A skillful translation of six classical odes of pre-Islamic Arabia.

The contributors to this wide-ranging work of scholarship and analysis include mentors, colleagues, friends, and students of the late Magda al-Nowaihi, an outstanding scholar of Middle East studies whose diverse interests and energy inspired numerous colleagues. The book's first part is devoted to Arabic elegy, the subject of an unfinished work by al-Nowaihi from which this volume takes its title. Included here is a previously unpublished lecture on elegy delivered by al- Nowaihi herself. Other contributors examine this poetic form in both classical and modern contexts, from a number of angles, including the partial feminization of the genre, making this volume perhaps the most comprehensive resource on the Arabic elegy available in English. The book's second half features essays relating to al-Nowaihi's other research interests, especially the modern Arabic novel and its transgressive and marginalized status as literature. It deals with authors as varied as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Latifa al-Zayyat, Bensalem Himmich, and Sonallah Ibrahim. Broad in its scope and rigorous in its scholarship, this volume makes a fitting tribute to an inspiring scholar. Contributors: Roger Allen, Dina Amin, Michael Beard, Jonathan P. Decter, Alexander E. Elinson, Marlé Hammond, András Hámori, Mervat Hatem, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Richard Jacquemond, Lital Levy, Mara Naaman, Magda al-Nowaihi, Dana Sajdi, and Christopher Stone.

This volume makes available and accessible the writings of the crucial early period of Islamic mysticism during which Sufism developed as one of the world's major mystical traditions. The texts are accompanied by commentary on their historical, literary and philosophical context.

Collection of previously published essays.

Covering the origins, key features, and legacy of the Islamic tradition, the third edition of A New Introduction to Islam includes new material on Islam in the 21st century and discussions of the impact of historical ideas, literature, and movements on contemporary trends. Includes updated and rewritten chapters on the Qur’an and hadith literature that covers important new academic research Compares the practice of Islam in different Islamic countries, as well as acknowledging the differences within Islam as practiced in Europe Features study questions for each chapter and more illustrative material, charts, and excerpts from primary sources

This volume brings together a set of key studies on classical Arabic poetry (ca. 500-1000 C.E.), published over the last thirty-five years; the individual articles each deal with a different approach, period, genre, or theme. The major focus is on new interpretations of the form and function of the pre-eminent classical poetic genre, the polythematic qasida, or Arabic ode, particularly explorations of its ritual, ceremonial and performance dimensions. Other articles present the typology and genre characteristics of the short monothematic forms, especially the lyrical ghazal and the wine-poem. After thus setting out the full poetic genres and their structures, the volume turns in the remaining studies to the philological, rhetorical, stylistic and motival elements of classical Arabic poetry, in their etymological, symbolic, historical and comparatist dimensions. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych's Introduction places the articles within the context of the major critical and methodological trajectories of the field and in doing so demonstrates the increasing integration of Arabic literary studies into contemporary humanistic scholarship. The Selected Bibliography complements the Introduction and the Articles to offer the reader a full overview of the past generation of Western literary and critical scholarship on classical Arabic poetry.

The Mute Immortals Speak will be important for students and scholars in the fields of Middle Eastern literatures, Islamic studies, folklore, oral literature...

The Power of Representation traces the emergence of modern Egyptian national identity from the mid-1870s through the 1910s. During this period, a new class of Egyptian urban intellectuals—teachers, lawyers, engineers, clerks, accountants, and journalists—came into prominence. Adapting modern ideas of individual moral autonomy and universal citizenship, this group reconfigured religiously informed notions of the self and created a national sense of "Egyptian-ness" drawn from ideas about Egypt's large peasant population. The book breaks new ground by calling into question the notion, common in historiography of the modern Middle East and the Muslim world in general, that in the nineteenth century "secular" aptitudes and areas of competency were somehow separate from "religious" ones. Instead, by tying the burgeoning Islamic modernist movement to the process of identity formation and its attendant political questions Michael Gasper shows how religion became integral to modern Egyptian political, social, and cultural life.

This is a study of the life and work of Ibn Dāniyāl (d. 1310), a Cairo-based eye doctor, poet, playwright, court jester, and arguably one of the most controversial cultural figures of his time. Drawing on medieval Arabic sources, many still in manuscript and some used for the first time, the author further contextualizes Ibn Dāniyāl’s work with respect to poetry production and popular culture in the Islamic Near East in the post-Mongol period. The book also presents the first full English translation of “The Phantom,” one of Ibn Dāniyāl’s three shadow plays, the only surviving pre-Ottoman Arabic theatrical texts.

A cultural history of European and Egyptian interest in ancient Egypt and its material culture, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth.