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The Madness of Vision
Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s The Madness of Vision is one of the most influential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque. Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, the author asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetic theory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, actually dazzles and distorts the perception of reality. In each of the nine essays that form The Madness of Vision Buci-Glucksmann develops...
Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind
Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ (1181–1235), author of two classic works, the Wine Ode and the Poem of the Sufi Way, is considered the greatest Sufi poet to write in Arabic. In this study, these and other poems by Ibn al-Fāriḍ are considered within the context of Islamic mysticism, Arabic literature, and Sufi poetry. Th. Emil Homerin uncovers the literary and religious intent of these poems and their aesthetic and mystical content, showing them to be a type of meditative poetry. Indeed, Ibn al-Fāriḍ often alludes to the Sufi practice of "recollection," or meditation on God, to evoke a view of existence in which the seeker may be transformed by an epiphany of love revealing an intimate relationship to the divine beloved. Homerin provides elegant translations and close readings of Ibn al-Fāriḍ's poetry, highlighting the beauty of his verse, its moods, meanings, and significance within Islamic mysticism and Arabic poetry, where Ibn al-Fāriḍ is still known as the "Sultan of the Lovers."
Transfigurations of the Maghreb
This work presents a critical perspective on many of the best-known texts of Algerian literature in French. It also discusses Maghrebian immigration into France; contemporary French writing about the Maghreb; and "nomadic" poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity and sociality. Woodhull offers a thorough and detailed exploration of the historical context and the ways in which femininity has been represented in the texts of North African and French writers since the mid-1950s. She aims to provide an important corrective to some (male) models of anticolonialist ideology. Through informed readings of texts by "metropolitan" writers such as Le Clezio, Tournier, Cardinal, and Sullerot...
In the Presence of Power
Insights into power, spectacle, and performance in the courts of Middle Eastern rulers In recent decades, scholars have produced much new research on courtly life in medieval Europe, but studies on imperial and royal courts across the Middle East have received much less attention, particularly for courts before 1500AD. In the Presence of Power, however, sheds new light on courtly life across the region. This insightful, exploratory collection of essays uncovers surprising commonalities across a broad swath of cultures. The pre-modern period in this volume includes roughly seven centuries, opening with the first dynasty of Islam, the Umayyads, whose reign marked an important watershed for Lat...
Women's Writing and Muslim Societies
Women’s Writing and Muslim Societies looks at the rise in works concerning Muslim societies by both western and Muslim women – from pioneering female travellers like Freya Stark and Edith Wharton in the early twentieth century, whose accounts of the Orient were usually playful and humorous, to the present day and such works as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter, which present a radically different view of Muslim Societies marked by fear, hostility and even disgust. The author, Sharif Gemie, also considers a new range of female Muslim writers whose works suggest a variety of other perspectives that speak of difficult journeys, the problems of integration, identity crises and the changing nature of Muslim cultures; in the process, this volume examines varied journeys across cultural, political and religious borders, discussing the problems faced by female travellers, the problems of trans-cultural romances and the difficulties of constructing dialogue between enemy camps.
Arab Voices
This book, first published in 1991, moves beyond sensational headlines to explore how Middle Eastern men and women speak and feel about the societies in which they live. Kevin Dwyer makes use of extensive research and interview material from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco and combines first-hand testimony with vivid and illuminating analysis. The voices are those of lawyers, political militants, religious thinkers, journalists and human rights activists who focus their discussion on the question of human rights and critical issues in social and cultural life.
Between Hebrew and Arabic Poetry
The book includes sixteen studies about medieval Hebrew poetry compared with Arabic poetry. It is well known that since the tenth century medieval Hebrew poets took Arabic poetry as the ultimate paradigm in terms of prosody, language purism and rhetorical devices and even in regard to poetical genres. However, the concept unifying all studies in this book is that a comparative examination must consider not only the identical elements in which Hebrew poetry borrowed from the Arabic one, but alos what is much more significant – what Hebrew poetry stubbornly set itself at a distance from Arabic poetry. The conclusive result of this sort of examination is that Hebrew poetry combined selectively borrowed Arabic poetical values with traditional ethical Jewish values to create a distinctive poetical school.
Beyond the Veil, Revised Edition
From the writing of her first book, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society in 1975, Mernissi has sought to reclaim the ideological discourse on women and sexuality from the stranglehold of patriarchy. She critically examines the classical corpus of religious-juristic texts, including the Hadith, and reinterprets them from a feminist perspective. In her view, the Muslim ideal of the silent, passive, obedient woman has nothing to do with the authentic message of Islam. Rather, it is a construction of the 'ulama', the male jurists-theologians who manipulated and distorted the religious texts in order to preserve the patriarchal system. Mernissi's work explores the relationship between sexual ideology, gender identity, sociopolitical organization, and the status of women in Islam; her special focus, however, is Moroccan society and culture. As a feminist, her work represents an attempt to undermine the ideological and political systems that silence and oppress Muslim women.
