In September 2005 I started the blog Tabsir (“Insight”) with several other colleagues to provide information on the Middle East as a supplement to the news and to note items of interest. The blog has been in hibernation since late 2018 as I simply had no time to keep it going. I am reviving the blog for posting items time to time and hope to involve several other academic colleagues as well.
Geocolonialism and the War in Yemen
In April Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the situation in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. After more than three years of a lopsided war between a Western-supported Saudi/Emirati coalition and a rebel group in control of the capital Sanaa and most of the estimated 28 million Yemenis, the crisis is only getting worse.
Now coalition forces are attempting to wrest control of the vital port of Hodeidah from the Huthi forces, thinking that such a loss would force the Huthis to accept their terms for a total submission. Since this port supplies most of the food and aid entering Yemen, loss of the port would likely trigger a siege to literally starve the Huthi areas into submission. The Huthis know this and are not likely to give up the port without a bloodbath. Meanwhile several hundred thousand residents fear for their lives and many have already fled to areas with no resources whatsoever. The UN fears a renewed outbreak of cholera, which has already affected more than one million Yemenis. Negotiations continue by the UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths to stop the impending violence.
But in the midst of all this turmoil, one recent pundit argues that the eastern province of Marib, firmly in control of the Saudi/Emirati alliance, shows how one province succeeds in the midst of Yemen’s war. Not only is this sparsely populated and oil-rich area considered a success, it is said to be “thriving.” A football stadium with German turf and according to FIFA standards is being constructed and there is a new university for 5,000 students. The biblical land of the Queen of Sheba and famous Marib dam mentioned in the Quran (which was bombed at one point by the Saudis) is said to be “regaining a slice of its historical importance.”
So what is the lesson for Yemen’s future from this miracle in the desert? For journalist Adam Baron “Marib’s experience holds wider lessons for Yemen’s future: embracing decentralisation, empowering local actors, and focusing on ground-up stabilisation are all strands of the story that international and local players interested in bringing peace and stability to Yemen should note.” The main local actor here is a tribal sheikh named Sultan Arada, drawing on support of the conservative Islah movement. With outside money pouring in, he has morphed into the sultan of a fiefdom. The current “stability” is grounded not on local concerns but from the top-down flow of money from the neighboring international players, Saudis and Emiratis.
Yemen’s future is not in Marib, nor in building state-of-the-art FIFA stadiums in a country with a ravaged infrastructure, ongoing water crisis and sectarian violence fueled by the grueling three years of war. Marib is currently a colony of the Saudis, just as the Emiratis would like to take control of the island of Socotra and the port of Aden. The two wealthiest states of the now moribund GCC are carving out their zones of influence on the backs of people in the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula. Without the billions of dollars worth of weapons and strategic intelligence from the West, this war dividend could never have been realized.
Welcome to the latest, post-Cold War twist in the land once thought to be Holy. It is no longer direct Western intervention but a shared geocolonialism, in which the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is applauded and abetted by Western leaders. Muhammad bin Salman’s recent trip to the U.S. sold his snake-oil reform in exchange for buying more weapons and all that he assumes oil-drenched money can buy. Meanwhile the Saudi abysmal track record on human rights and the war crimes of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen are ignored. If Marib is the model for Yemen’s future, then the only democracy, for its flaws, in the Arabian Peninsula will be geocolonized into yet another make-believe kingdom or emirate.
David King on Islamic Astronomy
The historian of Islamic astronomy and mathematics, Dr. David King, recently gave a fascinating lecture at the Furqan Foundation in London.
Here is the Youtube video of the talk.
For details on King’s work, there is an informative website.
Arabic Dictionaries Online
In 1981, while visiting Egypt for a consulting assignment with USAID, I purchased the old Cairo edition of the massive dictionary TÄj al-‘ArÅ«s of Murtaá¸Ä al-ZabÄ«dÄ« (d. 1790). This was in about 10 large and heavy volumes. For it and a few other books I bought a cheap suitcase and paid the porter who carried it from the taxi to the airline desk a large baksheesh. When I arrived back in New York, as I was entering the door of our home, the suitcase burst open and TÄj al-‘ArÅ«s was spread on the floor.
