Academic literature on the topic 'Narrative poetry, Arabic'

The subject of our study is the narrative techniques in the poetry of ʻAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (1926-1999) which were taken into account through the example of his second published works Abārīq Muhashshamah “Broken Pitchers, 1954”, as narration. The aim of the article is to define the features of narration and how the same techniques appear in creative work of a poet, one of the pioneers of modernity in contemporary Arabic poetry, in addition to Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (1926-1964), and Nāzik al-Malā'ikah (1926-2007). The study defines the following objectives: Determining the approaches developed in studying the aspects of narration in poetry, to distinguish the narrative examples in the modern poetic text under study; To show the process of creating the poetic genre in the Bayati literature through the example of free verse poems. This article seeks, through the methodological principles of narrative research, to reveal the features of the narrative model that organizes communication in al-Bayātī 's poetry, as well as the features of the composition of the narrative structure of the text in al-Bayātī 's collection Broken Pitchers. The article analyzes the poetic texts and their intertwining with prose, as it tries to uncover the narrative and performance discourses from which the poet set out in determining the techniques of narration he uses, the communicative possibilities such as dialogues and the narrator's point of view in the poems at al-Bayātī.

No doubt that Classical Arabic Literature was influenced by Greek Literature, as the modern Arabic literature was influenced by European Literature. The narrative poetry was designed for the emergence of theatrical poetry, a poetry modeled on the model of the story with its performance in the front of audience. This style was not known as Arabic poetry, but borrowed from the European literatures by the elite of poets who were influenced by European literatures looking forward to renew the Arabic poetry. It means that we use in this article the historical methodology based on the historical relation between European and Arabic literature in the ancient and modern age. The first who introduced the theatrical art in Arab countries was Mārūn al-Niqqāsh, who was of a Lebanese origin. He traveled to Italy in 1846 and quoted it from there. The first play he presented to the Arab audience in Lebanon was (Miser) composed by the French writer Molière, in late 1847. It is true that the art of play in Arabic literature at first was influenced by European literatures, but soon after reached the stage of rooting, then the artistic creativity began to emerge, which was far away from the simulation and tradition. It is true also that European musical theatres had been influenced later by Arabic literature and oriental literatures. European musical theatres (ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn and the magical lamp), the play (Māʿrūf Iska in Cairo) and the musical plays of (Shahrzād) are derived from (One thousand and one Nights). This study aims to discover the originality of theatrical art in modern Arabic literature. Therefore it is focused on its both side: Its European originality and its journey to Arab World, hence its artistic characteristics in modern Arabic literature. We also highlight its journey from the poetic language to the prose.

