James E Montgomery – författare

Two Arabic Travel Books combines two exceptional exemplars of Arabic travel writing, penned in the same era but chronicling wildly divergent experiences. Accounts of China and India is a compilation of reports and anecdotes on the lands and peoples of the Indian Ocean, from the Somali headlands to China and Korea. The early centuries of the Abbasid era witnessed a substantial network of maritime trade—the real-life background to the Sindbad tales. In this account, we first travel east to discover a vivid human landscape, including descriptions of Chinese society and government, Hindu religious practices, and natural life from flying fish to Tibetan musk-deer and Sri Lankan gems. The juxtaposed accounts create a jigsaw picture of a world not unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization. In its ports, we find a priceless cargo of information; here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men—a marvelous, mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella. In Mission to the Volga, we move north on a diplomatic mission from Baghdad to the upper reaches of the Volga River in what is now central Russia. This colorful documentary by Ibn Fadlan relates the trials and tribulations of an embassy of diplomats and missionaries sent by caliph al-Muqtadir to deliver political and religious instruction to the recently-converted King of the Bulghars. During eleven months of grueling travel, Ibn Fadlan records the marvels he witnesses on his journey, including an aurora borealis and the white nights of the North. Crucially, he offers a description of the Viking Rus, including their customs, clothing, tattoos, and a striking account of a ship funeral. Mission to the Volga is also the earliest surviving instance of sustained first-person travel narrative in Arabic—a pioneering text of peerless historical and literary value. Together, the stories in Two Arabic Travel Books illuminate a vibrant world of diversity during the heyday of the Abbasid empire, narrated with as much curiosity and zeal as they were perceived by their observant beholders.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Made up of a number of seminal articles that are translated for the first time in English, this prestigious book from Gregor Schoeler gives a reasoned, informed and comprehensive overflow of how the written and the spoken interacted, diverged and received cultural articulation among the Muslim societies of the first two centuries of the Hijra.

Made up of a number of seminal articles that are translated for the first time in English, this prestigious book from Gregor Schoeler gives a reasoned, informed and comprehensive overflow of how the written and the spoken interacted, diverged and received cultural articulation among the Muslim societies of the first two centuries of the Hijra.

Edinburgh University Press will publish two self-contained guides to reading al-Jahiz that also shed light on his society and its writings. This first volume, 'In Praise of Books', is devoted to bibliomania and al-Jahiz’s bibliophilia. Volume 2, In Censure of Books, explores Al-Jahiz's bibliophobia. Al-Jahiz was a bibliomaniac, theologian, and spokesman for the political and cultural elite, a writer who lived, counselled and wrote in Iraq during the first century of the 'Abbasid caliphate. He advised, argued and rubbed shoulders with the major power brokers and leading religious and intellectual figures of his day, and crossed swords in debate and argument with the architects of the Islamic religious, theological, philosophical and cultural canon. His many, tumultuous writings engage with these figures, their ideas, theories and policies. They give us an invaluable but much-neglected window onto the values and beliefs of this cosmopolitan elite.

