Academic literature on the topic 'European Folk literature'

Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights in the eighteenth century brought to the wider European readership an awareness of the wealth of written folk literature of medieval provenance in the Near and Middle East. During the Romantic movement, popular translations or rewritings from Arabic, Turkish and Persian medieval folk literatures proliferated (see Appendix 1 below, Chauvin, no. 6; Marzolph, no. 10).

The dissertation Obraz literatury średniowiekowych ludów, a mianowicie Słowian i Niemców [The Literature of Medieval Peoples: Slavs and Germans] was published in Warsaw in 1856. It was a translation of a study by the French philologist and comparatist Frédéric Gustave Eichhoff. The original text was signifi cantly modifi ed and supplemented by Wacław Aleksander Maciejowski, a Polish historian of law and specialist on Slavic culture. The article identifi es the parts of the text that Maciejowski added, as this allows for a reconstruction of his general views on Slavic poetry, including the differences between folk ballad traditions of the Slavic nations, as well as between Slavic and Western European folk ballads (primarily Germany). Maciejowski’s views on the development of the literatures of various European nations by the mid-nineteenth century have also been discussed.

This article examines the prosody and other features of Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Eugene Onegin , which were composed as a part of Ashkenazi Jewish cultural movements in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Palestine. Russian literature played an important role within the history of modern literature in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Translating Russian literature tested the limits of the literary Yiddish and Hebrew languages. Due to the novel’s status in the Russian canon and its poetic forms, translating it was a coveted literary challenge for high-culture artistic production in Jewish languages. I examine this phenomenon using Pushkin’s simulation of folk poetry in the “Song of the Girls.” Due to the different social and textual functions of Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as their linguistic features, translatability of even formal characteristics differed from one Jewish language to another. The changes in Hebrew pronunciation during this period were reflected clearly in the changing limits of the ability of writers to translate Onegin . Though motivated by an inward-facing drive to produce modern and Western literature in one Jewish language or another, these translations were also a manifestation of the cultural bond between secular, East European Jewish intellectuals and Russian literature.

AbstractMs. Uppsala E.8 contains an incomplete version of the wonder tale ATU 510B, Donkey-Skin, taken down from oral performance in 1612. Though briefly mentioned in reference works it is largely ignored and has not been translated before. Other than being the first known version of the tale and of the motif Three Magical Dresses known from the Cinderella cycle it is probably the first record anywhere of a folktale taken down from an oral source, as demonstrated by its form. It also appears to be the only folktale manifestation of the motif Three Animal Opponents, known prominently from Dante’s Commedia. Complete versions of the tale come from Scandinavian nineteenth-century folk tradition in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Some of these have the incest motif (The Unnatural Father) common to ATU 510 B, while others, including the 1612 fragment, do not: these tell of a farmer or similar who wants to give his daughter to a man she does not want, not of a widowed king pretending a marriage with his own child. In both cases the heroine escapes from home, assisted by a magical Animal Helper. An early fourteenth-century version as a non-magical novella is found in the Florentine collection Il Pecorone; there is also a loose connection to Straparola’s novella Tebaldo – the latter with, the former without the incest motif. Furthermore, the existence of the tale is one of several obstacles to Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s controversial theory that wonder tales were a sixteenth-century urban creation in print rather than a European oral tradition.