In his book, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry: from Heroic to Lyric to Metapoet- ic, Jaroslav Stetkevych traces the evolution of Arabic hunt poetry from its origins as an integral part of the heroic ode (qaṣῑda) to becoming a genre by itself (ṭardiyya) during the Islamic era, and then evolving into a meta- poetic self-conscious expression of poets in our modern time. The book is a collection of a revised book chapter and a number of revised articles that Stetkevych published between 1996 and 2013 discussing Arabic hunt poet- ry at different periods spanning from the pre-Islamic age, known in Arabic as “al-‘Aṣr al-jāhiliyya” (Age of Ignorance), to the contemporary era. This does not diminish the coherence of the book nor detract from Stetkevych’s welcomed thematic approach and his contribution to literary criticism on Arabic poetry and the socio-political and linguistic factors that influenced its development and evolution. Stetkevych divides his 256-page book into three parts. The first part, entitled “The Heroic and the Anti-Heroic in the Early Arabic Ode: The Qaṣῑdah,” consists of three chapters and discusses the evolution of the qa- ṣῑda (ode) during the Age of Ignorance. Stetkevych dissects the structure of the ode and shows how hunt poetry was an integral part of it (not an independent genre). In doing so, Stetkevych draws a vivid picture of the life and geosocial terrain of the period spanning from pre-Islamic to the mid-Umayyad eras. In the first chapter, “The Hunt in the Pre-Islamic Ode”, Stetkevych uses examples mainly from the Mu‘allaqāt of Rabī‘ah ibn Maqrum, Labād Ibn Rabī‘ah, and the famous Imru’ al-Qays to illustrate the different roles hunt poetry played based on where it fell in the structure of the ode. He further establishes that the hunt section of the ode served as the origin for what later became a genre in its own right, known as ṭardiyya. In the second and third chapters, “The Hunt in the Ode at the Close of the Archaic Peri- od” and “Sacrifice and Redemption: The Transformation of Archaic Theme in al-Ḥuṭay’ah”, Stetkevych distinguishes between the different terms for “hunt” and the ṭard that would be the “chivalrous hunt” that takes place from the back of a horse. Parsing these distinctions with poems from ‘Ab- dah Ibn al-Ṭabῑb, al-Shamardal, and ‘Amr Ibn Qamῑ’ah, among others, the author sketches how hunt poetry began taking its own shape as a freestand- ing genre during the Umayyad period: when hunt poetry “is no longer ex- plicitly ‘chivalrous’… we are now in the realm of falconry” (55). The second part of the book, “The Hunt Poem as Lyric Genre in Classi- cal Arabic Poetry: The Ṭardiyyah”, is made up of four chapters that discuss the maturation of the hunt poem under ‘Abbasid rule. During that period, the cultural, economic, scientific, and social renaissance left its impact on poets and poetry. Hunt poetry became a genre of its own, taking an inde- pendent form made of hunt-specialized shorter lyrics. Stetkevych begins this section in chapter 4, “The Discreet Pleasures of the Courtly Hunt: Abū Nuwās and the ‘Abbasid Ṭardiyyah”. He shows how the move of hunt po- etry from subjective to objective description was utterly distinctive under “Abu Nuwas, the master of archaic formulas, who is capable of employing those formulas in conceits that are no longer archaic” (102). Chapter 5, “From Description to Imagism: ‘Alῑ Ibn al-Jahm’s ‘We Walked over Saffron Meadows’,” shows how Ibn al-Jahm and other Abbasid poets such as Ibn al-Mu‘tazz and Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī “exercise considerable stylistic freedom in developing their own markedly varied but distinctive ṭardiyyah-po- ems from the broadly imagist to the highly lyrical to the fully narrative” (131). Stetkevych shows how the rhythm of hunt poetry was liberated as the Abbasid poets moved from the rajaz meter used in pre-Islamic hunt poetry to modifying and modulating “the ṭawῑl meter to create the unique rhythmic qualities” (131). In chapter 6, “Breakthrough into Lyricism: The Ṭardiyyahs of Ibn al-Mu‘tazz,” the author uses multiple examples to show how “the ṭardiyyah not only found that new lyrical voice but also allowed it … to become a closely integrated and even more broadly formative part of that poet’s multi-genre ‘project’ of a ‘new lyricism’ of Arabic poetry” (183). Chapter 7, “From Lyric to Narrative: The Ṭardiyyah of Abu Firas al-Ḥam- danῑ,” demonstrates how the prince poet “abandons the short lyric mono- rhyme for the sprawling narrative rhymed couplets (urjuzah muzdawijah)” (9). Stetkevych notes that although this “shift did not result (yet) in the achievement of a separate narrative genre, it can …be rightfully viewed as a step in the exploration of the possibility of a large narrative form” (187). The third and final section, “Modernism and Metapoesis: the Pursuit of the Poem,” discusses the revival of hunt poetry by modernist poets after being neglected for centuries. Chapter 8, “The Modernist Hunt Poem in ‘Abd al-Wahhab al Bayatῑ and Aḥmad ‘Abd al Mu‘ṭῑ Ḥijazῑ,” examines two poems of the two poets, both entitled Ṭardiyyah. Stetkevych argues that the Iraqi free-verse poet, al-Bayatῑ, transformed the “genre-and form-bound, rhymed and metered lyric… into a formally free exploration of the dra- matic and tragic image of the hunted hare as a metaphor for the political and cultural predicament of modern man” (9). Meanwhile, Hijazi’s Ṭardi- yyah transforms “the poignant lyricism of the traditional hunt poem into an expression of the poet’s personal experience of political exile and poetic restlessness and frustration” (10). The author concludes that the two poets’ explorations into ṭardiyyah “helped not only to preserve and activate the classical metaphor of hunt/ṭardiyyah into modernity, but in equal measure to validate and enrich the achievements of modern Arabic poetry” (242). In the last chapter, “The Metapoetic Hunt of Muḥammad ‘Afῑfῑ Maṭar,” Stetkevych—through interpretation, comparison, and criticism—shows how Maṭar’s modern poetry while “hermeneutically connected to the old genre… [is] very personal mythopoesis” (10). Stetkevych’s book does not discuss Andalusian hunt poetry, such as that of ‘Abbās Ibn Firnās, Ibn Hadhyal and Ibn al-Khaṭīb, nor the Ṭardiyyah of the contemporary Egyptian poet ‘Abdulraḥman Youssef, published in 2011 after the revolution in Tunisia and two days before the Egyptian revolution started. While including such examples would have further bol- stered this already strong and convincing argument and further illustrated the evolution of hunt poetry from the pre-Islamic era into modern times, their absence does not take away from the book writ large. Stetkevych’s excellent English translations of the poetry cited make his examples more accessible to readers who do not know Arabic. Overall, the book is a very valuable addition to literary criticism of Arabic poetry written in English and will surely be a great asset for scholars, students, and others interested in Arabic poetry as a reflection of a cultural and humanistic experience. Gaby SemaanAssistant Professor of ArabicUniversity of Toledo

