Download or read book Studies on Arabia in Honour of Professor G Rex Smith written by John F. Healey and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays written in honour of Professor G. Rex Smith, arabist, historian, and scholar of the medieval history of the Yemen, on aspects of the pre-Islamic and Islamic history of Arabia and the Yemen written by a group of international scholars.
Download or read book A Traveller in Thirteenth Century Arabia Ibn al Mujawir s Tarikh al Mustabsir written by G. Rex Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first English translation of the Tarikh al-Mustabsir, written in the early quarter of the thirteenth century by Ibn al-Mujawir. The text is a fascinating account of the western and southern areas of the Arabian Peninsula by a man from the east of the Islamic world, probably from Khurasan in Iran. Ibn al-Mujawir was a man who in all probability followed the age-old Islamic practice of making the pilgrimage to Mecca and thereafter travelling in the area to further his business interests. His route began in Mecca and essentially ran south through the Red Sea coastal plain, Tihamah, down into the Yemen and along the southern coast of the peninsula. He paused long in Aden, where he observed closely the activities of the port to report at some length on its administration, its taxes, its markets, its currency, its weights and measures, and the like. His route then continued along the southern coast of Arabia into the Gulf, and he presumably returned home to the east via Iraq. The author is a wonderful observer of people: their buildings, their dress, their customs, their agriculture, their food and their history. This book is a unique source for the social and economic history of thirteenth-century south Arabia, written with a humour and wit otherwise unknown in the writings of medieval Islam. The text is of major linguistic importance too, written as it is in a far from classical Arabic. This translation is fully annotated with an introduction, appendices, glossary and full index, and contains maps and illustrations.
Download or read book Arabic in the Fray written by Yasir Suleiman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pre-modern period saw a background of inter-ethnic strife among Arabs and non-Arabs, mainly Persians. Starting from the symbolic and cognitive roles of language, Yasir Suleiman shows how discussions about the inimitability and (un)translatability of the Qur'an in this period were, at some deep level, concerned with issues of ethnic election. In this respect, theology and ethnicity emerge as partners in theorising language. Staying within the symbolic role of language, Suleiman goes on to investigate the role of paratexts and literary production in disseminating language ideologies and in cultural contestation. He shows how language symbolism is relevant to ideological debates about hybrid and cross-national literary production in the Arab milieu. In fact, language ideology appears to be everywhere, and a whole chapter is devoted to discussions of the cognitive role of language in linking thought to reality.
Download or read book The Longest Journey written by Eric Tagliacozzo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, has been a yearly phenomenon of great importance in Muslim lands for well over one thousand years. Each year, millions of pilgrims from throughout the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia, make the trip to Mecca as one of the five pillars of their faith. By the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth, fully half of all pilgrims making the journey in any given year could come from Southeast Asia. The Longest Journey, spanning eleven modern nation-states and seven centuries, is the first book to offer a history of the Hajj from one of Islam's largest and most important regions.
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 Literacy and Identity in Pre Islamic Arabia written by M.C.A. Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these studies Michael Macdonald examines the extraordinary flowering of literacy in both the settled and nomadic populations of western Arabia in the 1500 years before the birth of Islam, when a larger proportion of the population could read and write than in any other part of the ancient Near East, and possibly any other part of the ancient world. Even among the nomads there seems to have been almost universal literacy in some regions. The scores of thousands of inscriptions and graffiti they left paint a vivid picture of the way-of-life, social systems, and personal emotions of their authors, information which is not available for any other non-élite population in the ancient Near East outside Egypt. This abundance of inscriptions has enabled Michael Macdonald to explore in detail some of the - often surprising - ways in which reading and writing were used in the literate and non-literate communities of ancient Arabia. He describes the many different languages and the distinct family of alphabets used in ancient Arabia, and discusses the connections between the use of particular languages or scripts and expressions of personal and communal identity. The problem of how ancient perceptions of ethnicity in this region can be identified in the sources is another theme of these papers; more specifically, they deal from several different perspectives with the question of what ancient writers meant when they applied the term 'Arab' to a wide variety of peoples throughout the ancient Near East.
Download or read book New Researches on the Quran Why and How Two Versions of Islam Entered the History of Mankind written by Dr. Seyed Mostafa Azmayesh and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the time before the Quran and the emergence of Islam. The research delves into the origin of the Quran, using its verses alongside investigative works which support various new theories. The Quran is a written document which, according to recent discoveries such as, the recently discovered world's oldest Quran manuscript at the University of Birmingham, can be traced to the lifetime of Prophet Mohammad. It focuses on the time preceding Islam and highlights the relationships that are pivotal for understanding the development of Islam. The danger posed by false interpretations of the Quran has become increasingly more serious from first appearance of Islam until today, the result of which we can see clearly in our current world. Hence the Quran itself is the most important document to be researched and studied for resolving the problems caused by its false interpretation.
Download or read book Histories of the Middle East written by Roxani Eleni Margariti and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-12-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dedicated to their teacher, Abraham L. Udovitch, his students offer in this volume a chronologically, geographically and thematically wide range of papers united by an emphasis on a close reading of primary sources and the juxtaposition of different genres of narratives.