Thе relevance of this scientific statistic will begin before we start, as the Ukrainian literature of the 19th century will require more detailed reassessment. We are very important in the development of folklore warehouse, some of the folklore itself has become an unacceptable dzherel for the establishment of the actualization of artistic themes and images that were given to the dobies. Folklorе images were found in the folk culture and integrated in the creative palette of Ukrainian writing. After the hour of writing robots, a hermeneutic, descriptive, systemic and systematic method of reading has been obtained. This аrticle is devoted to the problem of creative interpretation of the folk phytonym "perekotypole" on the basis of works of Ukrainian literature of the XIX century, in particular the article considers the ballad "Pokotypole" by A. Metlinsky, the Russian-language story nun "and the poem" We are so similar in autumn "by T. Shevchenko, L. Glibov's fable" Perekotypole ". Allusions to European romantic literature have also been identified in the study of the creative interpretation of the folklore image of the perekotypol. In the cоurse of research it is proved that the folk tale about perekotypole is consonant with F. Schiller's ballad "Ivik's cranes". Both works show that both the steppe plant and the cranes in the sky can be silent witnesses to the ruthless violent death of a person, and in the end they help solve the murder and help punish the thief. Among all the works analyzed in the article, it is worth noting the Russian-language story "Perekatypole" by G. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, which at one time was not republished at all and was removed from the list of the author's academic publication. Thе study highlights the levels of transformation of the folk image of the perekotypol in various literary genres of Ukrainian literature of the XIX century: direct, secondary, indirect. The emotional and semantic load of the folk phytonym "perekotypole" in the artistic texts of the mentioned period is also determined. This image in the structure of the lіterary text serves as a silent witness to the murder (folk tales about Perekotypole, the bаllad "Pokotypole" by A. Metlinsky, "Perekotypole" by G. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko), symbolizes the state of loneliness, orphan destiny (poetry of T. Shevchenko), еmbodies the image of barrenness and alienation (L. Glшbov's fable "Perekotipole"). The study is promising in terms of further study of Ukrainian literature of the nineteenth century, its links with folklore, as well as with the European literature of Romanticism.

Speaking Today. Literature, Politics and Other Languages in Songs (Herder, Alunāns, Barons). This article claims that the politico-cultural relevance of literary texts in their respective present consists, among other aspects, of their handling of linguistic diversity. As examples, it presents three 18th and 19th century publications from the German and/or Latvian speaking territories which put (folk) songs into the centre of their rather different politicocultural endeavours. Herder’s collection of folk songs from 1778/79 is read as an attempt at a poetic new beginning that makes use of linguistic diversity qua translation in order to inspire originality in the ‘mother tongue’. The folk songs here serve to synchronise and dynamise linguistic means in the name of a new literature. The Dseesmiņas (‘little songs’), a collection of translations of European poetry into Latvian published by Alunāns in 1856, combines precisely this claim to renewal with an attempt at an anti-colonial synchronisation and modernisation of the Latvian language. Eventually, the six-volume collection of Latwju Dainas (Latvian folk songs), published by Barons around 1900, takes up Herder’s efforts to preserve folk songs. Barons synchronises a dialectally, materially and historically diverse corpus of songs in the name of anti-colonial emancipation. In terms of cultural policy, his project aims to give presence to pre-modern folk life under the conditions of modernity.

A large body of Michael Finnissy's work refers to music, texts and other aspects of culture outside the mainstream European tradition. As a child he met Polish and Hungarian friends of the family, and was further attracted to aspects of Eastern European music when asked to transcribe Yugoslav music from a record, for a ballet teacher. Study of anthropological and other literature led him to a conviction that folk music lay at the roots of most other music, and related quite directly to the defining nature of man's interaction with his environment. Finnissy went on to explore the widest range of folk music and culture, from Sardinia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, the Kurdish people, Azerbaijan, the Vendan Africans, China, Japan, Java, Australia both Aboriginal and colonial, Native America and more recently Norway, Sweden, Denmark, India, Korea, Canada, Mexico and Chile.