The article is devoted to the most interesting phenomenon in Arabic literature - tribal legends, included in the Arab medieval literature called “Ayyam al- Arab” (“Days of the Arabs”). Oral narrative is an incomparable genre of Arab culture. Containing folklore origins and genetically related to the epic, it is at the same time quite distinctive and distinctly separate from other literary genres. The prose of Days, as well as poetry, is a work of high art with its own laws and its own poetics. And considering that for a long time, Arabic prose has not received proper development, the appearance of Ayyam Al- Arab should be regarded as one of the sources of historiographic prose, actually as the beginning of narrative prose in the history of Arabic literature.

"The Man in the Panther's Skin" is the masterpiece of Shota Rustaveli (c. 1160—after c. 1220), the greatest Georgian Christian poet, who has been translated into nearly 45 languages in the world so far. In this article we are going to study the Motifs of ʿUd̲h̲rī Love (AR: al-ḥubb al-ʿud̲h̲rī) in Rustaveli's book. The Ghazal (ode) of Ud̲h̲rī is a literary product of the Islamic-Arab community in which love derives its principles from religion of Islam and the like. In fact, during the era of the Umayyad caliphate (661-750 BCE) was born ʿUd̲h̲rī as a new kind of ode in the Arabic poetry in the Arabian Peninsula and has made its way into other lands, including Iran, and this kind of love poem penetrated through Iran into Rustavli's poetry.ʿUd̲h̲rī poem was narration of true, intense and chaste love between lover and a beloved far from sensuality, debauchery and lechery. Therefore, their lifestyles were very similar to mystic. The main purpose of this study is to find out the extent to which Rustaveli was influenced by ʿUd̲h̲rī poem. The research method in this article is to compare the specific and objective features which inferred from the Arabic-PersianʿUd̲h̲rī literature with the narrative in the Rustaveli's work. This does not mean, of course, that we will examine all the ʿUd̲h̲rī poetry works written before Rustaveli's book in the world; rather, we mean matching the specific Motifs of Arabic-Farsi works with the Rustaveli's poem. The results of this study show that there is a complete similarity between the motifs in the poems of Rustaveli's work and the motifs of the ʿUd̲h̲rī poets in all its components. This study also confirms that if we omit some details of the story in Rustaveli's book, we will find that Rustaveli was thoroughly familiar with Islamic ʿUd̲h̲rī literature and implemented it in his book "The Man in the Panther's Skin".

