Download or read book How Do You Say Epigram in Arabic Literary History at the Limits of Comparison written by Adam Talib and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Do You Say “Epigram” in Arabic? is the first study of one of the most popular and enduring genres in the history of Arabic poetry, the maqṭūʿah, and a contribution toward a decolonized comparative literature.
Download or read book Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century written by James White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the courts of the Mughal Empire, and scholars from across the region came together to debate the Islamic sciences in the Arabian Peninsula's holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This book demonstrates that the globalising tendency of migration created worldly literary systems which linked Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula through the production and circulation of classicizing Arabic and Persian poetry. By close reading over seventy unstudied manuscripts of seventeenth-century Arabic and Persian poetry that have remained hidden on the shelves of libraries in India, Iran, Turkey and Europe, the book examines how migrant poets adapted shared poetic forms, imagery and rhetoric to engage with their interlocutors and create communities in the cities where they settled. The book begins by reconstructing overarching patterns in the movement of over a thousand authors, and the economic basis for their migration, before focusing on six case studies of literary communities, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. In so doing, the book demonstrates the plurality of seventeenth-century aesthetic movements, a diversity which later nationalisms purposefully simplified and misread.
Download or read book Browsing through the Sultan s Bookshelves written by Kristof D'hulster and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2021-07-12 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting from 135 manuscripts that were once part of the library of the late Mamluk sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516), this book challenges the dominant narrative of a "post-court era", in which courts were increasingly marginalized in the field of adab. Rather than being the literary barren field that much of the Arabic and Arabic-centred sources, produced extra muros, would have us believe, it re-cognizes Qāniṣawh's court as a rich and vibrant literary site and a cosmopolitan hub in a burgeoning Turkic literary ecumene. It also re-centres the ruler himself within this court. No longer the passive object of panegyric or the source of patronage alone, Qāniṣawh has an authorial voice in his own right, one that is idiosyncratic yet in conversation with other voices. As such, while this book is first and foremost a book about books, it is one that consciously aspires to be more than that: a book about a library, and, ultimately, a book about the man behind the library, Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī.
Download or read book Literary Spectacles of Sultanship written by Gowaart Van Den Bossche and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-09-18 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The so-called Mamluk sultans who ruled Egypt and Syria between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries AD have often been portrayed as lacking in legitimacy due to their background as slave soldiers. Sultanic biographies written by chancery officials in the early period of the sultanate have been read as part of an effort of these sultans to legitimise their position on the throne. This book reconsiders the main corpus of six such biographies written by the historians Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d. 1293) and his nephew Shāfiʿ ibn ʿAlī (d. 1330) and argues that these were in fact far more complex texts. An understanding of their discourses of legitimisation needs to be embedded within a broader understanding of the multi-directional discourses operating across the texts. The study proposes to interpret these texts as "spectacles", in which authors emplotted the reign of a sultan in thoroughly literary and rhetorical fashion, making especially extensive use of textual forms prevalent in the chancery. In doing so the authors reimagined the format of the biography as a performative vehicle for displaying their literary credentials and helping them negotiate positions in the chancery and the wider courtly orbit.
Download or read book Arabic Poetics written by Lara Harb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes language beautiful? Arabic Poetics offers an answer to what this pertinent question looked like at the height of the Islamic civilization. In this novel argument, Lara Harb suggests that literary quality depended on the ability of linguistic expression to produce an experience of discovery and wonder in the listener. Analyzing theories of how rhetorical figures, simile, metaphor, and sentence construction are able to achieve this effect of wonder, Harb shows how this aesthetic theory, first articulated at the turn of the eleventh century CE, represented a major paradigm shift from earlier Arabic criticism which based its judgement on criteria of truthfulness and naturalness. In doing so, this study poses a major challenge to the misconception in modern scholarship that Arabic criticism was 'traditionalist' or 'static', exposing an elegant widespread conceptual framework of literary beauty in the post-eleventh-century Islamicate world which is central to poetic criticism, the interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics in Arabic philosophy and the rationale underlying discussions about the inimitability of the Quran.