The subject of this paper are city (small town) folk dances in a broader sense and Niševljanka folk dance as a town game in a narrower sense. The aim of the paper was to describe Niševljanka as a town folk dance. The basic task is to write down the music, rhythm and technique of the dance. In the available literature dealing with the systematization and division of folk dances, city folk dances are nowhere to be found as a special type of dance. Maybe rightly so, since they can be traced back to the traditional, original dances. However, given the conditions and time of the origin of these dances, with the migration of the peasantry to the towns and cities, the city dances in some way distanced themselves from the traditional ones. This was influenced by new living conditions, more cramped space, mixtures of the European and Oriental culture, as well as the Europeanization of culture and way of life in general. It can be stated that city folk dances are in fact traditional - original dances that have taken on other aspects of dancing and dancing behavior. If any folk dance has marked our city, and the state in general, from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, it is undoubtedly Niševljanka folk dance. Numerous manuscripts, books, travelogues, newspaper articles from that time testify to this fact. This paper is an attempt to point this out and to find in one place the musical, rhythmic and playful record of this, undoubtedly original city folk dance.

South Africa and the Philippines are home to a number of indigenous groups whose cultures and traditions have not been tainted by centuries of colonization. This paper compares the pre-colonial literature of cultural communities in two countries, where one is part of a continent (South Africa) while the other is an archipelago (the Philippines). Despite the differences in their geographical features, the two countries share common experiences: 1) colonized by European powers; 2) have a significant number of indigenous communities; 3) a treasury of surviving folk literature. Published African and Philippine folktales reveal recurring images and elements. One of these is the use of animals as characters, performing domestic tasks in households, and representing gender roles. This paper compares how animal characters portray feminine characteristics and domestic roles in selected fables from South Africa and the Philippines, specifically on the commonalities in the roles of the female characters. The research highlights the relevance of recording and publishing of folk literature, and the subsequent integration and teaching thereof within basic and higher education curricula.Key words: Indigenous, Cultural communities, fables, folk literature, Philippine folk tales, South African folk talesHow to cite this article:Quintero, G.J. & Makgabo, C. 2020. Animals as Representations of Female Domestic Roles in selected fables from the Philippines and South Africa. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South. v. 4, n. 1, p. 37-50. April 2020. Available at:https://sotl-south-journal.net/?journal=sotls&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=121This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Considering the importance of the topos of the Crusades for the Arab discourses of the 19th - 21st centuries and its influence on the collective memory in modern Arab countries, the challenge of finding the roots of this phenomenon is of vital importance. This problem can be solved only through the analyses of the memory of the Crusades in Arab culture from the late 13th to the beginning of the 19th centuries. Proceeding from this, it seems relevant to study the preservation of the memory of the Crusades in one of the most important types of works of Arabic literature, Arabic Folk Epics. The analysis of the image of the Franks in this kind of sources shows that during the era of the Crusades itself and in the subsequent centuries a huge number of the Arab tribal pre-Islamic narratives and passages about the struggle against Byzantium were transformed into the ones dedicated to Jihad against the Franks. Thus, first the Crusades reshaped this kind of narratives, and then the Arab tradition itself began to support and reproduce the image of the Christian-European-Crusader in the collective memory in Egypt and Levant due to the high popularity of the Folk Epics, which might have created a horizon of expectation for the perception of the European colonial policy of the 19th-20th centuries, i.e. “the return of the Crusaders”.

This chapter examines the emergence of colloquial Arabic poetry as populist-political commentary in Egypt by offering a reading of Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi's series of texts, which figured political contestation in the thematic-formal mould of the sira shaʻbiyya. It first provides an overview of the sira shaʻbiyya (folk epic, folk romance) before discussing at least four Bayramic sira compositions, all of which narrate the Turkish–Greek conflict over possession of Asia Minor in the context of postwar intra-European negotiations for neocolonial primacy. The texts, labelled ‘Sira Kemaliyya’, chronicle the conflict between Greece and Turkey in 1919–1922, highlighted by the exploits of Turkish ‘epic hero’ and nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The chapter explains how Bayram manages the duality of heroic posturing as a heavy-handed colonialist tactic versus the effective heroism of Mustafa Kemal.