The study explores the Udhrî ghazal as a classical literary phenomenon in the Arabic poetry; and it seeks to correlate it with Plato’s theories of love in The Symposium. The issues the study raises are: history of the Udhrî love, factors leading to its emergence, impact of Islam on the Udhrî poets, and stages of the Udhrî narrative based on classical Arabic poetry and prose. The study controverts the claims associating the Udhrî ghazal with Islam due to the profound discrepancies between Islamic teachings and the practices and behaviors of the Udhrî poets. It as well reviews the theories of love Plato introduces in the Symposium for the purpose of estimating their manifestations in classical Arabic prose and impact on the Udhrî ghazal. The beginnings of Udhrî love go back to the pre-Islamic era during which poets, such as Antara Al-Absi, frequently combined the motif of chaste love with other related topics in their poems. Yet, the Udhrî ghazal flourishes in the Umayyad age during which poets tackled Udhrî love as an autonomous motif and subgenre. The study further questions the various possible factors, i.e. political, religious, environmental and social, modernists believe have led to the evolution of the Udhrî ghazal in the Islamic age and the Umayyad age.

AbstractThe prophetic encomia—panegyrics dedicated to the prophet Muhammad—are one of the most often recited forms of Arabic poetry up to today and are grounded in a cultural milieu where hagiography, competitive circulation of narrative and counter-narratives, rituals and esoteric practices, and educational institutions have a role in its formation. The unifying of the classical erotic poetic with the postclassical devotional created out of the encomium a vehicle that encapsulated palpable memory, nostalgia, and aspirational ideal for a greater past and beloved subject and successfully left a lasting cultural imprint. Against a general disregard for the postclassical tradition as one of decadence argued by Arab modernists, I join the ongoing effort to debunk the myth of premodern decadence as interrogated by Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part article “The Republic of Letters: Arab Modernity?” by considering the role of the postclassical prophetic encomia’s amatory prelude—a convention from the classical Arabic ode—as a site of continuity and innovation. Within specifically the famousQaṣīdat al-Burdah(trans.The Mantle Ode) by Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būsīrī (d. 693/1294) and thebadī’iyyātmodeled after theBurdahin meter and rhyme initiated by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349), the prelude takes a significant poetic turn replacing the classical abandoned desert campsites of the Arabic ode with the city of Madīnah. Operating as a unifying repository of the medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, the amatory prelude continued to perform its classical function as a liminal space but innovatively transformed that space for the reading/listening public as a collective reimagining of the Beloved as Muhammad and the abandoned desert campsite as the City of the Prophet outside of the discursive borders of the imperial.

Horace's Art of Poetry supplied the medieval schools with the only available classical doctrines on fiction and poetry before Aristotle's Poetics became widely studied in the fifteenth century. Horace exercized both practical and theoretical influence on literary exegesis, and shaped medieval and early Renaissance doctrines of composition by discussing the very nature of fiction, narrative techniques, authorial roles, description of character and tone, including performance and reading of a text. The anonymous commentators as well as the Dante commentator Francesco da Buti (1395) were deeply influenced by the twelfth-century “Materia” Commentary, but also by the Arabic notion of an independent art of poetics, and remained in lively dialogue with the teaching of Ciceronian rhetoric of invention, disposition, elocution, and delivery.

Any meaningful assessment of biography and autobiography writing among the Swahili as a historical source needs to take at least three factors into consideration. The first is the influence of Arab literary traditions on the emergence of the genre on the East African coast; the second is the relationship between literacy and orality, and its implication for writing and narration in an African context. The role of colonialism, and the introduction of the Western “mode” of biography and autobiography writing, forms the third factor. The aim of the paper is to survey these factors, not chronologically, but as part of a general discussion on the notion and status of the genre in the Swahili context.Swahili interface with Arabic as an essential ingredient of Islamic practice laid the foundation for the development of literate genres on the East African coast, among them the biographical and the historical. In the process, Swahili adopted styles of narrative expression which are reflected in the terms employed for them. The most common are habari (from the Arabic khabar) and wasifu (from wasf). In its original usage, khabar denoted a description of an event or events that were connected in a single narrative by means of a phrase such as “in that year.” It lacked a genealogy of narrators, and the form was stylistically flexible to include verses of poetry relevant to the events. In Swahili the current meaning of the word habari is “information” and “news” (and, hence, also a greeting) but, as a historical genre, it has been used in two ways. The first is in relation to the history of the city-states recounted through documents whose titles include the word, khabari/habari, (or the plural, akhbar in Arabic), usually translated as “chronicle(s).”

