Shawkat M. Toorawa – författare

A beautifully curated and translated collection of the Qur’anic surahs and verses that are most cherished and memorized by Muslims the world overMuslim devotional practices vary greatly over time and across regions, communities, and denominations, but they share core Qur’anic surahs (chapters) and verses rooted in the practice of earlier figures—the Prophet Muhammad, his closest Companions, the Shiite Imams, saintly figures, learned scholars, Sufi masters, local imams and religious teachers, forebears, and parents.This volume is the first to present a curated English translation of these core passages, offering a powerful distillation of the recitational tradition that is at the heart of Muslim faith and practice. In these translations of thirty-two surahs and some forty verses, Shawkat M. Toorawa gives attention to rhythm, assonance, and end rhyme, as well as to the musicality and emotional force of the original Arabic. He organizes the selections according to devotional use and explains the place and role of the surah, verse, or passage in Muslim devotional practice.This book is for anyone interested in the Qur’an, its aesthetic qualities, and its place in Muslim devotion, including any Muslims seeking a sensitive English translation of these essential surahs and verses.

Toorawa re-evaluates the literary history and landscape of  third to ninth century Baghdad by demonstrating and emphasizing the significance of the important transition from a predominantly oral-aural culture to an increasingly literate one. This transformation had a profound influence on the production of learned and literary culture; modes of transmission of learning; nature and types of literary production; nature of scholarly and professional occupations and alliances; and ranges of meanings of certain key concepts, such as plagiarism. In order to better understand these, attention is focused on a central but understudied figure, Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (d. 280 to 893), a writer, schoolmaster, scholar and copyist, member of important literary circles, and a significant anthologist and chronicler. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Arabic literary culture and history, and those with an interest in books, writing, authorship and patronage.

Toorawa re-evaluates the literary history and landscape of  third to ninth century Baghdad by demonstrating and emphasizing the significance of the important transition from a predominantly oral-aural culture to an increasingly literate one. This transformation had a profound influence on the production of learned and literary culture; modes of transmission of learning; nature and types of literary production; nature of scholarly and professional occupations and alliances; and ranges of meanings of certain key concepts, such as plagiarism. In order to better understand these, attention is focused on a central but understudied figure, Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (d. 280 to 893), a writer, schoolmaster, scholar and copyist, member of important literary circles, and a significant anthologist and chronicler. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Arabic literary culture and history, and those with an interest in books, writing, authorship and patronage.

Every year hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world converge on Mecca and its precincts to perform the rituals associated with the Hajj and have been doing so since the seventh century. In this volume, scholars from a range of fields - including history, religion, anthropology, and literature - together tell the story of the Hajj and explain its significance as one of the key events in the Muslim religious calendar. By outlining the parameters of the Hajj from its beginnings to the present day, the contributors have produced a global study that takes in the vast geographies of belief in the world of Islam. This volume pays attention to the diverse aspects of the Hajj, as lived every year by hundreds of millions of Muslims, touching on its rituals, its regional forms, the role of gender, its representation in art, and its organization on a global scale.

Every year hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world converge on Mecca and its precincts to perform the rituals associated with the Hajj and have been doing so since the seventh century. In this volume, scholars from a range of fields - including history, religion, anthropology, and literature - together tell the story of the Hajj and explain its significance as one of the key events in the Muslim religious calendar. By outlining the parameters of the Hajj from its beginnings to the present day, the contributors have produced a global study that takes in the vast geographies of belief in the world of Islam. This volume pays attention to the diverse aspects of the Hajj, as lived every year by hundreds of millions of Muslims, touching on its rituals, its regional forms, the role of gender, its representation in art, and its organization on a global scale.

An eclectic collection of poems about New York City."New York, the city that never sleeps, contains more light than all the myriad heavens conceived of by its denizens of every possible race, religion, culture, color, and creed combined. All poets are besotted with light: it is the most transformative of all phenomena and we are permanently drunk on it-moon mad, sun blind, star struck." - from the Foreword by Anne Pierson WieseAs Shawkat M. Toorawa writes in his preface, "Not every poet loves New York, but each and every one is mesmerized by it." Indeed, with its protean mix of cultures, languages, natives, transplants, and exiles, New York City seems to exert a special hold over the poetic imagination. The sixty-one poems, extracts of poems, and song lyrics collected here reflect a wide range of responses to New York, both positive and negative, insider and outsider. Arranged in four sections-Morning, Day, Evening, and Night-the collection not only gives the reader the opportunity to experience twenty-four hours in New York through poetry, but also puts poems and poets in conversation, debate, and even occasionally in conflict with one another.Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive, this volume juxtaposes well-known poets and lyricists such as Maya Angelou, Bob Dylan, Denise Levertov, and Walt Whitman with important and emerging voices such as Valzhyna Mort, Purvi Shah, and Melanie Rehak, as well as poets less frequently included in such anthologies, such as Mahmoud Darwish, Anna Margolin, and Nicanor Parra. The result is a collection of poems that vary in their aesthetics, tone, mood, and subject, and thereby reflect the vexed and manifold nature of their subject-New York, the city that never sleeps.

Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Sa'i (d. 674/1276). Ibn al-Sa'i was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656/1258.In this work, Ibn al-Sa'i is keen to forge a connection between the munificent wives of his time and the storied lovers of the so-called golden age of Baghdad. Thus, from the earlier period, we find Harun al-Rashid pining for his brother's beautiful slave, Ghadir, and the artistry of such musical and literary celebrities as 'Arib and Fadl, who bested the male poets and singers of their day. From times closer to Ibn al-Sa'i's own—when Abbasid authority was trying to reassert itself and Baghdad was again a major center of intellectual and religious activity—we meet women such as Banafsha, who endowed law colleges, had bridges built, and provisioned pilgrims bound for Mecca; slave women whose funeral services were led by caliphs; and noble Saljuq princesses from Afghanistan.Informed by the author's own sources, his insider knowledge, and well-known literary materials, these singular biographical sketches, though delivered episodically, bring the belletristic culture of the Baghdad court to life, particularly in the personal narratives and poetry of culture heroines otherwise lost to history.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Sa'i (d. 674/1276). Ibn al-Sa'i was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656/1258.In this work, Ibn al-Sa'i is keen to forge a connection between the munificent wives of his time and the storied lovers of the so-called golden age of Baghdad. Thus, from the earlier period, we find Harun al-Rashid pining for his brother's beautiful slave, Ghadir, and the artistry of such musical and literary celebrities as 'Arib and Fadl, who bested the male poets and singers of their day. From times closer to Ibn al-Sa'i's own—when Abbasid authority was trying to reassert itself and Baghdad was again a major center of intellectual and religious activity—we meet women such as Banafsha, who endowed law colleges, had bridges built, and provisioned pilgrims bound for Mecca; slave women whose funeral services were led by caliphs; and noble Saljuq princesses from Afghanistan.Informed by the author's own sources, his insider knowledge, and well-known literary materials, these singular biographical sketches, though delivered episodically, bring the belletristic culture of the Baghdad court to life, particularly in the personal narratives and poetry of culture heroines otherwise lost to history.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Some thirty years have passed since the original publication of M. M. Ahsan's Social Life Under the Abbasids, but it remains an invaluable resource for the study of the material culture of Abbasid life in the ninth and tenth centuries.Ahsan arranges his material thematically-costume, food, housing, hunting, indoor and outdoor games, and festivities and festivals. Moreover, that arrangement together with the eclectic mix of citations, also give readers a taste of what it is like to browse through the many kinds of adab works that are Ahsan's main sources, including, among numerous others, anecdotal, biographical, culinary, geographical and literary texts.

Arabic Belles Lettres brings together ten studies that shed light on important questions in the study of Arabic language, literature, literary history, and writerly culture. The volume is divided into three sections. Early Narratives comprises: Joseph Lowry on the Qurʾan's allusive legal language; Abed el-Rahman Tayyara on matrilineal lineages in the context of Badr and Uhụd; Ruqayya Khan on the ramifications of public courtship in ʾUdhrī romances; and Philip Kennedy on firāsah (reading for signs and traces) in medieval narrative. Medieval Authors comprises: Shawkat Toorawa on ʿUbaydallāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Abī Ṭāhir's History of Baghdād; Maurice Pomerantz and Bilal Orfali on Ibn Fāris and the origins of the maqāmah genre; Everett Rowson on al-Tawḥīdī and his predecessors (a reprint of his 1996 ZDMG article); and Ghayde Ghraowi on al-Khafājī and his Rayḥānat al-alibbāʾ. Modern Egypt comprises: Roger Allen on a cultural controversy in the Cairo newspapers of 1902; and Devin Stewart on preposterous boasting and ingenuity in on modern Egyptian Arabic.