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« Origins », Transmission, and Metamorphoses of Adab literature
The notion of adab is at the very heart of the Islamicate cultures. Born in the crucible of the Arabic and Persian civilisations of the Late Antiquity period, nourished by Greek, Syriac and Indian influences, this polysemic notion could cover a variegated range of meanings, ranging from good behaviour, good manners, etiquette, proper knowledge of the rules, to belles-lettres, and finally, literature. This volume addresses the notion of adab through four perspectives, which correspond to the four parts into which it is divided: “Origins”; “Transmissions”; “Metamorphosis” of the “Origins” and finally “Origins” through the lens of modernity.
Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau
The present volume is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state. By means of poetry in Arabic script, the poet raises his voice against social ills and injustices troubling his community on Lamu. The book situates Mahmoud Mau’s oeuvre within transoceanic exchanges of thoughts so characteristic of the Swahili coast. It shows how Swahili Indian Ocean intellectual history inhabits an individual biography and writings. Moreover, it also portrays a unique African Muslim thinker and his poetry in the local language, which has so often been neglected as major site for critical discourse in Islamic Africa.
The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.
Author:
For over sixty years, Professor Fuat Sezgin meticulously documented the literary and scientific writings and achievements of Muslim scholars. His celebrated Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), the largest bio-bibliography for the Arabic literary tradition in general, and the history of science and technology in the Islamic world in particular, is still of utmost importance for the field.
In The Cooing of the Dove and the Cawing of the Crow Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych offers original translations, close readings, and new interpretations of selected poems from the two contrasting diwans of the blind Late ʿAbbāsid master-poet, Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 449 H./1057 C.E.). The first is Saqṭ al-Zand (Sparks of the Flint), the highly esteemed collection of qaṣīdah poetry of his youth, which he later disavowed. The second is Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam (Requiring What Is Not Required), the programmatic double-rhymed collection from his later period of withdrawal and seclusion. She argues that the contrasting ‘poetics of engagement’ and ‘poetics of disengagement’ of the two diwans reflect the transition from High Classical to Post Classical aesthetics.
Following the traces first left by The Arabic Literature of Africa volume 3A published in 2003, this widely enlarged and precisely updated edition of that pioneering work aims at providing a full-fledged and meticulously detailed reference book on the literature produced and circulated by the Muslim communities of the Horn of Africa. This entirely revised version of ALA3A makes use of the absolutely fresh data discovered and collected by the editors from 2013 to 2018 the framework of the ERC-funded project Islam in the Horn of Africa: A Comparative Literary Approach and draws a new comprehensive picture of the textual production of the Islamic scholars of the Horn of Africa since its first attestations until the present time.

Contributors
Sara Fani, Alessandro Gori, Adday Hernández, John M. Larsen, Irmeli Perho and Michele Petrone.
Author:
The book explores the political poetry recited by the Negev Bedouin from the late Ottoman period to the late twentieth century. By closely reading fifty poems Peled sheds light on the poets’ sentiments and worldviews. To get to the bottom of the issues that inspired their poetry, he weaves an interpretive web informed by the study of language, culture and history.
The poems reveal that the poets were perfectly aware of the workings of the power systems that took control of their lives and lifestyle. Their poetry indicates that they did not remain silent but practiced their art in the face of their hardships, observing the collapse of their world with a mixture of despair and inspiration, bitterness and wit.
K. al-Anwār al-bahiyya fī taʿrīf maqāmāt fuṣaḥāʾ al-bariyya is a work of adab attributed to the renowned littérateur and historian of literature Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī. The work consists of an introduction and four chapters. The first three chapters are concerned with knowledge (ʿilm): Chapter One discusses the merit and application of knowledge, Chapter Two the definition of knowledge and its true meaning, and Chapter Three the conditions of knowledge. The fourth chapter, which constitutes the bulk of the book, is concerned with occasions on which scholars and sages made speeches in the presence of rulers. It is divided into two parts: Part One presents pre-Islamic (jāhiliyya) speeches, incorporating Arab, Greek, Byzantine, Persian, and Indian traditions, and Part Two presents Islamic speeches. The work is introduced by an analytical study discussing the attribution of the work, its relation to the Maqāmāt genre, and the manuscripts used.
Editor:
The Qur’anic surahs and passages that are customarily taken to postdate Muhammad’s emigration to Medina occupy a key position in the formative period of Islam: they fundamentally shaped later convictions about Muhammad’s paradigmatic authority and universal missionary remit; they constitute an important basis for Islam’s development into a religion with a strong legal focus; and they demarcate the Qur’anic community from Judaism and Christianity. The volume exemplifies a rich array of approaches to the challenges posed by this part of the Qur’an, including its distinctive literary and doctrinal features, its relationship to other late antique traditions, and the question of oral composition.

Contributors are Karen Bauer, Saqib Hussain, Marianna Klar, Joseph E. Lowry, Angelika Neuwirth, Andrew J. O’Connor, Cecilia Palombo, Nora K. Schmid, Nicolai Sinai, Devin J. Stewart, Gabriel S. Reynolds, Neal Robinson and Holger Zellentin.
Kalīla wa-Dimna is one of the best-known texts of medieval Arabic literature and counts among the most illustrated works in the Islamic world. The extent of the corpus and its journey through the ages make it the ideal material for a reflection on the evolution of iconography in Islamic art. The studies gathered in this volume edited by Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Aïda El Khiari and Annie Vernay-Nouri, showcase a wide diversity of approaches that convincingly crosses textual investigation, codicology, iconographical study, and physico-chemical analyses. They explore new tracks, either by devoting themselves to the examination of unknown or rarely studied manuscripts, or by proposing innovative readings of this extremely rich work that is Kalīla wa-Dimna.

Kalīla wa-Dimna est l'un des textes les plus célèbres de la littérature arabe médiévale et compte parmi les œuvres les plus illustrées du monde islamique. L'étendue du corpus et son parcours à travers les âges en font un extraordinaire matériau pour mener une réflexion sur l’image dans l’histoire des arts islamiques. Les études rassemblées dans ce volume dirigé par Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Aïda El Khiari et Annie Vernay-Nouri, mettent en œuvre une grande diversité d'approches croisant investigation textuelle, codicologique, iconographique et analyses physico-chimiques. Elles explorent toutes des pistes nouvelles, soit en se consacrant à l'examen de manuscrits inédits ou très rarement étudiés, soit en proposant des lectures innovantes de cette œuvre extrêmement riche qu’est Kalīla wa-Dimna.

Contributors: Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, Nathalie Buisson, Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, Frantz Chaigne, Anna Contadini, Jean-Charles Coulon, Françoise Cuisance, Aïda El Khiari, Rajana Fatima Amalarajah, Béatrice Gruendler, Mika Natif, Bernard O’Kane, Hoa Perriguey, Yves Porter, Francis Richard, Valérie Saurel, Christine Van Ruymbeke, Annie Vernay-Nouri.

The volume is co-published by Brill, Leiden, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.