You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Transcending Traditions. Thurayya Al-Baqsami. A Creative Compilation - Poetry, Prose and Paint is an attempt to systemise Thurayya AI-Baqsami's literary creativity as well as examining the significance of her artistic work. Barbara Michalak-Pikulska is the Head of the Arabic Department of the Institute of Oriental Philology of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She obtained her Ph.D. in Arabic Literature from the Jagiellonian University in 1994 and now she is professor of modern Arabic Literature.
This book explores how there is latitude for people to make their own choices and how the chances to assert independence change over time in a Muslim, Arab, tribal culture. The book first gives a brief overview of day-to-day life in the Dhofar region of southern Oman, then focuses on how the traits of self-control and self-respect are linked in the everyday actions of several groups of tribes who speak Gibali (Jibbali, also known as Shari/Śḥeret), a non-written, Modern South Arabian language. Although no work can express the totality of a culture, this text describes how Gibalis are constantly shifting between preserving autonomy and signaling membership in family, tribal, and national communities. The work reflects observations and conclusions from over ten years of research into the history and culture of the Dhofar region along with longstanding, deep involvement with both men and women in the Gibali community.
The Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles that seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies. Contributions to the Review place special thematic emphasis on scepticism within Jewish thought and its links to other religious traditions and secular worldviews. The Review is interested in the tension at the heart of matters of reason and faith, rationalism and mysticism, theory and practice, narrativity and normativity, doubt and dogma.
Although there is a history of rich, complex, and variegated representations of female illness in Western literature over the last two centuries, the sick female body has traditionally remained outside the Arab literary imagination. Hamdar takes on this historical absence in The Female Suffering Body by exploring how both literary and cultural perspectives on female physical illness and disability in the Arab world have transformed in the modern period. In doing so, she examines a range of both canonical and hitherto marginalized Arab writers, including Mahmoud Taymur, Yusuf al-Sibai, Ghassan Kanafani, Naguib Mahfouz, Ziyad Qassim, Colette Khoury, Hanan al-Shaykh, Alia Mamdouh, Salwa Bakr, Hassan Daoud, and Betool Khedair. Hamdar finds that, over the course of sixty years, female physical illness and disability has moved from the margins of Arabic literature—where it was largely the subject of shame, disgust, or revulsion—to the center, as a new wave of female writers have sought to give voice to the “female suffering body.”
Uncovers the politics of nostalgia and madness inherent in the Arabic novel. The Arabic novel has taken shape in the intercultural networks of exchange between East and West, past and present. Wen-chin Ouyang shows how this has created a politics of nostalgia which can be traced to discourses on aesthetics, ethics and politics relevant to cultural and literary transformations of the Arabic speaking world in the 19th and 20th centuries. She reveals nostalgia and madness as the tropes through which the Arabic novel writes its own story of grappling with and resisting the hegemony of both the state and cultural heritage.
The Qur’an: A Guidebook is an updated English version of the work appeared in Italian (Rome 2021) Leggere e studiare il Corano which deals with the contents of the Qur’an, the style and formal features of the text, the history and fixation of it and an poutline of the reception in Islamic literature. The aim of the work is to give a reader a description of what he/she can find in the Islamic holy text and the state of the critical debates on all the topics dealt with, focusing mainly on the growing scholarly literature which appeared in the last 30 years. As such, the work is unique in combining the aim to give comprehensive information on the topic and, at the same, time, reconstruct the critical debate in a balanced outline also emphasizing confessional approaches and the dynamics in the study of the Qur’an. There is nothing similar in contemporary scholarship and the book is a handbook for students and scholars of Islam but also for readers in religious studies who need to know how the main questions related to the Islamic text have been discussed in recent scholarship.
This book traces the roots of Arabic science fiction through classical and medieval Arabic literature, undertaking close readings of formative texts of Arabic science fiction via a critical framework developed from the work of Western critics of Western science fiction, Arab critics of Arabic science fiction and postcolonial theorists of literature. Ian Campbell investigates the ways in which Arabic science fiction engages with a theoretical concept he terms “double estrangement” wherein these texts provide social or political criticism through estrangement and simultaneously critique their own societies’ inability or refusal to engage in the sort of modernization that would lead the Arab world back to leadership in science and technology.
The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Waïl S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world. The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook...
This book contributes to a growing corpus of writing on the body, bringing new perspectives to this fascinating and topical subject. Feminist, psychoanalytic and queer readings, among others, have demonstrated the extent of the functions and roles fulfilled by the body, as well as the number of critical perspectives it can serve. However, by and large, African representations of the body have been overlooked. This coherent volume brings together essays on the portrayal of the body in African art, film, literature, photography and theatre. The book includes thematically linked contributions which explore issues of power and representation, and reflects current trends in the study of the body and more broadly within the field of African Studies.