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Mahmoud Darwish is the poet laureate of the Palestinian national struggle. His poems resonate across the entire Arab world and, more than any other single figure perhaps since the death of Yasser Arafat, he represents a unifying figurehead for Palestinian national aspirations. In this, the first comprehensive biography of Darwish in English, Muna Abu Eid examines the poet's intellectual status on two fronts - both national and public - and offers a critical assessment of Darwish's national...

In this compelling and engaging book, Dvir Abramovich introduces readers to several landmark novels, poems and stories that have become classics in the Israeli Holocaust canon. Discussed are iconic writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Dan Pagis, Etgar Keret, Yoram Kaniuk, Uri Tzvi Greenberg and Ka-Tzetnik, and their attempts to come to terms with the unprecedented trauma and its after-effects. Scholarly, yet deeply accessible to both students and to the public, this illuminating volume offers a wid...

Since its advent, Islam has been cross-pollinating world literatures in Africa, Europe, Asia, the Pacific Ocean and the Americas, constantly enriching and enriched by various humanistic traditions in multiple languages, spanning the lives of individuals and societies throughout history. Yet, scholarship on Islam as World Literature has been sparse despite its significant contribution. Islam and New Directions in World Literature understands Islamic literary and cultural heritages as dynamic forc...

Though representations of alien languages on the early modern stage have usually been read as mocking, xenophobic, or at the very least extremely anxious, listening closely to these languages in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Marianne Montgomery discerns a more complex reality. She argues instead that the drama of the early modern period holds up linguistic variety as a source of strength and offers playgoers a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that, while still sometime...

To the English reader the mysticism of Rumi opens a new world of spiritual and poetical experience. "God is One but religions are many" runs the Sufi teaching; and the English reader can here enlarge his experience by apprehending the mystic intuition of a great Persian poet. The late Professor Nicholson’s beautiful and faithful translations are illuminated by Notes on Sufi doctrine and experience. Professor Nicholson did not finish the Introduction, but it has been completed by his old pupil an...

The volume demonstrates the scope of utopian thinking and the enduring significance of past utopian fictions and historical events as potentially contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the contemporary reality. The essays examine the concept of utopia in a variety of contexts, such as philosophy, translation, music, social and political issues, like workers' movements and ideology, exploring global utopian fiction from medieval Persian poetry, through late 19th- and early 20th-cen...

Besides the three mainstream languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, other languages such as Kurdish and Amazigh (Berber) have contributed to the rich literary tapestry of the region. Vernacular poetry and folktales, standardized Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, as well as literary works by Middle Easterners in different European languages offer a complex regional literary field. While comparative work among the "classical" traditions of these literatures is undertaken without comment, scholarship...

Cette edition partielle du Uns al-muhag wa-rawd al-furag d'al-Idrisi eclaire a la fois l"uvre du geographe arabe de Sicile et le reseau routier de l'Afrique depuis le Bilad al-Sudan jusqu'a la Mediterranee, a la fin du XIIe siecle. En effet, si dans cet ouvrage al-Idrisi suit les memes principes organisationnels que dans le Nuzhat al-mustaq - a savoir une carte, un chapitre -, il ne fait pas un resume du Nuzhat mais en extrait les itineraires qu'il complete avec de nouvelles informations. Des to...

The rhetoric of cultural identity generally goes in two potential directions: One a universal line that insists on an overall pattern of integration and harmony among all peoples regardless of their differences, and the other a line which suggests that various cultures are so specific and different that they will eventually enter into clash, violence and war. Drawing upon Derrida's concept of differance, I will point out that such rhetoric as examples of current political discourses fail to open...

Reading Palestine: a Literary Guide looks without prejudice at Israel-Palestine through the eyes of writers from biblical times to the present day, allowing the region to come alive through the pens of such diverse personalities as Napoleon Bonaparte, Gustave Flaubert, Lord Curzon, T. E. Lawrence, Sacheverell Sitwell, Linda Grant and Howard Jacobson. With thematic introductions and explanatory notes, the selection includes Jewish, Christian, Muslim and secular writings as well as the contrasting...

This work comprises a literary comparison of surviving alternative versions of selected narrative-cycles from the Nights. Pinault draws on the published Arabic editions - especially Bulaq, MacNaghten, and the fourteenth-century Galland text recently edited by Mahdi - as well as unpublished Arabic manuscripts from libraries in France and North Africa. The study demonstrates that significantly different versions have survived of some of the most famous tales from the Nights. Pinault notes how indi...

In 1906, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the tales of the Middle Eastern trickster Nasreddin to construct a progressive anti-colonial discourse with a strong emphasis on social, political and religious reform. Using folklore, visual art and satire, their periodical Moll? Nasreddin which had full-page lithographic cartoons in colour, reached tens of thousands of people across the Muslim world, from Iran and Turkey, to India and Egypt, impacting the thinking of a generation....