Ulayya bint al-Mahdi (160-210/777-825), jüngere Schwester des Kalifen Harun ar-Raschid und Arib (181-277/797-890), eine zunächst versklavte, später freigelassene Frau, waren bedeutende Vertreterinnen der Musik- und Dichtkunst am Hof der frühen Abbasiden. Ihre biographischen Erwähnungen im Kitab al-Agani von Abu l-Farag al-Isfahani – eine der wichigsten kulturhistorischen Quellen des zehnten Jahrhunderts – bilden die Grundlage für die vorliegenden Studie. In einer auf postkolonialen feministischen und literaturkritischen Ansätzen basierenden Lektüre untersucht die Autorin, warum und wie Frauen Eingang in die androzentrische Geschichtsschreibung des islamischen Mittelalters fanden und was mit ihren Lebensgeschichten in den Texten einer machtvollen Darstellung geschah. Sie lokalisiert die engen Verbindungen von Gender, sozialem Status und historiographischer Re-Präsentation, um muslimische Frauen früher Epochen als historische Akteurinnen anzuerkennen, deren bislang kaum bekannten Beiträge und spezifisches Wissen nicht nur ein integraler Bestandteil der islamischen Geschichte, sondern grundlegend für feministische Diskussionen der Gegenwart sind.

This study examines the revival of Sufism in the Arabic and Turkish novel during the second half of the 20th century. A picture is drawn where Sufism forms a main source of literary inspiration and becomes a mode to establish continuity with the past. Sufism is in this context not solely a passively transmitted cultural artifact; it quite the contrary becomes a major instrument to construct identity and meaning to a post-industrial society. In this respect, the act of writing becomes prayer of a sort; storytelling enables the Self to rest from the dreary political realities of authoritarian modernist ideologies. Thus, writing, in contrast to reason-driven, materialist, modernity becomes meaningful and enables the Self to connect with something beyond immanent reality; in one word, writing becomes “re-enchantment”.

This socio-literary study examines the relationship between processes of modernisation and reform, and new literary genres produced in Egypt of the second half of the 19th century. How did heterogenous modern literary forms emerge in this particular environment, and what were the underlying motivations of the new authors? Literature is regarded here as a specific sphere of knowledge and representation, facilitating in its modes of reflection novel individual and societal patterns of experience. If urbanity played a special role as constitutive element of narrative prose, ideas about new forms of public sphere and public opinion also played their role. The new means of text production, finally, attested to the recession of the auratic perception of a text.

This volume is the first comprehensive, across-media study of the work of the Lebanese film auteur Ghassan Salhab. His oeuvre emerges in a conceptual environment shaped by a crisis of representation. It is examined not only in its confrontation with the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) but also, and above all, in its aesthetic dimension. In doing so, the predominance of oral, poetic narration in the Arab-Islamic tradition as well as notions of melancholic expression and moods are considered as they emerge in periods of disorder provoked by war and subsequent reorientation.

Literary works are much more than mere illustrations of societal conditions. Literature is the setting in which society discusses itself. In this volume, international scholars of Literary Studies as well as specialists in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish Studies explore the dimensions and ways of how writers, from the classical period to modernity, tackle the values of their societies.

Interrelations of literature and art, word and image, are manifold. However, they have remained largely unexplored when it comes to literature and art in the Arab world. This book aims at introducing interarts studies to Middle Eastern studies and, at the same time, hopes to widen the horizon of interarts studies, which represents an interdisciplinary field of research in comparative literature. The book focuses on three case studies, examining the rapport of Arab writers, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920–1994), Abd al-Rahman Munif (1933–2004) and Etel Adnan (b. 1925), with art, be it as an art critic, an art lover, or an artist in his/her own right. It then sets out to read selected literary texts relationally, across the fields of literature and art, breaking with conventional ways of reading as well as seeing.

Through investigations of manuscripts, this book explores important aspects of the life of Badîʿ al-Zamân al-Hamadhânî’s Maqâmât. The broad concerns of the book are divided into three sections: authorship, texts, and contexts. Each chapter in this volume investigates hitherto unstudied textual materials related to al-Hamadhânî’s Maqâmât that adds to our understanding of the text, its history, and the literary culture that created it.