Abstract Hysteron-proteron is one of the rhetorical devices present in all literary works and in almost all literate cultures. Linguistically, it is considered a kind of inversion, topicalization or permutation that occurs on the sentence level and involves deviation in the syntagmatic progression of sentences as well as a semantic shift encompassing scope, focus and emphasis (Jakobson 1972: 78-80) besides fulfilling certain grammatical processes such as interrogation and passivization (Jack et al. 1989). Literarily, hysteron-proteron has a great aesthetic and poetic relevance as it is one of the rhetorical devices that can structurally modify both the texture and sense of the text according to the writer’s taste and intention. In other words, it offers one of the stylistic options that will consequently exercise certain pragmatic impact on the reader. It goes without saying, however, that by virtue of its strong affinity to syntax, semantics and style, hysteron-proteron usually involves translation problems which acquire more salience when the languages hold two diametrically opposing standpoints as is the case with Arabic and English. After expounding hysteron-proteron and, diagrammatically, illustrating its polyfunctionality, an account is provided on its occurrence in prose, poetry and in Arabic sacred literature i.e., the Qur’an, tackling its deeper sedimented layers in the Arab mind. The paper also legislates for the unmistakable impact of Western style of literary expression on some Arabic narrative texts. This just projects one more benefit of translation when used as a probing device in detecting literary borrowing through awkward or blind literal rendering of purposefully-disrupted word-order in English into Arabic or vice versa.

L’objectif de cette thèse est de faire découvrir le personnage d’Ahmad al-Rabbât al-Halabî, un libraire syrien qui a vécu entre la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle et la première moitié du XIXe siècle, de répertorier et présenter ses manuscrits et d’enquêter sur les utilisateurs « lecteurs » de cette archive culturelle : ce qui peut permettre d’apporter des réponses concrètes à certaines questions sur la littérature arabe, la création et la circulation des textes. Les recherches ont conduit à identifier environ 240 volumes, dispersés un peu partout dans le monde, de la bibliothèque initiale d’al-Rabbât. Les marges de ces manuscrits contiennent un grand nombre de certificats de lecture rédigés par plusieurs générations de lecteurs. Le travail sur les sources manuscrites a aussi donné la possibilité de créer une base de données sur les copistes, les propriétaires et les lecteurs des manuscrits, de déterminer le rôle qu’ont joué les voyageurs occidentaux et les agents consulaires dans la vie de ces documents
The aim of this thesis is to bring to light the unknown figure of Ahmad al-Rabbât al-Halabî, a Syrian bookseller, who lived between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, to catalog and present his manuscripts and to investigate the users « readers » of this cultural archive: it can provide concrete answers to questions raised in the Arabic literature, the creation and circulation of texts. The research led to identify about 240 volumes, scattered around the world, from the initial library of al-Rabbât. The margins of these manuscripts contain a large number of reading certificates written by many generations of readers.The work on the manuscript sources also presented an opportunity to create a database of the copyists, the owners and the readers of manuscripts, and to determine the role played by Western travelers and consular agents in the production and the history of the manuscripts

