the world's largest economy, valued 25% of world GDP. Its richest province, Bengal Subah, which was a world leading economy and have had better conditions to 18th-century Western Europe, showing signs of the Industrial Revolution, through the emergence of the period of proto-industrialization. Numerous conflicts such as the Anglo-Mughal War were also witnessed.


title: History of Islam

text: After the death of Aurangzeb, which marks the end of Medieval India and beginning of the European colonialism in India, internal dissatisfaction arose due to the weakness of the empire's administrative and economic systems, leading to its break-up and declarations of independence of its former provinces by the Nawab of Bengal, the Nawab of Awadh, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the major economic and military power known as Kingdom of Mysore ruled by Tipu Sultan and other small states. In 1739, the Mughals were crushingly defeated in the Battle of Karnal by the forces of Nader Shah, the founder of the Afsharid dynasty in Persia, and Delhi was sacked and looted, drastically accelerating their decline.


title: History of Islam

text: In 1757, the East India Company overtook Bengal Subah at the Battle of Plassey. By the mid-18th century, the Marathas had routed Mughal armies and won over several Mughal provinces from the Punjab to Bengal.


title: History of Islam

text: Tipu Sultan's Kingdom of Mysore based in South India, which witnessed partial establishment of sharia based economic and military policies i.e. Fathul Mujahidin, replaced Bengal ruled by the Nawabs of Bengal as South Asia's foremost economic territory.


title: History of Islam

text: The Anglo-Mysore Wars were fought between Hyder Ali, his son Tipu and their French allies, including Napoleon Bonaparte, and the East India Company. Rocket artillery and the world's first iron-cased rockets, the Mysorean rockets, were used during the war and the Jihad based Fathul Mujahidin was compiled.


title: History of Islam

text: During the following century Mughal power had become severely limited, and the last emperor, Bahadur Shah II, had authority over only the city of Shahjahanabad. Bahadur issued a "firman" supporting the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Consequent to the rebellion's defeat he was tried by the East India Company authorities for treason, imprisoned, and exiled to Rangoon. The last remnants of the empire were formally taken over by the British, and the British parliament passed the Government of India Act to enable the Crown formally to nationalize the East India Company and assume direct control of India in the form of the new British Raj.


title: History of Islam

text: The modern age brought technological and organizational changes to Europe while the Islamic region continued the patterns of earlier centuries. The European great powers globalized economically and colonized much of the region.


title: History of Islam

text: By the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had declined. The decision to back Germany in World War I meant they shared the Central Powers' defeat in that war. The defeat led to the overthrow of the Ottomans by Turkish nationalists led by the victorious general of the Battle of Gallipoli: Mustafa Kemal, who became known to his people as Atatürk, "Father of the Turks." Atatürk was credited with renegotiating the treaty of Sèvres (1920) which ended Turkey's involvement in the war and establishing the modern Republic of Turkey, which was recognized by the Allies in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Atatürk went on to implement an ambitious program of modernization that emphasized economic development and secularization. He transformed Turkish culture to reflect European laws, adopted Arabic numerals, the Latin script, separated the religious establishment from the state, and emancipated woman—even giving them the right to vote in parallel with women's suffrage in the west.


title: History of Islam

text: During the First World War, the Allies cooperated with Arab partisans against the Ottoman Empire, both groups being united in opposition to a common enemy. The most prominent example of this was during the Arab Revolt, when the British, led by secret intelligence agent T. E. Lawrence—better known as "Lawrence of Arabia" cooperated with Arab guerillas against the Ottoman forces, eventually securing the withdrawal of all Ottoman troops from the region by 1918. Following the end of the war, the vast majority of former Ottoman territory outside of Asia Minor was handed over to the victorious European powers as protectorates. However, many Arabs were left dismayed by the Balfour Declaration, which directly contradicted the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence publicized only a year earlier. Ottoman successor states include today's Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Balkan states, North Africa and the north shore of the Black Sea.


title: History of Islam

text: Many Muslim countries sought to adopt European political organization and nationalism began to emerge in the Muslim world. Countries like Egypt, Syria and Turkey organized their governments and sought to develop national pride among their citizens. Other places, like Iraq, were not as successful due to a lack of unity and an inability to resolve age-old prejudices between Muslim sects and against non-Muslims.


title: History of Islam

text: Some Muslim countries, such as Turkey and Egypt, sought to separate Islam from the secular government. In other cases, such as Saudi Arabia, the government brought out religious expression in the re-emergence of the puritanical form of Sunni Islam known to its detractors as Wahabism, which found its way into the Saudi royal family.


title: History of Islam

text: The Arab–Israeli conflict spans about a century of political tensions and open hostilities. It involves the establishment of the modern State of Israel as a Jewish nation state, the consequent displacement of the Palestinian people and Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, as well as the adverse relationship between the Arab states and the State of Israel (see related Israeli–Palestinian conflict). Despite at first involving only the Arab states bordering Israel, animosity has also developed between Israel and other predominantly Muslim states.


title: History of Islam

text: The Six-Day War of 5–10 June 1967, was fought between Israel and the neighbouring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The Arab countries closed the Suez Canal and it was followed in May 1970 by the closure of the "tapline" from Saudi Arabia through Syria to Lebanon. These developments had the effect of increasing the importance of petroleum in Libya, which is a short (and canal-free) shipping distance from Europe. In 1970, Occidental Petroleum broke with other oil companies and accepted the Arab demands for price increases.


title: History of Islam

text: In October 1973, a new war between Israel and its Muslim neighbours, known as the Yom Kippur War, broke out just as the oil companies began meeting with OPEC leaders. OPEC had been emboldened by the success of Sadat's campaigns and the war strengthened their unity. In response to the emergency resupply effort by the West that enabled Israel to put up a resistance against the Egyptian and Syrian forces, the Arab world imposed the 1973 oil embargo against the United States and Western Europe. Faisal agreed that Saudi Arabia would use some of its oil wealth to finance the "front-line states", those that bordered Israel, in their struggle. The centrality of petroleum, the Arab–Israeli conflict and political and economic instability and uncertainty remain constant features of the politics of the region.


title: History of Islam

text: Many countries, individuals and non-governmental organizations elsewhere in the world feel involved in this conflict for reasons such as cultural and religious ties with Islam, Arab culture, Christianity, Judaism, Jewish culture, or for ideological, human rights, or strategic reasons. Although some consider the Arab–Israeli conflict a part of (or a precursor to) a wider clash of civilizations between the Western World and the Muslim world, others oppose this view. Animosity emanating from this conflict has caused numerous attacks on supporters (or perceived supporters) of each side by supporters of the other side in many countries around the world.


title: History of Islam

text: In 1979 the Iranian Revolution transformed Iran from a constitutional monarchy to a populist theocratic Islamic republic under the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shi'i Muslim cleric and "marja". Following the Revolution, and a new constitution was approved and a referendum established the government, electing Ruhollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader. During the following two years, liberals, leftists, and Islamic groups fought each other, and the Islamics captured power.


