Exploring visual culture, design and politics in 1960s Beirut, this compelling interdisciplinary study examines a critical period in Lebanon's history.
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.
A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.
The Routledge Handbook of Arabic and Identity offers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of studies that relate the Arabic language in its entirety to identity. This handbook offers new trajectories in understanding language and identity more generally and Arabic and identity in particular. Split into three parts, covering ‘Identity and Variation’, ‘Identity and Politics’ and ‘Identity Globalisation and Diversity’, it is the first of its kind to offer such a perspective on identity, linking the social world to identity construction and including issues pertaining to our current political and social context, including Arabic in the diaspora, Arabic as a minority language, pidgin and creoles, Arabic in the global age, Arabic and new media, Arabic and political discourse. Scholars and students will find essential theories and methods that relate language to identity in this handbook. It is particularly of interest to scholars and students whose work is related to the Arab world, political science, modern political thought, Islam and social sciences including: general linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology, literature media studies and Islamic studies.
This volume deals with three themes: medieval Judaism, Arabic and Hebrew sociolinguistics, and Arabic Bible translation. Within Medieval Judaism, the Karaite Jews became a prosperous community under the banners of Islam. One of the most salient signs of the Karaite community's strength and internal cohesion was the extensive scientific contribution that it made to the fields of Biblical studies, Hebrew philology and philosophy. This book presents for the first time a critical edition of one of the works of the leading Karaite scholars in biblical exegeses and translation, Japheth ben Ali's Judaeo-Arabic translation of the "Book of Jeremiah", drawing on five medieval manuscripts. As the majority of Karaite works, including Bible manuscripts, are in Judaeo-Arabic, relatively few of them have been published. A number of the Karaite Bible manuscripts were written in Arabic script, resulting in their being neglected by scholars, despite the significance of these manuscripts to the history of medieval Judaism and Bible textual Studies. The author of this volume focuses on some of the most important issues in the field of sociolinguistics, namely language-contact, diglossia and the status of both Arabic and Hebrew in the medieval Jewish literary system. Equally important is the issue of the script-in-use (Hebrew or Arabic), which was a major subject of debate among the Rabbinates and the Karaites. Indeed, the language and the script used in these manuscripts will help us re-evaluate the established theories about the language-situation and literary systems in medieval Islamic and Jewish societies. The value of translating the Hebrew Bible into Arabic was unparalleled in medieval inter-religious scholarship. For Muslim scholars it was their only access to the Jewish Bible. The contribution of the Karaites to this field is enormous, and this work offers us a unique window into the Karaite theory of Biblical hermeneutics.
This comprehensive guide captures important trends in international relations (IR) pedagogy, paying particular attention to innovations in active learning and student engagement for the contemporary International Relations IR classroom.
Modern Arabic Sociolinguistics outlines and evaluates the major approaches and methods used in Arabic sociolinguistic research with respect to diglossia, codeswitching, language variation and attitudes and social identity. This book: outlines the main research findings in these core areas and relates them to a wide range of constructs, including social context, speech communities, prestige, power, language planning, gender and religion examines two emerging areas in Arabic sociolinguistic research, internet-mediated communication and heritage speakers, in relation to globalization, language dominance and interference and language loss and maintenance analyses the interplay between the various sociolinguistic aspects and examines the complex nature of the Arabic multidialectal, multinational, and multiethnic sociolinguistic situation. Based on the author’s recent fieldwork in several Arab countries this book is an essential resource for researchers and students of sociolinguistics, Arabic linguistics, and Arabic studies.
In this tense modern literary classic, acclaimed Palestinian author Sahar Khalifeh depicts the humiliation, bitter resignation and determined resistance of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. First published in 1976, Wild Thorns was the first Arab novel to offer a glimpse of everyday life under Israeli occupation. With uncompromising honesty, Khalifeh pleads elegantly for survival in the face of oppression.