Cette thèse est une analyse de la trilogie de ʼAḥlām Mustaġānimī, une des premières auteures algériennes en arabe avec l’analyse formelle et les travaux de Genette. L’introduction aborde la méthodologie et la problématique. Comment les romans sont-ils tissés en une trilogie et pourquoi ont-ils eu un tel succès auprès du lectorat arabophone ? Ce qui en amène un autre : comment l'histoire algérienne est-elle incluse dans la trilogie. La première partie montre que ces romans sont le reflet de la vie de Mustaġānimī et de son engagement, à travers les dédicaces et la langue arabe dont des générations ont été privées. La deuxième partie reprend les outils de l'approche formelle pour déterminer le mécanisme du suspense par le démontage du texte narratif en les éléments constitutifs du récit principal, l’histoire d’amour, et ses interruptions. Elle montre la grande sensibilité de ʼAḥlām Mustaġānimī à la place de la femme et à la politique algérienne avant et après l’indépendance. La dernière partie, avec les intertextualités et les styles linguistiques, analyse le texte, et la poésie de son écriture. Cette maitrise de la langue arabe par Mustaġānimī est une des causes de son succès dans le lectorat arabophone. Cette thèse montre l’intérêt de ces méthodes d’analyse, expliquant et objectivant les ressentis du lecteur. Enfin, Mustaġānimī se retrouve dans le protagoniste implicite de la trilogie qui est donc une « intrusion » dans la vie de l'écrivaine
This thesis is an analysis of the trilogy of ʼAḥlām Mustaġānimī, one of the first Algerian authors in Arabic with formal analysis and the works of Genette.The introduction discusses the methodology and the issue. How are the novels woven into a trilogy and why have they been so popular with the Arabic-speaking readership? Which leads to another: how Algerian history is included in the trilogy. The first part shows that these novels are a reflection of Mustaġānimī's life and his commitment, through the dedications and the Arabic language of which generations have been deprived. The second part uses the tools of the formal approach to determine the mechanism of suspense by disassembling the narrative text into the constituent elements of the main story, the love story, and its interruptions. It shows ʼAḥlām Mustaġānimī's great sensitivity to the place of women and to Algerian politics before and after independence. The last part, with intertextualities and linguistic styles, analyzes the text, and the poetry of its writing. This mastery of the Arabic language by Mustaġānimī is one of the causes of his success in the Arabic-speaking readership. This thesis shows the interest of these methods of analysis, explaining and objectifying the feelings of the reader. Finally, Mustaġānimī finds himself in the implicit protagonist of the trilogy, which is therefore an “intrusion” into the life of the writer

Chapter four investigates tarjama’s dual meaning in Arabic as biography and translation in the works of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal. Following up on the secular prophecy of chapter three, it studies the complex relationship between Islam and literature in the two modernists’ mappings of Arabic literary history and in relation to their approach to translation. It examines specifically Haykal’s two-volume biography of Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1921 and 1923, his biography of the Prophet and literary essays, exploring political and spiritual temporalities in his unfolding critique of colonialism. It then considers Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s controversial claims about the historicity of Jahili poetry as post-Islamic in On Jahili Poetry (1926) and argues that it prefigures his translations of André Gide ((1946) and Voltaire (1947), resituating his “heretic” claims within his translation theory. It concludes on the failed narrative subjectivities that emerge from the translations’ critique of European Enlightenment thought, contextualizing the importance of these adaptations to the study of the Arabic novel.

This chapter discusses the Arabic literary circulation and how the exclusive distribution of prints disconnected people. Qiṣṣat Rūbinṣun Kurūzī and the other Church Missionary Society publications were printed annually in small quantities and distributed by agents of the church by hand. The forms of Arabic literary circulation that existed when al-Shidyāq began his career in print were mainly restricted to religious and government publications, which were focused on liturgical and scientific texts, and only occasionally produced editions of poetry or narrative fiction. Literary societies served smaller and more selective audiences still. The chapter mentions the Syrian Society for Arts and Sciences, the Oriental Society of Beirut, and the Syrian Scientific Society. Those “disconnected” peoples that al-Shidyāq imagined connecting via the printing press would have been limited to a small group of readers. Al-Bustānī's “Khuṭba,” proposed a comprehensive plan for the renovation of the Arabic letters and sciences that hinged on the creation of a reading public. He called for reforming Arabic lexicography through the elimination of “dead words” “weighing down” Arab authors, increasing literacy through the founding and funding of schools, and above all investing in print. Reading print required too much translation, as al-Khūrī put it: writing for the public was not only like translation but entailed translation. It was, for him, not a sphere but an “abyss.” The modern reader, and that institution of literary modernity the public sphere, emerged as a problem of translation.