title: History of Islam

text: The development of the two opposite fringes, the Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam the Twelver Shia version and its reinforcement by the Iranian Revolution and the Salafi in Saudi Arabia, coupled with the Iran–Saudi Arabia relations resulted in these governments using sectarian conflict to enhance their political interests. Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (despite being hostile to Iraq) encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, which resulted in the Iran–Iraq War, as they feared that an Islamic revolution would take place within their own borders. Certain Iranian exiles also helped convince Saddam that if he invaded, the fledgling Islamic republic would quickly collapse.


title: Magic realism

text: Magic realism is a style of literary fiction and art. It paints a realistic view of the world while also adding magical elements, often blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Magic realism often refers to literature in particular, with magical or supernatural phenomena presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting, commonly found in novels and dramatic performances. Despite including certain magic elements, it is generally considered to be a different genre from fantasy because magical realism uses a substantial amount of realistic detail and employs magical elements to make a point about reality, while fantasy stories are often separated from reality. Magical realism is often seen as an amalgamation of real and magical elements that produces a more inclusive writing form than either literary realism or fantasy.


title: Magic realism

text: The term "magic realism" is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous, and Matthew Strecher (1999) defines it as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe." The term and its wide definition can often become confused, as many writers are categorized as magical realists. The term was influenced by a German and Italian painting style of the 1920s which were given the same name. In "The Art of Fiction", British novelist and critic David Lodge defines magic realism: "when marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative - is an effect especially associated with contemporary Latin-American fiction (for example the work of the Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Marquez) but it is also encountered in novels from other continents, such as those of Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. All these writers have lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel they cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism", citing Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" as an exemplar. " Michiko Kakutani writes that "The transactions between the extraordinary and the mundane that occur in so much Latin American fiction are not merely a literary technique, but also a mirror of a reality in which the fantastic is frequently part of everyday life." Magical realism often mixes history and fantasy, as in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children", in which the children born at midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment of India's independence, are telepathically linked.


title: Magic realism

text: Irene Guenther (1995) tackles the German roots of the term, and how an earlier magic realist art is related to a later magic realist literature; meanwhile, magical realism is often associated with Latin-American literature, including founders of the genre, particularly the authors Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Elena Garro, Mireya Robles, Rómulo Gallegos and Arturo Uslar Pietri. In English literature, its chief exponents include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Alice Hoffman, Nick Joaquin, and Nicola Barker. In Bengali literature, prominent writers of magic realism include Nabarun Bhattacharya, Akhteruzzaman Elias, Shahidul Zahir, Jibanananda Das and Syed Waliullah. In Japanese literature, one of the most important authors of this genre is Haruki Murakami. In Kannada literature, the writers Shivaram Karanth and Devanur Mahadeva have infused magical realism in their most prominent works. In Polish literature, magic realism is represented by Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature.


title: Magic realism

text: The term first appeared as the German "magischer Realismus" ('magical realism'). In 1925, German art critic Franz Roh used "magischer Realismus" to refer to a painterly style known as "Neue Sachlichkeit" ('New Objectivity'), an alternative to expressionism that was championed by German museum director Gustav Hartlaub. Roh identified magic realism's accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, and portrayal of the 'magical' nature of the rational world; it reflected the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment. He also believed that magic realism was related to, but distinct from, surrealism, due to magic realism's focus on material object and the "actual existence" of things in the world, as opposed to surrealism's more abstract, psychological, and subconscious reality.


title: Magic realism

text: German magic-realist paintings influenced the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality. In 1926, he founded the magic realist magazine "900.Novecento," and his writings influenced Belgian magic realist writers Johan Daisne and Hubert Lampo.


title: Magic realism

text: Roh's magic realism also influenced writers in Hispanic America, where it was translated in 1927 as "realismo mágico". Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who had known Bontempelli, wrote influential magic-realist short stories in the 1930s and 40s that focused on the mystery and reality of how we live. Luis Leal attests that Pietri seemed to have been the first to adopt the term "realismo mágico" in Hispanic America in 1948. There is evidence that Mexican writer Elena Garro used the same term to describe the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, but dismissed her own work as a part of the genre. French-Russian Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who rejected Roh's magic realism as tiresome pretension, developed his related concept "lo real maravilloso" ('marvelous realism') in 1949. Maggie Ann Bowers writes that marvelous-realist literature and art expresses "the seemingly opposed perspectives of a pragmatic, practical and tangible approach to reality and an acceptance of magic and superstition" within an environment of differing cultures.


title: Magic realism

text: Magic realism was later used to describe the uncanny realism by such American painters as Ivan Albright, Peter Blume, Paul Cadmus, Gray Foy, George Tooker, and Viennese-born Henry Koerner, among other artists during the 1940s and 1950s. However, in contrast with its use in literature, magic realist art does not often include overtly fantastic or magical content, but rather, it looks at the mundane through a hyper-realistic and often mysterious lens.


title: Magic realism

text: The term "magical realism," as opposed to "magic realism," first emerged in the 1955 essay "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction" by critic Angel Flores in reference to writing that combines aspects of magic realism and marvelous realism. While Flores named Jorge Luis Borges as the first magical realist, he failed to acknowledge either Carpentier or Pietri for bringing Roh's magic realism to Latin America. Borges is often seen as a predecessor of magical realists, with only Flores considering him a true magical realist. After Flores's essay, there was a resurgence of interest in marvelous realism, which, after the Cuban revolution of 1959, led to the term "magical realism" being applied to a new type of literature known for matter-of-fact portrayal of magical events.


title: Magic realism

text: Literary magic realism originated in Latin America. Writers often traveled between their home country and European cultural hubs, such as Paris or Berlin, and were influenced by the art movement of the time. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, for example, were strongly influenced by European artistic movements, such as Surrealism, during their stays in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. One major event that linked painterly and literary magic realisms was the translation and publication of Franz Roh's book into Spanish by Spain's "Revista de Occidente" in 1927, headed by major literary figure José Ortega y Gasset. "Within a year, Magic Realism was being applied to the prose of European authors in the literary circles of Buenos Aires." Jorge Luis Borges inspired and encouraged other Latin American writers in the development of magical realism – particularly with his first magical realist publication, "Historia universal de la infamia" in 1935. Between 1940 and 1950, magical realism in Latin America reached its peak, with prominent writers appearing mainly in Argentina. Alejo Carpentier's novel "The Kingdom of This World", published in 1949, is often characterised as an important harbinger of magic realism, which reached its most canonical incarnation in Gabriel García Marquez's novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967). García Marquez cited Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" as a formative influence: "The first line almost knocked me out of bed. It begins: 'As Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.' When I read that line I thought to myself I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago." He also cited the stories told to him by his grandmother: "She told me things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write "One Hundred Years of Solitude", I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to was believe in them myself and them write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face."


