Humor in early Islam
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Humor in Early Islam , first published in 1956, is a pioneering study by the versatile and prolific scholar Franz Rosenthal (1914-2003), who (having published an article on mediaeval Arabic blurbs), should have written this text himself. It contains an annotated translation of an Arabic text on a figure who became the subject of many jokes and anecdotes, the greedy and obtuse Ashʿab, a singer who lived in the eighth century but whose literary and fictional life long survived him. The translation is preceded by chapters on the textual sources and on the historical and legendary personalities of Ashʿab; the book ends with a short essay on laughter. Whether or not the jokes will make a modern reader laugh, the book is a valuable source for those seriously interested in a religion or a culture that all too often but unjustly is associated, by outsiders, with an aversion to laughter.
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"Translation of texts":p. [36]-131. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789004215733 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
A descriptive and comparative grammar of Andalusi Arabic /
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Andalusi Arabic is a close-knit bundle of Neo-Arabic dialects resulting from interference by Ibero-Romance stock and interaction of some Arabic dialects. These dialects are mostly Northern but there are also some Southern and hybrid ones, brought along to the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century A.D. by an invading army of some thousands of Arab tribesmen who, in the company of a much larger number of partially Arabicized Berbers, all of them fighting men alone, succeeded in establishing Islamic political rule and Arab cultural supremacy for a long while over these lands. The study of Andalusi Arabic is of enormous interest to the Arabic dialectologist, as well as a subject of paramount importance to those concerned with the medieval literatures and cultures of Western Europe.
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1 online resource (xxii, 274 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004230279 :
0169-9423 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Nāmahā va munshaʾāt-i Jāmī /
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Regarded by many as the last great mystical poet of medieval Persia, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492) spent the greater part of his life in Herat. As a student, he excelled in every subject he engaged in and appeared destined for an academic career. But then, in his early thirties, he went through a spiritual crisis that ended in him joining the Herat branch of the mystical Naqshbandiyya order, led by the charismatic Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī (d. 860/1456). A protégé of three successive Timurid rulers in Herat, Jāmī's wide network of friendships and relations extended from spiritual and literary circles through the political to the academic. With 39.000 lines of verse and over 30 prose works to his name, Jāmī's literary production is quite overwhelming. The present volume, containing 433 of his letters and messages, bears witness to his great yet modest personality, his social engagement, and the expanse and variety of his network.
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1 online resource. :
9789004401839
9789646781313
The cutting edge of the poet's sword : Muslim poetic responses to the Crusades /
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In this comprehensive analysis of Arabic poetry during the period of the crusades (sixth/twelfth-seventh/thirteenth centuries), Osman Latiff provides an insightful examination of the poets who inspired Muslims to unite in the jihād against the Franks. The Cutting Edge of the Poet's Sword not only contributes to our understanding of literary history, it also illuminates a broad spectrum of religiosity and the role of political propaganda in the anti-Frankish Muslim struggle. Latiff shows how poets, often used by the ruling elite to promote their rule, emphasised the centrality of Islam's holy sites to inspire the Muslim response to the occupation and later reconquest of Jerusalem, and expressed some surprising views of Frankish Christians.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004345225 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Persian wisdom in Arabic garb : ʻAlī born ʻUbayda al-Rayḥānī (d. 219/834) and his Jawāhir al-kilam wa-farāʼid al-ḥikam /
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This volume introduces ʿAlī born ʿUbayda al-Rayḥānī (d. 219/834), one of the central figures in the transmission of classical Greek and Persian wisdom into Arabic. It offers an edition, translation, and evaluation of his book Jawāhir al-kilam , one of the oldest collections of proverbial wisdom and moralia in Arabic, as well as other remaining pieces of his works. The first part of the book surveys the content of his more than sixty books and suggests that among his translations from Middle Persian into Arabic were the Sindbād-nāma and Bilawhar wa-Budhāsf . Moreover, he emerges as the author of the famous al-Adab al-ṣaghīr heretofore wrongly attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa'. The second part contains the Arabic texts and translations as well as a rich documentation of their sources and their further transmission.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (v. 1, pages [339]-360) and index. :
9789047418757 :
0169-8729 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Sheikh Ahmadu Bamba : selected poems /
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While in exile in Gabon (1895-1902), Sheikh Ahmadu Bamba marked a historic moment with his poetry of resilience, pivotal to the cultural and religious transformation of the Murīds of Senegal. The qaṣāʾid (poems) included in this annotated edition, most of them hymns of praise to the qualities of Allāh and the Prophet Muḥammad, and professions of faith that demonstrate how to realize the precepts found in the Qur'ān, display the underlying elements of Sheikh Ahmadu Bamba's imaginative energy and poetic vision. They reveal a unifying poetic purpose and exemplify Ṣūfī literary traditions in subject matter, form, and versification and aim to explore the deepest regions of mysticism in search of the divine truth.
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Translated from the Arabic. :
1 online resource (xxi, 205 pages) : illustrations, maps. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004339194 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Metapoesis in the Arabic tradition : from modernists to muḥdathūn /
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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.
