Edward William Lane's “Description of Egypt”

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Thompson

Few Western students of the Arab world are as well known as the 19th-century British scholar Edward William Lane (1801–76). During his long career, Lane produced a number of highly influential works: An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), a translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1839–41), Selections from the Ḳur-án (1843), and the Arabic–English Lexicon (1863–93). The Arabic–English Lexicon remains a pre-eminent work of its kind, and Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is still a basic text for both Arab and Western students. Through his published work, Lane contributed substantially to the prevailing Western picture of the Arab world.

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 590-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cengiz Tomar

AbstractIbn Khaldun is one of most discussed social philosophers in the modern Arab World. The most important reasons for this are that he lived in a time of crisis that resembles the one that Muslims find themselves in at the present time, that his thoughts have found approval from Western scientists, and that they possess modern characteristics. It is for these reasons that the thought of Ibn Khaldun, from the 19th century onwards, have given rise to a wide variety of interpretations, including pan-Islamism, nationalism, socialism and other ideologies that have found interest in the Arab world. In this article, after examining the heritage of thought bequeathed by Ibn Khaldun to Arab culture, starting from the time in which he lived, we will try to evaluate interpretations of the Muqaddimah in the modern Arab world.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Holt

In the mid-19th century, the Arabic novel emerged as a genre in Ottoman Syria and khedival Egypt. While this emergence has often been narrated as a story of the rise of nation-states and the diffusion of the European novel, the genre’s history and ongoing topography cannot be recovered without indexing the importance of Arabic storytelling and Islamic empire, ethics, and aesthetics to its roots. As the Arabic periodicals of Beirut and the Nile Valley, and soon Tunis and Baghdad, serialized and debated the rise of the novel form from the 19th century onward, historical, romantic, and translated novels found an avid readership throughout the Arab world and its diaspora. Metaphors of the garden confronted the maritime span of European empire in the 19th-century rise of the novel form in Arabic, and the novel’s path would continue to oscillate between the local and the global. British, French, Spanish, and Italian empire and direct colonial rule left a lasting imprint on the landscape of the region, and so too the investment of Cold War powers in its pipelines, oil wells, and cultural battlefields. Whether embracing socialist realism or avant-garde experimentation, the Arabic novel serves as an ongoing register of the stories that can be told in cities, villages, and nations throughout the region—from the committed novels interrogating the years of anticolonial national struggles and Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the ongoing history of war, surveillance, exile, occupation, and resource extraction that dictates the subsequent terrain of narration. The Arabic novel bears, too, an indelible mark left by translators of Arabic tales—from 1001 Nights to Girls of Riyadh—on the stories the region’s novelists tell.


2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 317-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
FILIPPO OSELLA ◽  
CAROLINE OSELLA

AbstractThis paper critiques ethnographic tendencies to idealise and celebratesufi‘traditionalism’ as authentically South Asian. We perceive strong academic trends of frank distaste for reformism, which is then inaccurately—and dangerously buttressing Hindutva rhetoric—branded as going against the grain of South Asian society. This often goes along with (inaccurate) branding of all reformism as ‘foreign inspired’ orwah'habi. Kerala'sMujahids(Kerala Naduvathul Mujahideen [KNM]) are clearly part of universalistic trends and shared Islamic impulses towards purification. We acknowledge the importance to KNM of longstanding links to the Arab world, contemporary links to the Gulf, wider currents of Islamic reform (both global and Indian), while also showing how reformism has been producing itself locally since the mid-19th century. Reformist enthusiasm is part of Kerala-wide patterns discernable across all religious communities: 1920s and 1930s agitations for a break from the 19th century past; 1950s post-independence social activism; post 1980s religious revivalism. Kerala's Muslims (like Kerala Hindus and Christians) associate religious reformism with: a self-consciously ‘modern’ outlook; the promotion of education; rallying of support from the middle classes. There is a concomitant contemporary association of orthoprax traditionalism with ‘backward’, superstitious and un-modern practices, troped as being located in rural and low-status locations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (38) ◽  
pp. 43-57
Author(s):  
Mohammed Naser Hassoon

Since Najib al-Haddad and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s first Arabic versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet at the end of the 19th century, the reception of Shakespeare in the Arab world has gone through a process of adaptation, Arabization, and translation proper. We consider the process of Arabization / domestication of Shakespeare’s plays since Najib al-Haddad’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s adaptation of Hamlet, to the achievements of Khalīl Mutran and Muhammad Hamdi. We underline, as particular examples of Shakespeare’s appropriation, the literary response of Ali Ahmed Bakathir, Muhammad al-Maghut and Mamduh Udwan, with a particular stress on Khazal al-Majidi and his adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. All these writers reposition Shakespeare’s plays in an entirely different cultural space.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioannis Petropoulos

Although the extraordinary progress in medicine since the 19th century has made Hippocrates and Galen irrelevant, Greek and Greek-derived terms continue to be used in the medical sciences today. The marked ability of the Greek language to form compounds facilitated the expansion of its medical lexicon. Greek medicine evolved far longer than its modern counterpart; its enduring cachet has lent it an atemporality. This article traces the main stages in the history of the nearly continuous reception of Greek medical nomenclature across more than two millennia. The process is shown to have been inseparable from the transmission and editing of Greek medical texts and their translation into Latin, Arabic, and eventually into vernacular languages. The article also sheds incidental light on the history of translation and transliteration in Europe and the Arab world.


Arabica ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsten-Michael Walbiner

AbstractA thematic analysis of the manuscripts which were read, copied and written by the monks, the paper raises the issue of education and knowledge amongst the members of the Greek Catholic congregation of the Basilians of al-Šuwayr (Mount Lebanon) during the 18th century, a time in which the order constituted an intellectual centre in Syria, although its influence remained mainly restricted to the own communiy. Despite all efforts the level of knowledge remained—compared with European standards—low. But the monks nevertheless developed a basic attitude, which was important for the introduction of modernity to the Arab world in the 19th century. They had broad interests beyond the narrow limits of their own religion and did not assume from the start a disapproving attitude towards the knowledge and inventions of the West. These were decisive preconditions for a process of learning that had become imperative if the Orient wanted to close the quickly widening scientific gap between East and West.


1970 ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Lebanese American University

The 19th Century in the Arab World saw the rise of pioneering figures who. strove to revive Classical Arabic literature. They produced important linguistic works which prepared the way for further achievements. They were succeeded, in the late 19th and in the early twentieth century, by a group of committed authors who laid the foundation of modern journalism, essay·writing, drama, fiction and modern poetry. They produced a neo·c1assical literature and, in spite of variety in the topics they treated, their works were characterized by deep interest in social reform.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 635-640
Author(s):  
Memduh Erdogan

A unique contribution of the book is its depiction of economic thought through the lenses of many personalities representing varied sections of the society. So, by gathering these personalities of statesmen to literati, Islahi tries to present an encompassing spectrum of the economic thought produced in the 19th century with an exclusive look to the Arab world. Moreover, Islahi puts an effort to contextualize the views of these personalities with references to the political and economic conditions surrounding them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
Takashi Takekoshi

In this paper, we analyse features of the grammatical descriptions in Manchu grammar books from the Qing Dynasty. Manchu grammar books exemplify how Chinese scholars gave Chinese names to grammatical concepts in Manchu such as case, conjugation, and derivation which exist in agglutinating languages but not in isolating languages. A thorough examination reveals that Chinese scholarly understanding of Manchu grammar at the time had attained a high degree of sophistication. We conclude that the reason they did not apply modern grammatical concepts until the end of the 19th century was not a lack of ability but because the object of their grammatical descriptions was Chinese, a typical isolating language.


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