Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 925-1350: Edited by Terri DeYoung and Mary St. Germain

by Roger Allen

Essays in Arabic Literary Biography Vol. 1 (925-1350) is the first in a series of three works* that select 40 authors from a particular time period in Arabic literary history and invite scholars with specialized expertise to contribute biographical essays on them. The tenth through twelfth centuries was a period when Arab Islamic culture was experiencing dramatic growth and the entire Mediterranean area - extending from the Iberian Peninsula in the West to the banks of the Sind River in the East - came increasingly under its sway. The Islamic world had assimilated and consolidated a variety of influences from earlier times and other places, and now major intellectuals were turning their attention to producing new responses to the changed environment around them. These included innovations in the forms of literature, and engagement with new themes and ideas. The volume edited by Terri DeYoung and Mary St. Germain includes essays on Hispano-Arab authors as well as those writing in various capitals in the Arab East, those who wrote in other languages besides Arabic and those who were inspired to bring new literary approaches to religious sensibility, including members of the Shiite and Sufi communities alongside the more numerically dominant Sunnis. Every essay is self-contained, beginning with a list of the author's complete works (and translations of them), and then proceeding to chronicle the subject's life through a thorough examination of the principal works attributed to him. Each essay concludes with a selected bibliography of reference works.

371 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Roger Allen is an English scholar of Arabic literature. He has translated several Arabic works of literature into English, and has also written scholarly works on Arabic literature.

He was the first student at Oxford University to obtain a PhD degree in modern Arabic literature, which he did under the supervision of Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. His doctoral thesis was on Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s narrative Hadith Isa ibn Hisham (Isa Ibn Hisham’s Tale), and was later published as a book titled A Period of Time (1974, 1992).

At the request of Dr Gaber Asfour, the Director-General of the Supreme Council for Culture in Egypt, he later prepared an edition of the complete works of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (2002), and that of his father, Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi (2007).

In 1968, Allen moved from Bristol to Philadelphia to take up an academic position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he subsequently taught generations of students and Arabic scholars. He co-wrote an Arabic textbook with Adel Allouche, and was engaged with Arabic pedagogy throughout his career. After a 43-year career at UPenn, he retired in 2011, serving as chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations for the last six years.

As a translator, Allen has brought forth into English numerous works of contemporary Arabic literature, a list of which is given below. His translations of Naguib Mahfouz were instrumental in bringing the Egyptian writer to global attention, and Allen also played a critical role in the nomination process that eventually led to Mahfouz winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.

Roger Allen was the first director of the Huntsman Program at the University of Pennsylvania along with Jamshed Ghandi.