That was some 35 years ago, but now I have pdf files of the entire modern Kuwaiti edition courtesy of archive.org. While a scholar of Arabic used to either buy the physical book (I purchased a set of LisÄn al-‘Arab in Baghdad in 1979) or be based near a major library (I had the advantage of the Oriental Room of the New York Public Library), now all it takes is a click of a mouse and many megabytes of space to build up a library of Arabic dictionaries.
For those who are looking for Arabic dictionaries available online or in pdf format, here is a list. Others are welcome to suggest sources they know.
Online Arabic Dictionaries
• The first place to go for classical Arabic is al-BÄḥith al-‘ArabÄ« (http://www.baheth.info/), which is searchable by word in Arabic for the following dictionaries:
LisÄn al-‘Arab of Ibn Manẓūr (d. 1311 CE); MaqÄyyis al-lugha of Aḥmad ibn FÄris (d. 1004) ; al-SiḥÄḥ fÄ« al-lugha of IsmÄ‘īl ibn ḤammÄd al-JawharÄ« (d. 1003); al-QÄmÅ«s al-muḥīṠof al-FÄ«rÅ«zÄbÄdÄ« (d. 1329); and, al-‘UbÄb al-zÄkhir of al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-á¹¢aghÄnÄ« (d. 1252).
• The Arabic website al-Ma‘ÄnÄ« (http://www.almaany.com/) is an excellent source for Arabic definitions of Arabic terms.
• For Arabic to English, the original text of Edward Lane’s (1863) An Arabic-English Lexicon is available as an online pdf at http://www.tyndalearchive.com/TABS/Lane/. It is also available as a download at archive.org and at http://www.studyquran.co.uk/LLhome.htm
Arabic Dictionaries in PDF
• Al-FayrÅ«zÄbÄdī’s al-QÄmÅ«s al-muḥīṠis at https://archive.org/details/QamusMuhit
• Ibn Manẓūr’s LisÄn al-‘Arab is at https://archive.org/details/lisan.al.arab
• Al-á¹¢aghÄnī’s al-Takmila wa-al-dhayl is at https://archive.org/details/TKMLH
• Al-ZabÄ«dī’s massive TÄj al-‘arÅ«s (Kuwaiti version) is at https://archive.org/details/taga07
• see also Dozy, R. (1881) Supplement aux Dictionnaires Arabes. Leiden Brill. at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6254645z
Arabic/English, English/Arabic, etc.
• Baretto, Joseph (1804) A Dictionary of the Persian and Arabic Languages. Calcutta : S. Greenway, India Gazette Press. Vol. 2 at https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofpers02barriala
• Johnson, Francis (1852) A Dictionary, Persian, Arabic and English. London: W.H. Allen. at https://archive.org/details/b22651366
• Penrice, John (1873) A Dictionary and Glossary of the Kor-ân. London: Henry S. King. at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_QYwq3ylpv6kC
• Richardson, John (1810) A Vocabulary, Persian, Arabic, and English; abridged from the quarto edition of Richardson’s dictionary is at https://archive.org/details/vocabularypersia00richiala
• Steingass, Francis Joseph (1882) English-Arabic Dictionary: For the Use of Both Travellers and Students. London: W. H. Allen and Co. at https://archive.org/details/englisharabicdi00steigoog
• Steingass, Francis Joseph (1884) The Student’s Arabic-English Dictionary. London: Crosby, Lockwood and Son at https://archive.org/details/cu31924026873194
• Wehr, Hans (1960) Arabic-English Dictionary is available as a pdf at https://archive.org/details/Arabic-englsihDictionary
• Wortabet, William Thomson Arabic-English Dictionary is available as a pdf at https://archive.org/details/WortabetsArabic-englishDictionary
Arabic Dialect Dictionaries
• Ben Sedirah, Belkassam (1910) Petit dictionnaire arabe-français de la langue parlée en Algérie, contenant les mots et les formules employés dans les lettres et les actes judiciaires. Alger: Jourdan. at https://archive.org/details/petitdictionnair00abaluoft
• Biberstein-Kazimirski, Albert de (1860) Dictionnaire arabe-francais contenant toutes les racines de la langue arabe : leurs dérivés, tant dans l’idiome vulgaire que dans l’idiome littéral, ainsi que les dialectes d’Alger et de Maroc. Paris: Maisonneuve: Éditeurs pour les langues orientales, Européenes et comparées. at https://archive.org/details/dictionnairearab02bibeuoft
• Cameron, Donald Andreas (1892) An Arabic-English vocabulary for the use of English students of modern Egyptian Arabic. London: Bernard Quaritch. at https://archive.org/details/arabicenglishvoc00cameuoft
• Crow, Francis Edward (1901) Arabic manual. A colloquial handbook in the Syrian dialect, for the use of visitors to Syria and Palestine, containing a simplified grammar, a comprehensive English and Arabic vocabulary and dialogues. London: Luzac and co.