In this chapter I present an overview of the most prominent trends in South African working-class literature from the beginning of the 20th century until 1994. Since its emergence, South African working class was a heterogeneous formation which encompassed diverse ethnicities, both of European and non-European origin. Each of them created its own literature and culture, using various languages, incorporating traditional elements and means of expression, and merging them with borrowed foreign discourses and literary devices belonging to the repertoire of socialist literature that had been created mostly in the Soviet Union, the USA and other European countries. Consequently, South African working-class literature can be conceived of as conglomerate of heteroglot hybrid forms and manifestations of a subversive counter-discourse of protest literature. The forms presented here include writings of European socialists commenting on South African situation, novels utilizing the Jim goes to Joburg plot pattern, drama incorporating the Soviet socialist realism and references to the Afrikaans farm novel, Afrikaans folk tunes functioning as protest songs, and black workers praise poetry based on tribal oral conventions. As a carrier of a new working-class identity, this literature promoted a modern urban model which, nevertheless, relied on the continuity with local rural traditions.

This chapter details how Mordechai Gebirtig engraved his name on the history of Jewish cabaret in Poland between the wars. Every singer had his songs in his or her repertoire. These songs spread from the cabaret stages (kleynkunstbine) of Łódź and Warsaw to all of Poland and to the entire Jewish world. Even today they are alive on the stage and in Jewish homes; they are an indispensable part of the repertoire of Jewish singers. They are also arousing increasing interest among non-Jewish audiences in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United States. Since the destruction of European Jewry, these songs have become a crucial means of learning about Jewish folklore and the life of the Jewish poor, matters inadequately recorded in Yiddish literature and other sources.

This chapter examines the technophobia of modernist literature towards the question of machine intelligence. The chapter takes Edmund Husserl’s ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man’ (1935) as its starting point, in terms of the tension between a vitalistic conception of what defines the ‘human’ as opposed to the apparent sterility of machine technology. Husserl’s lecture is contextualized alongside critical thinkers Walter Benjamin, Gustave Le Bon, and Georg Simmel, and literary writers Albert Robida and Emile Zola. The second section concentrates upon Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), with its satirical depiction of machine intelligence, in contrast to H. G. Wells’s grotesque rendering of the Beast Folk in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) as a form of cyborg life. The final section, focusing upon representative texts by modernist authors such as E. M. Forster, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Raymond Roussel, and Karel Čapek, argues that they respond variously to the templates of Butler and Wells.

This chapter talks about the role humoral pathology played in Jewish medicine. Humans were created from four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. And the fact that someone, God forbid, falls ill is due to an imbalance of these elements. One becomes dominant over another and there is no peace between them. In both Jewish medicine and rabbinic literature, views on the elements, the humours, and the temperaments were concordant with the dominant conceptions across Europe and in the Middle East. Humoral theory in Jewish folk beliefs was a significant element of most popular publications cited in traditional health and medical manuals. However, with the rise of biomedicine, memory of the origins of many views and practices derived from humoral pathology faded. Nonetheless, like the temperaments, they remained a presence in colloquial phraseology. As humoral pathology filtered down into folk culture it began to interact with magic and religion, even offering grounds for speculation on the extrasensory world, angels, and so on.

