The teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe /
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This volume brings together the leading experts in the history of European Oriental Studies. Their essays present a comprehensive history of the teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe, covering a wide geographical area from southern to northern Europe and discussing the many ways and purposes for which the Arabic language was taught and studied by scholars, theologians, merchants, diplomats and prisoners. The contributions shed light on different methods and contents of language teaching in a variety of academic, scholarly and missionary contexts in the Protestant and the Roman Catholic world. But they also look beyond the institutional history of Arabic studies and consider the importance of alternative ways in which the study of Arabic was persued. Contributors are Asaph Ben Tov, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Sonja Brentjes, Mordechai Feingold, Mercedes García-Arenal, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Aurélien Girard, Alastair Hamilton, Jan Loop, Nuria Martínez de Castilla Muñoz, Simon Mills, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Bernd Roling, Arnoud Vrolijk. This title, in its entirety, is available online in Open Access.
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Based on a conference held on 16 November 2013 at the National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, RMO), in Leiden. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004338623 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The medieval reception of the Shahnama as a mirror for princes /
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Nasrin Askari explores the medieval reception of Firdausī's Shāhnāma , or Book of Kings (completed in 1010 CE) as a mirror for princes. Through her examination of a wide range of medieval sources, Askari demonstrates that Firdausī's oeuvre was primarily understood as a book of wisdom and advice for kings and courtly elites. In order to illustrate the ways in which the Shāhnāma functions as a mirror for princes, Askari analyses the account about Ardashīr, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, as an ideal king in the Shāhnāma . Within this context, she explains why the idea of the union of kingship and religion, a major topic in almost all medieval Persian mirrors for princes, has often been attributed to Ardashīr.
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1 online resource (398 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004307919 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Kashefi's Anvar-e Sohayli : Rewriting Kalila wa-Dimna in Timurid Herat.
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Kashefi's Anvar-e Sohayli (15th c. A.D.) is a Persian rewriting of the timeless and influential Kalila wa-Dimna text, done at the Timurid court. Christine van Ruymbeke offers a first in-depth analysis of the contents and style of this important text and also addresses the Kalila wa-Dimna field across its full rewriting history. This analysis shows how Kashefi's additions function as an invaluable commentary that opens up our understanding and the appreciation of this seminal text. This studies revisits several received ideas and current misapprehensions about the text and shows why it has been such an international best-seller before being unjustly relegated to children's literature. In Van Ruymbeke's words, Kalila wa-Dimna is a grim text, exposing the mechanisms of sophisticated psychological manipulation and exploring universal philosophical themes, known since Antiquity and still relevant today.
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Description based upon print version of record. :
1 online resource (428 pages) :
9789004314757 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Shahnama studies II : the reception of Firdausi's Shahnama /
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This volume explores different aspects of the reception of Firdausi's Shahnama or 'Book of Kings', both within Iran and in neighbouring lands. Later poets and writers not only looked to Firdausi's work for a model, but supplemented its stories with other narratives or absorbed the characters and the moral values of the poem into their own works. Several chapters focus on the literary traditions fed by the Shahnama , including reports of the continuing oral performances of its more popular stories. Others discuss Firdausi's impact on the creative imagination of the miniature painters who illustrated manuscript copies of the Shahnama in the courts of the Ottoman Empire, Moghul India, and the Central Asia Khanates up till the seventeenth century. Contributors include Gabrielle van den Berg, Francesca Leoni, Farhad Mehran, Bilha Moor, Adeela Qureshi, Ravshan Rahmoni, Julia Rubanovich, Karin Ruehrdanz, Jan Schmidt, Ivan Steblin-Kamenski, Zeren Tanindi, Lâle Uluç, Evangelos Venetis, Olga Yastrebova, and Marjolijn van Zutphen.
