Imagining the Arabs

Imagining the Arabs

Author: Webb Peter Webb

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1474408281

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Who are the Arabs? When did people begin calling themselves Arabs? And what was the Arabs' role in the rise of Islam? Investigating these core questions about Arab identity and history by marshalling the widest array of Arabic sources employed hitherto, and by closely interpreting the evidence with theories of identity and ethnicity, Imagining the Arabs proposes new answers to the riddle of Arab origins and fundamental reinterpretations of early Islamic history. This book reveals that the time-honoured stereotypes which depict Arabs as ancient Arabian Bedouin are entirely misleading because the essence of Arab identity was in fact devised by Muslims during the first centuries of Islam. Arab identity emerged and evolved as groups imagined new notions of community to suit the radically changing circumstances of life in the early Caliphate. The idea of 'the Arab' was a device which Muslims utilised to articulate their communal identity, to negotiate post-Conquest power relations, and to explain the rise of Islam. Over Islam's first four centuries, political elites, genealogists, poetry collectors, historians and grammarians all participated in a vibrant process of imagining and re-imagining Arab identity and history, and the sum of their works established a powerful tradition that influences Middle Eastern communities to the present day.


The Excellence of the Arabs

The Excellence of the Arabs

Author: Ibn Qutaybah

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-09-04

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1479859761

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A spirited defense of Arab identity from a time of political unrest In ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad, the social prestige attached to claims of Arab identity had begun to decline. In The Excellence of the Arabs, the celebrated litterateur 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. By incorporating extensive excerpts from the poetic heritage—“the archive of the Arabs”—Ibn Qutaybah aims to demonstrate that poetry is itself sufficient evidence 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 does it mean to be Arab?


Imagining the Middle East

Imagining the Middle East

Author: Matthew F. Jacobs

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0807834882

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As its interests have become deeply tied to the Middle East, the United States has long sought to develop a usable understanding of the people, politics, and cultures of the region. In Imagining the Middle East, Matthew Jacobs illuminates how Ameri


Imagining the Arab Other

Imagining the Arab Other

Author: Tahar Labib

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2007-11-28

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0857713426

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In this innovative study, Professor Tahar Labibseeks to understand how the 'Other' is viewed in Arab culture, and vice versa. Imagining the Arab Other examines how Turks, Europeans, Christians and Iranians have been represented in the arts, opinions and cultures of the Arab world. Conversely, it also explores the intellectual representation of 'The Arab' in other cultures. It demonstrates the central role of the Catholic Church in ascribing to the Arab peoples a set of characteristics associated with the 'Other'. Labib places this survey in the context of theoretical debates, started by Edward Said's 'Orientalism', on the construction of 'Other'. With its diversity of perspectives, Imagining the Arab Other offers a new way of understanding identity and cultural difference in the Middle East, one which goes beyond the Orientalist/Occidentalist paradigm.


Arabs

Arabs

Author: Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 681

ISBN-13: 0300180284

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A riveting, comprehensive history of the Arab peoples and tribes that explores the role of language as a cultural touchstone This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia. Mackintosh-Smith reveals how linguistic developments--from pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of script, Muhammad's use of writing, and the later problems of printing Arabic--have helped and hindered the progress of Arab history, and investigates how, even in today's politically fractured post-Arab Spring environment, Arabic itself is still a source of unity and disunity.


Jews and Muslims in the Arab World

Jews and Muslims in the Arab World

Author: Jacob Lassner

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2007-05-30

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1461638097

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Jews and Muslims in the Arab World highlights the effects of historical memory on the Arab-Israel conflict, demonstrating that both Jews and Arabs use stories of distant pasts to create their identities and shape their politics. Whether real or imagined, the past filtered through their collective memories has had and will continue to have enormous influence on how Jews and Arabs perceive themselves and each other. Jews and Muslims in the Arab World describes the ways in which the past is absorbed, internalized, and then processed among Jews and Arabs. The book stresses the importance of historical imagination on the current evolving political cultures, but does not claim that explanations from an ancient past shed light on every aspect of contemporary events.


Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora

Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora

Author: Claire Chambers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-13

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1317654129

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Literary, cinematic and media representations of the disputed category of the ‘South Asian Muslim’ have undergone substantial change in the last few decades and particularly since the events of September 11, 2001. Here we find the first book-length critical analysis of these representations of Muslims from South Asia and its diaspora in literature, the media, culture and cinema. Contributors contextualize these depictions against the burgeoning post-9/11 artistic interest in Islam, and also against cultural responses to earlier crises on the subcontinent such as Partition (1947), the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war and secession of Bangladesh, the 1992 Ayodhya riots , the 2002 Gujarat genocide and the Kashmir conflict. Offering a comparative approach, the book explores connections between artists’ generic experimentalism and their interpretations of life as Muslims in South Asia and its diaspora, exploring literary and popular fiction, memoir, poetry, news media, and film. The collection highlights the diversity of representations of Muslims and the range of approaches to questions of Muslim religious and cultural identity, as well as secular discourse. Essays by leading scholars in the field highlight the significant role that literature, film, and other cultural products such as music can play in opening up space for complex reflections on Muslim identities and cultures, and how such imaginative cultural forms can enable us to rethink secularism and religion. Surveying a broad range of up-to-date writing and cultural production, this concise and pioneering critical analysis of representations of South Asian Muslims will be of interest to students and academics of a variety of subjects including Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Media Studies, Women’s Studies, Contemporary Politics, Migration History, Film studies, and Cultural Studies.


All Things Arabia

All Things Arabia

Author: Ileana Baird

Publisher: Arts and Archaeology of the Is

Published: 2020-12-11

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9789004435919

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Introduction: Complex legacies : materiality, memory, and myth in the Arabian Peninsula / Ileana Baird -- Frankincense and its Arabian burner / William Gerard Zimmerle -- The tyranny of the pearl : desire, oppression, and nostalgia in the Lower Gulf / Victoria Hightower -- Palm dates, power, and politics in pre-oil Kuwait / Eran Segal -- Circulating things, circulating stereotypes : representations of Arabia in eighteenth-century imagination / Ileana Baird -- "Who will change old lamps for new ones?" : Aladdin and his wonderful lamp in British and American children's entertainment / Jennie MacDonald -- Creative cartography : from the Arabian Desert to the garden of Allah / Holly Edwards -- Kinetic symbol : falconry as image vehicle in the United Arab Emirates / Yannis Hadjinicolaou -- Al-Sadu weaving : significance and circulation in the Arabian Gulf / Rana Al-Ogayyel and Ceyda Oskay -- Head coverings, Arab identity, and new materialism / Joseph Donica -- Written in silver : protective medallions from inner Oman / James Redman -- From cradle to grave : a life story in jewelry / Marie-Claire Bakker and Kara McKeown -- Cine-things : the revival of the Emirati past in Nojoom Alghanem's cinemascape / Chrysavgi Papagianni -- Afterword: All things collected / Hülya Yağcıoğlu.


Muslims in the Western Imagination

Muslims in the Western Imagination

Author: Sophia Rose Arjana

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-01-02

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0199324948

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A Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title Throughout history, Muslim men have been depicted as monsters. The portrayal of humans as monsters helps a society delineate who belongs and who, or what, is excluded. Even when symbolic, as in post-9/11 zombie films, Muslim monsters still function to define Muslims as non-human entities. These are not depictions of Muslim men as malevolent human characters, but rather as creatures that occupy the imagination -- non-humans that exhibit their wickedness outwardly on the skin. They populate medieval tales, Renaissance paintings, Shakespearean dramas, Gothic horror novels, and Hollywood films. Through an exhaustive survey of medieval, early modern, and contemporary literature, art, and cinema, Muslims in the Western Imagination examines the dehumanizing ways in which Muslim men have been constructed and represented as monsters, and the impact such representations have on perceptions of Muslims today. The study is the first to present a genealogy of these creatures, from the demons and giants of the Middle Ages to the hunchbacks with filed teeth that are featured in the 2007 film 300, arguing that constructions of Muslim monsters constitute a recurring theme, first formulated in medieval Christian thought. Sophia Rose Arjana shows how Muslim monsters are often related to Jewish monsters, and more broadly to Christian anti-Semitism and anxieties surrounding African and other foreign bodies, which involves both religious bigotry and fears surrounding bodily difference. Arjana argues persuasively that these dehumanizing constructions are deeply embedded in Western consciousness, existing today as internalized beliefs and practices that contribute to the culture of violence--both rhetorical and physical--against Muslims.


Imagining the Middle East

Imagining the Middle East

Author: Thierry Hentsch

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9781895431131

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Recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation, Imagining the Middle East examines how Western perceptions of the Middle East were formed and how they have been used as a rationalization for setting policies and determining actions.