From Solitude to Stealth: Taha Hussein and Sonallah Ibrahim

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahia Abdel Nasser
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Cultural Status

This chapter examines the foundational three-volume autobiography in Arabic literature by Egyptian reformer Taha Hussein and an autobiographical novel by Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim. The two works rework the form through important historical, cultural, and literary junctures. The chapter explores the ways in which Hussein’s The Days and Ibrahim’s Stealth blur the conventional borders between fiction and autobiography. One lays down the conventions of the autobiography of childhood and the other dramatically revises the genre. By focusing on a canonical autobiography and a seemingly conventional autobiographical novel, the chapter reads the reworking of the form from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries in parallel with national developments and through the cultural status of the writers.

The Paden Collection of Arabic Materials from Kano

1980 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 369-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.N. Saad
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Arabic Poetry ◽  
The Third ◽  
Northwestern University ◽  
Printed Materials

The following is a brief description of a collection of Arabic materials deposited by John Paden at the Herskovits Africana Library, Northwestern University. The collection includes 424 numbered volumes of which about half enclose manuscript materials while the other half enclose published books and pamphlets, most of them privately printed in Kano, Zaria, or Cairo. The collection altogether (and especially so among the pamphlets) includes a substantial proportion of works of West African authorship. However, the classical Muslim/Arabic literature, and especially the basic jurisprudential treatises and the better known diwans of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, are well represented in the collection.This summary is made up of three parts, beginning with a few words on the classical Muslim/Arabic works in the collection. The second part is concerned with the unusual manuscript materials and includes a listing and description of these materials. Finally, the third part will be concerned with individual West African authors whose works are well represented in the collection. In most cases, these authors are represented by privately printed materials or by manuscripts of which copies generally tend to be found elsewhere.In the references to specific manuscripts below, no attempt will be made to describe the calligraphy, the size of pages, etc. The purpose is to call attention to the availability of the sources under consideration, especially since they are scheduled to be microfilmed by the Cooperative Africana Microform Project soon.Though mostly represented by manuscript copies, the diwans of Arabic poetry present little interest since they tend to be recent copies of works long ago published in numerous printings and editions elsewhere.

scholarly journals A-11 Study of the Prophet’s Ḥadīth in the origins of the art of Arabic literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-157
Author(s):  
Abdul Majid Nadeem
Keyword(s):  
Great Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Arab Literature

Arab sciences are blessed with all the blessings of the Qur’an and Ḥadīth in their inception and development, and ancient Qur’anic and modern studies are full of linguistic and literary studies. From this standpoint, there is a correlation between Islamic studies and linguistic studies. So that Arabic linguistic studies got the most from Qur’anic studies and then from the Ḥadīths of the Prophet, ﷺ. There is no doubt in this matter that the prophetic Ḥadīth has a great influence on Arab literature. To study this interaction between Arabic literature and the Ḥadīth of the Prophet ﷺ, the researcher makes use of four books in Arabic literature that Ibn Khaldun mentioned the origins of the art of literature in his famous saying. These are: Adab al-Kitab by Ibn Qutaybah, Kitab al-Kamil al-Mubarrad, Kitab al-Bayan wal-Tabyeen by al-Jahiz, and Kitab al-Nawadir by Abu Ali al-Qali al-Baghdadi. The researcher believes that the authors of these four books paid great attention to the Ḥadīth of the Prophet, which make this aspect to be studied separately. Their interest is evident in the fields of morphology, grammar and rhetoric and Arabic history and literature. But they benefited a lot from the Ḥadīth of the Holy Prophet ﷺ as well. They brought and reported the Ḥadīth for various reasons in a variety of styles; Sometimes they reported the Ḥadīth for it’s study, while at another they brought it as a linguistic citation to the other materials in terms of language and meaning and morphological, syntactical and rhetorical clarification. Hence, this study includes methodological points and features of these four books in reporting Ḥadīths.  

scholarly journals America in an Arab Mirror

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-109
Author(s):  
Juliane Hammer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Us ◽  
Travel Accounts

