Download or read book Utopia and Civilization in the Arab Nahda written by Peter Hill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the 'Nahda', a cultural renaissance in the Arab world, through the utopian visions of Arab intellectuals during the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Literary Optics written by Maha AbdelMegeed and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Literary Optics, Maha AbdelMegeed offers a compelling and far-reaching alternative to the traditional mode of analyzing Arabic literature through an encounter between Arabic narrative forms and European ones. Drawing upon close engagements with the works of canonical authors from the period, including Hassan Husni al-Tuwayrani, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Ali Mubarak, Francis Marrash, and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, AbdelMegeed addresses not where these works emanate from but rather how and why they were drawn together to form a canon. In doing so, she rejects the expectation that these texts, through the trope of encounter, hold the explanatory key to modern Arabic literature. In this reformulation of Arabic literary history, AbdelMegeed argues that the canon is forged through an urgency to define a new form of political sovereignty and to make history visible. In doing so, she explores three pivotal concepts: the spectral (khayal), the trace (athar) and the collective (alnas). By examining the texts through these concepts, Literary Optics provides a remarkable intellectual history that delves into the aesthetic, philosophical, and political stakes of nineteenth-century Arabic literature.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History written by Beth Baron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this Oxford Handbook rethink the modern history of one of the most important and influential countries in the Middle East--Egypt. For a country and region so often understood in terms of religion and violence, this work explores environmental, medical, legal, cultural, and political histories. It gives readers an excellent view of the current debates in Egyptian history.
Download or read book The Clarion of Syria written by Butrus al-Bustani and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. When Nafir Suriyya—“The Clarion of Syria”—was penned between September 1860 and April 1861, its author Butrus al-Bustani, a major figure in the modern Arabic Renaissance, had witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Written during Ottoman and European investigations into the causes and culprits of the atrocities, The Clarion of Syria is both a commentary on the politics of state intervention and social upheaval, and a set of visions for the future of Syrian society in the wake of conflict. This translation makes a key historical document accessible for the first time to an English audience. An introduction by the translators sketches the history that led up to the civil strife in Mt. Lebanon, outlines a brief biography of Butrus al-Bustani, and provides an authoritative overview of the literary style and historiography of Nafir Suriyya. Rereading these pamphlets in the context of today’s political violence, in war-torn Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, helps us gain a critical and historical perspective on sectarianism, foreign invasions, conflict resolution, Western interventionism, and nationalist tropes of reconciliation.
Download or read book Empire of Salons written by Helen Pfeifer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 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 Post Apocalyptic Cultures written by Julia Urabayen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Institutions of Literature 1700 1900 written by Jon Mee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-21 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection provides students and researchers with a new and lively understanding of the role of institutions in the production, reception, and meaning of literature in the period 1700–1900. The period saw a fundamental transition from a patronage system to a marketplace in which institutions played an important mediating role between writers and readers, a shift with consequences that continue to resonate today. Often producers themselves, institutions processed and claimed authority over a variety of cultural domains that never simply tessellated into any unified system. The collection's primary concerns are British and imperial environments, with a comparative German case study, but it offers encouragement for its approaches to be taken up in a variety of other cultural contexts. From the Post Office to museums, from bricks and mortar to less tangible institutions like authorship and genre, this collection opens up a new field for literary studies.
Download or read book Futures of Literary Studies written by Tim Lanzendörfer and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-30 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together essays that ask how one may chart more productive engagements with the methodological foundations of literary studies, a discipline that is finding itself in a moment of severe crisis. The temptation to reduce methodological debates to method wars constitutes one of the main obstacles for what ought to be the common goal of our discipline: to articulate the possible and indeed necessary futures of literary studies. How do we think about the future of literary studies in the funerary climate that has engendered the belief that we need to fight our internal wars for survival? How might (must?) our understanding of what literary criticism is and does change? How do we formulate possible futures for literary studies while grappling with the significant problems that our present poses? The chapters in this volume stage hopeful interventions that seek to contribute to the effort to explore the futures of literary studies by way of and conceived as a collective endeavor. Together, the authors advance a call for better, more useful, more active, more networked, and, yes, even for abandoned versions of the always multiple and joyously contradictory discipline that is called literary studies. This book will be beneficial to students and scholars of English literature, literary theory and literary studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice and are accompanied by a new Preface.
Download or read book The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.
