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This volume brings together studies that explore the richness of the Arabic literary tradition and of Islamic intellectual life, from the beginnings of Islam to the present. The contributors cover an unusually wide range of subjects, including such topics as guile in the Quran, marriage in Islamic law, early esoterica, commentaries on al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqamāt, Hellenistic philosophy in Arabic, medieval music and song, scurrilous poetry, Arabic rhetoric, cursing, the modern social and legal history of the Middle East, al-Kharrat’s modernist project, and contemporary Islamic thought and responses to it. The volume’s range reflects the enormous breadth of Everett Rowson’s scholarship an...
Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and ...
This anthology explores different genealogies of sexuality and questions some of the theoretical emphases and epistemic assumptions affecting current histories of sexuality.
This text examines the importance of masculine homosexual allusion in classical Arabic literature. It explores the underlying meanings of masculine motifs in classical texts. The fawn, for example, was often a symbol for the ethereally beautiful male youth, while the stallion represented masculine bravery and valour. For the most part such symbols do not represent homosexual intention, but are a reflection of sublime erotic ideals intertwined with religious beliefs.
This highly original book brings into focus the sexual discourses manifest in a wealth of little-studied source material—medical texts, legal documents, religious literature, dream interpretation manuals, shadow theater, and travelogues—in a nuanced, wide-ranging, and powerfully analytic exploration of Ottoman sexual thought and practices from the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Following on the work of Foucault, Gagnon, Laqueur, and others, the premise of the book is that people shape their ideas of what is permissible, define boundaries of right and wrong, and imagine their sexual worlds through the set of discourses available to...
Dedicated to the topic of eroticism and sexuality in the visual production of the medieval and early modern Muslim world, this volume offers new insights and methodological models that extend our understanding of erotic and sexual subjects in the Islamic tradition. The essays shed light on the diverse socio-cultural milieus of erotic images, on the motivations underlying their production, and on the responses generated by their circulation.
This volume chronicles the history of the Islamic state in the years A. H. 74-81 (A. D. 693-701), after the final defeat of Ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca put an end to twelve years of civil war and reunited the empire under the rule of the Marwānid caliph 'Abd al-Malik. Syria and the Hijaz enjoyed a period of relative peace during this time, and stability and consolidation were furthered by such basic administrative reforms as the institution of an official Islamic coinage. Pacification of Iraq, where Khārijite rebel bands still roamed and mutiny was spreading among the government forces, was entrusted by 'Abd al-Malik to the victorious general al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf. Al-Ṭabarī i gives a deta...
This is a pioneering book about the impact that knowledge produced in the Maghrib (Islamic North Africa and al-Andalus = Muslim Iberia) had on the rest of the Islamic world. It presents results achieved in the Research Project "Local contexts and global dynamics: al-Andalus and the Maghrib in the Islamic East (AMOI)", funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (FFI2016-78878-R AEI/FEDER, UE) and directed by Maribel Fierro and Mayte Penelas. The book contains 18 contributions written by senior and junior scholars from different institutions all over the world. It is divided into five sections dealing with how knowledge produced in the Maghrib was integrated in the ...
Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)-- Harvard University, 2012.
Unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded combines a mordant satire on seventeenth-century Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day. In Volume One, al-Shirbīnī describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion and rural dervish—offering numerous anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, illiteracy, lack of proper religious understanding, and criminality of each. He follows it in Volume Two with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abū Shādūf, who charts the...