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Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful by Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1039)
In his Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful (Taḥsīn al-qabīḥ wa-taqbīḥ al-ḥasan) the prolific anthologist al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1037) offers a thematically arranged selection of Arabic poems and prose anecdotes or sayings with contrary or paradoxical purport, such as praise of miserliness, boredom, sickness, and death, or condemnation of generosity, intelligence, youth, and music. The book is both entertaining and informative, giving insight in premodern Arab and Islamic culture. It contains a new edition of the Arabic text and a complete English translation (the first in any language) with extensive annotation, preceded by an introduction with the necessary background of the genre.
Editor / Translator:
Nahj al-Balāghah, the celebrated compendium of orations, letters, and sayings of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) compiled by al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (d. 406/1016), is a masterpiece of Arabic literature and Islamic wisdom studied and memorized avidly and continually for over a thousand years. Showcasing ʿAlī’s life and travails in his own words, it also transcribes his profound reflections on piety and virtue, and on just and compassionate governance. Tahera Qutbuddin’s meticulously researched critical edition based on the earliest 5th/11th-century manuscripts, with a lucid, annotated facing-page translation, brings to the modern reader the power and beauty of this influential text, and confirms the aptness of Raḍī’s title, “The Way of Eloquence.”
[Exegesis of Sūrat al-Fatḥ by the scholar Muḥammad Abū al-Surūr al-Bakrī al-Ṣiddīqī (d. 1007H/1598 CE)]
هذا الكتاب عبارة عن تحقيق علمي لـ«تفسير سورة الفتح» للمفسّر محمّد أبي السرور البكريّ الصدّيقيّ، العلّامة الصوفيّ المصريّ البارز في القرن السادس عشر للميلاد. يشمل هذا الكتاب أيضًا السيرة الذاتيّة للمفسّر وأسرته، آل البكريّ الصدّيقيّ. يعتمد هذا الكتاب على مخطوطةٍ تُوجد النُّسخة الأَصليّة لها في المكتبة السُّلَيْمانيّة في إسطنبول. يمثّل هذا التفسير مدرسةً في الفكر الإسلاميّ لم يُكتَب عنها كثيرًا والتي اهتمّ بها في ذلك العصر العُلماء بتأييد سلاطين الخلافة العثمانيّة. يقدّم الكتاب النصّ العربيّ الأصليّ للمخطوطة مع تحقيق وتعليق، إضافةً إلى ملخّص باللغة الإنجليزيّة.


This is a scholarly edition of Muḥammad Abū al-Surūr al-Bakrī al-Ṣiddīqī’s Exegesis of Sūrat al-Fatḥ. Al-Ṣiddīqī was a prominent Sufi scholar in Ottoman Egypt in the 16th century. The edition includes a biography and family history of its author. The book is based on a unique manuscript found in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul and represents a lesser-explored philosophical school of thought within Islam, which enjoyed the patronage and endorsement of the Ottoman caliphate of the time. It presents the original Arabic text and a commentary in Arabic, as well as an English introduction.
Editor / Translator:
ʿAlī ibn Sahl Rabban aṭ-Ṭabarī's Indian Books, completed in the year 850 CE as an appendix to his medico-philosophical chef-d'œuvre "Paradise of Wisdom", belong to the most remarkable texts in Arabic scientific literature. The Indian Books offer a unique, interpretative summary of the main tenets of Ayurvedic medicine, as understood by Arabic-speaking scholars on the basis of now lost translations from Sanskrit. The present book centres around a critical edition and annotated translation of this crucial text, framed by a detailed introduction and extensive glossaries of terms. Ṭabarī's learned exposé of Ayurveda also throws a more nuanced light on the allegedly uncontested supremacy of Greek humoralism in 9th-century Arabic medicine.
Latin-German Pharmaceutical Glossaries in Hebrew Characters extant in Ms Leiden Universiteitsbibliotheek, Cod. Or. 4732/1 (SCAL 15), fols. 1a–17b
With A Glimpse into Medical Practice among Jews around 1500: Latin-German Pharmaceutical Glossaries in Hebrew Characters extant in Ms Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Cod. Or. 4732/1 (SCAL 15), fols. 1a–17b, Gerrit Bos and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer present an edition of two unique medieval lists of medico-botanical terms in Latin and German, written in Hebrew characters. Jewish physicians probably used these kinds of lists for the acquisition of pharmaceuticals they needed for the preparation of medicines. The edition with a total of 568 entries features transcriptions from the Hebrew, tables and indexes of the analysed terms in a regularized form, and a facsimile of the Leiden manuscript.

Many of the German plant names featuing in the edition are not listed in the otherwise monumental reference work Wörterbuch der deutschen Pflanzennamen (Dictionary of German Plant Names) by the German botanist Heinrich Marzell. This testifies to the value of these glossaries for further research. It is also useful to see which Latin forms were in current use at the time of creation of the edition.