title: Magic realism

text: The theoretical implications of visual art's magic realism greatly influenced European and Latin American literature. Italian Massimo Bontempelli, for instance, claimed that literature could be a means to create a collective consciousness by "opening new mythical and magical perspectives on reality", and used his writings to inspire an Italian nation governed by Fascism. Pietri was closely associated with Roh's form of magic realism and knew Bontempelli in Paris. Rather than follow Carpentier's developing versions of "the (Latin) American marvelous real", Uslar-Pietri's writings emphasize "the mystery of human living amongst the reality of life". He believed magic realism was "a continuation of the vanguardia [or avant-garde] modernist experimental writings of Latin America".


title: Magic realism

text: The extent to which the characteristics below apply to a given magic realist text varies. Every text is different and employs a smattering of the qualities listed here. However, they accurately portray what one might expect from a magic realist text.


title: Magic realism

text: Magical realism portrays fantastical events in an otherwise realistic tone. It brings fables, folk tales, and myths into contemporary social relevance. Fantasy traits given to characters, such as levitation, telepathy, and telekinesis, help to encompass modern political realities that can be phantasmagorical.


title: Magic realism

text: The existence of fantastic elements in the real world provides the basis for magical realism. Writers do not invent new worlds, but rather, they reveal the magical in the existing world, as was done by Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote the seminal work "One Hundred Years of Solitude". In the world of magical realism, the supernatural realm blends with the natural, familiar world.


title: Magic realism

text: "Authorial reticence" is the "deliberate withholding of information and explanations about the disconcerting fictitious world." The narrator is indifferent, a characteristic enhanced by this absence of explanation of fantastic events; the story proceeds with "logical precision" as if nothing extraordinary had taken place. Magical events are presented as ordinary occurrences; therefore, the reader accepts the marvelous as normal and common. Explaining the supernatural world or presenting it as extraordinary would immediately reduce its legitimacy relative to the natural world. The reader would consequently disregard the supernatural as false testimony.


title: Magic realism

text: In his essay "The Baroque and the Marvelous Real", Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier defines the baroque by a lack of emptiness, a departure from structure or rules, and an "extraordinary" abundance ("plenitude") of disorienting detail. (He cites Mondrian as its opposite.) From this angle, Carpentier views the baroque as a layering of elements, which translates easily into the postcolonial or transcultural Latin-American atmosphere that he emphasizes in "The Kingdom of this World". "America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations...mestizaje, engenders the baroque," made explicit by elaborate Aztec temples and associative Nahuatl poetry. These mixing ethnicities grow together with the American baroque; the space in between is where the "marvelous real" is seen. Marvelous: not meaning beautiful and pleasant, but extraordinary, strange, and excellent. Such a complex system of layering—encompassed in the Latin-American "boom" novel, such as "One Hundred Years of Solitude"—aims towards "translating the scope of America."


title: Magic realism

text: Magical realism plot lines characteristically employ hybrid multiple planes of reality that take place in "inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous."


title: Magic realism

text: This trait centers on the reader's role in literature. With its multiple realities and specific reference to the reader's world, it explores the impact fiction has on reality, reality on fiction, and the reader's role in between; as such, it is well suited for drawing attention to social or political criticism. Furthermore, it is the tool paramount in the execution of a related and major magic-realist phenomenon: textualization. This term defines two conditions—first, where a fictitious reader enters the story within a story while reading it, making them self-conscious of their status as readers—and secondly, where the textual world enters into the reader's (real) world. Good sense would negate this process, but "magic" is the flexible convention that allows it.


title: Magic realism

text: Something that most critics agree on is this major theme. Magic realist literature tends to read at an intensified level. Taking "One Hundred Years of Solitude", the reader must let go of pre-existing ties to conventional exposition, plot advancement, linear time structure, scientific reason, etc., to strive for a state of heightened awareness of life's connectedness or hidden meanings. Luis Leal articulates this feeling as "to seize the mystery that breathes behind things," and supports the claim by saying a writer must heighten his senses to the point of ""estado limite"" ('limit state' or 'extreme') in order to realize all levels of reality, most importantly that of mystery.


title: Magic realism

text: Magic realism contains an "implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite." Especially with regard to Latin America, the style breaks from the inarguable discourse of "privileged centers of literature." This is a mode primarily about and for "ex-centrics:" the geographically, socially, and economically marginalized. Therefore, magic realism's "alternative world" works to correct the reality of established viewpoints (like realism, naturalism, modernism). Magic-realist texts, under this logic, are subversive texts, revolutionary against socially-dominant forces. Alternatively, the socially-dominant may implement magical realism to disassociate themselves from their "power discourse." Theo D'haen calls this change in perspective "decentering."


title: Magic realism

text: In his review of Gabriel Garcia Márquez' novel "Chronicle of a Death Foretold", Salman Rushdie argues that the formal experiment of magic realism allows political ideas to be expressed in ways that might not be possible through more established literary forms:


title: Magic realism

text: "El realismo mágico", magic realism, at least as practised by Márquez, is a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely "Third World" consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called "half-made" societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called "North", where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what's really going on. In the works of Márquez, as in the world he describes, impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun.


title: Magic realism

text: Mexican critic Luis Leal summed up the difficulty of defining magical realism by writing, "If you can explain it, then it's not magical realism." He offers his own definition by writing, "Without thinking of the concept of magical realism, each writer gives expression to a reality he observes in the people. To me, magical realism is an attitude on the part of the characters in the novel toward the world," or toward nature.


title: Magic realism

text: Leal and Guenther both quote Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who described "man as a mystery surrounded by realistic facts. A poetic prediction or a poetic denial of reality. What for lack of another name could be called a magical realism."


title: Magic realism

text: The critical perspective towards magical realism as a conflict between reality and abnormality stems from the Western reader's disassociation with mythology, a root of magical realism more easily understood by non-Western cultures. Western confusion regarding magical realism is due to the "conception of the real" created in a magical realist text: rather than explain reality using natural or physical laws, as in typical Western texts, magical realist texts create a reality "in which the relation between incidents, characters, and setting could not be based upon or justified by their status within the physical world or their normal acceptance by bourgeois mentality."


title: Magic realism

text: Guatemalan author William Spindler's article, "Magic realism: A Typology", suggests that there are three kinds of magic realism, which however are by no means incompatible:


title: Magic realism

text: Spindler's typology of magic realism has been criticized as:[A]n act of categorization which seeks to define Magic Realism as a culturally specific project, by identifying for his readers those (non-modern) societies where myth and magic persist and where Magic Realism might be expected to occur. There are objections to this analysis. Western rationalism models may not actually describe Western modes of thinking and it is possible to conceive of instances where both orders of knowledge are simultaneously possible.