How do Arab travelers view the US? Much has been written about how westerntravelers and scholars have seen and described the Orient, thereby not onlycreating an image but also transforming the reality of it. Looking at this anthologyone is reminded of Said's book Orienta/ism and inspired to ask whether asimilar process takes place in reverse. Not in terms of change but certainly increating an image of the unfamiliar as the other simultaneously admired andrejected.Kamal Abdel-Malek has collected and edited texts of twenty-seven Arab visitorsto the United States. Some came as students, others as accomplished scholars orcurious visitors. Each text is an excerpt of a longer text, usually a book, and allbooks were originally published in Arabic and have not been translated intoEnglish before. Also, as Abdel-Malek points out in his preface, the collectionrepresents most of the travel literature he was able to locate in Arabic and iscompleted by a list of all Arabic sources. Thus, this collection allows the readeraccess to a genre of Arabic literature otherwise not available.The travel accounts are organized in five sections and chronologically by year ofpublication within each section.The ftrst section is titled America in the Eyes of a Nineteenth-Century Amb andcontains one account of an Arab traveler to the US published in I 895. The authorpresents the reader with a comparison of what Arabs and Americans findimportant and how these preferences are diametrically opposed in most cases.In the second section Abdel-Malek has gathered a variety of accounts under thetitle The Making of an Image: America as the Unchanged Other, Ame1ica as theSeductive Female. The most interesting piece of this section is probably that ofSayyid Qutb, who studied in the US between 1948 and 1950 and published hisaccount under the title The America I have seen. Much of what he noted about theUS ln the first half of the 20th century, in my opinion, still holds true today. Qutbconcludes: "All that requires mind power and muscle are where American geniusshines, and all that requires spirit and emotion are where American naivete andprimitiveness become apparent .... All this does not mean that Americans are anation devoid of virtue, or else, what would have enabled them to live? Rather, itmeans that America's virtues are the virtues of production and organization, andnot those of human and social morals." (p. 26f.) ...

scholarly journals Towards a Bilingual Binational Translation Method: The Amputated Tongue Collection of Short Stories as a Sample

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (12) ◽  
pp. 132-145
Author(s):  
Rawiya Burbara
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Method ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Translation Method ◽  
Dual Method ◽  
Culture Heritage ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Right

Translators and writers are divided into two main groups regarding the method of translation that should be adopted in translating texts. One group believes that the translator should be true to the translated text, while the other group believes that the translator has the right to recreate the text into a more beautiful one.  This study deals with this issue from these two points of view and tries to answer the following questions: Why do we translate? What should we translate? How do we translate? The study relies on an innovative translation method developed by the Board of Maktoub Project for Translation that belongs to Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem to answer these questions. A group of about one hundred Arab and Jewish translators translated Arabic literature texts into Hebrew in an internationally new method, which is neither individual nor collective. It is a bilingual binational method. The translators consist of pairs of a Jewish or/and Arab translator, an Arab/or Jewish literary editor, and a linguistic editor, believing that translation is a text and culture, heritage, and traditions of a people or nation. This dual method gave the translated text its right of accuracy after it had been translated by one translator who can make mistakes due to his ignorance of the writer's culture. The study's conclusion confirms that bilingual binational translation is more fruitful and more accurate because it is based on dialogue, bilingual, and binational cultural knowledge.

Signs of Scripture in ‘The City of Brass’

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-118
Author(s):  
Bruce Fudge
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Face ◽  
The City

While Qur'anic elements are a common feature of Arabic literature, these scriptural references can take various forms and perform very different functions. This paper will essay a classification of the Qur'anic elements in a tale from the Thousand and One Nights. On the face of it, ‘The City of Brass’ is very similar to the other tales in the Nights. However, the wonders of the Nights that normally entertain and beguile us are here turned to a homiletic purpose, emphasising the transience of human existence and the futility of worldly gain. The result is what one scholar called the ‘gloomiest of travelogues’. There is a range of Qur'anic references and influences in ‘The City of Brass’, but this article will focus on two elements. First, the story contains many references to the Islamic story of Solomon, but is the moralistic message of ‘The City of Brass’ consonant with the scriptural (and extra-scriptural) version? Are the scriptural allusions and motifs used in a manner consistent with their original contexts or meanings? Second, is there a deeper connection to the Qur'an, one that goes beyond the recognisable topoi and allusions? What is interesting here is that ‘The City of Brass’ uses the same vocabulary of wonder common to the Nights to follow a different moral trajectory. This trajectory, I argue, is derived in part from the Qur'an but more fundamentally from a model of narrative related to scripture and revelation.