Continues the book’s examination of Arabic poetry as a means for ascent in the court and as a tool for exerting control over the empire. The focus here is the sultan Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn al-Ayyub, often called Saladin. During his transition from vizier to sultan during the twelfth-century Crusades, Saladin oversaw writers and political administrators vying with one another to construct his identity as Islam’s protector. The collapse of the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt and the threat of crusading armies gave the new regime a key opportunity. The Ayyubid system consolidated a previously scattered community of littérateurs. Whereas the Fatimids were seen as incapable eradicating “the Franks” from the Levant and Egypt, now writers challenged each other to poeticize a successful counter-crusade. Modern studies portray the Crusaders as a nagging anxiety of Saladin’s court but, I argue, the presence of a foreign enemy proved extraordinarily useful to him. Writers re-imagined Islamic history as having always included a mysterious threat to pious Muslim people, fully realized in the Franks’ arrival. At the cathartic endpoint of that narrative they placed Saladin and, more subtly, themselves as the chroniclers of Islam’s restoration.

This chapter juxtaposes the Arabic prose fiction of the Palestinian Israeli writer Emile Habiby (1922–1996) and the Iraqi Jewish writer Samir Naqqash (1938–2004). Habiby was a major figure in the Israeli political and cultural landscapes as well as in Modern Arabic literature. Naqqash was the most important contemporary Jewish writer of Arabic, yet remains virtually unknown. As two native speakers of Arabic who wrote Arabic prose fiction in Israel, they offer an illuminating, if unorthodox, point of comparison. The chapter explores the poetics of misunderstanding in their fiction, elucidating how they thematize communicative failure as one means of contesting dominant historical narratives and undermining their faulty logic. It also offers the first comparative study of Habiby's critical reception in both Arabic and Hebrew, based on a bilingual reading of his masterpiece al-Mutasha'il (The Pessoptimist).

This chapter provides a general introduction to the standard narratives of the post-Ilkhanid period, and the framework of the book, followed by a discussion of the source material available and used in the study. Sources for the history of the Jalayirids include chronicles, biographical dictionaries, poetry, documents, coins, and inscriptions, written in Persian, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish.

This chapter attempts to re-create the “internal dialogue” about their pasts as militants that the Shi'r poets chose not to make public. This narrative is centered on the career of Yusuf al-Khal, who as editor in chief played a leading role in determining the principles of the Shi'r movement. But the real protagonists of the story are institutions: the political party, the university, the Cénacle, and the little magazine. These settings constitute the backstory to al-Khal's engagement with the institutions of late modernism itself—the global network of actors and discourses examined in Chapter 1. This focus on institutional history is intended, in part, as a corrective to the Shi'r poets' insistence that modernist literature is the work of heroic, deracinated individuals.

The purpose of this research is to explore the patterns of journalistic treatments for issues of Arab Language in Al Arab Qatari newspaper during the year of 2017. It also seeks to understand the degree to which this journalistic behavior enhances Qatar National identity. The importance of this research, which is funded by Qatar National Research Fund, No. UREP21-095-5-009 is to test the relationship between journalistic practices in relation to coverage of Arabic language issues and national identity. As interdisciplinary research combining Arabic language and journalism studies, its data were gathered by students of Arabic and Mass Communication Departments. The study adopted the descriptive and analytical approach to explore a sample of 841 publications that covered 10 linguistic forms including folk literature, translation, sermon, thought, novel, narration, poetry, story, drama and others as well as 6 editorial forms including investigative report, news report, dialogue, news, article, feature story and others. We analyze both the editorial content and the layout treatment. The results showed a statistical significance in the use of different editorial forms to demonstrate the Arabic language topics in Al Arab Qatari newspaper as well as the use of different layout techniques such as positioning, size, headline style and the accompanying visual elements. Future studies can compare the influence of different journalistic practices on national identity.