Category Archives: Literature

English and the Hijab in Cairo

Egypt, Gender and Sexuality, Literature

The ongoing political protests in Egypt have captured the imagination of people everywhere. A dictator is toppled and young people twitter their way into a people power not imaginable in the past. And now actual elections with more than 40 parties involved. The final results of the transition are yet to be felt, as many observers fear that there will be a conservative religious regime which will impose more restrictions on women, people’s expressive behavior and non-Muslim minorities. Egypt’s recent past is reflected in a post-Nasser conservative shift that Sadat originally encouraged and that eventually even Mubarak could not control. A visual portrayal of this can be seen in the pictures below of students graduating from the English Department of Cairo University in 1959, 1978 and 2004. Note the fashioning of a more conservative approach even to English literature over the past five decades.


Class of 1958


Class of 1978


Class of 2004

Wellcome Library Arabic Manuscripts Online

Calligraphy, Islamic History, Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Languages, Literature, Maps, Miniatures, Teaching Resources

Historic Arabic medical manuscripts go online

Researchers may now search and browse the Wellcome Library’s Arabic manuscripts using groundbreaking functionalities in a new online resource that brings together rich descriptive information and exceptionally detailed images.

Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library’s Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes’ commentaries on Avicenna’s medical poetry.

The Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Partnership (WAMCP) combines the efforts of the Wellcome Library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King’s College London Digital Humanities Department and is funded by JISC and the Wellcome Trust. It offers a rich digital manuscript library available online for free, which represents a significant resource for a wide range of researchers – including Arabic studies scholars, medical historians and manuscript conservators – to aid and enhance their work.

The resource is now available online. Continue reading Wellcome Library Arabic Manuscripts Online →

Digitalizing Yemeni Manuscripts

Islamic Texts, Languages, Literature, Poetry, Scholars, Yemen, Zaydi


Detail from the title page of MS Glaser 20, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

Given the current unrest and economic turmoil in Yemen, little thought is being given to Yemen’s vast cultural heritage. But there is hope, at least for preservation of manuscripts. The German Archaeological Institute in Sanaa has recently released a report in English and Arabic entitled Preserving Yemens’ Cultural Heritage: The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Project and written by Sabine Schmidtke and Jan Thiele. This is available for reading online or as a pdf download.

Gems of Arabic Literature #1: Wise Words

Books You Should Read, Islam in Europe, Literature, Orientalism, Travel


With the virtual flood of book digitalization online quite a few obscure books are now available online either at archive.org or through Google. I recently came across a gem: a translation of a high school Arabic text used in Aden by the British at the start of the 20th century. The title page is shown above. The text has translations into English of classical Arabic texts, including fables, anecdotes and travel accounts. The full text can be downloaded as a pdf here. I include an anecdote about Salah al-Din below. Continue reading Gems of Arabic Literature #1: Wise Words →

Orientalist Images #3: Oil as a Happy Thought

Literature, Orientalist Images



[With this post I continue a series dedicated to photographs in an “Orientalist” mode. In addition to Reading Orientalism (which is also the title of my last book), the creation of an imagined Orient is very much a pictorial voyeuristic voyage. In this series I focus on Western images of the Middle East and North Africa, both those that perpetuate stereotypes and those that chip away at the bias. Readers of the blog are welcome to send in images they have found and want to share.]

I continue with images from a 1933 edition of Richards Cyclopedia, with 24 volumes published in New York by J. A. Richards, Inc and edited by Ernest Hunter Wright and Mary Heritage Wright. This is an unusual encyclopedia, arranged by topics in a more or less arbitrary order but replete with images. One of the articles is called “The Mtchless Story-Teller” (vol 18, pp. 4433-4448) and retells several of the more famous tales from the Arabian Nights. In the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves the plot to learn the secret of the cave from Ali Baba unfolds with a slave girl named Morgiana pouring hot oil in the vats where a number of robbers were hiding. But the reader is assured in the caption that it was a “happy thought” to so dispense with the troublemakers. Ah, how Orientalist to assume this part of the world has oil to burn…

to be continued

Quoth the Raven (in Arabic)

Books You Should Read, Egypt, Literature


Edgar Allen Poe

New Release: Translation of the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe into Arabic

The complete works of the macabre and quintessentially American poet Edgar Allan Poe are now available in Arabic, giving more readers the chance to be chilled

Ahram Online, Thursday, June 2, 2011

Egypt’s National Center for Translation has published the complete works of the American poet, Edgar Allan Poe. It is translated into Arabic by Ghada Al-Halawani and reviewed by the novelist Edward El-Kharrat. This comes as a part of a poetry series supervised by Dr Rania Fathi. The first volume is entitled The Valley of Anxiety.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, the American poet, critic and one of the greatest short story writers is one of the leaders of American Romanticism. His fame came from his macabre stories and poems that sometimes reach into science fiction. He invented the Gothic horror novels or detective literature.

As life imitates art, his death is surrounded by mystery: at the young age of forty he was oddly found wearing clothes that were not his. The cause of his death remains a mystery – as well as the location of his grave. Continue reading Quoth the Raven (in Arabic) →

How appalling, Mr. Naipaul

Gender and Sexuality, Jordan, Literature, Palestine


Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of five award-winning books, including the forthcoming novel Birds of Paradise

From One Writer To Another: Shut Up, V.S. Naipaul

by Diana Abu-Jaber, NPR, June 3, 2011

Dear V.S. Naipaul:

You recently remarked, “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

I was sad to read this, to realize that you’re apparently unable to think beyond schoolyard rankings and peevish comparisons, that you’re incapable of recognizing grace and power from unexpected and unfamiliar places, such as a woman’s experience.

But what worries me more is your comment that that women write with “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world,” because, “inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”

Your use of the word “master,” is chilling. Continue reading How appalling, Mr. Naipaul →

Tabsir Redux: Tancred or the New Crusade

Books You Should Read, Literature, Orientalism


Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) was one of the most colorful and literary of British Prime Ministers in the latter half of the 19th century. Among his novels was one about a young conservative English lord named Tancred who made a spiritual quest to the “Holy Land.” This is his Tancred, of The New Crusade, originally published in 1877. In the novel Tancred is disillusioned with the lack of morality in British politics. Instead of taking his inherited place in high society, he chooses instead to go on a quest for spiritual meaning to the land where his religion began. Disraeli, as novelist, uses the Levant as a backdrop for his psychological portrait of young Tancred, but it is as much about the foibles of the British political scene as it is an “Orientalist” rendering of the cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The novel is full of intrigue, as adventure stories should be. It has not made canonization as a “great” work, but it is still worth a read (if you can find a copy). Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Tancred or the New Crusade →