Hasan Shuraydi: The raven and the falcon. Youth versus old age in medieval Arabic literature (Islamic History and Civilization 107)

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-200
Author(s):  
Nicola Carpentieri
Author(s):  
Samuel England

Continues the book’s examination of Arabic poetry as a means for ascent in the court and as a tool for exerting control over the empire. The focus here is the sultan Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn al-Ayyub, often called Saladin. During his transition from vizier to sultan during the twelfth-century Crusades, Saladin oversaw writers and political administrators vying with one another to construct his identity as Islam’s protector. The collapse of the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt and the threat of crusading armies gave the new regime a key opportunity. The Ayyubid system consolidated a previously scattered community of littérateurs. Whereas the Fatimids were seen as incapable eradicating “the Franks” from the Levant and Egypt, now writers challenged each other to poeticize a successful counter-crusade. Modern studies portray the Crusaders as a nagging anxiety of Saladin’s court but, I argue, the presence of a foreign enemy proved extraordinarily useful to him. Writers re-imagined Islamic history as having always included a mysterious threat to pious Muslim people, fully realized in the Franks’ arrival. At the cathartic endpoint of that narrative they placed Saladin and, more subtly, themselves as the chroniclers of Islam’s restoration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 605-607
Author(s):  
Kahl Oliver

Abstract This short article proposes an explanation of the opaque term (variant ), which is recorded three times in medieval Arabic literature but not yet identified.


Books Abroad ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 843
Author(s):  
Walter G. Andrews ◽  
Andras Hamori

Jurnal CMES ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Moh. Wakhid Hidayat, Sangidu, Fadlil Munawwar Manshur, Taufiq Ahmad Dardiri

The novel of Islamic history by Jurjī Zaidān is one of the works of Modern Arabic literature which appeared at the end of the 19th century. Since it was first published, as a serial story in al-Hilal magazine, this novel has been read and has received a great response. Zaidān composed 22 titles of novels from 1891 to 1914. After Zaidān's death in 1914, his novels were still read by the public, reprinted, and even translated in various languages in the world. Zaidān’s Islamic historical novels still exist, both within the scope of modern Arabic literature and in Arabic thought, with many studies to date. Research on this novel is reviewed and analyzed to reveal the diversity of perspectives to be mapped. Found nine perspectives in the study of Islamic historical novels; the perspective of the development of Arabic novel genres, the perspective of authorship and pioneering in Arabic novel genre, the perspective of the popularization of Arab-Islamic history, critical perspectives of Islamic historical facts, intrinsic literary criticism perspective, narrative structure perspective, feminist perspective, perspective modern Arab identity, and Arab nationalism perspective. The mapping of studies become the positioning of further Islamic historical novel studies, and at the same time can be a model of study for the analysis of other historical novels that develop in Arabic literature or other national literature.


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