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Includes index. :
1 online resource (xx, 316 pages, [26] pages of plates) : illustrations (some color) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004228634 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Labyrinths, intellectuals and the revolution : the Arabic-language Moroccan novel, 1957-72 /
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Labyrinths, Intellectuals and the Revolution traces the development of the postcolonial Arabic-language Moroccan novel from its roots in travel narratives and autobiography into its more mature period of stylistic and thematic diversity in the early 1970s. This study first undertakes an exploration of the political, social and artistic conditions under which the genre developed, then moves to close readings of each of the formative texts, grouped by theme. The analysis of these texts centers around their spatial practices: there is a tension between the labyrinthine space of the street, which deflects legibility, and the sacred interior within the blank walls, wherein a certain equality of gaze and power can be perceived.
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1 online resource (v, 246 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004247697 :
1877-9808 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval : textes, contextes, analyses /
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La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval constitue un nouvel apport aux études historiques et linguistiques dans la mesure où de nombreux matériaux sur la langue berbère font l'objet d'une monographie spécifique. Plusieurs faits de langue sont reliés par une trame précise et ils sont réunis afin de mettre en relief les indices textuels puisés dans diverses sources écrites en arabe et en berbère. Dans les quatre parties du livre, il est tour à tour question des apports de la documentation narrative, de la littérature hagiographique et des textes ibadites ainsi que de l'importance des contacts entre le berbère et les langues africaines à travers la littérature narrative et l'épigraphie islamique. Ce livre a été conçu comme un essai documentaire mais également afin d'attirer l'attention des chercheurs sur la présence relativement bien documentée de la langue berbère dans les textes produits en milieu arabo-musulman du Moyen Âge à l'époque moderne. La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval is a new contribution to the historical and linguistic studies in that many materials on the Berber language are the subject of a specific monograph. Several facts of language are connected by an accurate frame and are gathered to highlight textual clues collected from various sources written in Arabic and Berber. The four parts of the book treat contributions of narrative documentation, hagiographical literature and Ibadi texts and the importance of contacts between Berber and African languages through the narrative literature and Islamic epigraphy. This book was conceived as a documentary essay, but also to attract the attention of researchers on the relatively well-documented presence of the Berber language in the texts produced in Arab-Muslim environment from the Middle Ages to Modern era.
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1 online resource (xvi, 479 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004302358 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Arabic and its alternatives : religious minorities and their languages in the emerging nation states of the Middle East (1920-1950) /
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"Arabic and its Alternatives discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion and communal identities in the Middle East in the period following the First World War. This volume takes its starting point in the non-Arabic and non-Muslim communities, tracing their linguistic and literary practices as part of a number of interlinked processes, including that of religious modernization, of new types of communal identity politics and of socio-political engagement with the emerging nation states and their accompanying nationalisms. These twentieth-century developments are firmly rooted in literary and linguistic practices of the Ottoman period, but take new turns under influence of colonization and decolonization, showing the versatility and resilience as much as the vulnerability of these linguistic and religious minorities in the region. Contributors are Tijmen C. Baarda, Leyla Dakhli, Sasha R. Goldstein-Sabbah, Liora R. Halperin, Robert Isaf, Michiel Leezenberg, Merav Mack, Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Konstantinos Papastathis, Franck Salameh, Cyrus Schayegh, Emmanuel Szurek, Peter Wien".
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Includes index. :
1 online resource. :
9789004423220
Farāmarz, the Sistāni Hero : Texts and Traditions of the Farāmarznāme and the Persian Epic Cycle.
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In Farāmarz, the Sistāni Hero Marjolijn van Zutphen discusses the manuscripts, storylines and main themes of the shorter and the longer Farāmarznāme (c. 1100), in relation to Ferdowsi's Shāhnāme and several other later maṡnawis about the warriors from Sistān (the Persian Epic Cycle). Farāmarz, a secondary figure of the Shāhnāme , gained importance in later epic traditions and as the invincible protagonist of both Farāmarznāmes reached a status that equalled, if not surpassed, that of his famous father Rostam. Van Zutphen further shows how Farāmarz displays parallels to the fictional figures of Garshāsp (his ancestor) and Eskandar and argues that some story elements of Farāmarz's Indian conquest may be rooted in historical events from both the Parthian and the Ghaznawid period.
