The essays, which discuss authors in a variety of literary genres and across the spectrum of the region concerned-from Iraq in the East to Tunisia in the West-provide clear evidence of the gradually changing roles of the indigenous and the imported which are an intrinsic feature of the movement known in Arabic as al-bahada (cultural revival) and the way in which Arab litterateurs chose to respond to the inspiration that such changes inevitably engendered. --

“With extraordinary linguistic range, Calderwood brings us the voices of Arabs and Muslims who have turned to the distant past of Spain to imagine their future.” —Hussein Fancy, Yale University How the memory of Muslim Iberia shapes art and politics from New York and Cordoba to Cairo and the West Bank. During the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace. That reputation is not entirely deserved, yet, as On Earth or in Poems shows, it has had an enduring hold on the imagination, especially for Arab and Muslim artists and thinkers in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. From the vast and complex story behind the name al-Andalus, Syrians and North Africans draw their own connections to history’s ruling dynasties. Palestinians can imagine themselves as “Moriscos,” descended from Spanish Muslims forced to hide their identities. A Palestinian flamenco musician in Chicago, no less than a Saudi women’s rights activist, can take inspiration from al-Andalus. These diverse relationships to the same past may be imagined, but the present-day communities and future visions those relationships foster are real. Where do these notions of al-Andalus come from? How do they translate into aspiration and action? Eric Calderwood traces the role of al-Andalus in music and in debates about Arab and Berber identities, Arab and Muslim feminisms, the politics of Palestine and Israel, and immigration and multiculturalism in Europe. The Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish once asked, “Was al-Andalus / Here or there? On earth ... or in poems?” The artists and activists showcased in this book answer: it was there, it is here, and it will be.

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. This book explores the writing and influence of her landmark piece al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur the first Arabic-language global biographical dictionary of women.

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was as a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 women's lives, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Pearls scattered in times and places: Classes of ladies of cloistered spaces, 1893-6) featuring Boudicca, Catherine the Great, Zaynab (the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad), Victoria Woodhull, the Turkish poet Sirri Hanim and many others built on the Arabic-Islamic biographical tradition to produce a work for women in the modern era, grafting European, Turkish, Arab, and Indian life narratives, amongst others onto Arabic literary patternsIn Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces Marilyn Booth argues that Fawwazs work was less exemplary biography than feminist history, in its exploration of achievement but also of patriarchal trauma in the lives of women across times and places. She traces Fawwazs creative use of her sources, her presentation of biographical narratives in the context of the political essays she wrote in the Arabic press, her publicised dialogue with the President of the Board of Lady Managers of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition where she attempted to send the volume and how her inscription of a feminine ancient history diverged from that of men writing history in 1890s Egypt.

The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada. A detailed introduction provides an overview of the scholarly terrain, and highlights different themes and concerns that emerge in the volume. The Modernist World is essential reading for those new to the subject as well as more advanced scholars in the area – offering clear introductions alongside new and refreshing insights.

Egyptians are known among the Arabs as awlād al-nukta, Sons of the Jokes, for their ability to laugh in face of adversity. This creative weapon has been directed against socio-political targets both in times of oppression and popular upheaval, such as the 2011 Tahrir Revolution. This book looks at the literary expression of Egyptian humour in the novels of Muḥammad Mustajāb, Khayrī Shalabī, and Ḥamdī Abū Julayyil, three writers who revive the comic tradition to innovate the language of contemporary fiction. Their modern tricksters, wise fools, and antiheroes play with the stereotypical traits attached to the ordinary Egyptians, while laughing at the universal contradictions of life. This ability to combine local and global culture, literary traditions and popular references, makes them a stimulating read in an intercultural perspective. Combining humour studies and literary criticism, this book examines language play and narrative creativity to understand which strategies craft Egyptian literary humour. In doing so, it sheds light on the contribution of humour to literary innovations of Egyptian fiction since the late Seventies, while adding new writers to those who are considered the masters of humour in the Arab novel.

Winner, 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association The novel, the literary adage has it, reflects a world abandoned by God. Yet the possibilities of novelistic form and literary exegesis exceed the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary criticism. Showing how the Qurʾan itself invites and enacts critical reading, Hoda El Shakry’s Qurʾanic model of narratology enriches our understanding of literary sensibilities and practices in the Maghreb across Arabophone and Francophone traditions. The Literary Qurʾan mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside embodied and hermeneutical forms of Qurʾanic pedagogy, to theorize modern Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, it attends to literature as a site where the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. Engaging with the Arab-Islamic tradition of adab—a concept demarcating the genre of belles lettres, as well as social and moral comportment—El Shakry demonstrates how the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self. Foregrounding form and praxis alike, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. The book places twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers (Abdelwahab Meddeb, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi) into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones (Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Muḥammad Barrāda). Theorizing the Qurʾan as a literary object, process, and model, this interdisciplinary study blends literary and theological methodologies, conceptual vocabularies, and reading practices.

The life, birth, and early years of 'the Fariyaq'—the alter ego of the Arab intellectual Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of “the Fariyaq,” alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women’s rights, sexual relationships between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures, all the while celebrating the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language. Volumes One and Two follow the hapless Fariyaq through his youth and early education, his misadventures among the monks of Mount Lebanon, his flight to the Egypt of Muhammad 'Ali, and his subsequent employment with the first Arabic daily newspaper—during which time he suffers a number of diseases that parallel his progress in the sciences of Arabic grammar, and engages in amusing digressions on the table manners of the Druze, young love, snow, and the scandals of the early papacy. This first book also sees the list—of locations in Hell, types of medieval glue, instruments of torture, stars and pre-Islamic idols—come into its own as a signature device of the work. Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg over Leg a work that is unique and unclassifiable. It was initially widely condemned for its attacks on authority, its religious skepticism, and its “obscenity,” and later editions were often abridged. This is the first complete English translation of this groundbreaking work.

Egypt just before political eruption! Turns of the century in Africa's northeastern corner have been critical moments, ushering in overt popular activism in the hope of radical political redirection--as this volume's focus on Egypt's 19th-century fin-de-siecle demonstrates. The end of the 19th century in Egypt witnessed crisscrossing and conflicting political currents as well as fluctuating economic, geopolitical, social conditions, demographic conditions and cultural processes. Like Egypt's 20th-century fin-de-siecle, much of this ferment was a prelude to the more visible and politically eruptive events of the next decades, when Egypt's popular resistance burst onto the international scene. But its subterranean cast was no less dynamic for that.