Studies on Performing Arts & Literature of the Islamicate World – serie

In The Encoded Cirebon Mask: Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java’s Islamic Northwest Coast, Laurie Margot Ross situates masks and masked dancing in the Cirebon region of Java (Indonesia) as an original expression of Islam. This is a different view from that of many scholars, who argue that canonical prohibitions on fashioning idols and imagery prove that masks are mere relics of indigenous beliefs that Muslim travelers could not eradicate. Making use of archives, oral histories, and the performing objects themselves, Ross traces the mask’s trajectory from a popular entertainment in Cirebon—once a portal of global exchange—to a stimulus for establishing a deeper connection to God in late colonial Java, and eventual links to nationalism in post-independence Indonesia.

The Sung Home tells the story of Kurdish singer-poets (dengbêjs) in Kurdistan in Turkey, who are specialized in the recital singing of historical songs. After a long period of silence, they returned to public life in the 2000s and are presented as guardians of history and culture. Their lyrics, life stories, and live performances offer fascinating insights into cultural practices, local politics and the contingencies of state borders. Decades of oppression have deeply politicized and moralized cultural and musical production. Through in-depth ethnographic analysis Hamelink highlights the variety of personal and social narratives within a society in turmoil. Set within the larger global stories of modernity, nationalism, and Orientalism, this study reflects on different ideas about what it means to create a Kurdish home.

Seen and Unseen teases out and explores how visual mediums construct visual cultures that often create limited perspectives of certain issues and groups. This volume focuses in particular on the representation of Islam and Muslims. It deals with fixed and stereotypical visual representations and explores alternative and challenging visual representations that reconstruct and dismantle existing belief systems. It approaches the topic from a vantage point of diverse multiple perspectives. Covering issues from Brunei, Iran, Egypt, and England and cyberspace, the essays in this volume examine the visual cultures of how Islam and Muslims are understood, misunderstood, misrepresented, or even embraced visually. Scholars in this volume draw on historical paintings, books and their covers, photography, and news to demonstrate the diversity and sometimes contradictory visual cultures that construct and adhere meaning to how Islam and Muslim people are seen.Contributors: Hoda Afshar, Jared Ahmed, Syed Farid Alatas, Sanaz Fotouhi, Christiane Gruber, Layla Hendow, Raihana M.M., Bruno Starrs and Esmaeil Zeiny.

In Poet of Jordan, William Tamplin presents two decades’ worth of the political poetry of Muhammad Fanatil al-Hajaya, a Bedouin poet from Jordan and a public figure whose voice channels a popular strain of popular Arab political thought. Tamplin’s footnoted translations are supplemented with a biography, interviews, and pictures in order to contextualize the man behind the poetry. The aesthetics and politics of vernacular Arabic poetry have long gone undervalued. By offering a close study of the life and work of Hajaya, Tamplin demonstrates the impact that one poet’s voice can have on the people and leaders of the contemporary Middle East.

In Modern and Contemporary Political Theater from the Levant, A Critical Anthology, Robert Myers and Nada Saab provide a sense of the variety and complexity of political theater produced in and around the Levant from the 1960s to the present within a context of wider discussions about political theater and the histories and forms of performance from the Islamic and Arab worlds. Five major playwrights are studied, ʿIsam Mahfuz, from Lebanon; Muhammad al-Maghut and Saʿd Allah Wannus, from Syria; Jawad al-Asadi, from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon; and Raʾida Taha, from Palestine. The volume includes translations of their plays The Dictator, The Jester, The Rape, Baghdadi Bath and Where Would I Find Someone Like You, ʿAli?, respectively.

