Arabic Newspapers Research Articles

Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead

Abstract For many decades, scholars of gender and women's history in the Middle East and North Africa have challenged prevailing visions of an unchanged patriarchy, showing how patriarchy was transformed in relation to colonialism, and how some women struggled against it. To the contrary, this article aims to challenge our understanding of women's agency, taking Mzab as a case study. It explores the ways in which women of this Berber speaking region, inhabited by Ibadi Muslims and conquered by the French in 1882, contributed to the colonial reinforcement of male domination. Reading together works of ethnography, colonial administrative files, legal disputes, and Arabic-language newspapers, this article shows that, together with the colonial legal framework, other informal legal discourses and institutions shaped women's condition. Down the road, forms of patriarchy and notions of gender shifted.

Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead

For many decades, scholars of gender and women’s history in the Middle East and North Africa have challenged prevailing visions of an unchanged patriarchy, showing how patriarchy was transformed in relation to colonialism, and how some women struggled against it. To the contrary, this article aims to challenge our understanding of women’s agency, taking Mzab as a case study. It explores the ways in which women of this Berber speaking region, inhabited by Ibadi Muslims and conquered by the French in 1882, contributed to the colonial reinforcement of male domination. Reading together works of ethnography, colonial administrative files, legal disputes, and Arabic-language newspapers, this article shows that, together with the colonial legal framework, other informal legal discourses and institutions shaped women’s condition. Down the road, forms of patriarchy and notions of gender shifted.

Unpopular Protest: Mass Mobilization and Attitudes to Democracy in Post-Mubarak Egypt

Political science has long debated the significance of protest during a democratic transition, but attention has been largely confined to its impact on elite support for democracy. Contributing to scholarship on the attitudinal consequences of mobilization, we examine how protest shaped popular perceptions of democracy during the post-Mubarak transition in Egypt. We do this by matching wave 2 of the Arab Barometer survey with georeferenced protest events reported in Arabic-language newspapers. Our results show that Egyptians came to hold less favorable attitudes to democracy following sustained protest in their district. We find that this relationship was principally driven by longer-lasting, static street protests that targeted public space. Qualitative case details illustrate how such tactics could disrupt everyday life and affect livelihoods. These findings highlight one way in which popular support for democracy can be eroded during a transition.

An Evaluation of Automatic Text Summarization of News Articles: The Case of Three Online Arabic Text Summary Generators

Digital news platforms and online newspapers have multiplied at an unprecedented speed, making it difficult for users to read and follow all news articles on important, relevant topics. Numerous automatic text summarization systems have thus been developed to address the increasing needs of users around the world for summaries that reduce reading and processing time. Various automatic summarization systems have been developed and/or adapted in Arabic. The evaluation of automatic summarization performance is as important as the summarization process itself. Despite the importance of assessing summarization systems to identify potential limitations and improve their performance, very little has been done in this respect on systems in Arabic. Therefore, this study evaluated three text summarizers AlSummarizer, LAKHASLY, and RESOOMER using a corpus built of 40 news articles. Only articles written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) were selected as this is the formal and working language of Arab newspapers and news networks. Three expert examiners generated manual summaries and examined the linguistic consistency and relevance of the automatic summaries to the original news articles by comparing the automatic summaries to the manual (human) summaries. The scores for the three automatic summarizers were very similar and indicated that their performance was not satisfactory. In particular, the automatic summaries had serious problems with sentence relevance, which has negative implications for the reliability of such systems. The poor performance of Arabic summarizers can mainly be attributed to the unique morphological and syntactic characteristics of Arabic, which differ in many ways from English and other Western languages (the original language/s of automatic summarizers), and are critical in building sentence relevance and coherence in Arabic. Thus, summarization systems should be trained to identify discourse markers within the texts and use these in the generation of automatic summaries. This will have a positive impact on the quality and reliability of text summarization systems. Arabic summarization systems need to incorporate semantic approaches to improve performance and construct more coherent and meaningful summaries. This study was limited to news articles in MSA. However, the findings of the study and their implications can be extended to other genres, including academic articles.

