Library of Arabic Literature discussion
non-LAL Arabic Literature
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Wonderful! We can post a lot of interesting things here.
ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Wonderful! We can post a lot of interesting things here."Post away!
[not to put too many arbitrary limits on stuff, but it might be appropriate to keep stuff in this Folder to the same timeline as the LAL, i.e., more or less pre-20th century.]
Of course will post on topic or related to the texts.
This may be interesting, comparing Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delight with Al-Ma'arri's Vision of Heaven and Hell. Interactive : https://tuinderlusten-jheronimusbosch...
Read this earlier. Sharing: The Aurora through Medieval Arab Eyes
Intellectuals from the Medieval Islamic world were among the wisest and most knowledgeable of their time and some were extremely well-informed about the mysterious North, the land of the Northern Lights and the Polar Night.
In the year 922, the Iraqi dignitary and intellectual Ahmad Ibn Fadlán reached the land of the Eastern Bulghárs, near the Ural mountains. His famed account, which served, among other things, as the basis for the movie The 13th Warrior, contains descriptions of numerous wonders experienced by Ibn Fadlán himself. One of the most interesting of those is beyond a doubt a magnificent display of the Northern Lights, described by the Bulghárs as being the battling souls of supernatural spirits:
“The first night that we spent in [the land of the Bulghárs], before the light of the sun faded, [a full hour before sunset] I saw the horizon turn a brilliant shade of red and in the upper air there was a great noise and tumult. I raised my head and saw red mist like fire close to me. The tumult and noise issued from it and in the cloud were shapes of men and horses. These spectral men held lances and swords. I could see them clearly and distinguish them. Then suddenly another bank of mist appeared, just like the first, as one cavalry detachment falls upon another. Frightened, we began to pray and beseech god most humbly, while the locals laughed at us and were astonished at our behaviour. We watched the two armies charging. They clashed for a moment and then parted, and so it continued for an hour after nightfall. Then they vanished. We questionned the king on this subject. He claimed that his ancestors said: ´They are the believing and the unbelieving Jinn. They fight every evening and have not failed to do so every night since they were first created.´” (1).
Two centuries after Ibn Fadlán, the Andalusian intellectual Abú Hámid would reach the same land. Sadly, he didn’t get the chance to experience the Aurora but he nevertheless mentioned the fearful Polar Night that reigns supreme over ´The Sea of Darkness´:
“Beyond Wísú [East Karelia], there is a region known as Yúra, on the Sea of Darkness. The day there is very long in summer, so the merchants say that the sun does not set for the space of forty days. In winter, on the other hand, the nights are equally long. The merchants say that the Darkness is very close to this place, so that the people of Yúrá enter the Darkness provided with torches. In the Darkness there is a tree as big as a large village and on it perches an enormous creature, some say a bird.” (2).
To read the rest: http://www.bivrost.com/the-aurora-thr...
The Case for Cats in Islam and A Medieval Cat Poem from Cairohttps://dianabuja.wordpress.com/2012/...
For our Arabic readers, the Arabic Poetry Encyclopedia contains over 2 million verses. Now online athttps://poetry.tcaabudhabi.ae/
Oh you have got to read this!!!!Catalog of Selected Manuscripts from the Exhibition "Timbuktu: Scripts & Scholarship" (2008)
https://t.co/DLc9DWqlho https://t.co/Cq1jtODduQ
It's a great blog! Good to see manuscript getting digitized, and other info you don't normally get to see. Thanks, Reem.
Glad you liked them Jibran. I come across a lot of material that I will try to share here now that I know that there is interest.:)
Jibran are you on twitter?
ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Jibran are you on twitter?"I am not, unfortunately. I tried but couldn't get into it -_-
Really? That's odd. Try again. People from all around the world are on it.
Jibran wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Jibran are you on twitter?"I am not, unfortunately. I tried but couldn't get into it -_-"
The trick to Twitter is, first register, then find people you might find interesting by 'hooking' to some hashtag like #arablit.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23arablit
... and finally, make friends! You'll quickly get the hang of it by just seeing what others are twitting. You'll be amazed by the amount of interesting people there. [and I know that's hard to believe :)]
ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Really? That's odd. Try again. People from all around the world are on it."Yeah, my google searches bring up surprising number of very interesting twitter pages. Like Pablo says, I should perhaps give it another try. I also had an old FB account from the time when only university students with institutional emails were allowed on it. I drifted away from that as well when it was opened up to the public, esp during their graphic intensive, tiny-fontish, heavy-bandwidthed, colourful update that spins my head every time I navigate it. Perhaps I like simple things, like GR :D
I agree with Pablo. There is a very active, intelligent literary community on twitter. The only problem is that it becomes too distracting. You can even interact with authors if you like. You should definitely join!