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Originally presented as the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Indiana University, 2011. :
1 online resource (222 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-210) and index. :
9789004294578 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Looking back at al-Andalus : the poetics of loss and nostalgia in medieval Arabic and Hebrew literature /
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Looking Back at al-Andalus focuses on Arabic and Hebrew Literature that expresses the loss of al-Andalus from multiple vantage points. In doing so, this book examines the definition of al-Andalus' literary borders, the reconstruction of which navigates between traditional generic formulations and actual political, military and cultural challenges. By looking at a variety of genres, the book shows that literature aiming to recall and define al-Andalus expresses a series of symbolic literary objects more than a geographic and political entity fixed in a single time and place. Looking Back at al-Andalus offers a unique examination into the role of memory, language, and subjectivity in presenting a series of interpretations of what al-Andalus represented to different writers at different historical-cultural moments.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [171]-180) and index. :
9789047442721 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The mischievous muse : extant poetry and prose by Ibn Quzman of Cordoba (d. AH 555/AD 1160) /
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The first part of this work includes all the known works of the twelfth-century Andalusi author Ibn Quzmān, most of which are zajal poems composed in the colloquial dialect of Andalus. They have been edited in a Romanized transliteration, and are accompanied by a facing-page English prose translation, along with notes and commentaries intended to elucidate matters relevant to each poem. In the second part of the work, sixteen chapters are devoted to analyzing specific poems from a literary perspective, in order to delve into their meaning and, thereby, explain the poet's literary goals.
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1 online resource (2 volumes (1038 pages ; 500 pages)) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004323773 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Nūbat Ramal al-Māya in cultural context : the pen, the voice, the text /
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In this unique edition, Carl Davila takes an original approach to the texts of the modern Moroccan Andalusian music tradition. This volume offers a literary-critical analysis and English translation of the texts of this nūba , studies their linguistic and thematic features, and compares them with key manuscripts and published anthologies. Four introductory chapters and four appendices discuss the role of orality in the tradition and the manuscripts that lie behind the print anthologies. Two supplements cross-reference key poetic images in English and Arabic, and provide information on known authors of the texts. This groundbreaking contribution will interest scholars and students of pre-modern Arabic poetry, muwashshaḥāt , Andalusian music traditions, Arabic Studies, orality, and sociolinguistics.
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1 online resource (xxii, 624 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004294530 :
1571-5183 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
An Arabic-Ethiopian glossary /
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The Arabic-Ethiopic Glossary by al-Malik al-Afḍal by Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan is a detailed annotated edition of a unique monument of Late Medieval Arabic lexicography, comprising 475 Arabic lexemes (some of them post-classical Yemeni dialectisms) translated into several Ethiopian idioms and put down in Arabic letters in a late-fourteenth century manuscript from a codex in a private Yemeni collection. For the many languages involved, the Glossary provides the earliest written records, by several centuries pre-dating the most ancient attestations known so far. The edition, preceded by a comprehensive linguistic introduction, gives a full account of the comparative material from all known Ethiopian Semitic languages. A detailed index ensures the reader's orientation in the lexical treasures revealed from the Glossary.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004321823 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Corpus inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae.
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Western Palestine is extremely rich in Arabic inscriptions, whose dates range from as early as CE 150 until modern times. Most of the inscriptions date from the Islamic period, for under Islam the country gained particular religious and strategic importance, even though it made up only part of the larger province of Syria. This historical importance is clearly reflected in the hundreds of inscriptions, the texts of which cover a variety of topics: construction, dedication, religious endowments, epitaphs, Qur'anic texts, prayers and invocations, all now assembled in the Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae ( CIAP ). The CIAP follows the method established at the end of the 19th century by Max van Berchem, namely, the studying of the Arabic inscriptions 'in context'. Van Berchem managed to publish two volumes of the inscriptions from Jerusalem: the CIAP covers the entire country. The inscriptions are arranged according to site, and are studied in their respective topographical, historical and cultural context. In this way the CIAP offers more than a survey of inscriptions: it represents the epigraphical angle of the geographical history of the Holy Land. Volume One: A, was published in 1997, Volume Two: -B-C- in 1999, Volume Three: -D-F- in 2004, Volume Four: G in 2008 and an Addendum in 2007. All volumes are still available.
