A closeted first attempt to present the complexities and elegance of the Islamic faith and the prophet Muhammad on the English stage. Thirsty Arabia was written over a century before the first English translation of the Qur’an was published. Despite this shortfall in primary sources about Islam, this comedy incorporates with unbiased research a wealth of theological and cultural details. Information flowed into Britain from Muslim countries alongside general trade in goods after Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth I in 1570, but trade was halted shortly after this play was written in 1603. The narrative is launched when Muhammad declares he will destroy all mortals in Arabia for their sins in forty days with a drought. Muhammad’s angelic council objects that there might be good people in the region worth saving, so Muhammad allows Harut and Marut to travel across Arabia disguised as humans to attempt to find any do-gooders to save Arabia. The main romantic entanglement across this plot is the unsuccessful courtship of Marquess of the Deserts Epimenides by most of the eligible bachelors, including two imams (Caleb and Tubal), the wealthy magician astrologer Geber, the two disguised angels (Harut and Marut) and Muhammad himself. While most of the characters are distracted with love, the Arabian people are dying of thirst, and fraudsters such as Çavuş work to capitalize on this desperation with tricks such as selling water-licenses. Spirits, magic, time travel and fortune telling are used to gain favor and preferment, while angels and good spirits punish evil-doers. The Aristotelian “Square of Opposition” in a logic game the angels play with Muhammad is only one of the many educational and entertaining devices. The poetic, wooing love songs, and witty refusals alone are sufficient for readers to explore the surprises along this narrative. “An extraordinary, inherently fascinating and entertaining drama that is enhanced with expert notations and commentaries by the editor and translator Anna Faktorovich… A unique and recommended addition to community, college, and university library English Drama & Literature collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.” —Midwest Book Review, Clint Travis (March 2021) Plot and Staging Text Terms, References, Questions, Exercises

Explores the popular epic of Arabic storytelling by focusing on a particular example, The Life Story of 'Antar, purporting to recount the life of the famous pre-Islamic Arab poet and warrior. Considers the poem in the context of Arabic oral tradition and the storytelling of other Islamic peoples, in

Translated and compiled from the works of the most approved native or naturalized authorities ... In an introduction and four parts.

In Islam the fascination for “the word” is as vigorous as in Judaism and in Christianity, but an extra dimension is, that the revealed text, the Koran, is considered to be verbatim the word of the Almighty Himself, thereby providing the Arabic language with just an extra quality. No wonder that throughout Islamic history the study of the word, the Koran, the prophet’s utterances and the interpretation of both, has become the main axis of knowledge and education. As a consequence the intellectuals – and also the poets in Islamic culture - were thoroughly familiar with religious terms and the phraseology of a language which was highly estimated because of the divine origin with which it was associated. No wonder therefore, that allusions to religious texts can be found throughout Arabic literature, both classical and modern. The subject of this volume is the representation of the divine in Arabic poetry, be it the experience of the divine as expressed by poets or the use of imagery coined by religion.

Spanning the fifth century to the sixteenth, and ranging from Afghanistan to Spain, this unique collection provides a profound insight into the sheer vitality and depth of Classical Arabic literature. From the earliest surviving fragments of The Thousand and One Nights to the elegant beauty and profound power of the Qur'an - believed by the Islamic faith to contain the actual words of Allah - it includes translated extracts from all the major works of the period, alongside many less well-known but equally fascinating pieces. Exploring such traditional themes as lovesick yearning and fated doom, and considering subjects as diverse as the etiquette of falling in love with slave-girls and the terrors of the sea, this compelling anthology of poetry and prose brilliantly illuminates a body of writing that has been unjustly neglected by the west for centuries.

Noha Radwan offers the first book-length study of the emergence, context, and development of modern Egyptian colloquial poetry, recently used as a vehicle for communications in the revolutionary youth movement in Egypt on January 25th 2011, and situates it among modernist Arab poetry.

In The Qur'an and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism, Mohammad Salama navigates the labyrinthine semantics that underlie this sacred text and inform contemporary scholarship. The book presents reflections on Quranic exegesis by explaining - and distinguishing between - interpretation and explication. While the book focuses on Quranic and literary scholarship in twentieth-century Egypt from Taha Husayn to Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, it also engages with an immense tradition of scholarship from the classical period to the present, including authors such as Abu 'Ubayda, Ibn 'Abbas, al-Razi, and al-Tabari. Salama argues that, over the centuries, the Arabic language experienced semantic and phonological shifts, creating a lacuna in understanding the Qur'an and bringing contemporary readers under the spell of hermeneutical and parochial interpretations. He demonstrates that while this lacuna explains much of the intellectual poverty of traditionalist approaches to Quranic exegesis, the work of the modern Egyptian school of academics marks a sharp departure from the programmed conservatism of Islamist and Salafi exegetics. Through analyses of the writings of these intellectuals, the author shows that a fresh look at the sources and a revolutionary attempt to approach the Qur'an could render tradition itself an impetus for an alternative aesthetics-contextual, open, and unfolding.