The Virgin Mary as such cannot be examined scientifically. We can, however, examine her ‘apparitions’ in the world, as well as the innumerable variants of Marian devotion and cult. This volume focuses on her manifestations in the post-Communist region with some geographical spillovers. It is either because post-Communist transformation concerned not only the former socialist countries, but also had an impact on the entire European region and was part of the overall post-modern and post-Communist reconfiguration of the European area. Another factor is that Marian worship is not controlled by political borders of present-day nation states. It has a wider transnational potential and impact. Nevertheless, we focused our viewfinder primarily on the post-Communist region, as we believe that thanks to its geographical and symbolic location and economic position in Europe, as well as its historical roots and traditions and common Communist history and heritage, it not only shows different traits of modernity compared to ‘Western Europe’, but we also face specific features and forms of worshipping of the Virgin Mary. We therefore decided to present in this volume the traces of the Virgin Mary by means of more in-depth analyses from selected countries of the post-socialist region. By means of this publication, we can observe how the Virgin Mary is manifested in the faces of seers and pilgrims and how audio-visual means are becoming a direct part of Marian apparitions in Germany in the modern era (H. Knoblauch and S. Petschke); how she speaks through the mouth of a blind Roma woman and pacifies the ethnic and religious tensions between various groups in Romania (L. Peti); how she attributes meaning to meaningless places on the map by reallocating her presence through the geo- graphical and time distribution of Marian dedications in Slovakia (J. Majo); how, after the fall of Communism, she revitalises the old places of her cult with new power, bringing together traditional and non-traditional forms of worship in the secular Czech Lands (M. Holubová); how her messages are spread on the websites of new non-traditional Marian movements and how their apocalyptical warnings are being updated and localised into the specific national environment in Czechia (V. Tutr); how she addresses the readers of Marian literature differently on the shelves of book- stores in Slovakia and Austria (R. Kečka); but also how the Virgin Mary absorbs ultra-modern millennial and spiritualistic concepts of Mother Earth and Mother of the Universe, becoming the speak- er of the great unified Hungarian nation (J. Kis-Halas); how she is becoming the re-discovered herald of Serbian national identity (A. Pavićević); how she absorbs the local forms of faith and folk Christianity in modern era and is thus the manifestation of grass- root Christianity and local religious culture in Bulgaria (V. Baeva and A. Georgieva); and how the path from a private to an officially recognised apparition depends not only on the Virgin Mary and the seer, but also on the overall constellation of the audience and the ability to offer a religious ready-made event (T. Zachar Podolinská and L. Peti). This publication observes the current diversity of the forms of Marian devotion in post-Communist countries through different national and geographically defined contours and, in particular, the ability of the Virgin Mary to satisfy the hunger for modern spirituality and authentic religiousness, give voice to unofficial and popular religions, revitalise and redefine old places of cult and add new ones, appease war conflicts, speak out on behalf of nations and marginalised ethnic groups, and guard national and conservative values. The post-modern and post-Communist Mary thus restores ruptured traditions with love and enchants the violently atheised European region with new miracles and apparitions, regardless of whether top Church and state representatives like it or not.

This chapter recounts how the Babylonian centre of Jewish study gradually went into decline and Jewish centres in Christian Europe grew stronger in France, Germany, Spain, and Provence during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It demonstrates the ways Jews sought reasons to extol the virtues of their own locale, which was customary in contemporaneous Christian societies. It also describes the various centres in Christian Europe that sought to establish a connection to the charismatic Charlemagne, cities, and countries in the Islamic world, which produced literatures praising their region. The chapter describes the eleventh-century legends and folk tales that extol the virtues of different Jewish centres in Europe set against the backdrop of the decline of the Babylonian centre following the death of R. Hai Gaon. It examines the rivalry between Spain and Ashkenaz as each centre strived to outdo the other.

As money laundering is a highly threatening and dangerous activity, its damage is only discussed when the consequences of these illegal activities become public, thus such kinds of investigations are particularly relevant. By fol-lowing public anti-money laundering (AML) directives and internal financial legislation of specific countries, it is pos-sible to improve any money laundering situation, anticipate potential risks and avoid various financial downturns. This paper examines the evolution of money laundering, the motives behind them, the potential economic consequences and highlights the need to suppress these activities to promote higher standards of AML, which could have a posi-tive impact on the countries’ economies. In the empirical part, according to the main macroeconomic indicators, 10 Northern European countries are analysed and the effectiveness of anti-money laundering processes, are identified. The analysis is made using several research steps, obtained results are compared and discussed. Methods used: scientific literature analysis, comparative analysis, data systematization, statistical data analysis, COPRAS, and cluster analysis. Conclusions and future research areas are mentioned.