Download or read book Laugh like an Egyptian written by Cristina Dozio and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Egyptians are known among the Arabs as awlād al-nukta, Sons of the Jokes, for their ability to laugh in face of adversity. This creative weapon has been directed against socio-political targets both in times of oppression and popular upheaval, such as the 2011 Tahrir Revolution. This book looks at the literary expression of Egyptian humour in the novels of Muḥammad Mustajāb, Khayrī Shalabī, and Ḥamdī Abū Julayyil, three writers who revive the comic tradition to innovate the language of contemporary fiction. Their modern tricksters, wise fools, and antiheroes play with the stereotypical traits attached to the ordinary Egyptians, while laughing at the universal contradictions of life. This ability to combine local and global culture, literary traditions and popular references, makes them a stimulating read in an intercultural perspective. Combining humour studies and literary criticism, this book examines language play and narrative creativity to understand which strategies craft Egyptian literary humour. In doing so, it sheds light on the contribution of humour to literary innovations of Egyptian fiction since the late Seventies, while adding new writers to those who are considered the masters of humour in the Arab novel.
Download or read book In the Sultan s Salon Learning Religion and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Q ni awh al Ghawr r 1501 1516 2 vols written by Christian Mauder and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 1328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on his award-winning research, Christian Mauder’s In the Sultan’s Salon constitutes the first detailed study of the intellectual, religious, and political culture of the court of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517), one of the most important polities in Islamic history.
Download or read book Studies on the History and Culture of the Mamluk Sultanate 1250 1517 written by Stephan Conermann and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The general field of study of this volume is the history and culture of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517). It contains the proceedings of the First German-Japanese Workshop held at the Toyo Bunko in Tokyo, Japan. The authors write about a variety of topics from rural irrigation systems to high diplomacy vis à vis the Safavid empire and the Ottoman threat. The volume includes case studies of important personalities and families living in the centres of Mamluk power such as Cairo and Damascus as well as analyses of contemporary writers and their stance toward the ruling military class. Next to innovation in the field, this volume is an agenda of an increasing globalisation of scholarship that is fertilizing future research.
Download or read book Empire of Salons written by Helen Pfeifer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the Ottoman incorporation of Arab lands that shows how gentlemanly salons shaped culture, society, and governance Historians have typically linked Ottoman imperial cohesion in the sixteenth century to the bureaucracy or the sultan’s court. In Empire of Salons, Helen Pfeifer points instead to a critical but overlooked factor: gentlemanly salons. Pfeifer demonstrates that salons—exclusive assemblies in which elite men displayed their knowledge and status—contributed as much as any formal institution to the empire’s political stability. These key laboratories of Ottoman culture, society, and politics helped men to build relationships and exchange ideas across the far-flung Ottoman lands. Pfeifer shows that salons played a central role in Syria and Egypt’s integration into the empire after the conquest of 1516–17. Pfeifer anchors her narrative in the life and network of the star scholar of sixteenth-century Damascus, Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi (d. 1577), and she reveals that Arab elites were more influential within the empire than previously recognized. Their local knowledge and scholarly expertise competed with, and occasionally even outshone, that of the most powerful officials from Istanbul. Ultimately, Ottoman culture of the era was forged collaboratively, by Arab and Turkophone actors alike. Drawing on a range of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, Empire of Salons illustrates the extent to which magnificent gatherings of Ottoman gentlemen contributed to the culture and governance of empire.
Download or read book Approaches to the Study of Pre Modern Arabic Anthologies written by Nadia Maria El Cheikh and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this volume is to raise and discuss questions about the different approaches to the study of pre-modern Arabic anthologies from the perspectives of philology, religion, history, geography, and literature.
Download or read book Roma in the Medieval Islamic World written by Kristina Richardson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Dan David Prize for outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history In Middle Eastern cities as early as the mid-8th century, the Sons of Sasan begged, trained animals, sold medicinal plants and potions, and told fortunes. They captivated the imagination of Arab writers and playwrights, who immortalized their strange ways in poems, plays, and the Thousand and One Nights. Using a wide range of sources, Richardson investigates the lived experiences of these Sons of Sasan, who changed their name to Ghuraba' (Strangers) by the late 1200s. This name became the Arabic word for the Roma and Roma-affiliated groups also known under the pejorative term 'Gypsies'. This book uses mostly Ghuraba'-authored works to understand their tribal organization and professional niches as well as providing a glossary of their language Sin. It also examines the urban homes, neighborhoods, and cemeteries that they constructed. Within these isolated communities they developed and nurtured a deep literary culture and astrological tradition, broadening our appreciation of the cultural contributions of medieval minority communities. Remarkably, the Ghuraba' began blockprinting textual amulets by the 10th century, centuries before printing on paper arrived in central Europe. When Roma tribes migrated from Ottoman territories into Bavaria and Bohemia in the 1410s, they may have carried this printing technology into the Holy Roman Empire.