title: Magic realism

text: Alejo Carpentier originated the term "lo real maravilloso" (roughly 'the marvelous real') in the prologue to his novel "The Kingdom of this World" (1949); however, some debate whether he is truly a magical realist writer, or simply a precursor and source of inspiration. Maggie Bowers claims he is widely acknowledged as the originator of Latin American magical realism (as both a novelist and critic); she describes Carpentier's conception as a kind of heightened reality where elements of the miraculous can appear while seeming natural and unforced. She suggests that by disassociating himself and his writings from Roh's painterly magic realism, Carpentier aimed to show how—by virtue of Latin America's varied history, geography, demography, politics, myths, and beliefs—improbable and marvelous things are made possible. Furthermore, Carpentier's meaning is that Latin America is a land filled with marvels, and that "writing about this land automatically produces a literature of marvelous reality."


title: Magic realism

text: "The marvelous" may be easily confused with magical realism, as both modes introduce supernatural events without surprising the implied author. In both, these magical events are expected and accepted as everyday occurrences. However, the marvelous world is a unidimensional world. The implied author believes that anything can happen here, as the entire world is filled with supernatural beings and situations to begin with. Fairy tales are a good example of marvelous literature. The important idea in defining the marvelous is that readers understand that this fictional world is different from the world where they live. The "marvelous" one-dimensional world differs from the "bidimensional" world of magical realism because, in the latter, the supernatural realm blends with the natural, familiar world (arriving at the combination of "two" layers of reality: bidimensionality). While some use the terms magical realism and lo real maravilloso interchangeably, the key difference lies in the focus.


title: Magic realism

text: Critic Luis Leal attests that Carpentier was an originating pillar of the magical realist style by implicitly referring to the latter's critical works, writing that "The existence of the marvelous real is what started magical realist literature, which some critics claim is "the" truly American literature." It can consequently be drawn that Carpentier's "lo real maravilloso" is especially distinct from "magical realism" by the fact that the former applies specifically to "América" (the American content). On that note, Lee A. Daniel categorizes critics of Carpentier into three groups: those that do not consider him a magical realist whatsoever (Ángel Flores), those that call him "a mágicorealista writer with no mention of his 'lo real maravilloso' (Gómez Gil, Jean Franco, Carlos Fuentes)", and those that use the two terms interchangeably (Fernando Alegria, Luis Leal, Emir Rodriguez Monegal).


title: Magic realism

text: Criticism that Latin America is the birthplace and cornerstone of all things magic realist is quite common. Ángel Flores does not deny that magical realism is an international commodity but articulates that it has a Hispanic birthplace, writing that "Magical realism is a continuation of the romantic realist tradition of Spanish language literature and its European counterparts." Flores is not alone on this front; there is argument between those who see magical realism as a Latin American invention and those who see it as the global product of a postmodern world. Guenther concludes, "Conjecture aside, it is in Latin America that [magic realism] was primarily seized by literary criticism and was, through translation and literary appropriation, transformed." Magic realism has taken on an internationalization: dozens of non-Hispanic writers are categorized as such, and many believe that it truly "is" an international commodity.


title: Magic realism

text: The Hispanic Origin Theory: If considering all citations given in this article, there are issues with Guenther's and other critic's "Hispanic origin theory" and conclusion. By admission of this article, the term "magical realism" first came into artistic usage in 1927 by German critic Franz Roh after the 1915 publication of Franz Kafka's novella "The Metamorphosis", both visual and literary representations and uses of magic realism, regardless of suffix nitpicking. The Russian author Nikolai Gogol and his story "The Nose" (1835) is also a predecessor to the Hispanic origin theory. All this further called into question by Borges' critical standing as a true magical realist versus a predecessor to magic realism and how the dates of publications between Hispanic and European works compare. Magic realism has certainly enjoyed a "golden era" in the Hispanic communities. It cannot be denied that Hispanic communities, Argentina in particular, have supported great movements and talents in magic realism. One could validly suggest that the height of magic realism has been seen in Latin American countries, though feminist readers might disagree. Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are excellent critical challenges to this notion of Hispanic magic realism as a full and diversely aware aesthetic. Allende's work is a later contribution to this gender aware discourse. Frida Kahlo is also important to this as well, but at a later date than Woolf and Gilman. This feminist mapping, however, is unnecessary in identifying the basic truth that Kafka and Gogol predate Borges. They may each have their own forms of magic realism, but by the broader definition solidly within this article's given identification, their "...highly detailed, realistic setting[s are] invaded by something too strange to believe..."


title: Magic realism

text: This issue of feminist study in magic realism and its origination is an important discourse as well and should not be ignored. Given that magic realism, by nature of its craft, allows underrepresented and minority voices to be heard in more subtle and representational contexts, magic realism may be one of the better forms available to authors and artists who are expressing unpopular scenarios in socio-political contexts. Again, Woolf, Allende, Kahlo, Carter, Morrison, and Gilman are excellent examples of diversity in gender and ethnicity in magic realism. To this end, the Hispanic origin theory does not hold.


title: Magic realism

text: Gender diversity aside, magic realism's foundations are more diverse and intricate than what the Hispanic origin theory, as defined in this article, would suggest. Early in the article, we read a broader definition: Magic realism is "...what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe...". This "too strange to believe" standard is relative to European aesthetics, i.e. Woolf's, Kafka's and Gogol's work. Later, we read another definition and seeming precedent to the Hispanic origin theory: "Magical realism is a continuation of the romantic realist tradition of Spanish language literature." This "continuation" is a subset of a broader magic realism definition and standard. The Hispanic "continuation" and "romantic realist tradition of Spanish language" subset certainly identifies why magic realism took root and further developed in Hispanic communities, but it does not set a precedent for ground zero origin or ownership strictly within Hispanic cultures. Magic realism originated in Germany as much as it did in Latin American countries. Both can claim their more specific aesthetics, but to identify the broader term of magic realism as being Hispanic is merely a theory unsupported by the citations within this article. Perhaps it is time to identify each as its own part of a broader and less biased umbrella.


title: Magic realism

text: Magic realism is a continued craft in the many countries that have contributed to it in its earliest stages, Germany being first, and Latin American countries being a close second. There are certainly differences in aesthetics between European and Hispanic magic realists, but they are both equally magic realists. For this reason, the Hispanic magic realists should perhaps have a proper designation as such, but not the overarching umbrella of the broader term as this article suggests.


title: Magic realism

text: Taking into account that, theoretically, magical realism was born in the 20th century, some have argued that connecting it to postmodernism is a logical next step. To further connect the two concepts, there are descriptive commonalities between the two that Belgian critic Theo D'haen addresses in his essay, "Magical Realism and Postmodernism". While authors such as Günter Grass, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Italo Calvino, John Fowles, Angela Carter, John Banville, Michel Tournier, Willem Brakman, and Louis Ferron might be widely considered postmodernist, they can "just as easily be categorized...magic realist." A list has been compiled of characteristics one might typically attribute to postmodernism, but that also could describe literary magic realism: "self-reflexiveness, metafiction, eclecticism, redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, the dissolution of character and narrative instance, the erasure of boundaries, and the destabilization of the reader." To further connect the two, magical realism and postmodernism share the themes of post-colonial discourse, in which jumps in time and focus cannot really be explained with scientific but rather with magical reasoning; textualization (of the reader); and metafiction.


