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.