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Description based upon print version of record.
7 Conclusion. :
1 online resource (790 pages) :
9789004268289 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
'His pen and ink are a powerful mirror' : Andalusi, Judaeo-Arabic, and other Near Eastern studies in honor of Ross Brann /
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"'His Pen and Ink are a Powerful Mirror' is a volume of collected essays in honor of Ross Brann, written by his students and friends on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The essays engage with a diverse range of Andalusi and Mediterranean literature, art, and history. Each essay begins from the organic hybridity of Andalusi literary and cultural history as its point of departure, introduce new texts, ideas, and objects into the disciplinary conversation or radically reassesses well-known ones, and represent the theoretical, methodological, and material impacts Brann has had and continues to have on the study of the literature and culture of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in al-Andalus. Contributors include: Ali Humayn Akhtar, Esperanza Alfonso, Peter Cole, Jonathan Decter, Elisabeth Hollender, Uriah Kfir, S.J. Pearce, F.E. Peters, Arturo Prats, Cynthia Robinson, Tova Rosen, Aurora Salvatierra, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Jessica Streit, Shawkat M. Toorawa, David Torollo".
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004407541
The Ottoman press, 1908-1923 /
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The Ottoman Press (1908-1923) looks at Ottoman periodicals in the period after the Second Constitutional Revolution (1908) and the formation of the Turkish Republic (1923). It analyses the increased activity in the press following the revolution, legislation that was put in place to control the press, the financial aspects of running a publication, preventive censorship and the impact that the press could have on readers. There is also a chapter on the emergence and growth of the Ottoman press from 1831 until 1908, which helps readers to contextualize the post-revolution press.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004394889
Shahnama studies III : the reception of the Shahnama /
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Shahnama Studies III focuses on the hugely successful afterlife of the Shahnama or Book of Kings, completed by the poet Firdausi around 1010 AD. This long epic grew out to be an icon of Persian culture and served as a source of inspiration for art and literature, leaving its traces in manifold ways. The contributors to this volume each treat an aspect of the rich legacy of the Shahnama and offer new insights in Shahnama manuscript studies, the illustration of the Shahnama , the phenomenon of later epics, and the Shahnama in later texts and contexts.
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1 online resource (xix, 431 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004356252 :
2210-3554 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Khwadāynāmag : the Middle Persian Book of kings /
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Khwadāynāmag. The Middle Persian Book of Kings by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila analyses the lost sixth-century historiographical work of the Sasanians, drawing on a large number of Middle Persian, Greek, Arabic, and Classical Persian sources. The Khwadāynāmag is often conceived of as a large book of stories, comparable to Firdawsī's Shāhnāme , but Hämeen-Anttila convincingly shows that it was a concise and dry chronicle. He also studies the lost Arabic translations of the book, which turn out to be fewer than hitherto thought, as well as the sources of Firdawsī's Shāhnāme , showing that the latter was only remotely related to the Khwadāynāmag . It also becomes clear that there were no separate \'priestly\' and \'royal\' Khwadāynāmags .
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004277649 :
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.