at https://archive.org/details/arabicmanualcoll00crow
• Hinds, Martin and el-Said Badawi (1986) A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic is available as a pdf at https://archive.org/details/ADictionaryOfEgyptianArabicArabicEnglish
• Landberg, Carlo (1901) Études sur les dialectes de l’Arabie méridionale. I: Ḥaá¸ramoÅ«t. Leiden: Brill. at https://archive.org/details/tudessurlesdial00unkngoog
• Landberg, Carlo (1909) Études sur les dialectes de l’Arabie méridionale. Datina. Leiden: Brill. https://archive.org/details/p2tudessurlesdia02landuoft
• Nishio, Tetsuo (1992) A Basic Vocabulary of the Bedouin Arabic Dialect of the JbÄli tribe (Southern Sinai). Tokyo : Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa. https://archive.org/details/basicvocabularyo00nish
• Rhodokanakis, Nikolaus (1908) Der vulgärarabische Dialekt im Dofâr (Zfâr). Vienna: Alfred Hölder. at https://archive.org/details/dervulgrarabis10rhod
Arabic Thesaurus
• Ibn Qutayba Adab al-kÄtib. Beirut: Mu’assisa al-RisÄla. at https://archive.org/details/tanmawia.com_15789
• Ibn SÄ«da, Al-MukhaṣṣÄá¹£. Beirut: DÄr al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya. at https://archive.org/details/mukhsasmukhsas
• KhuwÄrizmÄ«, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad (1866-1903) Liber Mafâtîh al-olûm: explicans vocabula technica scientiarum tam Arabum quam peregrinorum. Edited by G. Voten. Lugduni Batavorum: Brill. [in Arabic] at https://archive.org/details/b29006247
Specialized Arabic Terms
•Al-DamÄ«rÄ« (1908) Ad-Damîrî’s Ḥayât al-ḤayawÄn (A Zoological Lexicon). Translated by A. S. G. Jayakar. London: Luzac. Vol. 2, Part 1. at https://archive.org/details/addamrsaytalaya00damgoog
• Al-DamÄ«rÄ« ḤayÄt al-ḥayawÄn ms. at https://al-mostafa.info/data/arabic/depot/gap.php?file=m013645.pdf
• Fleury, V and Muammad Souhlal (1915) L’arabe pratique et commercial à l’usage des établissements d’instruction et des commerçants, lecture, écriture, grammaire, syntaxe, exercices d’application, conversation, lexiques, dictionnaire commercial. Alger: Jourdan.
at https://archive.org/details/larabepratiqueet00fleuuoft
• Dozy, Renard (1845) Dictionnaire Détaillé des noms des vêtements chez les Arabes. Amsterdam: Jean Müller. at https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedt00dozyuoft
• Fonahn, A. (1922) Arabic and Latin Anatomical Terminology. Kristiania: Jacob Dybwad. at https://archive.org/details/arabiclatinanat00fona
• IbrÄhÄ«m, Rajab (2002) al-Mu‘jam al-‘ArabÄ« li-asmÄ’ al-malÄbis. Cairo: DÄr al-MufÄq. at https://archive.org/stream/FP56847/56847#page/n0/mode/2up
• Mu‘jam muá¹£á¹laḥÄt al-‘ulÅ«m al-shar‘īyya. Saudi Arabia, 2017. Vol. 1 at https://archive.org/details/momsolshPDF
• Siddiqi, Abdussattar (1919) Studien über die Persischen Fremdwörter im klassischen Arabisch. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck. at https://archive.org/details/studienberdiep00sidd
• YÄqÅ«t, Mu‘jam al-buldan. at https://www.4shared.com
Exploring Arabic Texts:
There are many more sources available at archive.org if you put “Arabic language†in the search bar. Important sources for links to pdfs of Arabic language texts include the following:
• Arabic Collections Online (NYU Aby Dhabi): http://dlib.nyu.edu/aco/
• 4shared.com: https://www.4shared.com/
• Al-Madinah Inernational University Digital Library: http://dlibrary.mediu.edu
• al-Maktaba al-ShÄmila: http://shamela.ws/
• Mawqa‘ al-á¸Ä«yÄ‘: http://www.aldhiaa.com/arabic/book.php?sort=all
• al-Mostafa: https://www.al-mostafa.com/
• Waqfeya: http://waqfeya.com/category.php?cid=6
• See the list of sites at https://digitalorientalist.com/2015/01/16/full-text-online-arabic-sources-a-preliminary-list/
Cholera, Cluster Bombs and Summer Vacation
This post can be read at MENA Tidningen.
