The image of a muslim arab woman in medieval rus’ literature

Rus’ medieval authors drew information about the history and culture of the Arabs mainly from Byzantine sources, translated into Old-Church-Slavonic. The image was supplemented by observations made by residents of medieval Rus’ in the course of direct contacts with the Arabs (e.g. during their travels to the Holy Land) or ideas about other Islamic peoples, whose customs could be known to old Rus’ authors from personal experience (e.g. Turks or Mongols/Tatars). The aim of this paper is to analyze the image of Arab women emerging from old Rus’ works. We will be interested in people from Muhammad’s closest surroundings (e.g. his first wife Khadija or Fatima, the daughter of the prophet), as well as selected figures of Muslim Arab women from later centuries. The question will also be raised as to how the authors of the examined texts perceive and evaluate the position of women in Arab Medieval societies.

A ‘Rich Fabric of Some Sort, Which No One Can Fully Comprehend [or] Fully Own’

This chapter considers what ‘Levantine remains’ yield for post-millennial Palestine, particularly in the context of a seemingly moribund ‘two-state solution.’ It takes up the regional optic of a multi-generational extended-family narrative in Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), his sister Jean Said Makdisi’s Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir (2005), and his mother-in-law Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman (2009). The chapter contends that the Said-Makdisi-Cortas family collectively summon, through memoirs and paratexts, a ‘lost’ or otherwise ‘forgotten’ Levantine world. In archiving ways in which historically-produced ‘facts on the ground’ have etiolated Levantine identities, these authors resuscitate embedded, expansive models of being Palestinian.

Figurative Language in Layla Al-Atrash’s Nesa’a Ala Al-Mafareq: A Stylistic Analysis

This study aims to analyze Layla Al-Atrash’s Nesa’a Ala Al-Mafareq stylistically to address the issue of an identity crisis and self-alienation by shedding light on the Arabic narrative discourse that is used by Al-Atrash in the selected novel. The stylistic analysis focuses on casting lights on how the five protagonists of the selected novel employed their feminist narrative discourse to represent their suffering and how the old cultural and social values affect their lives. To achieve the aim of the study, the researcher relies on Geffrey Leech's (2006) theory of figurative language to analyze the novel. Accordingly, this study is considered as the first study focusing on analyzing the language used by Al-Atrash linguistically in light of the stylistic analysis of figurative speech such as a simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification, and metonymy. The researcher used both qualitative and quantitative approaches with (SPSS) program for statistics. The results showed that Al Atrash succeeded in utilizing her feminist narrative discourse linguistically to introduce the catastrophic situation the woman has in the masculine society. Taking into consideration metonyms with the highest rates (189) indicating the problems that the Arab woman encounters without finding a solution. Although hyperbole (126= 23%) refers to the writer's trial to support the readers with the perfect image of a woman’s life and why she surrenders to reality and accepts the outdated conventions and traditions.

Cultural Dilemma of The Arab Woman Expressed through Nature Imagery: An Ecocritical Study of Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt

The Arab community is essentially a patriarchal one with a history of women being subjected to various kinds of afflictions and oppression under cultural, religious and societal laws. Though there is a collective consciousness now regarding the position of the Arab woman in the Arab world, with significant progress being made to emancipate and empower them, much needs to be done still. Set in the mid-20th century Jordan, Arab Anglophone author Fadia Faqir’sPillars of Salt portrays the tragic plight of Arab women at the hands of the traditional patriarchal Arab communities of Jordan. Nature plays a significant role in Faqir’s narrative wherein much of the miseries faced by the women characters are conveyed through rich nature imageries and analogies. This renders the novel the identity of an eco-fictional work and provides scope for analysis based on the ecological approaches as perceived in Emerson’s Nature to the more recent theory of Ecocriticism formulated by William Rueckert. This paper explores an ecocritical approach towards the position of women in the Arab society as expressed through profound eco-comparisons, imageries and analogies in Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt.

7. The ambivalence of the veil

‘The ambivalence of the veil’ explores the relationship between Western and Muslim worlds. For many Westerners, nothing symbolizes the differences more than ‘the veil’, a shorthand for the many ways in which Muslim women choose to dress, sometimes covering their heads or faces. Today, in Islamic societies, and among many Muslim women in non-Islamic societies, the veil (hijab) has come to symbolize a cultural and religious identity. A pertinent question to ask is how can a 1930s colonial image of an ‘Arab woman’ typifies European stereotypical representations of, and assumptions about, Muslim women even today. This can be contrasted with how men in masks—Batman or the Zapatistas in balaclavas—are considered to exhibit positive forms of masculinity.