Download or read book KaE ba Orientations written by O'Meara Simon O'Meara and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most sacred site of Islam, the KaE ba (the granite cuboid structure at the centre of the Great Mosque of Mecca) is here investigated by examining six of its predominantly spatial effects: as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer); as the axis and matrix mundi of the Islamic world; as an architectural principle in the bedrock of this world; as a circumambulated goal of pilgrimage and site of spiritual union for mystics and Sufis; and as a dwelling that is imagined to shelter temporarily an animating force; but which otherwise, as a house, holds a void.
Download or read book Kitab Al qabasat written by Muḥammad Bāqir ibn Muḥammad Dāmād and published by Alhoda UK. This book was released on 2009 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Including Selections from Sayyed Ahmad 'Alawi's Sharoh Kitaab al-Qabasaat."
Download or read book Arabic in Context written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writing of Arabic’s linguistic history is by definition an interdisciplinary effort, the result of collaboration between historical linguists, epigraphists, dialectologists, and historians. The present volume seeks to catalyse a dialogue between scholars in various fields who are interested in Arabic’s past and to illustrate how much there is to be gained by looking beyond the traditional sources and methods. It contains 15 innovative studies ranging from pre-Islamic epigraphy to the modern spoken dialect, and from comparative Semitics to Middle Arabic. The combination of these perspectives hopes to stand as an important methodological intervention, encouraging a shift in the way Arabic’s linguistic history is written.
Download or read book Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature written by Vitaly Naumkin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time after D. H. Müller’s pioneering studies of the 1900s, a large body of folklore texts in Soqotri becomes available to the Semitological scholarship. The language is spoken by ca. 100.000 people inhabiting the island Soqotra (Gulf of Aden, Yemen). Soqotri is among the most archaic Semitic languages spoken today, whereas the oral literature of the islanders is a mine of deeply original motifs and plots. Texts appear in transcription, English and Arabic translations, and an Arabic-based native script. Philological annotations deal with grammatical, lexical and literary features, as well as realia. The Glossary accumulates all words attested in the volume. The Plates provide a glimpse into the fascinating landscapes of the island and the traditional lifestyle of its inhabitants.
Download or read book Index Islamicus written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The T Stems in Soqotri written by Maria Bulakh and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-07-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the results of a field research on the verbal system of Soqotri, a little-studied language spoken on the island of Soqotra (Arabian Sea) and belonging to the Modern South Arabian branch of Semitic. The investigation focuses on the so-called T-stems (marked by the infix -t-), mostly employed as derivational means of detransitivisation. In this book you will find comprehensive descriptions of the synchronic morphology and semantics of the T-stems, as well as an inquiry into their diachronic background. Simultaneously, the study is a contribution to the general typology of detransitivising derivation in the languages of the world.
Download or read book The Semitic Languages written by Stefan Weninger and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-23 with total page 1298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The handbook The Semitic Languages offers a comprehensive reference tool for Semitic Linguistics in its broad sense. It is not restricted to comparative Grammar, although it covers also comparative aspects, including classification. By comprising a chapter on typology and sections with sociolinguistic focus and language contact, the conception of the book aims at a rather complete, unbiased description of the state of the art in Semitics. Articles on individual languages and dialects give basic facts as location, numbers of speakers, scripts, numbers of extant texts and their nature, attestation where appropriate, and salient features of the grammar and lexicon of the respective variety. The handbook is the most comprehensive treatment of the Semitic language family since many decades.
Download or read book Ancient South Arabia through History written by George Hatke and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Arabia, an area encompassing all of today’s Yemen and neighboring regions in Saudi Arabia and Oman, is one of the least-known parts of the Near East. However, it is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of access, that South Arabia remains under-researched, for this region was, in fact, very important during pre-Islamic times. By virtue of its location at the crossroads of caravan and maritime routes, pre-Islamic South Arabia linked the Near East with Africa and the Mediterranean with India. The region is also unique in that it has a written history extending as far back as the early first millennium BCE—a far longer history, indeed, than any other part of the Arabian Peninsula. The papers collected in this volume make a number of important contributions to the study of the history and languages of ancient South Arabia, as well as the history of the modern study of South Arabia’s past, which will be of interest to scholars and laypeople alike.
Download or read book In Synchrony with the Heavens Volume 2 Instruments of Mass Calculation written by David King and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-06-01 with total page 1142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first investigation of one of the main interests of astronomy in Islamic civilization, namely, timekeeping by the sun and stars and the regulation of the astronomically-defined times of Muslim prayer. The study is based on over 500 medieval astronomical manuscripts first identified by the author, now preserved in libraries all over the world and originally from the entire Islamic world from the Maghrib to Central Asia and the Yemen. The materials presented provide new insights into the early development of the prayer ritual in Islam. They also call into question the popular notion that religion could not inspire serious scientific activity. Only one of the hundreds of astronomical tables discussed here was known in medieval Europe, which is one reason why the entire corpus has remained unknown until the present. A second volume, also to be published by Brill, deals with astronomical instruments for timekeeping and other computing devices.