Hayv Kahraman’s work grapples with the marginal spaces between Western and Middle Eastern culture, aesthetics and concepts of gender through her personal history as an Iraqi émigré to Europe and ultimately the US. Her paintings elegantly recall Japanese style calligraphy, Italian Renaissance painting and illuminated Arab manuscripts, though the subjects are deeply and psychologically brutal. Her work calls back to these Western and Middle Eastern art histories, but her aesthetic, as an immigrant, belongs to neither. To read more and check out the gallery: http://www.jackshainman.com/artists/h...
Currently listening to Cultural exchange in the languages and literatures of medieval Spain:http://www.medievalists.net/2016/04/2...
The influence of Kalila wa Dimna mentioned in lecture.
Came across something interesting. Has anyone readWhat is Islam
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/105...
When discussing the modern discipline of Islamic studies, Ahmed liked to complain that it was possible to earn a doctorate in this field from an Ivy League university without ever reading the Divan of Hafiz, the great 14th-century Persian poet. He describes that work in What Is Islam?as “the most widely-copied, widely-circulated, widely-read, widely-memorized, widely-recited, widely-invoked, and widely-proverbialized book of poetry in Islamic history.” This was not merely a work of belles lettres, but a book that exemplified “ideals of self-conception…in the largest part of the Islamic world for half-a-millennium.” How could a modern student of Islamic civilization formulate an understanding of this subject without taking stock of such a work, and especially its treatment of wine drinking, erotic love, and the hypocrisies of self-righteous moralists? If Hafiz’s work is not Islamic, then what is?
How Has Islamic Orthodoxy Changed Over Time?A new book by the late scholar Shahab Ahmed reveals the capaciousness, complexity, and contradictions of Islam.
http://www.thenation.com/article/cont...
An interesting read : Influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic Thought:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ara...
FYIISLAMICATE TEXTS INITIATIVE
(ITI)
Creating the digital infrastructure for
the study of the premodern Islamicate world
ABOUT ITI
The written heritage of the “Islamicate” cultures that stretch from modern Bengal to Spain is as vast as it is understudied and underrepresented in the digital humanities. The sheer volume and diversity of the surviving works produced in Persian and Arabic by denizens of these lands in the premodern period makes this body of texts ideal for computational forms of analysis. Efforts to utilize these new digital forms of analysis, however, have been stymied by the lack of a reliable corpus.
The Islamicate Texts Initiative (ITI) is a multi-institutional effort to construct the first machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts. Led by researchers at the Aga Khan University (AKU), Universität Leipzig (UL), and the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland (College Park) and an interdisciplinary advisory board of leading digital humanists and Islamic, Persian, and Arabic studies scholars, ITI aims to provide the essential textual infrastructure in Persian and Arabic for new forms of macro textual analysis and digital scholarship. In the process, ITI will enable new synergies between Digital Humanities and the inter-related Islamicate fields of Islamic, Persian, and Arabic Studies.
ITI IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
After completing pilot Persian and Arabic corpus projects over the course of 2015 (The KITAB (Knowledge, Information, and The Arabic Book) and Persian Digital Library (PDL) projects), ITI team members began drafting an implementation plan that would bring together these efforts in one united Islamicate textual corpus that would contain approximately 10,000 Islamicate texts (ca. 7,000 Arabic and 3,000 Persian texts). In this stage, we will (1) review and format existing open-access premodern Persian and Arabic text according to the CapiTainS canonical text services (CTS) standards; (2) enrich these texts with as much verified metadata as possible (using our data schema developed in the pilot stage); and (3) develop and execute a plan to achieve greater parity in the number, genre, and chronological coverage of both Persian and Arabic texts in the ITI corpus after reviewing results of first phase of the work plan.
Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. Funded by New York University Abu Dhabi, this mass digitization project aims to expose up to 15,000 volumes from NYU and partner institutions over a period of five years. NYU and the partner institutions are contributing all types of material—literature, business, science, and more—from their Arabic language collections. ACO will provide digital access to printed books drawn from rich Arabic collections of prominent libraries.Contributing Partners:
American University of Beirut
Columbia University
Cornell University
New York University
Princeton University
http://dlib.nyu.edu/aco/
With a starting 200 Arabic books digitized, the Arabic Collections Online project brings Arab academic literature available across borders and online, for the first time. A project funded by the New York University Abu Dhabi, the collection aims to expand to 15,000 volumes.
My pleasure LunaBel! :)
Stranded on the Island of Reason - Los Angeles Review of Bookshttps://lareviewofbooks.org/article/s...
Recipes from 13th-Century Syria | Library of Arabic Literaturehttp://www.libraryofarabicliterature....
This is where stuff about 1001 Nights, for instance, could be posted.