The Zephyrs of Najd

The Zephyrs of Najd PDF Author: Jaroslav Stetkevych
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226773353
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, Jaroslav Stetkevych attempts in this book to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre. Stetkevych concentrates on the "places of lost bliss" that furnish the dominant motif in the lyric-elegiac opening section (nasib) of the classic Arab code, or qusidah. In defining the Arabic lyrical genre, he shows how pre-Islamic lamentations over abandoned campsites evolved, in Arabo-Islamic mystical poetry, into expressions of spiritual nostalgia. Stetkevych also draws intriguing parallels between the highlands of Najd in Arabic poetry and Arcadia in the European tradition. He concludes by exploring the degree to which the pastoral-paradisiacal archetype of the nasib pervades Arabic literary perception, from the pre-Islamic ode through the Thousand and One Nights and later texts. Enhanced by Stetkevych's sensitive translations of all the Arabic texts discussed, The Zephyrs of Najd brings the classical Arabic ode fully into the purview of contemporary literary and critical discourse.

Iberian Jewish Literature

Iberian Jewish Literature PDF Author: Jonathan P. Decter
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253116953
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment. Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional narratives. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

War Remains

War Remains PDF Author: Yasmine Khayyat
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815655789
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
War Remains traces the poetics of ruination and resistance in select contemporary Lebanese wartime literature, cultural production, and sites of memory. Drawing upon work from southern Lebanon and Beirut, Khayyat examines how war remains are employed as a resistant trope in the intellectual spaces of war’s aftermath. She focuses on "Southern Counterpublics," a collective of poets, novelists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens and their war-inspired creative productions that speak to the ruins’ capacity to be reframed, recycled, and recontested. Khayyat argues that the ruins of war can be thought of as a generative milieu for resistant thought and action. An ambitious and provocative work, War Remains ventures to the so-called margins to archive the texture and substance rendered invisible when studies of memory rely solely on data furnished by official narratives and military accounts of war.

The City Lament

The City Lament PDF Author: Tamar M. Boyadjian
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173086X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Poetic elegies for lost or fallen cities are seemingly as old as cities themselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this genre finds its purest expression in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem; in Arabic, this genre is known as the ritha al-mudun. In The City Lament, Tamar M. Boyadjian traces the trajectory of the genre across the Mediterranean world during the period commonly referred to as the early Crusades (1095–1191), focusing on elegies and other expressions of loss that address the spiritual and strategic objective of those wars: Jerusalem. Through readings of city laments in English, French, Latin, Arabic, and Armenian literary traditions, Boyadjian challenges hegemonic and entrenched approaches to the study of medieval literature and the Crusades. The City Lament exposes significant literary intersections between Latin Christendom, the Islamic caliphates of the Middle East, and the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, arguing for shared poetic and rhetorical modes. Reframing our understanding of literary sources produced across the medieval Mediterranean from an antagonistic, orientalist model to an analogous one, Boyadjian demonstrates how lamentations about the loss of Jerusalem, whether to Muslim or Christian forces, reveal fascinating parallels and rich, cross-cultural exchanges.

Moses in the Qur'an and Islamic Exegesis

Moses in the Qur'an and Islamic Exegesis PDF Author: Brannon M. Wheeler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136128905
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Relating the Muslim understanding of Moses in the Qur'an to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Alexander Romances, Aramaic Targums, Rabbinic Bible exegesis, and folklore from the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, this book shows how Muslim scholars authorize and identify themselves through allusions to the Bible and Jewish tradition. Exegesis of Qur'an 18:60-82 shows how Muslim exegetes engage Biblical theology through interpretation of the ancient Israelites, their prophets, and their Torah. This Muslim use of a scripture shared with Jews and Christians suggests fresh perspectives for the history of religions, Biblical studies, cultural studies, and Jewish-Arabic studies.

Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East

Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East PDF Author: Y. Noorani
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230106439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This work is a study of the nature and origin of nationality and modern social ideals in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Bringing together writings on political and social reform with literary works, Noorani challenges dominant assumptions about the emergence of modernity. It shows that while nationalist, liberal, and democratic ideals emerged in the Middle East under European influence, these ideals were nevertheless created out of existing cultural values by reformers and intellectuals. The central element of this process, the book argues, was the transformation of virtue into nationality.

