XL223: Introduction to Middle Eastern Literatures

Music of a Distant Drum marks a literary milestone. It collects 129 poems from the four leading literary traditions of the Middle East, all masterfully translated into English by Bernard Lewis, many for the first time. These poems come from diverse languages and traditions--Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew--and span more than a thousand years.

The essays in "Ruse and Wit" examine in detail a wide range of texts (from nonsensical prose, to ribald poetry, titillating anecdotes, edifying plays, and journalistic satire) that span the best part of a millennium of humorous and satirical writing in the Islamic world, from classical Arabic to medieval and modern Persian, and Ottoman Turkish (and by extension Modern Greek).

An introduction to the history of this turbulent region from the beginnings of Islam to the present day, this widely acclaimed text by Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. is distinguished by its clear style, broad scope, and balanced treatment. This book explores the evolution of Islamic institutions and culture, the influence of the West, the modernization efforts of Middle Eastern governments, the struggle of various peoples for political independence, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the reassertion of Islamic values and power, the issues surrounding the Palestinian Question, and the post-9/11 Middle East.

Incorporating the latest scholarly research, the third edition of A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000-323 BC presents a comprehensive overview of the multicultural civilizations of the ancient Near East.

This indispensible guide to modern Arabic literature in English translation features not only a comprehensive bibliography but also chapters on fiction, drama, poetry, and autobiography, as well as a special chapter on Iraq's Arabic literature. By focusing on Najib Mahfuz, one of Arabic Literature's luminaries, and on poetry--a major, if not the major genre of the region-- Altoma assesses the progress made towards a wider reception of Arabic writing throughout the western world.

Far from offering another study that bemoans Arab women's repression and veiling, Anxiety of Erasure looks at Arab women writers living in the diaspora who have translated their experiences into a productive and creative force. In this book, Al-Samman articulates the therapeutic effects of revisiting forgotten histories and of activating two cultural tropes: that of the maw'udah (buried female infant) and that of Shahrazad in the process of revolutionary change.

The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar. This book offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the power of this collection of tales that penetrates so many cultures and appeals to such a variety of predilections and tastes.

Short story writing in Egypt was still in its infancy when Denys Johnson-Davies, described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time," arrived in Cairo as a young man in the 1940s. Nevertheless, he was immediately impressed by such writing talents of the time as Mahmoud Teymour, Yahya Hakki, Yusuf Gohar, and the future Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and he set about translating their works for local English-language periodicals of the time.He continued to translate over the decades, and sixty years later he brings together this remarkable overview of the work of several generations of Egypt's leading short story writers.

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

The first steps in Hebrew secular poetry took place around the turn of the ninth century, under the impact of contemporary Arabic poetry. This impact was so great that some researchers, incorrectly, define the Hebrew poetry as a school which is distinct from the Arabic school only by virtue of its Hebrew language. However, the right way to the essence of medieval Hebrew poetry is not only by revealing and describing its ties with Arabic poetry but also by determining the specific characteristics by which it stubbornly distinguished itself from its Arabic contemporaries.

Judah Halevi (ca. 1075-1141) is the best known and most beloved of medieval Hebrew poets, partly because of his passionate poems of longing for the Land of Israel and partly because of the legend of his death as a martyr while reciting his Ode to Zion at the gates of Jerusalem. He was also one of the premier theologians of medieval Judaism, having written a treatise on the meaning of Judaism that is still studied and venerated by traditional Jews.

Comedy is both relative, linked to a time and culture, and universal, found pervasively across time and culture. The Hebrew Bible contains comedy of this relative, yet universal nature. Melissa A. Jackson engages the Hebrew Bible via a comic reading and brings that reading into conversationwith feminist-critical interpretation, in resistance to any lingering stereotype that comedy is fundamentally non-serious or that feminist critique is fundamentally unsmiling.

Many contemporary Israelis suffer from a strange condition. Despite the obvious successes of the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel, tension persists, with a collective sense that something is wrong and should be better. Through the lens of five major works in Hebrew by writers Abraham Mapu (1853), Theodor Herzl (1902), Yosef Luidor (1912), Moshe Shamir (1948), and Amos Oz (1963), Schwartz unearths the core of this paradox as it evolves over one hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s.

Social and ethnic identity are nowhere more enmeshed with language than in Israel. Words and Stones explores the politics of identity in Israel through an analysis of the social life of language.

A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry is designed to introduce students of Pesian to the richness of the classical poetic legacy. The Persian metrical system and poetic forms are explained, and selections are given from the works of all major poets, from Rudaki in the tenth century to Bahar in the twentieth, with annotations of difficult grammatical constructions and unfamiliar allusions.

Innovative methodologies reorient critical readings of classical Middle Eastern literature.

What does it mean to be human? Humanism has mostly considered this question from a Western perspective. Through a detailed examination of a vast literary tradition, Hamid Dabashi asks that question anew, from a non-European point of view. This groundbreaking study of Persian humanism presents the unfolding of a tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.

This book examines representations of Istanbul in the text of contemporary Turkish and non-Turkish writers, highlighting how multiple and even contradictory depictions in the texts engage in cross-genre mergings that narrate plural accounts of Istanbul's imperial past and its present role as Turkey's largest industrial city.

The articles contained in this volume collectively provide a critical overview of Turkish literature from its earliest phases in the sixth century well into the Republican period, including pieces detailing the literature of the Ottoman as well as those dealing with Europeanization.

This book explores the changing understandings of Islam by focusing on the Islamist movement's production of literary fiction since the early 1980s. By focusing on Islamic literary narratives of the period, this study introduces issues of change, space, history and analytical relation that are excluded by the essentialist reading of Islamism.

This book is a translation of one of the most important Turkish scholarly works of the twentieth century. It was the masterpiece of M.F. Koprulu, one of Turkey's leading, and most prolific, intellectuals and scholars. Using a wide variety of Arabic, and especially Turkish and Persian sources, this book sheds light on the early development of Turkish literature and attempts to show the continuity in this development between the Turks and that of Anatolia.