Export has been in the focus of economic literature for years due to its multi-fold contribution to the macroeconomic stability and economic growth. These contributions are of great importance for Macedonia and Turkey on their way to becoming full members of the European Union. The objective of this paper is to investigate empirically the impact of the inward foreign direct investments (FDI) on export performance of Macedonia and Turkey. To achieve this objective we use a popular model of export and estimate two models. The first (benchmark) model includes the real effective exchange rate, the potential GDP, trade liberalization and export in the previous year. Along with these explanatory variables, in the second model we include the FDI inflows variable. The results of the benchmark model indicate that trade liberalization has a positive and significant impact on export. The export performance is positively and significantly affected by the last year's exports. The estimated coefficient of real effective exchange rate is not statistically significant. The potential output has a positive impact on the increase of export but it is also statistically not significant. The results of the second model indicate that FDI have a positive impact on export performance of Macedonia and Turkey, but not significant. The other explanatory variables have kept their signs as in benchmark model and only trade liberalization and the export from the previous period remained statistically significant.

Microfluidic concentration is achieved by utilizing Joule heating effect induced temperature gradient focusing (TGF) under a combined AC and DC electric field imposed in a straight microchannel with sudden expansion in cross-section. The introduction of AC electric field component services dual functions: one is to produce Joule heating effects for generating temperature gradient, and the other is to suppress electroosmotic flow with high frequencies. Therefore, the required DC voltage for achieving sample concentration with Joule heating induced TGF technique is remarkably reduced. The lower DC voltage can lead to smaller electroosmotic flow (EOF), thereby reducing the backpressure effect due to the finite reservoir size. It was demonstrated that using the proposed new TGF technique with Joule heating effect under a combined AC and DC field, more than 2500-fold concentration enhancement was obtained within 14 minutes in a PDMS/PDMS microdevice, which is an order of magnitude higher than the literature reported concentration enhancement achieved by microfluidic devices utilizing the Joule heating induced TGF technique.