Asim Al-Haidari His life and his political and cultural role

This study attempts to investigate one of the great Kurdish political and intellectual figures (Hasim Haydari) who had played a great role in the twentieth century in the development of the national freedom movement of Iraq. In addition, he has worked in many Kurdish and Arabic newspapers. He has also used literary genres to raise peoples’ awareness. In spite of all these great achievements, he has not been very well-appreciated and valued in the history of his nation. Therefore, we have dedicated this study to this under the title (Hasim Haydari 1921-1971 political and cultural role). Apart from the introduction, this study consists of two main parts. The first part is devoted to his biography and his role in the national freedom movement in Iraq and kurdistan.  The second part Its focuses on the cultural role and an axis divided into two topics, the first talks about his writings and publication in newspapers and magazines, and the second deals with his articles translated in the political and literary aspects.

The Islamic State's Pattern of Sexual Violence: Ideology and Institutions, Policies and Practices

AbstractThe Islamic State (IS), which controlled significant territory in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, engaged in a wide repertoire of violence against civilians living in these areas. Despite extensive media coverage and scholarly attention, the determinants of this pattern of violence remain poorly understood. We argue that, contrary to a widespread assumption that the IS wielded violence indiscriminately, it systematically targeted different social groups with distinct forms of violence, including sexual violence. Our theory focuses on ideology, suggesting it is a necessary element of explanations of patterns of violence on the part of many armed actors. Ideologies, to varying extent, prescribe organizational policies that order or authorize particular forms of violence against specific social groups and institutions that regulate the conditions under which they occur. We find support for our theory in the case of sexual violence by IS by triangulating between several types of qualitative data: official documents; social media data generated by individuals in or near IS-controlled areas; interviews with Syrians and Iraqis who have knowledge of the organization's policies including victims of violence and former IS combatants; and secondary sources including local Arabic-language newspapers. Consistent with our theory, we find that the organization adopted ideologically motivated policies that authorized certain forms of sexual violence, including sexual slavery and child marriage. Forms of violence that violated organizational policies but were nonetheless tolerated by many commanders also occurred and we find evidence of two such practices: gang rape of Yazidi women and forced marriage of Sunni Muslim women.

Efficient Discrimination between Arabic Dialects

Background: With the explosion of communication technologies and the accompanying pervasive use of social media, we notice an outstanding proliferation of posts, reviews, comments, and other forms of expressions in different languages. This content attracted researchers from different fields; economics, political sciences, social sciences, psychology and particularly language processing. One of the prominent subjects is the discrimination between similar languages and dialects using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. The problem is usually addressed by formulating the identification as a classification task. Methods: The approach is based on machine learning classification methods to discriminate between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and four regional Arabic dialects: Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf and North-African. Several models were trained to discriminate between the studied dialects in large corpora mined from online Arabic newspapers and manually annotated. Results: Experimental results showed that n-gram features could substantially improve performance. Logistic regression based on character and word n-gram model using Count Vectors identified the handled dialects with an overall accuracy of 95%. Best results were achieved with Linear Support vector classifier using TF-IDF Vectors trained by character-based uni-gram, bi-gram, trigram, and word-based uni-gram, bi-gram with an overall accuracy of 95.1%. Conclusion: The results showed that n-gram features could substantially improve performance. Additionally, we noticed that the kind of data representation could provide a significant performance boost compared to simple representation.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of the Russian-Turkish Conflict in Western and Arab Newspapers: An Appraisal Model

News articles vary considerably in ideological perspective depending on the type and the stance of the newspaper. The present study employs CDA approach with a view of assessing the Western and Arab newspaper articles motivated by a specific ideology with regard to the ongoing conflict between Turkey and Russia after the downing of the Russian Su-24 on 24 November 2015. It aims at showing how the portrayal of the Self and Other reveal the hidden ideologies of these newspapers. Additionally, the present study aims to explore the evaluative stances and attitudinal positioning of Western and Arab newspapers. The study draws on Van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square of positive Self-presentation and negative Other – presentation to clarify different views and ideologies. The Appraisal model is the linguistic framework employed in the current study at both qualitative and quantitative levels. The data comprises of 68 articles taken from Western newspapers and news agencies and 30 news report from the Arab newspapers. The findings of the analysis in both Arab and Western Newspapers indicate that the number of judgmental resources exceeds that of affectual resources in both Western and the Arab newspapers. This means there is an emphasis on constructing an ideology that appeals to the readers’ moral and social rather than emotional aspects that invites the readers' sympathy.