al-Juwayni on Islamic Law
David R. Vishanoff has recently published online A Critical Edition, English Translation, and New Commentary on ImÄm al‑Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī’s Leaflet on the Sources of Law
(KitÄb al‑WaraqÄt fÄ« uṣūl al‑fiqh).
“For an English-speaking student who wishes to understand the theory behind Islamic law, the first step is to read an introductory legal theory text such as Muslim students traditionally read and memorize in the Arab world. The KitÄb al-WaraqÄt fÄ« uṣūl al-fiqh, or Leaflet on the Sources of Law, attributed to the KhurÄsÄnÄ« ShÄfiÊ¿Ä« AshÊ¿arÄ« scholar ImÄm al-Ḥaramayn AbÅ« al-MaÊ¿ÄlÄ« Ê¿Abd al-Malik ibn AbÄ« Muḥammad al-JuwaynÄ« (d. 1085), is a good choice, for two reasons.
First, it is brief, yet covers all the main concepts, terms, and principles of the classical Islamic discipline of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), which explains the scriptural “roots†or “sources†(uṣūl) from which the detailed rules of Islamic law (fiqh) derive their authority, and the interpretive process that connects each rule to its sources. It defines what law and legal theory are, then explains how to analyze the language of Muslim scriptures (how to translate commands into laws, and various ways to resolve contradictions between texts), and then goes on to describe several other tools that one can use when scripture does not provide a clear rule (e.g. textual criticism and reasoning by analogy). It concludes with a description of who is qualified to use legal theory, and how certain they can be about the conclusions they reach.
Second, it is representative of mainstream SunnÄ« views that dominated legal thought in al-Juwaynī’s day and that are still widely accepted today…”
click here to go to the website.
Pierre Cachia 1921-2017
Pierre Cachia 1921-2017
Pierre Cachia slipped away peacefully on 1st April, a few days shy of his 96
th birthday, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. With the passing
of this key architect of Arabic studies who made modern Arabic literature a
serious academic subject in both the UK and US, those of us who have
studied and worked with him will not only mourn the loss of a friend,
teacher, and mentor, but also the irretrievable era in which a first
generation of post-War American and European Arabists and Orientalists made
tremendous strides in fashioning academic studies of modern Arabic
literature into what it is today: grounded in native fluency of the Arabic
language, informed by real experiences lived in close proximity with Arab
writers and storytellers, and took seriously the concerns and priorities of
Arab scholars, critics and intellectuals.
Born in Faiyum (Fayyum) on 30 April 1921 to Maltese father and Russian
mother, Pierre grew up in Upper Egypt. He successively attended French,
Italian, Egyptian and American schools before he enrolled at the American
University in Cairo, where he earned his BA degree. After war service with
the British 8th Army in North Africa, Italy and Austria, he moved to
Scotland. He received his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh in 1951
and joined its Faculty. He was appointed Professor of Arabic Language and
Literature at Columbia University in 1975 and would remain there until he
retired in 1991. However, he continued to teach and write, and in fact he
published many of his important works after retirement. He wrote scholarly
articles and books on a variety of subjects, translated classical and
modern literary and critical works, and published other scholars in *Journal
of Arabic Literature*, which he co-founded and on whose editorial board he
served for many years.
Continue reading Pierre Cachia 1921-2017
Sadiq al-Azm (1934-2016)
The loss of a true intellectual. May he rest in peace as the world he loved continues to spiral in conflict.