title: Magic realism

text: Concerning attitude toward audience, the two have, some argue, a lot in common. Magical realist works do not seek to primarily satisfy a popular audience, but instead, a sophisticated audience that must be attuned to noticing textual "subtleties." While the postmodern writer condemns escapist literature (like fantasy, crime, ghost fiction), he/she is inextricably related to it concerning readership. There are two modes in postmodern literature: one, commercially successful pop fiction, and the other, philosophy, better suited to intellectuals. A singular reading of the first mode will render a distorted or reductive understanding of the text. The fictitious reader—such as Aureliano from "100 Years of Solitude"—is the hostage used to express the writer's anxiety on this issue of who is reading the work and to what ends, and of how the writer is forever reliant upon the needs and desires of readers (the market). The magic realist writer with difficulty must reach a balance between saleability and intellectual integrity. Wendy Faris, talking about magic realism as a contemporary phenomenon that leaves modernism for postmodernism, says, "Magic realist fictions do seem more youthful and popular than their modernist predecessors, in that they often (though not always) cater with unidirectional story lines to our basic desire to hear what happens next. Thus they may be more clearly designed for the entertainment of readers."


title: Magic realism

text: When attempting to define what something "is", it is often helpful to define what something is "not". Many literary critics attempt to classify novels and literary works in only one genre, such as "romantic" or "naturalist", not always taking into account that many works fall into multiple categories. Much discussion is cited from Maggie Ann Bowers' book "Magic(al) Realism", wherein she attempts to delimit the terms magic realism and magical realism by examining the relationships with other genres such as realism, surrealism, fantastic literature, science fiction and its African version, the animist realism.


title: Magic realism

text: Realism is an attempt to create a depiction of actual life; a novel does not simply rely on what it presents but "how" it presents it. In this way, a realist narrative acts as framework by which the reader constructs a world using the raw materials of life. Understanding both realism and magical realism within the realm of a narrative mode is key to understanding both terms. Magical realism "relies upon the presentation of real, imagined or magical elements as if they were real. It relies upon realism, but only so that it can stretch what is acceptable as real to its limits." Literary theorist Kornelije Kvas wrote that "what is created in magic(al) realism works is a fictional world close to reality, marked by a strong presence of the unusual and the fantastic, in order to point out, among other things, the contradictions and shortcomings of society. The presence of the element of the fantastic does not violate the manifest coherence of a work that is characteristic of traditional realist literature. Fantastic (magical) elements appear as part of everyday reality, function as saviors of the human against the onslaught of conformism, evil and totalitarianism. Moreover, in magical realism works we find objective narration characteristic of traditional, 19th-century realism."


title: Magic realism

text: As a simple point of comparison, Roh's differentiation between expressionism and post-expressionism as described in "German Art in the 20th Century," may be applied to magic realism and realism. Realism pertains to the terms "history," "mimetic," "familiarization," "empiricism/logic," "narration," "closure-ridden/reductive naturalism", and "rationalization/cause and effect." On the other hand, magic realism encompasses the terms "myth/legend," "fantastic/supplementation," "defamiliarization," "mysticism/magic," "meta-narration," "open-ended/expansive romanticism," and "imagination/negative capability."


title: Magic realism

text: Surrealism is often confused with magical realism as they both explore illogical or non-realist aspects of humanity and existence. There is a strong historical connection between Franz Roh's concept of magic realism and surrealism, as well as the resulting influence on Carpentier's marvelous reality; however, important differences remain. Surrealism "is most distanced from magical realism [in that] the aspects that it explores are associated not with material reality but with the imagination and the mind, and in particular it attempts to express the 'inner life' and psychology of humans through art". It seeks to express the sub-conscious, unconscious, the repressed and inexpressible. Magical realism, on the other hand, rarely presents the extraordinary in the form of a dream or a "psychological experience". "To do so," Bowers writes, "takes the magic of recognizable material reality and places it into the little understood world of the imagination. The ordinariness of magical realism's magic relies on its accepted and unquestioned position in tangible and "material reality"."


title: Magic realism

text: "Imaginary realism" is a term first coined by Dutch painter Carel Willink as a pendant of magic realism. Where magic realism uses fantastical and unreal elements, imaginary realism strictly uses realistic elements in an imagined scene. As such, the classic painters with their biblical and mythological scenes, can be qualified as 'imaginary realists'. With the increasing availability of photo editing software, also art photographers like Karl Hammer and others create artistic works in this genre.


title: Magic realism

text: Fabulism traditionally refers to fables, parables, and myths, and is sometimes used in contemporary contexts for authors whose work falls within or relates to magical realism.


title: Magic realism

text: Though often used to refer to works of magical realism, fabulism incorporates fantasy elements into reality, using myths and fables to critique the exterior world and offer direct allegorical interpretations. Austrian-American child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim suggested that fairy tales have psychological merit. They are used to translate trauma into a context that people can more easily understand and help to process difficult truths. Bettelheim posited that the darkness and morality of traditional fairy tales allowed children to grapple with questions of fear through symbolism. Fabulism helped to work through these complexities and, in the words of Bettelheim, "make physical what is otherwise ephemeral or ineffable in an attempt...of understanding those things that we struggle the most to talk about: loss, love, transition."


title: Magic realism

text: Author Amber Sparks described fabulism as blending fantastical elements into a realistic setting. Crucial to the genre, said Sparks, is that the elements are often borrowed from specific myths, fairy tales, and folktales. Unlike magical realism, it does not just use general magical elements, but directly incorporates details from well known stories. "Our lives are bizarre, meandering, and fantastic," said Hannah Gilham of the "Washington Square Review" regarding fabulism. "Shouldn't our fiction reflect that?"


title: Magic realism

text: While magical realism is traditionally used to refer to works that are Latin American in origin, fabulism is not tied to any specific culture. Rather than focusing on political realities, fabulism tends to focus on the entirety of the human experience through the mechanization of fairy tales and myths. This can be seen in the works of C.S. Lewis, who was once referred to as the greatest fabulist of the 20th century. His 1956 novel "Till We Have Faces" has been referenced as a fabulist retelling. This re-imagining of the story of Cupid and Psyche uses an age-old myth to impart moralistic knowledge on the reader. A Washington Post review of a Lewis biography discusses how his work creates "a fiction" in order to deliver a lesson. Says the Post of Lewis, "The fabulist...illuminates the nature of things through a tale both he and his auditors, or readers, know to be an ingenious analogical invention."


title: Magic realism

text: Italo Calvino is an example of a writer in the genre who uses the term "fabulist". Calvino is best known for his book trilogy, "Our Ancestors", a collection of moral tales told through surrealist fantasy. Like many fabulist collections, his work is often classified as allegories for children. Calvino wanted fiction, like folk tales, to act as a teaching device. "Time and again, Calvino insisted on the 'educational potential' of the fable and its function as a moral exemplum," wrote journalist Ian Thomson about the Italian Fabulist.