An Anthropology of the Qur’an

An Anthropology of the Qur’an PDF Author: Ahmed Achrati
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000469069
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book presents an anthropological study of the Qur’an, offering an unprecedented challenge to some of the epistemological and metaphysical assumptions of the tawḥīdic discourses. Combining primary textual materials and anthropological analysis, this book examines transcendence as a core principle of the Qur’an, uniquely signified in the divine name al-Quddūs (the Holy). It shows how the tawḥīdic representations of Allah constitute an inversion of this attribute; examines how this inversion has been conceived, authorized, and maintained; and demonstrates how it has affected Islamic thinking and practices, especially as relates to authority. This book also explores how a return to the Qur’anic primacy of God’s otherness as al-Quddūs can influence Islamic thinking and practices moving forward. Therefore, it will be highly useful to scholars of Islamic Studies, philosophical theology, Qur’anic studies, political science, ethics, anthropology, and religious studies.

The Barbarian Plain

The Barbarian Plain PDF Author: Elizabeth Key Fowden
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520922204
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
During the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. there arose on the Euphrates frontier, between the empires of Rome and Iran, a city girded with glittering gypsum walls. Within these walls stood a great church, a shrine for the relics of Saint Sergius, who was martyred there, at Rusafa, in the early fourth century. Around Rusafa stretched the "Barbarian Plain," inhabited by Rome's Arab allies, many of whom revered the saint. Elizabeth Key Fowden examines the rise of the cult of Sergius in late antiquity, drawing on literary accounts, inscriptions, archaeology, images, and the landscape itself to construct a many-faceted picture of the role of religion in this frontier society. Focusing on the socio-cultural as well as the political dimensions of the Sergius cult, her study sheds light on the lives of the ordinary faithful, as well as on religion's place in the strategic calculations of hostile empires. Beginning with a detailed analysis of the surviving accounts of the martyrdom of Sergius, Fowden provides a discussion of Syrian Rusafa-Sergiopolis, traces the spread of the Sergius cult in Syria and Mesopotamia, and provides a provocative interpretation of the relation between the saint's presence at Rusafa and his role in frontier defense. She also discusses Arab Christianity in the context of late Roman culture in the East, as well as the continuation of the Sergius tradition after the Muslim conquest, emphasizing the changes and continuities brought by the rise of Islam.

Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition

Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition PDF Author: Huda J. Fakhreddine
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004294570
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition Huda J. Fakhreddine expands the study of metapoesis to include the Abbasid age in Arabic literature. Through this lens that is often used to study modernist poetry of the 20th and the 21st century, this book detects and examines a meta-poetic tendency and a self-reflexive attitude in the poetry of the first century of Abbasid poets. What and why is poetry? are questions the Abbasid poets asked themselves with the same persistence and urgency their modern successor did. This approach to the poetry of the Abbasid age serves to refresh our sense of what is “modernist” or “poetically new” and detach it from chronology.

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry PDF Author: Huda J. Fakhreddine
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100381543X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Comprised of contributions from leading international scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry incorporates political, cultural, and theoretical paradigms that help place poetic projects in their socio-political contexts as well as illuminate connections across the continuum of the Arabic tradition. This volume grounds itself in the present moment and, from it, examines the transformations of the fifteen-century Arabic poetic tradition through readings, re-readings, translations, reformulations, and co-optations. Furthermore, this collection aims to deconstruct the artificial modern/pre-modern divide and to present the Arabic poetic practice as live and urgent, shaped by the experiences and challenges of the twenty-first century and at the same time in constant conversation with its long tradition. The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry actively seeks to destabilize binaries such as that of East-West in contributions that shed light on the interactions of the Arabic tradition with other Middle Eastern traditions, such as Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew, and on South-South ideological and poetic networks of solidarity that have informed poetic currents across the modern Middle East. This volume will be ideal for scholars and students of Arabic, Middle Eastern, and comparative literature, as well as non-specialists interested in poetry and in the present moment of the study of Arabic poetry.

The Raven and the Falcon

The Raven and the Falcon PDF Author: Hasan Shuraydi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004278958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This book fills a long-standing gap in Arabic-Islamic studies. Following the informative and entertaining style of adab literature and based on a large number of relevant sources from a wide range of genres, Hasan Shuraydi presents a panoramic view of relevant themes that concern youth and old age in Medieval Arabic literature intended for both specialists and non-specialists. A pattern of binary oppositions runs through such themes, e.g., black/white, male/female, husband/wife, sacred/profane, paradise/this world, ignorance/wisdom, past/present, young/old, new/old, health/disease, sappy/dry, permitted/forbidden, lust/chastity, obedience/disobedience, experience/inexperience, folly/reason, sobriety/intoxication, parent/child, celibacy/marriage, present life/hereafter. Themes discussed include: aging, ambition, aphrodisiacs, beauty, education, feminist trends, hair dyeing, homosexuality, honoring age, jihad, life stages, longevity, love, marriage, sex.