scholarly journals Le débat sur la diglossie en France: aspects scientifiques et politiques

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN MASSOT ◽  
PAUL ROWLETT
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Moral Dimension ◽  
Scientific Objectivity ◽  
Grammatical Variation ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
Internal Coherence ◽  
Linguistic Behaviour ◽  
Random Nature

ABSTRACTThis article outlines the diglossic approach to intra-speaker grammatical variation (Ferguson 1959), wherein speaker-hearers acquire two grammars which are socio-stylistically distinct – one H(igh), the other L(ow) – but linguistically related (to the extent that users regard them as the same language), and then engage one or other of them (but do not mix them) in their active productions. It then sets out how a case could be made for such a model to capture variation in contemporary France, in place of the variationist model which envisages a single, flexible grammar, e.g., the bipolarity, strength and non-random nature of the sociolinguistic H–L distinction, the differing pattern of acquisition of H and L forms, the tendency for L forms to encroach on H terrain (rather than vice versa), and the internal coherence of each of the H and L varieties. Finally, the article sketches the politico-moral dimension to the debate, extending beyond scientific objectivity, and relating to the treatment of non-standard linguistic behaviour in context of the socio-cultural status of the standard.

scholarly journals NARRATION TECHNIQUES IN THE STORY OF HAYY BIN YAQZAN BY IBN TUFAIL

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Mohamed Saeb KHUDAIR ◽  
◽  
Sura Ahmed SALIH ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Arab Literature

Believing in our Arab heritage that our Arab heritage needs a second reading that shows its creativity and originality, we chose the story of Hayy Bin Yaqzan, which is considered one of the important literary texts in Andalusia, and many scholars considered it a message that others promised to be a story, and for the purpose of proving that it is a message or a story, we chose to apply narration techniques to it And the other thing is to prove that the stories of ancient Arab literature contain all the elements of narration that Western literature has talked about, meaning that our literature and our writers know these techniques, even if they are without theorizing them, as the West did. The research is divided into several axes: Who is Ibn Tufail? - What is the neighborhood of Bin Yaqzan? What is the purpose of the story and the scholars' opinions about it? - The elements of narration in the story of Hayy bin Yaqzan, which we gave a brief discussion of the meaning of narration and its elements in general and its elements in the story of Hayy bin Yaqzan in particular, and we have dealt with the elements of narration from an event, character, time and place in it, dialogue, style, description and conflict. We support what Muhammad Rajab Bayoumi said in his book (Andalusian Literature: Between Influence and Influence, p.137) "The story of Hayy Bin Yaqzan did not take its full share of analysis and clarification." In conclusion, we hope that we have succeeded in presenting a comprehensive summary of our topic, and that it be in the service of our Arabic literature and scholars.

Beydoun, Abbas (Bayḏūn, ʿAbbās) (1945--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Tramontini
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Arab World ◽  
School Teacher ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Lebanese Civil War ◽  
Politically Active

Abbas Beydoun is one of Lebanon’s most famous poets and writers, and one of the most outstanding and important intellectuals in the Arab world. He was born in Tyre, Lebanon, in 1945. He attended secondary school there, before moving to Beirut to study Arabic Literature at the Arab University. Politically active since 1968, he worked for extremist-leftist papers in Beirut and was arrested and put in prison several times for his political activities. During the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, he started working as a school teacher in Tyre and Sidon, and then had to flee the country because of his Communist connections. He migrated to France, where in the 1970s he studied at the Sorbonne and received his diploma (DEA). After his return to Beirut he joined the Lebanese daily As-Safir, then moved on to the other dailies Al-Hayat and Al-Nahar before returning to As-Safir in the year 1997 for good, as editor in chief for the cultural section, a position he still holds. Beydoun is one of Lebanon’s most famous poets and intellectuals, with impact far beyond Lebanon. Apart from journalistic essays, literary criticism, and poetry, have which made him a household name, he has made a late-in-life debut as a novelist.

Notes on the Traffic between Theory and Arabic Literature

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 731-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed-Salah Omri
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The One

In most Western universities, Arabic literature is rarely studied by itself or for itself. It is subject to disciplinary traffic and intersections, on the one hand, and to what might be called a political predicament, on the other. With this in mind, I outline below some thoughts underpinned by two examples of the state of the art in Arabic literary studies, published four decades apart.

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