An Enhanced Corpus for Arabic Newspapers Comments

In this paper, we propose our enhanced approach to create a dedicated corpus for Algerian Arabic newspapers comments. The developed approach has to enhance an existing approach by the enrichment of the available corpus and the inclusion of the annotation step by following the Model Annotate Train Test Evaluate Revise (MATTER) approach. A corpus is created by collecting comments from web sites of three well know Algerian newspapers. Three classifiers, support vector machines, naïve Bayes, and k-nearest neighbors, were used for classification of comments into positive and negative classes. To identify the influence of the stemming in the obtained results, the classification was tested with and without stemming. Obtained results show that stemming does not enhance considerably the classification due to the nature of Algerian comments tied to Algerian Arabic Dialect. The promising results constitute a motivation for us to improve our approach especially in dealing with non Arabic sentences, especially Dialectal and French ones

Articulating Statistics in Science News in Arab Newspapers: The Cases of Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to understand how journalists engage with and use statistics to articulate science news in particular Arab countries with emphasis on the cases of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The study assesses the current capabilities of journalism and identifies key knowledge gaps in the area, while examining the nature of the news sources that provide this data and how journalists handle these sources in relation to the outputs that they produce. It does so by applying a mix-methods approach that triangulates content analysis, expert panel and semi-structured interviews with journalists and news editors in order to analyse outputs, organisational cultures and practices. The overall project suggests similarities in the existing gaps and causes of these deficits to those present among journalists in the West and highlights some important distinctive contextual features that hinder news reporting of science in the countries studied here.

The Islamic State’s Pattern of Sexual Violence: Ideology and Institutions, Policies and Practices

The Islamic State, which controlled significant territory in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, engaged in a wide repertoire of violence against civilians living in these areas. Despite extensive media coverage and scholarly attention, the determinants of this pattern of violence remain poorly understood. We argue that, contrary to a widespread assumption that the Islamic State wielded violence indiscriminately, it systematically targeted different social groups with distinct forms of violence, including sexual violence. Our theory focuses on ideology, suggesting it is a necessary element of explanations of patterns of violence on the part of many armed actors. Ideologies, to varying extent, prescribe organizational policies that order or authorize particular forms of violence against specific social groups and institutions that regulate the conditions under which they occur. We find support for our theory in the case of sexual violence by the Islamic State by triangulating between several types of qualitative data: official documents; social media data generated by individuals in or near Islamic State-controlled areas; interviews with Syrians and Iraqis who have knowledge of the organization’s policies including victims of violence and former Islamic State combatants; and secondary sources including local Arabic-language newspapers. Consistent with our theory, we find that the organization adopted ideologically motivated policies that authorized certain forms of sexual violence, including sexual slavery and child marriage. Forms of violence that violated organizational policies but were nonetheless tolerated by many commanders also occurred and we find evidence of two such practices: gang rape of Yazidi women and forced marriage of Sunni Muslim women.

استخدام الرسوم المعلوماتية في الصحف الإلكترونية

الرسوم المعلوماتية هي تمثيل البيانات والمعلومات المعقدة باستخدام رسوم إبداعية تجذب الانتباه وتيسر على المتلقي إدراكها بسرعة ووضوح. تظهر مشكلة الدراسة في الاتجاهات الحديثة لكيفية توظيف الرسوم المعلوماتية بالصحف الإلكترونية من خلال المقارنة بين نموذجين مختلفين من الصحف الإلكترونية العربية والإنجليزية وهما صحيفتا USA Today والبيان. من خلال تحليل الرسوم المعلوماتية التي نشرت في هاتين الصحيفتين تبين أن النوع السائد من الرسوم المعلوماتية المستخدمة في كلتا الصحيفتين الإلكترونيتين هي الرسومات القائمة على الكتابة؛ إذ استخدمت صحيفة USA Today عددًا أكبر من الرسومات القائمة على الكتابة.

