Rude, the Bad and the Bawdy

Marlé Hammond is Senior Lecturer in Arabic Popular Literature and Culture at SOAS University of London where she teaches classes on Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern and North African cinema. She is the author of The Tale of al-Barraq Son of Rahwan and Layla the Chaste: A Bilingual Edition and Study (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the award-winning monograph Beyond Elegy: Classical Arabic Women’s Poetry in Context (Oxford University Press, 2010). She also edited Arabic Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2014). Having studied film modules at Columbia University in New York and The American University in Cairo, she started teaching about Arabic-language cinema in 2006 and began integrating it into her research in 2007, when she was awarded a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford University to explore representations of ancient female poets in modern Arabic literature and film. This led to her publication of studies of two films: Togo Mizrahi’s Sallama (1945) and Bahiga Hafez’s Layla, Daughter of the Desert (1937). She has also authored a book chapter on the role of the kiss in Egyptian film language of the 1940s. Her work at the archival collection of (primarily Egyptian) film scripts at the New York State museum in her home town of Albany, has enabled her to ‘reconstruct’ bowdlerized films, such as Yusuf Wahbi’s Love and Revenge (1945), the subject of Chapter 1.3, and have informed the regional essays at certain junctures. Whilst this ‘expertise’ has been focused on Egypt, over a decade of teaching of teaching on the subject of Arabic-language cinema more generally has resulted in her researching the cinemas of North Africa and the Eastern Arab world rather extensively.

• Tabula GratulatoriaGeert Jan van Gelder: a biographical sketchIntroduction1. Wen-chin Ouyang, ‘Mujūn, Junūn, Funūn’2. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, ‘What is Obscene? Obscenity in Classical Arabic Literature’3. Pieter Smoor, ‘A Suspicion of Excessive Frankness’4. Gregor Schoeler, Abū Nuwās’ poem to the Zoroastrian boy Bihrūz: An Arabic ‘sawgand-nāma’ with a Persian ‘kharja’5.. Arie Schippers, ‘The Mujūn Genre by Abū Nuwās and by Ibn Quzmān: a Comparison’6. Nefeli Papoutsakis, ‘The ayrīyāt of Abū Ḥukayma (d. 240/854): A preliminary study’7. Monica Balda-Tillier, ‘ʻUdhrī Love and Mujūn: Opposites and Parallels’8. Emily Selove, ‘Mujūn is a Crazy Game’9. Thomas Bauer, ‘Dignity at Stake: Mujūn epigrams by Ibn Nubāta (686-768/1287-1366) and his contemporaries’10. Ewald Wagner, ‘Lyrics on a Fart’11. Denis McAuley, ‘Two fart jokes in Ibn ʿArabī’s Muḥāḍarat al-abrār’12. Richard van Leeuwen, ‘Love or Lust: Sexual Relationships between Humans and Jinns in the Thousand and One Nights and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye13. Roger Allen, ‘The Obscenity of Sexual Torture’14. Frédéric Lagrange, ‘Modern Arabic Literature and the Disappearance of Mujūn: Same-Sex Rape as a Case Study’15. Marlé Hammond, ‘The Foul-Mouthed Faḥla: Obscenity and Amplification in Early Women’s Invective’16. Clive Holes, ‘A Saudi “housewife” goes to war: الفتاوي الشريرة or “the evil fatwas”’17. Adam Talib, ‘Caricature and Obscenity in Mujūn Poetry and African-American Women’s Hip Hop’18. Jan Schmidt, ‘Love and Sex among the Ottomans (1500-1800)’19. Geert Jan van Gelder: List of PublicationsNotes on the ContributorsIndex