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Boasting about one's travels through the desert was a very common topic of self-praise in early Arabic poetry (ca. 500-750). Desert crossing would attest to a man's character, providing evidence of his valour, stamina, industriousness and ambition. The book focuses on desert travel as a self-praise theme in early Arabic poetry and especially in the work of the Umayyad poet Dur-Rumma (ca. 695-735), one of the last great exponents of the Bedouin poetic tradition. It discusses the various motifs associated with desert travel in Dur-Rumma and traces their antecedents in the work of earlier poets. By analyzing the diachronic development of the travel theme and evaluating its place within the poem as a whole, it challenges the widespread view of the Arabic ode (qasida) as a tripartite composition and contributes to a better understanding of early Arabic poetics. For despite the fact that desert travel was a central theme of early poetry, it has never been studied in detail and its purport as a theme of self-praise has not been generally recognized.
Central Asia has been perceived as a landscape of connections, of Silk Roads; an endless plain across which waves of conquerors swiftly rode on horseback. In reality the region is highly fragmented and difficult to traverse, and overcoming these obstacles led to routes becoming associated with epic travel and high-value trade. Put simply, the inhabitants of these lands became experts in the art of travelling the margins. This volume seeks to unravel some of the myths of long-distance roads in Central Asia, using a desert case-study to put forward a new hypothesis for how medieval landscapes were controlled and manipulated.
Intro; Arabische Studien; Table of Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Abu Dulama, Abu s-Samaqmaq and Other Early; 1.1 The Early Kufans; 1.2 Abu Dulama; 1.3 Abu s-Samaqmaq; 1.4 Abu Firʻawn as-Sasi; Ibn al-Hajjaj and the Yatima Poets; 2.1 The Yatīma Poets; 2.2 Ibn al-Hajjāj; Ibn Quzman and His Predecessors; 3.1 Begging Poetry and Sakwā Prior to Ibn Quzmān; 3.2 Ibn Quzmān; Epilogue; Bibliography; Appendix: Select Arabic Texts; Index: Names of Poets.
"Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world--a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas. Irwin tells how Ibn Khaldun, who lived in a world decimated by the Black Death, held a long series of posts in the tumultuous Islamic courts of North Africa and Muslim Spain,...
Includes passages translated into English.
The Book is full text on the rules and views of the games of chess and backgammon comes from a Pahlavi text, reported to be from the time of Khusro Anushirvan in the 6th CE.
A biography of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), famous historian, scholar, theologian and statesman.
This book explores the relationship between ancient Greek sculpture and modern Greek poetry between 1860 and 1960. It examines in some detail poems by Vasileiadis, Rangavis, Palamas, Cavafy, Sikelianos and Seferis, and shows how these poets appropriate the art of sculpture and in what ways this contributes to our understanding of each poet's poetics. Ancient Greek sculpture and sculptural imagery related to it are inevitably associated with the Classical heritage and bring the issue of ancient tradition and its relation to the modern artist into a prominent position. What is more, sculpture is particularly important for the erotic dimension through which the poets perceive their relation with art, and each poet systematically uses the image of the sculptor to define his perception of the artist. In both cases the myth of Pygmalion may be seen as successfully embodying each poet's relation with art and tradition.
This is the first collection of studies entirely devoted to the terminological pair dār al-islām / dar al-ḥarb, “the abode of Islam” and “the abode of war”, apparently widely known as representative of “the Islamic vision” of the world, but in fact almost unexplored. A team of specialists in different fields of Islamic studies investigates the issue in its historical and conceptual origins as well as in its reception within the different genres of Muslim written production. In contrast to the fixed and permanent categories they are currently identified with, the multifaceted character of these two notions and their shifting meanings is set out through the analysis of a wide range of contexts and sources, from the middle ages up to modern times. Contributors are Francisco Apellániz, Michel Balivet, Giovanna Calasso, Alessandro Cancian, Éric Chaumont, Roberta Denaro, Maribel Fierro, Chiara Formichi, Yohanan Friedmann, Giuliano Lancioni, Yaacov Lev, Nicola Melis, Luis Molina, Antonino Pellitteri, Camille Rhoné-Quer, Francesca Romana Romani, Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti, Roberto Tottoli, Raoul Villano, Eleonora Di Vincenzo and Francesco Zappa.
Born in Tlemcen and educated in Damascus, the fourteenth-century Arab litterateur Ibn Abī Ḥaǧalah (725-776/1325-1375) spent most of his adult life in Mamluk Cairo. His best-known works are Sukkardān as-sulṭān (The Sultan's Sugar Box) and Dīwān aṣ-ṣabābah (The Register of Passionate Love), two anthologies that he dedicated to his patron, the Mamluk Sultan Ḥasan, during the latter's second reign (755-762/1354-1361). A prolific author and master of the maqāmāt genre, Ibn Abī Ḥaǧalah also penned numerous other prose works, many of which are lost or still unedited. An acclaimed poet during his own time, he mainly composed panegyric and religious poetry. Even though he is one of the most important litterateurs of the Mamluk era, his work has so far received little scholarly attention.