Serializing protestantism: the missionary Miscellany and the Arabic press in 1850s Beirut

ABSTRACT This article explores the connections between two distinct publishing enterprises in 1850s Beirut to put into relief how American missionaries and learned Syrians in tandem shaped the early Arabic press industry. It examines Syrian journalistic ambitions, a missionary foray into serialized print, and the material practices of early Arabic publishing. Section one provides the first detailed history of the Miscellany (1851–1856), a series of religious pamphlets produced by the missionaries known in Arabic as Majmuʿ Fawayid (A Collection of Useful Knowledge). Through a material analysis of the publication, it also expands on the extent archival record and discusses developments to the format of the serial. Section two advances an updated establishment story of Hadiqat al-Akhbar (1858–1907), the first Arabic newspaper in the city. It spotlights a disremembered leader of the journalistic enterprise, Antonius Ameuney (1821–1881), and pinpoints the origins of the newspaper to a group of Syrians assembled at the forgotten Médawar Literary Circle. The entangled history of the Arabic press shows how foreigners and locals worked simultaneously to realize different visions for a serial publication in Beirut in the early days of the Arab Nahḍa (Renaissance).

Representations of Saudi Male’s Guardianship System and Women’s Freedom to Travel in Western Newspapers: A Critical Discourse Analysis

There has been a tremendous interest in the Western media concerning the status of women in Saudi Arabia. The recent reform in women’s rights and guardianship system has Western media gone into motion frenzy. A few research has been done on the representation of Saudi women in Arabic newspapers, but there is a scarce of research in Western English newspapers to date. This article exercises a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate the language used in three famous Western newspapers to uncover the hidden ideologies behind the representation of Saudi women’s guardianship system. To this end, van Dijk’s (2004) analytical framework was employed to reveal the underlying ideologies of six reports by The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Toronto Star. The findings show that the three newspapers have expressed the notion of “otherness” in their descriptions of Saudi Arabia and Saudi women. Furthermore, the newspapers have shared the employment of consensus and negative other-presentation to portray Saudi women as being oppressed and subordinate.

ANALISIS KEAKURATAN HASIL PENERJEMAHAN GOOGLE TRANSLATE DENGAN MENGGUNAKAN METODE BACK TRANSLATION

This research analyses comparison between the original Arabic text and the translation back to Arabic by Google Translate on Arabic newspapers. To achieve test the accuracy of text according to translated theory. Then researchers use qualitative descriptive method of research with translation method back translations that is, a validation tool that is widely used in international research settings and original documents compared to translation results Back to see the inconsistencies, and if nothing of the translation is considered equivalent. Based on the results of the study the accuracy results of Google Translate is inaccurate, but understanding of the meaning text still understandable. As for inaccuracies of translations found such as linguistic studies such as syntactic, semantics, mistakes in writing numbers, lack of words, reduction.

Responses to the abolitions of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate in the Arabic and Hebrew press of Palestine, 1922–1924

This is a study of the responses of the Arabic and Hebrew press of Palestine to the abolitions of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate. It is based on a comparative examination of the contemporary coverage of the events by the Arabic newspapers al-Karmil and Filastin and by the Hebrew newspapers Doar ha-Yom and Haaretz. The analysis yields valuable insights about how the Yishuv and the Palestinians viewed the abolitions of the Sultanate and Caliphate, the contemporary significance of these institutions, Kemalist Turkey, the rival population in Palestine, and Sharif Husayn. Mainly, it shows that the Hebrew press hailed the abolitions as revolutionary developments that would pave the road before the modernization of not only Turkey but the whole of Asia, while the Arabic press considered this too momentous a matter to be decided by Turkey alone and predicted adverse consequences for both that country and the East.

Entropy-Based Approach for the Detection of Changes in Arabic Newspapers' Content.

A new method for the recognition of meaningful changes in social state based on transformations of the linguistic content in Arabic newspapers is suggested. The detected alterations of the linguistic material in Arabic newspapers play an indicator role. The currently proposed approach acts in an “online” fashion and uses pre-trained vector representations of Arabic words. After a pre-processing stage, the words in the issues’ texts are substituted by vectors obtained within a word embedding methodology. The approach typifies the consistent linguistic template by the similarity of the embedded vectors. A change in the distributions of the issue-grounded samples indicates a difference in the underlying newspaper template. A two-step procedure implements the concept, where the first step compares the similarity distribution of the current issue versus the union of ones corresponding to several of its predecessors. A repeating under-sampling approach accompanied by a two-sample test stabilizes the sampling and returns a collection of the resultant p-values. In the second stage, the entropy of these sets is sequentially calculated, such that the change points of the time series obtained in this way indicate the changes in the newspaper content. Numerical experiments provided on the following issues of several Arabic newspapers published in the Arab Spring period demonstrate the high reliability of the method.

Discourse Markers in Arabic and English Newspaper Articles: The Case of the Arabic Lakin and its English equivalent But

Discourse markers, as words or phrases, play a significant role in promoting coherent segments of discourse. This paper investigates the use of discourse markers (DMs) in newspaper articles. By applying Fraser’s framework, this study aims at investigating the functions and positions of DM but (English) and its equivalent lakin (Arabic) in newspaper articles written by native and non-native speakers of English and Saudi and Egyptian speakers of Arabic. It also highlights the similarities and differences in the functions and positions of DMs but and lakin. This quantitative study adopts a corpus-based approach. The data consist of articles collected from 12 newspapers categorized as: Arabic language newspapers published in Saudi Arabia (Alriyadh, Al Jazirah, Al-Hayat) and Egypt (Al-Ahram, Al-Gomhuria, Eltahrir) and English language newspapers published in Saudi Arabia (Arab News, Saudi Gazette, Asharq Al-Awsat) and the USA (Washington Post, The New York Times, USA TODAY). Findings demonstrate, first, that DM but is used frequently as a confirmation or addition marker by both native and non-native speakers. However, second, lakin, functions as the primary correction DM in standard Arabic. Moreover, third, the native Arabic speakers mostly share the same functions of using lakin despite different dialects they have. This study also reveals that lakin can be found only in the medial position, whereas, but is found in the initial and medial position. It concludes that DMs but and lakin evidence that functions of DMs proposed by Fraser are universal and they could be generalized.

Transitional Portraits: Syrian Immigrants of the North American Mahjar in 'Abd Al-Masih Haddad's Prose

This article argues that the 1921 collection of diasporic short stories Hikayat al-mahjar, written by ‘Abd al-Masih Haddad, makes a unique and notable contribution to mahjar literature by mobilizing formal literary techniques and innovative thematic content to capture a Syrian immigrant community engaged in a transitional moment in America. This paper situates Haddad (best known as the founder of the biweekly Arabic newspaper al-Saʼih, and a founding member of the literary society al-Rābiṭa al-qalamiyya) among his literary peers and provides an analysis of Hikayat al-mahjar that demonstrates the work’s points of convergence and divergence from the literary norms of the Arab diaspora in North America. Haddad, in highlighting the ambivalence and tension that overwhelmed Syrian immigrant characters navigating the boundaries of new social and cultural realities, broke ranks with his contemporaries in the Arab diaspora, whose output in Arabic was primarily fixated on nostalgic and romantic depictions of the homeland.

واقع وتحديات الصحافة العلمية فى العالم العربي

Despite its early onset in the Arab world in the nineteenth century, science journalism is, nowadays, facing different challenges that hinder its role in contributing to the sustainable development and prosperity of our society. The main pillars of science journalism are professionalism, accuracy, reliability and simplifying complex information. For science journalism to achieve its goals, it should reach a broader audience to raise the Arab society’s awareness of scientific matters, news and content. Therefore, we need to review our perspective of science communication by offering training programs to specialized reporters, battling "pseudoscience" via social media and other channels, and bridging the gap between scientists and science journalists. Furthermore, the digital revolution can also help empower science journalism. In addition, there is a need to fact-check news sections in Arab newspapers, websites and agencies, to filter the huge flow of information that sometimes deliberately deceives our minds.