The Thousand and One Nights does not fall into a scholarly canon or into the category of popular literature. It takes its place within a middle literature that circulated widely in medieval times. The Nights gradually entered world literature through the great novels of the day and through music, cinema and other art forms. Material inspired by the Nights has continued to emerge from many different countries, periods, disciplines and languages, and the scope of the Nights has continued to widen, making the collection a universal work from every point of view. The essays in this volume scrutinize the expanse of sources for this monumental work of Arabic literature and follow the trajectory of the Nights’ texts, the creative, scholarly commentaries, artistic encounters and relations to science.Contributors: Ibrahim Akel, Rasoul Aliakbari, Daniel Behar, Aboubakr Chraïbi, Anne E. Duggan, William Granara, Rafika Hammoudi, Dominique Jullien, Abdelfattah Kilito, Magdalena Kubarek, Michael James Lundell, Ulrich Marzolph, Adam Mestyan, Eyüp Özveren, Marina Paino, Daniela Potenza, Arafat Abdur Razzaque, Ahmed Saidy, Johannes Thomann and Ilaria Vitali.

Robert Lachmann’s letters to Henry George Farmer, from the years 1923-38, provide insightful glimpses into his life and his progressive research projects. From an historical perspective, they offer critical data concerning the development of comparative musicology as it evolved in Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century. The fact that Lachmann sought contact with Farmer can be explained from their mutual, yet diverse interests in Arab music, particularly as they were then considered to be the foremost European scholars in the field. During the 1932 Cairo International Congress on Arab Music, they were selected as presidents of their respective committees.

Cultural Pearls from the East offers fascinating insights into Muslim-Arab culture and the evolution of its intellectual nature and literary texts from early Islam to modern times. The textual analysis of largely unexplored literary works and chronicles that epitomize this volume highlight the affinity between culture, society, and politics, exploring these issues from both thematic and comparative perspectives. Among the topics examined in depth: Arabic poetry of warfare at the dawn of Islam; medieval poems about venerated sites and saints; Ottoman and Egyptian chronicles portraying the socioreligious landscapes of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent under the Ottoman Empire and in the shadow of growing European encroachment; and Arab-Jewish literature dealing with suppression, exile, and identity.Contributors: Ghaleb Anabseh, Albert Arazi, Meir M. Bar-Asher, Peter Chelkowski, Geula Elimelekh, Sigal Goorj, Jane Hathaway, Meir Hatina, Yair Huri-Horesh, Amir Lerner, Menachem Milson, Gabriel M. Rosenbaum, Joseph Sadan, Yona Sheffer, Norman (Noam) A. Stillman, Ibrahim Taha, Michael Winter, Eman Younis

This book is the first full text and translation of a prosimetric tale from the rich repertoire of Central and West Asian bards to be published with ready access to recordings of both the prose narration and the sung verse. In Iranian Khorasan, bards known as bakhshi present tales that in other regions are performed wholly in a Turkic language with prose narration in Persian, Khorasani Turkish or Kurmanji Kurdish and most verses in Turkish. We compare portions of the full performance transcribed here with excerpts from two performances of Iranian bakhshis in the 1970s. Three introductory chapters and a commentary discuss musical and verbal dimensions of the bakhshi’s art in relation to relevant social, historical, and literary contexts.

The book explores the political poetry recited by the Negev Bedouin from the late Ottoman period to the late twentieth century. By closely reading fifty poems Peled sheds light on the poets’ sentiments and worldviews. To get to the bottom of the issues that inspired their poetry, he weaves an interpretive web informed by the study of language, culture and history.The poems reveal that the poets were perfectly aware of the workings of the power systems that took control of their lives and lifestyle. Their poetry indicates that they did not remain silent but practiced their art in the face of their hardships, observing the collapse of their world with a mixture of despair and inspiration, bitterness and wit.

The present volume is a double edition in English and Arabic about the art of ornamentations in the performance of the Arabic qanun (psaltery), and a historical document spanning more than one hundred years. It is based on George Sawa's experience as an artist and performer, as well as the experience of his teachers and their teachers. For the latter, Dr Sawa used his recollections of what his teachers said about their teachers, as well as recordings made by European companies that recorded their works on 78 rpm at the beginning of the 20th century. .