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The Bedouin, or 'desert dwellers', have a rich cultural heritage often expressed through music and poetry. Here, Moneera Al-Ghadeer provides us with the first comparative reading of women's oral poetry from Saudi Arabia. She examines women's lyrics of love, desire, mourning and grievance. We come to understand Bedouin mores and - most significantly - the unique description of a desert that is consistently held to be infinite, evocative, stimulating and an eternal freedom. As the first English tr...

Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi's great poem, the Mathnawi, is one of the best known and most influential works of Muslim mysticism. Nicholson's critical edition is based on the oldest know manuscripts, including the earliest, dated 1278 and preserved in the Mevlana Museum at Konya. It remains the standard text and is provided with diacritical marks to assist the student. The prose translation, similarly, is intended to be an exact and faithful guide to the Persian. The three volumes of English trans...

"Pamuk is a writer who shares my reverence for the great art of the novel. He takes the novel seriously in a way that is perhaps no longer possible for Western writers, boldly describing it as European civilization's greatest invention."--Michael McGaha Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is a prominent voice in Turkish literature, speaking to the country's history, culture, and politics. In 2006, he became the first Turkish writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.Autobiographies of Orhan Pamu...

This work reveals the complex and varied experiences of Arab American life. The first edition of ""Dinarzad's Children"" was a groundbreaking and popular anthology that brought to light the growing body of short fiction being written by Arab Americans. This expanded edition includes sixteen new stories - thirty in all - and new voices and is now organized into sections that invite readers to enter the stories from a variety of directions. Here are stories that reveal the initial adjustments of i...

To the world they are known as Berbers, but they prefer to call themselves Imazighen, or "free people." The claim to this unique cultural identity has been felt most acutely in Algeria in the Kabylia region, where an Amazigh consciousness gradually emerged after WWII. This is a valuable model for other Amazigh movements in North Africa, where the existence of an Amazigh language and culture is denied or dismissed in countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. By tracing the cultural...

This third volume in the author's series Oral Poetry & Narratives from Central Arabia presents and analyses the work of four contemporary Bedouin poets of the Dawasir tribe in southern Najd. The introductory part discusses the poetry within the context of the Najdi oral tradition, the poets' role in tribal society, and their mirroring of this society's self-image against the background of its rapid economic, social and political transformation, and its relation with the Saudi State. It is follow...

'Osman Aga was the son of an Ottoman officer settled in the town of Temeschwar, in the West of present-day Rumania. Entering the army in his turn he was taken prisoner by the Austrians and most of his autobiography is concerned with the eleven years he spent in captivity and his eventual escape in 1699. He spent much of the period in the capacity of groom, servant and even pastrycook in noble households and his dramatic and somewhat colloquial account of his experiences is unique in the T...

This study is an attempt to identify and describe the distinctive features of the poetic style of the acclaimed medieval Andalusian poet Ibn Khafaajah, who has been credited with starting a new school of poetry, in Andalus and elsewhere. It offers a close reading of his poetry, concentrating on the three basic elements of style - imagery, rhetorical devices, and structural patterns. It shows how Ibn Khafajah creatively uses the poetic tradition available to him to form new images and scenes, cre...

This work dates from about AD 1725; it was composed a few years after the damage and deaths caused by the Afghan conquest had effectively destroyed the system by which Persia had been administered since the 16th century. Persian text with translation.

Babar was born in 1483 and died in 1530. His autobiography, a classic of Chaghatay Turkish literature, provides a vivid picture of the character and eventful career of a sophisticated and observant Central Asian warrior Prince, for before founding the Mughal Empire in India, its author had spent many years losing and winning a series of kingdoms in the area of modern Afghanistan and Soviet Central Asia. This is the standard edition of the Chaghatay text, consisting of a facsimile of the...

Contains the text of a section missing in R.A. Nicholson's edition of the Kitab al-Luma and, in addition, Arberry's obituary notice on Professor Nicholson who was his friend and mentor.

Praise for the first edition: "An impressive collection of more than 50 pieces—essays, poems, folktales, short stories, memoirs, film scripts, lectures/speeches—by Arab women challenging the widely accepted view of Middle Eastern women as submissive non-thinkers to whom feminism is a foreign concept." —Booklist "Anyone interested in good writing should read [Opening the Gates]. Here are first-class stories with the energy and freshness we expect from a beginning." —Doris Lessing, The Independe...

Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate lit...