Nanawatai
Nənawā́te ( ps, ننواتې, "sanctuary") is a tenet of the Pashtunwali code of the Pashtun people. It allows a beleaguered person to enter the house of any other person and make a request of him which cannot be refused, even at the cost of the host's own life or fortune. A similar code of conduct is used by the neighbouring Baluch people.Durkin, Major J. Keller. "Authority, Legitimacy, and the Qawm: HistoricalPerspectives on Emergent Governance in Afghanistan", 2009 Traditionally it is used to refer to a request for sanctuary, whereby the host must be willing to fight or die for the sake of anyone who comes knocking at his door seeking refuge, even if it is a sworn enemy. As the burden of sanctuary and protection extends even to fighting against government troops on behalf of the person seeking refuge, some have suggested that Mullah Omar's refusal to turn in Osama bin Laden was due only to his having availed himself of ''Nənawā́te''. Usage By invoking Nənawā́te one is s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Beast Of War
''The Beast'' (also known as ''The Beast of War'') is a 1988 American war film directed by Kevin Reynolds and written by William Mastrosimone, based on his play ''Nanawatai''. The film follows the crew of a Soviet T-62 tank who became lost during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The film has enjoyed a cult-favorite status in spite of its low box office statistics. Plot In 1981 Afghanistan, a Soviet tank unit attacks a Pashtun village harboring a group of mujahideen fighters. Following the assault, one of the tanks—commanded by ruthless commander Daskal—takes a wrong turn through a mountain pass and enters a blind valley. Taj returns to discover the village destroyed, and his father and brother killed—the latter by having been crushed under Daskal's tank. As the new khan following his brother's death, Taj is spurred to seek revenge and leads a band of mujahideen fighters into the valley to pursue Daskal's tank, which they call 'The Beast', counting on their captured RPG-7 ant ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Håkon Berge
Håkon Berge (born 22 April 1954, in Stavanger) is a Norwegian contemporary composer, conductor and arranger. Berge studied composition at the Music Department at the University of Stavanger and the Norwegian Academy of Music. As a composer, Berge has contributed to stage productions at institutions such as Rogaland Teater, Den Nationale Scene and Oslo's National Theatre. He has also contributed to TV productions, including the score for the domestically broadcast opera ''Gagarin – a space opera'' in 1991. Berge has penned a number of commissioned works, including a work written for the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the opening work for Oslo's Nobel Peace Center and the 2008 European Brass Band Championship test piece ''Brass Blot''. As a freelancer, Berge has held positions as musical director, composer in residence and conductor at Norway's major theatres and has written music for more than 70 plays. In addition to his work on music for theatre productions, Berge ha ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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William Mastrosimone
William Mastrosimone (born August 19, 1947) is an American playwright and screenwriter from Trenton, New Jersey. He attended high school at The Pennington School and received a graduate degree in playwriting from Mason Gross School of the Arts, a part of Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was .... His plays include ''The Woolgatherer'', ''Extremities (play), Extremities'', ''Shivaree (play), Shivaree'', and ''Cat's Paw''. He also wrote ''Bang Bang You're Dead (play), Bang Bang You're Dead,'' which was once able to be downloaded from the Internet and performed by students for free. Other plays include ''The Afghan Women'' and ''Nanawatai#In popular culture, Nanawatai'', upon which the film ''The Beast of War, The Beast'' is based. Two recent plays are ' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pashtunwali
Pashtunwali or Pakhtunwali ( ps, پښتونولي) is the traditional lifestyle and is best described as a code of honor of the Pashtun people, by which they live. Scholars widely have interpreted it as being "the way of the Afghans" or "the code of life". Pashtunwali is widely practised by Pashtuns in the Pashtun-dominated regions. Pashtunwali dates back to ancient pre-Islamic times. Overview The native Pashtun tribes, often described as fiercely independent people, have inhabited the Pashtunistan region (eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan) since at least the 1st millennium BC. During that period, much of their mountainous territory has remained outside government rule or control. Pashtun resistance to outside rule and the terrain they reside in is sometimes speculated to be why Indigenous Pashtuns still follow the "code of life". Pashtunwali rules are accepted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and also in some Pashtun communities around the world. Some non-Pashtun Afgh ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pashtun People
Pashtuns (, , ; ps, پښتانه, ), also known as Pakhtuns or Pathans, are an Iranian ethnic group who are native to the geographic region of Pashtunistan in the present-day countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were historically referred to as Afghans () or xbc, αβγανο () until the 1970s, when the term's meaning officially evolved into that of a demonym for all residents of Afghanistan, including those outside of the Pashtun ethnicity. The group's native language is Pashto, an Iranian language in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Additionally, Dari Persian serves as the second language of Pashtuns in Afghanistan while those in the Indian subcontinent speak Urdu and Hindi (see Hindustani language) as their second language. Pashtuns are the 26th-largest ethnic group in the world, and the largest segmentary lineage society; there are an estimated 350–400 Pashtun tribes and clans with a variety of origin theories. The total popu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Scottish Clan
A Scottish clan (from Goidelic languages, Gaelic , literally 'children', more broadly 'kindred') is a kinship group among the Scottish people. Clans give a sense of shared identity and descent to members, and in modern times have an official structure recognised by the Court of the Lord Lyon, which regulates Scottish heraldry and coats of arms. Most clans have their own tartan patterns, usually dating from the 19th century, which members may incorporate into kilts or other clothing. The modern image of clans, each with their own tartan and specific land, was promulgated by the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott after influence by others. Historically, tartan designs were associated with Lowland and Highland districts whose weavers tended to produce cloth patterns favoured in those districts. By process of social evolution, it followed that the clans/families prominent in a particular district would wear the tartan of that district, and it was but a short step for that community ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Scottish Highlands
The Highlands ( sco, the Hielands; gd, a’ Ghàidhealtachd , 'the place of the Gaels') is a historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands. The term is also used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not clearly defined, particularly to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands. The Scottish Gaelic name of ' literally means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands. The area is very sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, and includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of the Highlands rose to around 300,000, but ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national " newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the pa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Soviet–Afghan War
The Soviet–Afghan War was a protracted armed conflict fought in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. It saw extensive fighting between the Soviet Union and the Afghan mujahideen (alongside smaller groups of anti-Soviet Maoism, Maoists) after the former militarily intervened in, or launched an invasion of, Afghanistan to support the local pro-Soviet government that had been installed during Operation Storm-333. Most combat operations against the mujahideen took place in the Afghan countryside, as the country's urbanized areas were entirely under Soviet control. While the mujahideen were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of their support came from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Iran; the American pro-mujahideen stance coincided with a sharp increase in bilateral hostilities with the Soviets during the Cold War (1979–1985), Cold War. The conflict led to the deaths of between 562,000 and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Stage Play
A play is a work of drama, usually consisting mostly of dialogue between Character (arts), characters and intended for theatre, theatrical performance rather than just Reading (process), reading. The writer of a play is called a playwright. Plays are performed at a variety of levels, from London's West End theatre, West End and Broadway theatre, Broadway in New York City – which are the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world – to Regional theater in the United States, regional theatre, to community theatre, as well as university or school productions. A stage play is a play performed and written to be performed on stage rather than broadcast or made into a movie. Stage plays are those performed on any stage before an audience. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference as to whether their plays were performed or read. The term "play" can refer to both the written texts of playwrights and to their complete ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a Federation, federal union of Republics of the Soviet Union, fifteen national republics; in practice, both Government of the Soviet Union, its government and Economy of the Soviet Union, its economy were highly Soviet-type economic planning, centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Saint Petersburg, Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kyiv, Kiev (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Ukrainian SSR), Minsk (Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Byelorussian SSR), Tas ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mujahideen
''Mujahideen'', or ''Mujahidin'' ( ar, مُجَاهِدِين, mujāhidīn), is the plural form of ''mujahid'' ( ar, مجاهد, mujāhid, strugglers or strivers or justice, right conduct, Godly rule, etc. doers of jihād), an Arabic term that broadly refers to people who engage in '' jihad'' (), interpreted in a jurisprudence of Islam as the fight on behalf of God, religion or the community (''ummah''). The widespread use of the word in English began with reference to the guerrilla-type militant groups led by the Islamist Afghan fighters in the Soviet–Afghan War (see Afghan mujahideen). The term now extends to other jihadist groups in various countries such as Myanmar (Burma), Cyprus, and the Philippines. Early history In its roots, the Arabic word ''mujahideen'' refers to any person performing '' jihad''. In its post-classical meaning, ''jihad'' refers to an act that is spiritually comparable in reward to promoting Islam during the early 600s CE. These acts could be a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |