Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature – serie

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 9th-century essayist, theologian and encyclopaedist ‘Amr b. Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ has long been acknowledged as a master of early Arabic prose writing. Many of his most engaging writings were clearly intended for a broad readership but were presented as presented as letters to individuals. Despite the importance and quantity of these letters, surprisingly little academic notice has been paid to them. Now, Thomas Hefter takes a new approach in interpreting some of al-Jāḥiẓ’s ‘epistolary monographs’. By focussing on the varying ways in which he wrote to the addressee, Hefter shows how al-Jāḥiẓ shaped his conversations on the page in order to guide (or manipulate) his actual readers and encourage them to engage with his complex materials.

Mirrors for princes form a substantial and important genre in many pre-modern literatures. Their ostensible purpose is to advise the king; at the same time they assert that the king, if he is truly virtuous, will appreciate being reminded of the contingency of his power. The unknown author of the Counsel for Kings studied in this book wrote in a distinctive early tenth-century Iranian environment. He deploys an abundant set of cultural materials representing ‘perennial wisdom’ of mixed provenances, which he reinvigorates by applying them to the circumstances of his own time and place.　The first volume situates Counsel for Kings in its historical context. The second volume gives direct access to a substantial portion of the text through translation and commentary.

Adab is not an English word, but it could become one. This collection, in honour of Julia Bray, experiments with juxtaposed articles, quotations, translations and lines of poetry to let readers create connections in the same way authors did a thousand years ago in Arabic. The collaboration is inspired by the ongoing work of Julia Bray, which continues to demonstrate the rewards of taking what we read seriously.The field of Arabic studies is increasingly rejecting a hard line between the modern and the premodern. This book is an intervention in that development – arguing that the premodern can structure contemporary thinking. It offers translations, commentaries and discussions of important and insufficiently known primary texts together with the original Arabic text of poems. These cross-genre and cross-disciplinary connections can catalyse future research and show how a key feature of the Arabic literary tradition is relevant to how we think about scholarship today. The chapters provide readers with both an academic resource and an intellectual conversation with the past.

The 9th-century essayist, theologian and encyclopaedist ‘Amr b. Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ has long been acknowledged as a master of early Arabic prose writing. Many of his most engaging writings were clearly intended for a broad readership but were presented as presented as letters to individuals. Despite the importance and quantity of these letters, surprisingly little academic notice has been paid to them. Now, Thomas Hefter takes a new approach in interpreting some of al-Jāḥiẓ’s ‘epistolary monographs’. By focussing on the varying ways in which he wrote to the addressee, Hefter shows how al-Jāḥiẓ shaped his conversations on the page in order to guide (or manipulate) his actual readers and encourage them to engage with his complex materials.

Ḥikāyat Abu al-Qāsim, probably written in the 11th century by the otherwise unknown al-Azdī, tells the story of a gate-crasher from Baghdad named Abū al-Qāsim, who shows up uninvited at a party in Isfahan. Dressed as a holy man and reciting religious poetry, he soon relaxes his demeanour, and, growing intoxicated on wine, insults the other dinner guests and their Iranian hometown. Widely hailed as a narrative unique in the history of Arabic literature, Ḥikāyah also reflects a much larger tradition of banquet texts. Painting a picture of a party-crasher who is at once a holy man and a rogue, he is a figure familiar to those who have studied the ancient cynic tradition or other portrayals of wise fools, tricksters and saints in literatures from the Mediterranean and beyond. This study therefore compares Ḥikāyah, a mysterious text surviving in a single manuscript, to other comical banquet texts and party-crashing characters, both from contemporary Arabic literature and from Ancient Greece and Rome.

According to Aristotle, a well-crafted recognition scene is one of the basic constituents of a successful narrative. It is the point when hidden facts and identities come to light—in the classic instance, a son discovers in horror that his wife is his mother and his children are his siblings. Aristotle coined the term ‘anagnôrisis’ for the concept. In this book Philip F. Kennedy shows how 'recognition' is key to an understanding of how one reads values and meaning into, or out of, a story. He analyses texts and motifs fundamental to the Arabic literary tradition in five case studies: the Qur’an; the biography of Muhammad; Joseph in classical and medieval re-tellings; the ‘deliverance from adversity’ genre and picaresque narratives.

This study compares ?ikayah, a mysterious text surviving in a single manuscript, to other comical banquet texts and party-crashing characters, especially from Ancient Greece and Rome.

This book studies the Counsel for Kings as an illuminating commentary on the milieu and polity in which it was written and as a composition that seeks to persuade by drawing allusions between the diverse repertoire of wisdom literature available to the author and his audience and the circumstances of the author s time and place.

This book studies the Counsel for Kings as an illuminating commentary on the milieu and polity in which it was written and as a composition that seeks to persuade by drawing allusions between the diverse repertoire of wisdom literature available to the author and his audience and the circumstances of the author s time and place.

The first study to analyse the recognition scene in the Arabic narrative traditionAccording to Aristotle, a well-crafted recognition scene is one of the basic constituents of a successful narrative. It is the point when hidden facts and identities come to light in the classic instance, a son discovers in horror that his wife is his mother and his children are his siblings. Aristotle coined the term 'anagnorisis' for the concept. In this book Philip F. Kennedy shows how 'recognition' is key to an understanding of how one reads values and meaning into, or out of, a story. He analyses texts and motifs fundamental to the Arabic literary tradition in five case studies: the Qur'an; the biography of Muhammad; Joseph in classical and medieval re-tellings; the 'deliverance from adversity' genre and picaresque narratives.Key FeaturesOffers new vistas for reading, understanding and interpreting Arabic literature as well as the culture in which it was producedProvides a comparative perspective, appealing to students of narrative literature across linguistic, regional and cultural traditionsHighlights the importance of intertextuality, showing the various ways in which literature and other genres of writing must be read together as manifestations of one complex cultural narrativeDemonstrates the fruitfulness of interdisciplinarity in literary studies

Leyla Ozgur Alhassen approaches the Qur'an as a literary, religious and oral text that affects its audience. She looks at how Qur'anic stories function as narrative: how characters and dialogues are portrayed; what themes are repeated; what verbal echoes and conceptual links are present; what structure is established; and what beliefs these narrative choices strengthen. Ozgur Alhassen argues that, in the Qur'an, some narrative features that are otherwise puzzling can be seen as instances in which God, as the narrator, centres himself while putting the audience in its place. In essence, this makes the act of reading an interaction between God and the audience.