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The present collection of articles deals with the relation between the Arabic popular epic and 'official' historiography. The Arabic popular epic can be considered as popular history since it represents a way in which a large, but mainly illiterate audience perceives, conceptualizes and commemorates history. Using methods based in literary criticism, modern research has come up with new and refreshing approaches to study the historicity of the heroic literature. The contributors to this volume a...

Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) can only be described through superlatives. For Rumi is the best known and arguably the greatest exponent of the mystical tradition in Islam. The Masnavi, Rumi's longest and most fully realised poetic work remains, in the eastern lands of Islam, the most extensively read and revered text after the Qur'an. Perhaps more surprisingly, at least to those still unfamiliar with his writings, Rumi is also often cited as the most widely read poet today in the United States. Th...

This is a paperback reprint in two volumes of the late Muhsin Mahdi's classic edition of the oldest preserved manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights kept in the BNF, Paris. It includes the original survey (in Arabic) of both the print and manuscript traditions of The Thousand and One Nights, with extensive notes and four appendices.

The early modern Ottoman poet Mihri Hatun (1460-1515) succeeded in drawing an admiring audience and considerable renown during a time when few women were accepted into the male-dominated intellectual circles. Her poetry collection is among the earliest bodies of women's writing in the Middle East and Islamicate literature, providing an exceptional vantage point on intellectual history. With this volume, Havliog?lu not only gives readers access to this rare text but also investigates the factors...

These seven poems, translated by A. J. Arberry in 1957, are the most famous survivors of a vast mass of poetry produced in the Arabian Desert in the sixth century. Arberry’s introduction explains to the reader what was known about the poems and how they came to be preserved and distributed over time. The epilogue particularly interrogates the authenticity of the poems and tracks how they have been transmitted over time. This work will be of interest to those studying Persian and Middle-Eastern...

This book is an examination of how the space of the downtown served dual purposes as both a symbol of colonial influence and capital in Egypt, as well as a staging ground for the demonstrations of the Egyptian nationalist movement. It is through the lens of literature, in this case a body of texts that form an archive on the downtown, that one is able to understand the layered significance of this space for multiple generations of Egyptians.

This book cuts across important debates in cultural studies, literary criticism, politics, sociology, and anthropology. Meyda Yegenoglu brings together different theoretical strands in the debates regarding immigration, from Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic understanding of the subject formation, to Zygmunt Bauman's notion of the stranger.

This volume focuses on several Russian authors among many who immigrated to Israel with the ""big wave"" of the 1990s or later, and whose largest part of their works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson. They are popular and active authors on the Israeli scene, in the printed and electronic media, and some of them are also editors of the renowned journals and authors of literary and cultural reviews and essays. They constit...

Noha Radwan offers the first book-length study of the emergence, context, and development of modern Egyptian colloquial poetry, recently used as a vehicle for communications in the revolutionary youth movement in Egypt on January 25th 2011, and situates it among modernist Arab poetry.

Despite the urgent need to develop understandings of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the light of the current situation in the Middle East, the role of violence and reconciliation in Palestinian and Israeli literature and film has received only brief treatment. This book is intended to fill that void; that is to explore how Israelis and Palestinians view and depict themselves and each other in situations that lead to either violence or reconciliation, and the ways in which both parties defin...

" . . . transcends the realm of literature and poetic criticism to include virtually every field of Arabic and Islamic studies." -Roger AllenThroughout the classical Arabic literary tradition, from its roots in pre-Islamic Arabia until the end of the Golden Age in the 10th century, the courtly ode, or qasida, dominated other poetic forms. In The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy, Suzanne Stetkevych explores how this poetry relates to ceremony and political authority and how the classical Arabic ode...

The role of medieval Syriac scholars in the translation, and thus preservation, of classical literature cannot be underestimated. Gottheil provides all of the extant Syriac texts of the translation of Aristotle's Categories, and a brief introduction.

Wanderings in Arabia is an abridgement of Charles M. Doughty's masterwork, Travels in Arabia Deserta, which has been hailed as the finest travel account in the English language. It is the first book to be written, in any language, about wide tracts of the Arabian Penisula. Out of his remote and lonely wanderings, Doughty fashioned a lyrical evocation of the desert and the peoples who inhabit this mysterious world. In the estimation of fellow explorer Benedict Allen: 'The book, which brims wit...

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between a search for totalizing doctrines-nationalist, Marxist, and religious-and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence Arab states, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, and failed development. They were also responding to successive defeats by Israel, humiliation, and injustice. The first book to take stock of these critical res...