This paper investigates the Gülen movement’s repertoires of action in order to determine how it differs from traditional Islamic revivalist movements and from the so-called ‘New Social Movements’ in the Western world. Two propositions lead the discussion: First, unlike many Islamic revivalist movements, the Gülen movement shaped its identity against the perceived threat of a trio of enemies, as Nursi named them a century ago – ignorance, disunity, and poverty. This perception of the opposition is crucial to understanding the apolitical mind-set of the Gülen movement’s fol- lowers. Second, unlike the confrontational New Social Movements, the Gülen movement has engaged in ‘moral opposition’, in which the movement’s actors seek to empathise with the adversary by creating (what Bakhtin calls) ‘dialogic’ relationships. ‘Moral opposition’ has enabled the movement to be more alert strategically as well as more productive tactically in solving the everyday practical problems of Muslims in Turkey. A striking example of this ‘moral opposition’ was witnessed in the Merve Kavakci incident in 1999, when the move- ment tried to build bridges between the secular and Islamist camps, while criticising and educating both parties during the post-February 28 period in Turkey. In this way the Gülen movement’s performance of opposition can contribute new theoretical and practical tools for our understanding of social movements. 104 | P a g e Recent works on social movements have criticized the longstanding tradition of classify- ing social movement types as “strategy-oriented” versus “identity-oriented” (Touraine 1981; Cohen 1985; Rucht 1988) and “identity logic of action” versus “instrumentalist logic of ac- tion” (Duyvendak and Giugni 1995) by regarding identities as a key element of a move- ment’s strategic and tactical repertoire (see Bernstein 1997, 2002; Gamson 1997; Polletta 1998a; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). Bifurcation of identity ver- sus strategy suggests the idea that some movements target the state and the economy, thus, they are “instrumental” and “strategy-oriented”; whereas some other movements so-called “identity movements” challenge the dominant cultural patterns and codes and are considered “expressive” in content and “identity-oriented.” New social movement theorists argue that identity movements try to gain recognition and respect by employing expressive strategies wherein the movement itself becomes the message (Touraine 1981; Cohen 1985; Melucci 1989, 1996). Criticizing these dualisms, some scholars have shown the possibility of different social movement behaviour under different contextual factors (e.g. Bernstein 1997; Katzenstein 1998). In contrast to new social movement theory, this work on the Gülen movement indi- cates that identity movements are not always expressive in content and do not always follow an identity-oriented approach; instead, identity movements can synchronically be strategic as well as expressive. In her article on strategies and identities in Black Protest movements during the 1960s, Polletta (1994) criticizes the dominant theories of social movements, which a priori assume challengers’ unified common interests. Similarly, Jenkins (1983: 549) refers to the same problem in the literature by stating that “collective interests are assumed to be relatively unproblematic and to exist prior to mobilization.” By the same token, Taylor and Whittier (1992: 104) criticize the longstanding lack of explanation “how structural inequality gets translated into subjective discontent.” The dominant social movement theory approaches such as resource mobilization and political process regard these problems as trivial because of their assumption that identities and framing processes can be the basis for interests and further collective action but cannot change the final social movement outcome. Therefore, for the proponents of the mainstream theories, identities of actors are formed in evolutionary processes wherein social movements consciously frame their goals and produce relevant dis- courses; yet, these questions are not essential to explain why collective behaviour occurs (see McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996). This reductionist view of movement culture has been criticized by a various number of scholars (e.g. Goodwin and Jasper 1999; Polletta 1997, 1999a, 1999b; Eyerman 2002). In fact, the debate over the emphases (interests vis-à-vis identities) is a reflection of the dissent between American and European sociological traditions. As Eyerman and Jamison (1991: 27) note, the American sociologists focused on “the instrumentality of movement strategy formation, that is, on how movement organizations went about trying to achieve their goals,” whereas the European scholars concerned with the identity formation processes that try to explain “how movements produced new historical identities for society.” Although the social movement theorists had recognized the deficiencies within each approach, the attempts to synthesize these two traditions in the literature failed to address the empirical problems and methodological difficulties. While criticizing the mainstream American collective behaviour approaches that treat the collective identities as given, many leading European scholars fell into a similar trap by a 105 | P a g e priori assuming that the collective identities are socio-historical products rather than cog- nitive processes (see, for instance, Touraine 1981). New Social Movement (NSM) theory, which is an offshoot of European tradition, has lately been involved in the debate over “cog- nitive praxis” (Eyerman and Jamison 1991), “signs” (Melucci 1996), “identity as strategy” (Bernstein 1997), protest as “art” (Jasper 1997), “moral performance” (Eyerman 2006), and “storytelling” (Polletta 2006). In general, these new formulations attempt to bring mental structures of social actors and symbolic nature of social action back in the study of collec- tive behaviour. The mental structures of the actors should be considered seriously because they have a potential to change the social movement behaviours, tactics, strategies, timing, alliances and outcomes. The most important failure, I think, in the dominant SM approaches lies behind the fact that they hinder the possibility of the construction of divergent collective identities under the same structures (cf. Polletta 1994: 91). This study investigates on how the Gülen movement differed from other Islamic social move- ments under the same structural factors that were realized by the organized opposition against Islamic activism after the soft coup in 1997. Two propositions shall lead my discussion here: First, unlike many Islamic revivalist movements, the Gülen movement shaped its identity against perceived threat of the triple enemies, what Nursi defined a century ago: ignorance, disunity, and poverty. This perception of the opposition is crucial to grasp non-political men- tal structures of the Gülen movement followers. Second, unlike the confrontational nature of the new social movements, the Gülen movement engaged in a “moral opposition,” in which the movement actors try to empathize with the enemy by creating “dialogic” relationships.