title: Magic realism

text: While reviewing the work of Romanian-born American theater director Andrei Serban, "New York Times" critic Mel Gussow coined the term "The New Fabulism." Serban is famous for his reinventions in the art of staging and directing, known for directing works like "The Stag King" and "The Serpent Woman," both fables adapted into plays by Carl Gozzi. Gussow defined "The New Fabulism" as "taking ancient myths and turn(ing) them into morality tales." In Ed Menta's book, "The Magic Behind the Curtain", he explores Serban's work and influence within the context of American theatre. He wrote that the Fabulist style allowed Serban to neatly combine technical form and his own imagination. Through directing fabulist works, Serban can inspire an audience with innate goodness and romanticism through the magic of theatre. "The New Fabulism has allowed Serban to pursue his own ideals of achieving on sage the naivete of a children's theater," wrote Menta. "It is in this simplicity, this innocence, this magic that Serban finds any hope for contemporary theatre at all."


title: Magic realism

text: Prominent English-language fantasy writers have said that "magic realism" is only another name for fantasy fiction. Gene Wolfe said, "magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish," and Terry Pratchett said magic realism "is like a polite way of saying you write fantasy."


title: Magic realism

text: However, Amaryll Beatrice Chanady distinguishes magical realist literature from fantasy literature ("the fantastic") based on differences between three shared dimensions: the use of antinomy (the simultaneous presence of two conflicting codes), the inclusion of events that cannot be integrated into a logical framework, and the use of authorial reticence. In fantasy, the presence of the supernatural code is perceived as problematic, something that draws special attention—where in magical realism, the presence of the supernatural is accepted. In fantasy, while authorial reticence creates a disturbing effect on the reader, it works to "integrate the supernatural" into the natural framework in magical realism. This integration is made possible in magical realism as the author presents the supernatural as being equally valid to the natural. There is no hierarchy between the two codes. The ghost of Melquíades in Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or the baby ghost in Toni Morrison's "Beloved" who visit or haunt the inhabitants of their previous residence are both presented by the narrator as ordinary occurrences; the reader, therefore, accepts the marvelous as normal and common.


title: Magic realism

text: To Clark Zlotchew, the differentiating factor between the fantastic and magical realism is that in fantastic literature, such as Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", there is a hesitation experienced by the protagonist, implied author or reader in deciding whether to attribute natural or supernatural causes to an unsettling event, or between rational or irrational explanations. Fantastic literature has also been defined as a piece of narrative in which there is a constant faltering between belief and non-belief in the supernatural or extraordinary event.


title: Magic realism

text: In Leal's view, writers of fantasy literature, such as Borges, can create "new worlds, perhaps new planets. By contrast, writers like García Márquez, who use magical realism, don't create new worlds, but suggest the magical in our world." In magical realism, the supernatural realm blends with the natural, familiar world. This twofold world of magical realism differs from the onefold world that can be found in fairy-tale and fantasy literature. By contrast, in the series "Sorcerous Stabber Orphen" the laws of natural world become a basis for a naturalistic concept of magic.


title: Magic realism

text: "Animist realism" is a term for conceptualizing the African literature that has been written based on the strong presence of the imaginary ancestor, the traditional religion and especially the animism of African cultures. The term was used by Pepetela (1989) and Harry Garuba (2003) to be a new conception of magic realism in African literature.


title: Magic realism

text: While science fiction and magical realism both bend the notion of what is real, toy with human imagination, and are forms of (often fantastical) fiction, they differ greatly. Bower's cites Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" as a novel that exemplifies the science fiction novel's requirement of a "rational, physical explanation for any unusual occurrences." Huxley portrays a world where the population is highly controlled with mood enhancing drugs, which are controlled by the government. In this world, there is no link between copulation and reproduction. Humans are produced in giant test tubes, where chemical alterations during gestation determine their fates. Bowers argues that, "The science fiction narrative's distinct difference from magical realism is that it is set in a world different from any known reality and its realism resides in the fact that we can recognize it as a possibility for our future. Unlike magical realism, it does not have a realistic setting that is recognizable in relation to any past or present reality."


title: Magic realism

text: Although critics and writers debate which authors or works fall within the magical realism genre, the following authors represent the narrative mode. Within the Latin American world, the most iconic of magical realist writers are Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was an instant worldwide success.


title: Magic realism

text: García Márquez confessed: "My most important problem was destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." Allende was the first Latin American woman writer recognized outside the continent. Her best-known novel, "The House of the Spirits", is arguably similar to García Márquez's style of magical realist writing. Another notable novelist is Laura Esquivel, whose "Like Water for Chocolate" tells the story of the domestic life of women living on the margins of their families and society. The novel's protagonist, Tita, is kept from happiness and marriage by her mother. "Her unrequited love and ostracism from the family lead her to harness her extraordinary powers of imbuing her emotions to the food she makes. In turn, people who eat her food enact her emotions for her. For example, after eating a wedding cake Tita made while suffering from a forbidden love, the guests all suffer from a wave of longing. The Mexican Juan Rulfo pioneered the exposition through a non-linear structure with his short novel "Pedro Páramo" that tells the story of Comala both as a lively town in times of the eponymous Pedro Páramo and as a ghost town through the eyes of his son Juan Preciado who returns to Comala to fulfil a promise to his dead mother.


title: Magic realism

text: In the Portuguese-speaking world, Jorge Amado and Nobel prize-winning novelist José Saramago are some of the most famous authors of magic realism. Less well-known figures may include Murilo Rubião, playwright Dias Gomes (Saramandaia), and José J. Veiga. Incidente em Antares, novel by Erico Verrissimo is also included, even though the author is not. Amado remains the best known of modern Brazilian writers, with his work having been translated into some 49 languages. He is the most adapted Brazilian author in cinema, theater, and television, notably Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1976 and the American remake Kiss Me Goodbye in 1982. Angolan author Ondjaki's novel Transparent City is an example of magical realism in African literature. Transparent City won the José Saramago Prize in 2013.


title: Magic realism

text: In the English-speaking world, major authors include: British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, whose "Midnight's Children" mixes history and fantasy; African American novelists Toni Morrison (although she has contested this descriptor of her work) and Gloria Naylor; Latino writers such as Ana Castillo, Rudolfo Anaya, Daniel Olivas, Rudy Ruiz, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Helena Maria Viramontes; Native American authors Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie; English author Louis de Bernières and English feminist writer Angela Carter. Perhaps the best known is Rushdie, whose "language form of magical realism straddles both the surrealist tradition of magic realism as it developed in Europe and the mythic tradition of magical realism as it developed in Latin America". Morrison's most notable work, "Beloved", tells the story of a mother who, haunted by the ghost of her child, learns to cope with memories of her traumatic childhood as an abused slave and the burden of nurturing children into a harsh and brutal society. The Welsh author Glyn Jones's novel "The Island of Apples" (1965) is often overlooked, perhaps because it appeared before the term magic realism was commonly known in English, perhaps because too much was made of the supposed influence of Jones's friend Dylan Thomas on his work, but this phantasmagorical blend of reality and myth with a twelve year old narrator set in a dreamlike-version of the early 20th century clearly merits inclusion in the genre. Jonathan Safran Foer uses magical realism in exploring the history of the stetl and Holocaust in "Everything Is Illuminated". The South African-Italian author Patricia Schonstein uses magic realism in examining the Holocaust, the Rhodesian War and apartheid in "A Time of Angels" and "A Quilt of Dreams".