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1 online resource (ca. 390 pages) : 288 illustrations. :
9789004254817 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae addendum : squeezes in the Max van Berchem collection (Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Northern Syria) : squeezes 1-84 /
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During his research of the Arabic inscriptions in the Middle East at the end of the 19th century, Max van Berchem collected many squeezes of inscriptions. These squeezes are stored in the archives of the Fondation Max van Berchem in Geneva. The present publication wishes to present a scholarly record of these squeezes, many of which represent inscriptions that do no longer exist. This publication is the first of, hopefully, two addenda which will constitute a full record of one of the few treasures left by the great epigrapher in his archives. For many students of Arabic epigraphy these squeezes afford the only opportunity to have a close glimpse of the originals as possible, and learn about their contents with the aid of the photographs and studies which accompany them in this volume.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-181) and indexes. :
9789047420736 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Pens, swords, and the springs of art : the oral poetry dueling of Palestinian weddings in the Galilee /
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Offering a detailed analysis of oral poetry dueling performed at traditional Palestinian weddings, this work is unique in addressing poetry dueling as a performative and compositional device, and exploring the complex linkages between this tradition and other genres of Arabic poetry. It includes a study of poetry dueling in standard Arabic; a description of the historical and performance contexts of the Palestinian duels, as well as of poets and their training; an analysis of a single performance; and a re-interpretation of the nature verbal dueling generally. Including a transcription and translation of an entire performance, the book considers the social efficacy of poetry dueling, its aesthetic nature, and its value as a compositional device within a larger system of poetic production.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [363]-369) and index. :
9789047410348 :
1571-5183 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Al-Riḥla al-Makkiyya : Tārīkh-i siyāsī u ijtimāʿi-yi Mushaʿshaʿiyān /
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In Islam, messianic beliefs are typically associated with the doctrines of the Shīʿa. The idea of the Manifestation of the Hidden Imam at the appointed time has always been part of their beliefs, then and now. Besides mainstream Shīʿa movements such as Twelver Shīʿism, Zaydism, or Ismailism, there have also been marginal and extremist groups around charismatic leaders claiming a messianic role. One of these is Sayyid Muḥammad b. Falāḥ (d. 861/1456-7), founder of the Mushaʿshaʿ movement among the Shīʿī Arab tribes of Khūzistān, western Iran. Fighting or arranging themselves temporarily with their neighbors, notably the Safavids and the Ottomans, the Mushaʿshaʿ dynasty continued to exist in different forms and shapes well into the nineteenth century. The present work is a nineteenth-century Persian translation of a history of the Mushaʿshaʿ dynasty in Arabic by the governor of Ḥuwayza and descendant of Ibn Falāḥ, ʿAlī Khān Mushaʿshaʿī (alive in 1128/1716). Based on written and oral sources.
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1 online resource. :
9789004408111
9786002031310
Kharābāt : Dar bayān-i ḥikmat, shajāʿat, iffat u ʿadālat bih payrawī az Gulistān-i Saʿdī /
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In the Persianate world, wisdom literature has a long history, dating back to pre-Islamic times. After the advent of Islam, this type of literature was continued, both in poetry and in prose. From among the medieval poets one could mention Firdawsī (d. 411/1020) and Nāṣir Khusraw (d. 481/1088), while among the writers of prose such authors as Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 485/1092) or Raḍī al-Dīn Nīshāpūrī (598/1201) come to mind. Still, the most influential medieval literary work on morals is without any doubt Saʿdī's (d. 691/1291-92) Rose Garden ( Gulistān ), a mixture of poetry and tales on a variety of themes in which morals play a central role. The present work on morals by Faqīr Shīrāzī (d. 1351/1932) takes its inspiration from Saʿdī's, which it emulates in many respects. Only, its thematic arrangement was taken from Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī's (d. 672/1274) philosophical Nasirean Ethics ( Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī ), centering on the virtues of wisdom, courage, continence and their balanced compound, justice.
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1 online resource. :
9789004402249
9789646781016
Dastūr al-kātib fī taʿyīn al-marātib. Volume 2 /
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From the time that the art of writing was invented, people have been sending letters. This is true of the Sumerians who wrote on clay tablets 5.000 years ago, as it is true today in the information age. But not every letter is the same: a letter to a lover, a friend, or a business relation, each requires a different tone. In the case of official correspondence, the need for a standard is even more pressing than in industry or trade. In the medieval Islamic world with its highly developed bureaucracies, there evolved a special type of textbook in the form of manuals for secretaries. These would include general information on the secreterial trade as well as collections of sample letters. This Persian manual by Shams Munshī was completed in 767/1366 and dedicated to Sultan Uways Jalāyirī of Tabriz (d. 776/1374). Wide in scope and well organized, it was superior to anything written before it. 2 vols; volume 2.
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1 online resource. :
9789004407350
9786002031280
Majmū'a-yi āthār-i Ḥusām al-Dīn-i Khūʾī /
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In every age and culture, royal courts have always attracted a multitude of scholars, artists and other folk seeking patronage and protection. In the Islamic world, one of these courts was that of the emirs of the Saljuqs of Rūm in Kastamonu in northern Anatolia. In the year 680/1282, Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 709-1309), a student of Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) who lived in Anatolia for years, dedicated his Ikhtiyārāt to the emir of Kastamonu, Muẓaffar al-Dīn Yavlaq Arslan (d. 691/1292). This same Muẓaffar also had a secretary in his service by the name of Ḥusām al-Dīn Khūʾī (alive in 709/1309-10), a refugee from Khūy near Tabriz in Iran. Ḥusām al-Dīn is the author of a number of works, six of which are published here for the very first time: four manuals on the art of the secretary, one Arabic-Persian glossary for use at the chancellery, and finally a collection of his poetry.
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1 online resource. :
9789004402256
9789646781481