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Incest and inbreeding are two different but related aspects of marriage and human reproduction. A version of this article is available in print Volume XIII, Fascicle 1, pp. 5-6 INCEST AND INBREEDING. Incest and inbreeding are two different but related aspects of marriage and human reproduction: the former a legal and culturally determined concept that regards specific cases of sexual relationship, the latter a biological notion that concerns processes and tendencies in the reproduction of a population. Next-of-kin marriage in…

(d. early 5th/11th cent.), scholar, littérateur, and author of works on Islamic ethics, Qurʾanic exegesis, Islamic theology, and Arabic philology, as well as anthologies. RĀḠEB EṢFAHĀNI, Abul’l-Qāsem Ḥosayn b. Moḥammad b Mofażżal (d. early 5th/11th cent.), scholar, littérateur, and author of works on Islamic ethics, Qurʾanic exegesis, Islamic theology, and Arabic philology, as well as anthologies. Next to nothing is known about his life, since he is hardly mentioned in major biographical dictionaries; and if he is mention…

  Music and language have things in common. It is even thought by some that they have a common origin and were once indistinguishable. Whatever the truth of this, they share several characteristics: although they can be written down, they are primarily oral/aural; they are organized sound; they progress linearly in time; their constituents use differences in length and pitch as distinctive elements; there is a hierarchy of structured constituents from the smallest ones (notes or phonemes) to larg…

In a general sense, ‘poetic license’ is the freedom customarily given to poets to deviate from the normal rules of grammar, diction, or subject matter that are valid for prose, or even to depart from commonly accepted historical or scientific truth. Here, poetic license will be restricted to violations of the linguistic rules in the fields of morphology or syntax; other liberties of poets, such as being able to use far-fetched metaphors and imagery, to contradict themselves, to declare their lov…