title: Magic realism

text: Dino Buzzati's novels and short stories are often cited as examples of magic realism in Italian literature.


title: Magic realism

text: In Norway, the writers Erik Fosnes Hansen, Jan Kjærstad and the young novelist Rune Salvesen have marked themselves as premier writers of magical realism, something that has been seen as very un-Norwegian.


title: Magic realism

text: Dimitris Lyacos's Poena Damni trilogy, originally written in Greek, is also seen as displaying characteristics of magic realism in its simultaneous fusion of real and unreal situations in the same narrative context.


title: Magic realism

text: In Kannada literature, Shivaram Karanth's Jnanpith award winning novel, Mookajjiya Kanasugalu and Devanur Mahadeva's Kendra Sahitya Akademi award winning novel, Kusuma Baale, are two prominent works that dabbled in magical realism. Both the works are widely read and have been adapted into a movie and a limited TV series, respectively. Mookajjiya Kanasugalu is a novel that traces the evolution of 'Gods' in a grounded setting via Mookajji's (the main character) preternatural ability to touch and see everything an inanimate object has witnessed in its entire existence. The novel Kusuma Baale blends magical realism and surrealism while telling the story of lives of people from the oppressed castes in rural parts of Karnataka.


title: Magic realism

text: The painterly style began evolving as early as the first decade of the 20th century, but 1925 was when "Magischer Realismus" and "Neue Sachlichkeit" were officially recognized as major trends. This was the year that Franz Roh published his book on the subject, "Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei" ("'Post-Expressionism, Magical Realism: Problems of the Newest European Painting"') and Gustav Hartlaub curated the seminal exhibition on the theme, entitled simply "Neue Sachlichkeit" (translated as "New Objectivity"), at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Mannheim, Germany. Guenther refers most frequently to the New Objectivity, rather than magical realism, which is attributed to that New objectivity is practical based, referential (to real practicing artists), while the magical realism is theoretical or critic's rhetoric. Eventually under Massimo Bontempelli guidance, the term "magic realism" was fully embraced by the German as well as in Italian practicing communities.


title: Magic realism

text: New Objectivity saw an utter rejection of the preceding impressionist and expressionist movements, and Hartlaub curated his exhibition under the guideline: only those, "who have remained true or have returned to a positive, palpable reality," in order to reveal the truth of the times," would be included. The style was roughly divided into two subcategories: conservative, (neo-)classicist painting, and generally left-wing, politically motivated Verists. The following quote by Hartlaub distinguishes the two, though mostly with reference to Germany; however, one might apply the logic to all relevant European countries.


title: Magic realism

text: In the new art, he saw a right, a left wing. One, conservative towards Classicism, taking roots in timelessness, wanting to sanctify again the healthy, physically plastic in pure drawing after nature...after so much eccentricity and chaos [a reference to the repercussions of World War I]... The other, the left, glaringly contemporary, far less artistically faithful, rather born of the negation of art, seeking to expose the chaos, the true face of our time, with an addiction to primitive fact-finding and nervous baring of the self... There is nothing left but to affirm it [the new art], especially since it seems strong enough to raise new artistic willpower.


title: Magic realism

text: Both sides were seen all over Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, ranging from the Netherlands to Austria, France to Russia, with Germany and Italy as centers of growth. Indeed, Italian Giorgio de Chirico, producing works in the late 1910s under the style "arte metafisica" (translated as "Metaphysical art"), is seen as a precursor and as having an "influence...greater than any other painter on the artists of New Objectivity."


title: Magic realism

text: Further afield, American painters were later (in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly) coined magical realists; a link between these artists and the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s was explicitly made in the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition, tellingly titled "American Realists and Magic Realists." French magical realist Pierre Roy, who worked and showed successfully in the US, is cited as having "helped spread Franz Roh's formulations" to the United States.


title: Magic realism

text: When art critic Franz Roh applied the term "magic realism" to visual art in 1925, he was designating a style of visual art that brings extreme realism to the depiction of mundane subject matter, revealing an "interior" mystery, rather than imposing external, overtly magical features onto this everyday reality. Roh explains:


title: Magic realism

text: We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world that celebrates the mundane. This new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism. It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things... it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world.


title: Magic realism

text: In painting, magical realism is a term often interchanged with post-expressionism, as Ríos also shows, for the very title of Roh's 1925 essay was "Post-Expressionism, Magical Realism". Indeed, as Dr. Lois Parkinson Zamora of the University of Houston writes, "Roh, in his 1925 essay, described a group of painters whom we now categorize generally as Post-Expressionists."


title: Magic realism

text: Roh used this term to describe painting that signaled a return to realism after expressionism's extravagances, which sought to redesign objects to reveal the spirits of those objects. Magical realism, according to Roh, instead faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself. One could relate this exterior magic all the way back to the 15th century. Flemish painter Van Eyck (1395–1441) highlights the complexity of a natural landscape by creating illusions of continuous and unseen areas that recede into the background, leaving it to the viewer's imagination to fill in those gaps in the image: for instance, in a rolling landscape with river and hills. The magic is contained in the viewer's interpretation of those mysterious unseen or hidden parts of the image.


title: Magic realism

text: The pictorial ideals of Roh's original magic realism attracted new generations of artists through the latter years of the 20th century and beyond. In a 1991 "New York Times" review, critic Vivien Raynor remarked that "John Stuart Ingle proves that Magic Realism lives" in his "virtuoso" still life watercolors. Ingle's approach, as described in his own words, reflects the early inspiration of the magic realism movement as described by Roh; that is, the aim is not to add magical elements to a realistic painting, but to pursue a radically faithful rendering of reality; the "magic" effect on the viewer comes from the intensity of that effort: "I don't want to make arbitrary changes in what I see to paint the picture, I want to paint what is given. The whole idea is to take something that's given and explore that reality as intensely as I can."


title: Magic realism

text: While Ingle represents a "magic realism" that harks back to Roh's ideas, the term "magic realism" in mid-20th century visual art tends to refer to work that incorporates overtly fantastic elements, somewhat in the manner of its literary counterpart.


title: Magic realism

text: Occupying an intermediate place in this line of development, the work of several European and American painters whose most important work dates from the 1930s through to the 1950s, including Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, Paul Cadmus, Ivan Albright, Philip Evergood, George Tooker, Ricco, even Andrew Wyeth, such as in his well-known work Christina's World, is designated as "magic realist". This work departs sharply from Roh's definition, in that it (according to artcyclopedia.com) "is anchored in everyday reality, but has overtones of fantasy or wonder". In the work of Cadmus, for example, the surreal atmosphere is sometimes achieved via stylized distortions or exaggerations that are not realistic.


title: Magic realism

text: Recent "magic realism" has gone beyond mere "overtones" of the fantastic or surreal to depict a frankly magical reality, with an increasingly tenuous anchoring in "everyday reality". Artists associated with this kind of magic realism include Marcela Donoso and Gregory Gillespie.


title: Magic realism

text: Artists such as Peter Doig, Richard T. Scott and Will Teather have become associated with the term in the early 21st century.


title: Magic realism

text: Magical realism is not an officially recognized film genre, but characteristics of magic realism present in literature can also be found in many moving pictures with fantasy elements. These characteristics may be presented matter-of-factly and occur without explanation.


title: Magic realism

text: Many films have magical realist narrative and events that contrast between real and magical elements, or different modes of production. This device explores the reality of what exists. Fredric Jameson, in "On Magic Realism in Film", advances a hypothesis that magical realism in film is a formal mode that is constitutionally dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present. "Like Water for Chocolate" (1992) begins and ends with the first person narrative to establish the magical realism storytelling frame. Telling a story from a child's point of view, the historical gaps and holes perspective, and with cinematic color heightening the presence, are magical realist tools in films.


title: Magic realism

text: A number of films by Woody Allen also convey elements of magic realism, including "The Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985), "Alice" (1990), "Midnight in Paris" (2011), "Scoop" (2006), and "To Rome With Love" (2012). Additionally, most of the films directed by Terry Gilliam are strongly influenced by magic realism; the animated films of Satoshi Kon and Hayao Miyazaki often utilize magic realism; and some of the films of Emir Kusturica contain elements of magical realism, the most famous of which is "Time of the Gypsies" (1988).


title: Magic realism

text: In his essay "Half-Real", MIT professor and ludologist Jesper Juul argues that the intrinsic nature of video games is magic realist. Early video games such as the 1986 text adventure "Trinity" combined elements of science fiction, fantasy and magic realism. Point-and-click adventure games such as "Kentucky Route Zero" (2013) and "Memoranda" (2017) have also embraced the genre. The "Metal Gear" franchise has also frequently been cited as a notable example of magic realism, because of its combination of realistic military fiction with supernatural elements.


title: Magic realism

text: In electronic literature, early author Michael Joyce's "Afternoon, a story" deploys the ambiguity and dubious narrator characteristic of high modernism, along with some suspense and romance elements, in a story whose meaning could change dramatically depending on the path taken through its lexias on each reading. More recently, Pamela Sacred perpetuated the genre through "La Voie de l'ange", a continuation of "The Diary of Anne Frank" written in French by a fictional character from her "The Passengers" hypertext saga.


title: Fiddler on the Roof

text: Fiddler on the Roof is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia in or around 1905. It is based on "Tevye and his Daughters" (or "Tevye the Dairyman") and other tales by Sholem Aleichem. The story centers on Tevye, a milkman in the village of Anatevka, who attempts to maintain his Jewish religious and cultural traditions as outside influences encroach upon his family's lives. He must cope with the strong-willed actions of his three older daughters who wish to marry for love; their choices of husbands are successively less palatable for Tevye. An edict of the tsar eventually evicts the Jews from their village.


title: Fiddler on the Roof

text: The original Broadway production of the show, which opened in 1964, had the first musical theatre run in history to surpass 3,000 performances. "Fiddler" held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical for almost 10 years until "Grease" surpassed its run. The production was extraordinarily profitable and highly acclaimed. It won nine Tony Awards, including best musical, score, book, direction and choreography. It spawned five Broadway revivals and a highly successful 1971 film adaptation and has enjoyed enduring international popularity. It has also been a popular choice for school and community productions.


title: Fiddler on the Roof

text: "Fiddler on the Roof" is based on "Tevye (or "Tevye the Dairyman") and his Daughters", a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem that he wrote in Yiddish between 1894 and 1914 about Jewish life in a village in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia at the turn of the 20th century. The stories are based on Aleichem's own upbringing near modern day Kyiv (fictionalized as Yehupetz). It is also influenced by "Life Is with People", by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Aleichem wrote a dramatic adaptation of the stories that he left unfinished at his death, but which was produced in Yiddish in 1919 by the Yiddish Art Theater and made into a film in the 1930s. In the late 1950s, a musical based on the stories, called "Tevye and his Daughters", was produced Off-Broadway by Arnold Perl. Rodgers and Hammerstein and then Mike Todd briefly considered bringing this musical to Broadway but dropped the idea.


title: Fiddler on the Roof

text: Investors and some in the media worried that "Fiddler on the Roof" might be considered "too Jewish" to attract mainstream audiences. Other critics considered that it was too culturally sanitized, "middlebrow" and superficial; Philip Roth, writing in "The New Yorker", called it "shtetl kitsch". For example, it portrays the local Russian officer as sympathetic, instead of brutal and cruel, as Sholom Aleichem had described him. Aleichem's stories ended with Tevye alone, his wife dead and his daughters scattered; at the end of "Fiddler", the family members are alive, and most are emigrating together to America. The show found the right balance for its time, even if not entirely authentic, to become "one of the first popular post-Holocaust depictions of the vanished world of Eastern European Jewry". Harold Prince replaced the original producer Fred Coe and brought in director/choreographer Jerome Robbins. The writers and Robbins considered naming the musical "Tevye", before landing on a title suggested by various paintings by Marc Chagall ("Green Violinist" (1924), "Le Mort" (1924), "The Fiddler" (1912)) that also inspired the original set design. Contrary to popular belief, the "title of the musical does not refer to any specific painting".


title: Fiddler on the Roof

text: During rehearsals, one of the stars, Jewish actor Zero Mostel, feuded with Robbins, whom he held in contempt, because Robbins had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and hid his Jewish heritage from the public. Other cast members also had run-ins with Robbins, who reportedly "abused the cast, drove the designers crazy [and] strained the good nature of Hal Prince".


title: Fiddler on the Roof

text: Tevye, a poor Jewish milkman with five daughters, explains the customs of the Jews in the Russian shtetl of Anatevka in 1905, where their lives are as precarious as the perch of a fiddler on a roof ("Tradition"). At Tevye's home, everyone is busy preparing for the Sabbath meal. His sharp-tongued wife, Golde, orders their daughters, Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava, Shprintze and Bielke, about their tasks. Yente, the village matchmaker, arrives to tell Golde that Lazar Wolf, the wealthy butcher, a widower older than Tevye, wants to wed Tzeitel, the eldest daughter. The next two daughters, Hodel and Chava, are excited about Yente's visit, but Tzeitel illustrates how it could have bad results ("Matchmaker, Matchmaker"). A girl from a poor family must take whatever husband Yente brings, but Tzeitel wants to marry her childhood friend, Motel the tailor.