Download or read book The Mamluk Sultanate written by Carl F. Petry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-26 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mamluk Sultanate ruled Egypt, Syria and the Arabian hinterland along the Red Sea. Lasting from the deposition of the Ayyubid dynasty (c. 1250) to the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, this regime of slave-soldiers incorporated many of the political structures and cultural traditions of its Fatimid and Ayyubid predecessors. Yet its system of governance and centralisation of authority represented radical departures from the hierarchies of power that predated it. Providing a rich and comprehensive survey of events from the Sultanate's founding to the Ottoman occupation, this interdisciplinary book explores the Sultanate's identity and heritage after the Mongol conquests, the expedience of conspiratorial politics, and the close symbiosis of the military elite and civil bureaucracy. Carl F. Petry also considers the statecraft, foreign policy, economy and cultural legacy of the Sultanate, and its interaction with polities throughout the central Islamic world and beyond. In doing so, Petry reveals how the Mamluk Sultanate can be regarded as a significant experiment in the history of state-building within the pre-modern Islamic world.
Download or read book The Hashish Waiter written by Khairy Shalaby and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tucked away in a rundown quarter, just out of sight of downtown Cairo, a group of intellectuals gather regularly to smoke hashish in Hakeem’s den. The den is the center of their lives, both a refuge and a stimulus, and at the center of the den is the remarkable man who keeps their hashish bowls topped up—Rowdy Salih. While his former life is a mystery to his loyal clientele of writers, painters, film directors, and even window dressers, each sees himself reflected in Salih; but without his humor, humility, or insight, or his occasional passions fueled by hootch. And when the nation has to face its own demons during the peace initiative of the 1970s, it is Rowdy Salih who speaks for them all. This is a comic novel with a broken heart, very like Salih himself, whose warm rough voice calls out long after we have recovered from the novel’s painful conclusion.
Download or read book Cairo Swan Song written by Mekkawi Said and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the shadows of great wealth, and among Cairo’s famous monuments, runs a world of street children. Mustafa, a former student radical who never really believed in the slogans, sets out to tell their story through a documentary he is making with his American girlfriend, Marcia. Alienated from a corrupt and corrupting society, Mustafa watches as the Cairo he cherishes crumbles around him. His former leftist comrades are now all either capitalists or Islamists, while his friends and acquaintances struggle to find lovers worthy of their love and causes worthy of their sacrifice, in a country that no longer deserves their loyalty. Meanwhile, the children of the streets wait for the city to take notice. Cairo Swan Song weaves together a patchwork narrative of overlapping lives, dreams, and realities all centering on Cairo’s famous downtown neighborhood.
Download or read book Sarmada written by Fadi Azzam and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarmada, Arabic for “perpetuate” or “the eternally-not-changed,” is the novel’s fictitious setting. In the title, Fadi Azzam creates a new word (a derivative female form of noun-verb, which does not exist in Arabic) and in so doing immediately lets the reader know that women are the protagonists of this story that spans several generations, from Syria to Paris and back again. The novel is set in the Druze area and is a declaration of love for tolerance and for the peaceful coexistence of the many religious groups that live in close proximity. Myths, communists, nationalists, murder, illicit love, superstition, erotic trees and women’s breasts make up the tapestry of this strange, beautifully writen, first novel. Fadi Azzam narrates, just as he writes poetry: Sarmada is direct, ruthless and full of fire.
Download or read book A Hundred and One Nights written by and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A luminous translation of Arabic tales of enchantment and wonder Translated into English for the very first time, A Hundred and One Nights is a marvelous example of the rich tradition of popular Arabic storytelling. Like the celebrated Thousand and One Nights, this collection opens with the frame story of Scheherazade, the vizier’s gifted daughter who recounts imaginative tales night after night in an effort to distract the murderous king from taking her life. A Hundred and One Nights features an almost entirely different set of stories, however, each one more thrilling, amusing, and disturbing than the last. Here, we encounter tales of epic warriors, buried treasure, disappearing brides, cannibal demon-women, fatal shipwrecks, and clever ruses, where human strength and ingenuity play out against a backdrop of inexorable, inscrutable fate. Distinctly rooted in Arabic literary culture and the Islamic tradition, these tales draw on motifs and story elements that circulated across cultures, including Indian and Chinese antecedents, and features a frame story possibly older than its more famous sibling. This vibrant translation of A Hundred and One Nights promises to transport readers, new and veteran alike, into its fantastical realms of magic and wonder.
Download or read book The Doves Necklace written by Raja Alem and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the secret life of Mecca.