The Excellence of the Arabs is a spirited defense of Arab identity—its merits, values, and origins—at a time of political unrest and fragmentation, written by one of the most important scholars of the early Abbasid era.In the cosmopolitan milieu of Baghdad, the social prestige attached to claims of being Arab had begun to decline. Although his own family originally hailed from Merv in the east, Ibn Qutaybah locks horns with those members of his society who belittled Arabness and vaunted the glories of Persian heritage and culture. Instead, he upholds the status of Arabs and their heritage in the face of criticism and uncertainty.The Excellence of the Arabs is in two parts. In the first, Arab Preeminence, which takes the form of an extended argument for Arab privilege, Ibn Qutaybah accuses his opponents of blasphemous envy. In the second, The Excellence of Arab Learning, he describes the fields of knowledge in which he believed pre-Islamic Arabians excelled, including knowledge of the stars, divination, horse husbandry, and poetry. And by incorporating extensive excerpts from the poetic heritage—"the archive of the Arabs"—Ibn Qutaybah aims to demonstrate that poetry is itself sufficient corroboration of Arab superiority.Eloquent and forceful, The Excellence of the Arabs addresses a central question at a time of great social flux at the dawn of classical Muslim civilization: what did it mean to be Arab?A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A rich anthology of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry on the beauties and perils of the huntIn the poems of Fate the Hunter, many of them translated into English for the first time, trained cheetahs chase oryx, and goshawks glare from falconers' arms, while archers stalk their prey across the desert plains and mountain ravines of the Arabian peninsula. With this collection, James E. Montgomery, acclaimed translator of War Songs by ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, offers a new edition and translation of twenty-six early works of hunting poetry, or ṭardiyyāt. Included here are poems by pre-Islamic poets such as Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Shanfarā, as well as poets from the Umayyad era such as al-Shamardal ibn Sharīk. The volume concludes with the earliest extant epistle about hunting, written by ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib, a master of Arabic prose. Through the eyes of the poet, the hunter's pursuit of the quarry mirrors Fate's pursuit of both humans and nonhumans and highlights the ambiguity of the encounter. With breathtaking descriptions of falcons, gazelles, and saluki gazehounds, the poems in Fate the Hunter capture the drama and tension of the hunt while offering meditations on Fate, mortality, and death.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Verses on hunter and quarry from a giant of Arabic poetryArguably the greatest poet of the Arabic language, Abū Nuwās was renowned for his innovations in poetic genre and style and was a larger-than-life figure even among his contemporaries in Abbasid Baghdad. In A Demon Spirit, acclaimed translator and scholar James E. Montgomery renders this literary giant's hunting poetry, or ṭardiyyāt, translated for the first time in vivid English.Abū Nuwās's poems radiate brilliance, ingenuity, and lyrical attentiveness to both nature and body. These hunting poems convey the crackling energy of ruthless predators and wily prey, the worryingly uncertain outcome of perilous pursuits, and the mythic perfection of warriors both human and animal—all the while overturning genre structures and power dynamics with unforgettable imagery expressed in smooth, natural language.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A collection of poems about nature and powerTo Ibn al-Muʿtazz and his Abbasid contemporaries, the hunt was more than a diversion—it was the theater for their poetic and political endeavors, captured here in fifty-nine Arabic hunting poems, or ṭardiyyāt. The poems of In Deadly Embrace describe hunting expeditions with animals trained to hunt, including saluki hounds and birds of prey. Many were composed after these outings, when the hunting party gathered to enjoy the game they caught. Poetry was central to Abbasid society and served as a method of maintaining networks of patronage and friendship; the poems in this collection reflect these power dynamics and allowed Ibn al-Muʿtazz—prince of the realm and in line for the caliphate—to explore his own relationship to social and political power and to demonstrate his fitness to rule.Ibn al-Muʿtazz was an influential poet and literary theorist of the Modernist school of poetry. In Deadly Embrace merges the Modernists' new techniques and styles with age-old themes: military prowess and wisdom, fitness to rule and comradeship, the camaraderie of the hunt and the cult of heroic masculinity. Groundbreaking and evocative, the poems paint vivid pictures of hunting scenes while posing deep questions about our attentiveness to the natural world and the relationship of the human to the nonhuman.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

The pre-Islamic warrior-poet 'Antarah ibn Shaddad, a composer of one of the Mu'allaqat, attracted the attention of the philologists who were active in Iraq at the nascence of the scholarly study of Arabic. These philologists collected and studied the diwan of 'Antarah as part of their recovery and codification of the Jahiliyyah: 'Antarah became one of the Six Poets, a collection of pre-Islamic poets associated with al-Asma'i, "the father of Arabic philology." Two centuries later, in al-Andalus, al-Shantamari and al-Batalyawsi composed their commentaries on the diwans of the Six Poets. This study uncovers the literary history of 'Antarah's diwan and presents five editions, with critical apparatus, of the extant recensions, based on an extensive collation of the surviving manuscripts.An Arabic edition with English scholarly apparatus.

Poems of love and battle by Arabia's legendary warrior From the sixth-century highlands of Najd in the Arabian peninsula, on the eve of the advent of Islam, come the strident cries of a legendary warrior and poet. The black outcast son of an Arab father and an Ethiopian slave mother, 'Antarah ibn Shaddad struggled to win the recognition of his father and tribe. He defied social norms and, despite his outcast status, loyally defended his people. 'Antarah captured his tumultuous life in uncompromising poetry that combines flashes of tenderness with blood-curdling violence. His war songs are testaments to his life-long battle to win the recognition of his people and the hand of 'Ablah, the free-born woman he loved but who was denied him by her family. War Songs presents the poetry attributed to 'Antarah and includes a selection of poems taken from the later Epic of 'Antar, a popular story-cycle that continues to captivate and charm Arab audiences to this day with tales of its hero's titanic feats of strength and endurance. 'Antarah's voice resonates here, for the first time in vibrant, contemporary English, intoning its eternal truths: commitment to one's beliefs, loyalty to kith and kin, and fidelity in love.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.