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In the present book, Oliver Kahl offers, for the first time, a complete, annotated English translation of Ibn Juljul’s Ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ wa-l-ḥukamāʾ, one of the earliest Arabic texts of its kind. Ibn Juljul’s work, completed in the year 987 CE in Córdoba, is essentially a collection of biographical essays on ancient and medieval physicians, scientists and philosophers, interspersed with numerous anecdotes and containing a highly instructive, relatively long section on ‘Andalusian sages’. The work represents a most crucial source for our understanding of the evolution and the development of medicine and philosophy in Muslim Spain, drawing also on a number of otherwise unattested Latin-into-Arabic translations, and abounding moreover in burlesque literary embellishments.
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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.
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.
A Critical Edition of Saʿdeddīn Efendi’s (d. 1599) Selimname
Saʿdeddīn Efendi was a renowned Ottoman chief jurisconsult, influential statesman, eminent scholar, and prolific translator of Arabic and Persian works into Turkish. Prognostic Dreams, Otherworldly Saints, and Caliphal Ghosts comprises a critical edition, English translation, and a facsimile of his hagiographic work on controversial Ottoman sultan Selim I (“the Grim”). Saʿdeddīn’s Selimname consists of a preface and twelve anecdotes in which Selim I is portrayed as a divinely ordained sultan who delves into the realm of meditation, communicates with otherworldly saints and the “rightly guided” caliphs, and foretells the future.
Volume Editors: and
Chapters gathered in Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explore a wide range of Syriac hagiographical works, while following two complementary methodological approaches, i.e. literary and cultic, or formal and functional. Grouped into three main sections, these contributions reflect three interrelated ways in which we can read Syriac hagiography and further grasp its characteristics: “Texts as Literature” seeks to unfold the mechanisms of their literary composition; “Saints Textualized” offers a different perspective on the role played by hagiographical texts in the invention and/or maintenance of the cult of a particular saint or group of saints; “Beyond the Texts” presents cases in which the historical reality behind the nexus of hagiographical texts and veneration of saints can be observed in greater details.
The Thousand and One Nights does not fall into a scholarly canon or into the category of popular literature. It takes its place within a middle literature that circulated widely in medieval times. The Nights gradually entered world literature through the great novels of the day and through music, cinema and other art forms. Material inspired by the Nights has continued to emerge from many different countries, periods, disciplines and languages, and the scope of the Nights has continued to widen, making the collection a universal work from every point of view. The essays in this volume scrutinize the expanse of sources for this monumental work of Arabic literature and follow the trajectory of the Nights’ texts, the creative, scholarly commentaries, artistic encounters and relations to science.

Contributors: Ibrahim Akel, Rasoul Aliakbari, Daniel Behar, Aboubakr Chraïbi, Anne E. Duggan, William Granara, Rafika Hammoudi, Dominique Jullien, Abdelfattah Kilito, Magdalena Kubarek, Michael James Lundell, Ulrich Marzolph, Adam Mestyan, Eyüp Özveren, Marina Paino, Daniela Potenza, Arafat Abdur Razzaque, Ahmed Saidy, Johannes Thomann and Ilaria Vitali.
Editors / Translators: and
The Sea of Chronicles is an English translation of the ninth and tenth chapters of the historiographical work entitled Muḥīṭ al-tavārīkh by Muḥammad Amīn b. Mīrzā Muḥammad Zamān Bukhārī. The work is a valuable source in particular for the study of the late seventeenth-century Central Asian political, cultural and religious history.

The ninth chapter offers accounts of the Timurid, Abulkhayrid/Shaybanid and the first four Ashatrkhanid khans. The tenth chapter which is the most original and important chapter of the work presents a detailed account of the life and time of the last great Ashatkhanid ruler, Subḥān Qulī Khān (r. 1682–1702), revealing historical information essential for the study of the period and region.
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In The Arab Thieves, Peter Webb critically explores the classic tales of pre-Islamic Arabian outlaws in Arabic Literature. A group of Arabian camel-rustlers became celebrated figures in Muslim memories of pre-Islam, and much poetry ascribed to them and stories about their escapades grew into an outlaw tradition cited across Arabic literature. The ninth/fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī arranged biographies of ten outlaws into a chapter on ‘Arab Thieves’ in his wide-ranging history of the world before Muhammad. This volume presents the first critical edition of al-Maqrīzī’s text with a fully annotated English translation, alongside a detailed study that interrogates the outlaw lore to uncover the ways in which Arabic writers constructed outlaw identities and how al-Maqrīzī used the tales to communicate his vision of pre-Islam. Via an exhaustive survey of early Arabic sources about the outlaws and comparative readings with outlaw traditions in other world literatures, The Arab Thieves reveals how Arabic literature crafted lurid narratives about criminality and employed them to tell ancient Arab history.
The Turkish Novel and the Quest for Rationality is the first book to contextualize the Turkish novel with regard to the intellectual developments motivating the Turkish modernization project since the 18th century. The book provides a dialectical narrative for the emergence and development of the Turkish novel in order to highlight the genre’s critical role within the modernization project. In doing so, it also delineates the changing forms the novel assumes in the Turkish context from a platform for new literature to a manifestation of crisis in the face of totalizing rationality. Vis-a-vis modernization's engagement with rationality, The Turkish Novel and the Quest for Rationality reveals unexplored ways of conceptualizing the development of the genre in non-western contexts.
The present volume consists of translated anecdotes, on musicological and socio-cultural topics, from al-Iṣbahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī al-Kabīr (The Grand Book of Songs) with annotations and commentaries. It deals with musical rhythmic and melodic modes, technical terms and treatises; music instruments; composition techniques and processes; education and oral/written transmissions; vocal and instrumental performances and their aesthetics; solo and ensemble music; change and its inevitability; musical and textual improvisations; ṭarab and the acute emotions of joy or grief; medieval dances; social status. Though extracts from The Grand Book of Songs have been translated in European languages since 1816, this work presents a much larger and more comprehensive scope that will benefit musicologists, medievalist and Middle Eastern scholars as well as the general reader.