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A remarkable book analysing the importance of oratory for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimising rulers and inculcating moral values in the medieval Islamic world.
Understanding the complexities of Arab politics, history, and culture has never been more important for North American readers. Yet even as Arabic literature is increasingly being translated into English, the modern Arabic literary tradition is still often treated as other--controversial, dangerous, difficult, esoteric, or exotic. This volume examines modern Arabic literature in context and introduces creative teaching methods that reveal the literature's richness, relevance, and power to anglophone students. Addressing the complications of translation head on, the volume interweaves such important issues such as gender, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the status of Arabic literature in world literature. Essays cover writers from the recent past, like Emile Habiby and Tayeb Salih; contemporary Palestinian, Egyptian, and Syrian literatures; and the literature of the nineteenth-century Nahda.
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This volume presents the seminal treatise of the important Spanish Muslim mystic, Ibn al-‘Arabī, on Islamic sainthood The Book of the Fabulous Gryphon. In highly allusive, symbolic language, the Shaykh al-Akbar reveals his manifesto of the revolutionary significance of sainthood in the person of its timely epitome, the Seal of the saints. The first part of the book consists of a critical introduction dealing with the biographical, historical and bibliographical background to the Fabulous Gryphon, along with a thorough examination of its concepts, themes and structure. The complete, annotated translation of the Gryphon is followed by further original translations of related texts by Ibn al-‘Arabī. Apart from the Fusūs al-ḥikam, no comparable treatise by this leading figure of Islamic spirituality has ever been presented in its entirety in any western language.
This translation and study extend our knowlege of the Arabic genre of the maq?ma by some years. If translations of the genre are lacking, literary critical studies of it are even rarer. Therefore, the work will be of interest to scholars of Arabic, Spanish, and other literatures, to comparativists, literary historians, critics, and theoreticians.
Although the Arabic maqāmah, a branch of the picaresque genre, was much cultivated in the Middle Ages, little is known about it aside from the works of al-Hamadhānī and al-ḥarīrī, its first two cultivators. This translation of the Maqāmāt al-luzūmīyah by the twelfth-century Andalusi author al-Saraqustī makes available to Western scholars of narrative prose a hitherto little-known but important collection of Arabic maqāmāt. The "Preliminary Study" places this specific collection in the context of the overall maqama genre, it further places that genre in the contexts both of Arabic and of world literature, exploring the differences between the picaresque genre and the modern novel. It discusses the meaning of the work, shows the way in which it is original within its genre, and establishes its organic unity. Finally, it shows that late and post-classical Arabic literary works such as that of al-Saraqustī, which were composed during the so-called "period of decadence," are not decadent at all, contrary to the opinion prevalent among scholars in the field.