{"title":"“The Intellect is the Essence of the Human”: The Arabic Poem of the Intellect (Qaṣīdat al-ʿAql) by the Indian Fatimid-Ṭayyibī Dāʿī al-Muṭlaq Sayyidna Taher Saifuddin (1888–1965)","authors":"Tahera Qutbuddin, Aziz Qutbuddin","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341471","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The 177-verse Arabic Poem of the Intellect (Qaṣīdat al-ʿAql) composed by the Indian Fatimid-Ṭayyibī Dāʿī al-Muṭlaq Sayyidna Taher Saifuddin (d. 1385/1965) breaks new ground in substance and form. In form, the poem creatively amalgamates the genres of qaṣīdah (poem), risālah (treatise), and waṣiyyah (testament) to produce an eloquent and innovative hybrid text. In content, it uniquely combines a philosophical exposition on Islamic theology and ethics with a road map to living a Pure Life. After an opening frame that provides a philosophical foundation, the poem’s three large thematic sections draw on the Qurʾan, the Prophet’s Hadith, and the sermons of Imam ʿAlī to describe principles of belief and approach, articles of character and deeds, and the grounding of both—abstract philosophy and concrete instructions—in love for and allegiance to the divine guides, the Imams and Dāʿīs, who are “God’s rope.” It has a gentle tone, preaching harmony between all people on earth, tranquility in one’s life, cheerfulness and positivity, and an atmosphere of love and caring. The closing section brings the poet directly into the frame of reference, stating that he, as the incumbent Dāʿī, is himself the manifestation of God’s rope in the current time, and those who follow his guidance will return to Paradise. The present article provides a window into Sayyidna Taher Saifuddin’s remarkable poem, translating and analyzing it against the backdrop of Fatimid and Ṭayyibī theological works and, briefly, the colonial and post-colonial fabric of early 20th century India, to explore a significant and largely unknown chapter of Arabic poetry.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41786017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb, written by Hoda El Shakry","authors":"M. Salama","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341483","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46351838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ʿAbdullāh al-ʿArwī’s ʾAwrāq: sīrat Idrīs al-dhihniyyah and the Aesthetics-Politics Dialectic","authors":"Anouar El Younssi","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341477","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article discusses the politics of form in ʿAbdullāh al-ʿArwī’s 1989 ʾAwrāq: sīrat Idrīs al-dhihniyyah (Papers: Idrīs’s Intellectual Biography), an important contribution to Moroccan experimental literature in the postcolonial era. Together with Muḥammad Barrādah’s 1987 novel Luʿbat al-nisyān (The Game of Forgetting, 1996), Awrāq consolidated the experimental turn in the Moroccan literary scene, aiding thereby its ascent to the mainstream. ʾAwrāq is a two-layered text, presenting the reader with, first, a stack of papers of various sorts belonging to the diseased protagonist Idrīs, and second, the commentaries on this archive by the narrator and Shuʿayb. The book constantly oscillates between these two layers, attempting in the process to shake the dominant realist form and its underlying European point of reference. ʾAwrāq’s search for its best form parallels Idrīs’s quest to restore, or be reconciled to, his identity in the context of France and Europe’s colonial project and its legacy. The text’s experimentalism is thus strategically harnessed to wrestle, within the diegesis, with various political and sociocultural challenges facing Morocco, and the Arab/Arabo-Amazigh world more broadly, in the postcolonial era—including the colossal task of reconciling the Islamic heritage (al-turāth) with hegemonic Western discourses of modernity.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49175424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation, edited by Sameh Hanna, Hanem El-Farahaty, and Abdel-Wahab Khalifa The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism, and Gender, edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal","authors":"M. Booth","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341479","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42897677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ghassān Kanafānī’s Children: Agency and Contingency","authors":"Ismail Nashef","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341476","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000One of the major premises of Arab (post)colonial modernity is that the child could be a key bearer of change for a better future for the society. For the child to be successful as a bearer of change, she must first be transformed into a modern subject. In this article, I present the Palestinian case to explore this premise, examining the nature of the child as a modern subject with a particular type of agency. Specifically, I will focus on how Ghassān Kanafānī’s literary works represent the child as a sociopolitical agent. I analyze several literary genres, including dedications, letters, short stories, and novels. The article concludes by suggesting that this particular agency is a hybrid of child-adult agency, bounded by intergenerational succession in the context of patriarchal-colonial Palestine of the post-Nakbah era.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43397867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Qurʾān Quotations Preserved on Papyrus Documents, 7th–10th Centuries. And The Problem of Carbon Dating Early Qurʾāns, edited by Andreas Kaplony and Michael Marx","authors":"P. Sijpesteijn","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341484","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47978869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures: Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry, written by Muhsin Al-Musawi","authors":"Moneera al-Ghadeer","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341480","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45277497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Way We See It: Poetic-Visual Reciprocity in Egyptian Street Art Since 2011","authors":"Eid Mohamed, Talaat Farouq Mohamed","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341470","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article traces the manifestations of the newly adapted artistic form of “calligraffiti,” or the synthetic braiding of poetry and graffiti on what became known as the “walls of protest” in post-2011 Egypt. This new mode of writing/drawing answers to the immediacy of an unprecedented revolutionary moment in Egypt and rewrites Egyptian history in peculiar artistic instantaneity. The image-text discursive dynamics of this hybrid form of expression enhance our understanding of the 2011 Egyptian uprising, enabling us to explore the potential of revolutionary impulse for stretching new artistic forms. This article therefore engages calligraffiti as a means to expand the scope of the literary, and specifically the poetic, to involve the visual dimension as coupled with the conceptual (linguistic). In this border- and genre-crossing artistic mode, Arabic poetry and graffiti meld as a revolutionary form of self-expression that defies local and international hegemonic, patriarchal regimes. Calligraffiti serves not only as a means of registering a revolutionary moment in Egypt or of celebrating the epiphany of the uprising, but more importantly it stands as a cultural and literary tool developed and used by Egyptian artists to represent the revolutionary artistic self and galvanize dissent during a highly contested moment in Egypt’s history. The article thus traces the ways that the calligraffiti of Egyptian artists like Bahiyyah Shihāb (Bahia Shehab) and ʿUmar Fatḥī (Omar Fathy), ʿAmmār Abū Bakr (Ammar Abo Bakr), Ganzīr (Ganzeer), Al-Mushīr (El-Moshir) and ʿAlāʾ ʿAwaḍ (Alaa Awad), are enmeshed with the poetic lines of Amal Dunqul, Pablo Neruda, and Yāsir al-Manawahlī (Yasser el-Manawahly) on the artistic canvas of muralled Egyptian revolution.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49057604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus, written by Dwight Reynolds","authors":"Imed Nsiri","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341468","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43497887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}