Beholding Beauty : Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry /
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Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry explores the relationship between sexuality, politics, and spirituality in the lyrics of Saʿdi Shirazi (d. 1292 CE), one of the most revered masters of classical Persian literature. Relying on a variety of sources, including unstudied manuscripts, Domenico Ingenito presents the so-called "inimitable smoothness" of Saʿdi's lyric style as a serene yet multifaceted window into the uncanny beauty of the world, the human body, and the realm of the unseen. The book constitutes the first attempt to study Sa'di's lyric meditations on beauty in the context of the major artistic, scientific and intellectual trends of his time. By charting unexplored connections between Islamic philosophy and mysticism, obscene verses and courtly ideals of love, Ingenito approaches Sa'di's literary genius from the perspective of sacred homoeroticism and the psychology of performative lyricism in their historical context.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004435902
9789004435896
Like Joseph in beauty : Yemeni vernacular poetry and Arab-Jewish symbiosis /
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Like Joseph in Beauty traces the evolution of an Arabic poetic form called 'Humayni poetry'. From Muslim mystical circles, the courts of aristocrats in Highland Yemen, and kabbalist circles of Yemenite Jews, Humayni poetry distinguishes itself with lyricism, musicality, and eroticism. It also plays a variety of code-switching linguistic games. The book addresses the connections between the Humayni poetry of Yemen and the sacred poetry of Jews from Yemen, a hitherto-neglected chapter in the history of Arabic and Jewish literatures. The book culminates with a discussion of ways in which poets and critics in modern-day Yemen and in Israel transformed this poetry.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [327]-339) and index. :
9789047442196 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Prophets, gods and kings in Sirat Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan : an intertextual reading of an Egyptian popular epic /
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This book is a literary, intertextual study of an Egyptian popular epic. In this innovative study, Helen Blatherwick investigates how various sources, including Islamic qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ ('tales of the prophets'), Pharaonic, Graeco-Roman and Coptic Egyptian myths and narratives, and recensions of the Alexander Romance function as intertexts within Sīrat Sayf . Blatherwick argues that these intertexts are deployed as narrative devices which are readily recognisable to the story's audience, and that they are significant carriers of meaning and theme. Crucially, these intertexts also interact within Sīrat Sayf to bring a conceptual continuity to its discussion of kingship and society that stretches from this late-medieval epic back to ancient Egyptian narratives.
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Revised and expanded version of the author's thesis (doctoral)--SOAS, University of London, 2002. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004314801 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Anthologist's Art : Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī and His Yatīmat al-dahr.
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Why did premodern authors in the Arabic-Islamic culture compile literary anthologies, and why were these works remarkably popular? How can an anthology that consists of reproduced material be original and creative, and serve various literary and political ends? How did anthologists select their material, then record and arrange it? This book examines the life and works of Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī (350-429/961-1039), an eminent anthologist from Nīshāpūr, paying special attention to his magnum opus, Yatīmat al-dahr ( The Unique Pearl ), and its sequel, Tatimmat al-Yatīma ( The Completion of the Yatīma ). This book is a direct window on to an anthologist's workshop in the second half of the fourth/tenth century. It examines the methodological consciousness expressed in Thaʿālibī's selection and arrangement, and his sophisticated system of internal references and cross-references to other works; how he selected from his contemporaries' oeuvres; how he sought, recorded, memorized, misplaced, and sometimes lost or forgot his selections; how he scrutinized the authenticity of material, accepting, questioning, or rejecting its attribution; and the errors and inconsistencies that resulted from this process.
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Description based upon print version of record. :
1 online resource (291 pages) :
References to the Earlier Version of the Yatīma References to Other Works by Thaʿālibī ; Later Additions to the Yatīma ; Authenticity and Misattribution ; Forgotten, Lost, and Inconsistent Material ; Chapter 4. The Sources of Thaʿālibī in Yatīmat al-Dahr and Tatimmat al-Yatīma; Written Sources ; Dīwāns; Books; Other Written Media ; Oral and Aural Sources ; Main Guarantors in the Yatīma ; Main Guarantors in the Tatimma ; Conclusion ; Chapter 5. Material within the Entry; Categorization and Arrangement of Material within Entries ; The Biographical Summary ; Dates; Deaths of Poets. :
9789004317352 :
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.
How do you say "epigram" in Arabic? : literary history at the limits of comparison /
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The qaṣīdah and the qiṭʿah are well known to scholars of classical Arabic literature, but the maqṭūʿ , a form of poetry that emerged in the thirteenth century and soon became ubiquitous, is as obscure today as it was once popular. These poems circulated across the Arabo-Islamic world for some six centuries in speech, letters, inscriptions, and, above all, anthologies. Drawing on more than a hundred unpublished and published works, How Do You Say "Epigram" in Arabic? is the first study of this highly popular and adaptable genre of Arabic poetry. By addressing this lacuna, the book models an alternative comparative literature, one in which the history of Arabic poetry has as much to tell us about epigrams as does Greek.
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1 online resource (337 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004350533 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.