Download or read book Markets of Civilization written by Muriam Haleh Davis and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-08 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Markets of Civilization Muriam Haleh Davis provides a history of racial capitalism, showing how Islam became a racial category that shaped economic development in colonial and postcolonial Algeria. French officials in Paris and Algiers introduced what Davis terms “a racial regime of religion” that subjected Algerian Muslims to discriminatory political and economic structures. These experts believed that introducing a market economy would modernize society and discourage anticolonial nationalism. Planners, politicians, and economists implemented reforms that both sought to transform Algerians into modern economic subjects and drew on racial assumptions despite the formally color-blind policies of the French state. Following independence, convictions about the inherent link between religious beliefs and economic behavior continued to influence development policies. Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella embraced a specifically Algerian socialism founded on Islamic principles, while French technocrats saw Algeria as a testing ground for development projects elsewhere in the Global South. Highlighting the entanglements of race and religion, Davis demonstrates that economic orthodoxies helped fashion understandings of national identity on both sides of the Mediterranean during decolonization.
Download or read book The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz written by Marilyn Booth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the career and writings of Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) an early feminist thinker and writer in Egypt. It focuses on her newspaper essays, novels, poetry, and her play which was the first to be published by a female author in Arabic.
Download or read book Narratives of Arab Secularism written by Youssef M. Choueiri and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-16 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new interpretation of the rich narratives of Arab secularism, contending that secularism as a set of ideas and a social movement is destined to loom large on the political and legal horizon of most Arab states. Youssef M. Choueiri provides a study of three moments in the development of secularism in the Arab World, the Machiavellian, the Alfierian and the Gramscian. It is within such a scope that secularism in its interaction with state-building projects, women’s emancipation and religion is treated as an intellectual current and a discursive entity embedded in the political process of its diverse societies. Through the chapters, Choueiri demonstrates how secularism occupies a pivotal presence in the religious and political life of the Arab world, exploring such interrelated configurations as indigenous contributions, diverse reforms and the impact of Western states. He concludes that secularism has become a moral prerequisite and a required vehicle in creating the necessary conditions for the success of democracy in the Middle East. Narratives of Arab Secularism tackles the complexity and contemporary ramifications of the subject in a way that no previous single study has been able to. It will be relevant to both students and academics dealing with topics related to the Middle East including religion, politics, anthropology and history.
Download or read book Islam Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life written by Jörg Matthias Determann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search. Determann takes us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such as wildly popular adaptations of Star Wars and mysterious movements centred on UFOs. Repression is shown to have helped science fiction more than hurt it, with censorship encouraging authors to disguise criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times and on distant planets. The book will be insightful for anyone looking to explore the science, culture and politics of the Muslim world and asks what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would mean for one of the greatest faiths.
Download or read book Emerging Subjectivity in the Long 19th Century Middle East written by Stephan Guth and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Age of Coexistence written by Ussama Makdisi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Flawless . . . [Makdisi] reminds us of the critical declarations of secularism which existed in the history of the Middle East."—Robert Fisk, The Independent Today's headlines paint the Middle East as a collection of war-torn countries and extremist groups consumed by sectarian rage. Ussama Makdisi's Age of Coexistence reveals a hidden and hopeful story that counters this clichéd portrayal. It shows how a region rich with ethnic and religious diversity created a modern culture of coexistence amid Ottoman reformation, European colonialism, and the emergence of nationalism. Moving from the nineteenth century to the present, this groundbreaking book explores, without denial or equivocation, the politics of pluralism during the Ottoman Empire and in the post-Ottoman Arab world. Rather than judging the Arab world as a place of age-old sectarian animosities, Age of Coexistence describes the forging of a complex system of coexistence, what Makdisi calls the "ecumenical frame." He argues that new forms of antisectarian politics, and some of the most important examples of Muslim-Christian political collaboration, crystallized to make and define the modern Arab world. Despite massive challenges and setbacks, and despite the persistence of colonialism and authoritarianism, this framework for coexistence has endured for nearly a century. It is a reminder that religious diversity does not automatically lead to sectarianism. Instead, as Makdisi demonstrates, people of different faiths, but not necessarily of different political outlooks, have consistently tried to build modern societies that transcend religious and sectarian differences.
Download or read book Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age written by Jens Hanssen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-22 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fundamental overhaul of modern Arab intellectual history, reassessing cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship.
Download or read book Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age written by Jens Hanssen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-22 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between thought and practice in the domains of language, literature and politics? Is thought the only standard by which to measure intellectual history? How did Arab intellectuals change and affect political, social, cultural and economic developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries? This volume offers a fundamental overhaul and revival of modern Arab intellectual history. Using Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1962) as a starting point, it reassesses Arabic cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship and extends the analysis beyond Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the outbreak of World War II. The chapters offer a mixture of broad-stroke history on the construction of 'the Muslim world', and the emergence of the rule of law and constitutionalism in the Ottoman empire, as well as case studies on individual Arab intellectuals that illuminate the transformation of modern Arabic thought.
