The Struggle over Arabisation in Medieval Arabic Christian Hagiography

The process of Arabisation and Islamisation that began shortly after the Muslim conquests in greater Syro-Palestine was still in full swing well after the ‘Abbāsid revolution. One of the neglected sources for unravelling the nuances of the cultural transformations that were taking place is the Christian hagiography of the period. This article argues that the contrast between Byzantine and Arab Christian hagiography from the late eighth through the ninth century provides an important window in the process of Arabisation and Islamisation in the Early Islamic period. In particular when the Byzantine account of the Twenty Martyrs of Mar Saba is compared to the Arabic account of the Martydom of Raw[hdot] al-Qurayshī, an Arab Christian, many of the significant features of the process of cultural change come to the fore.     

The English Translation of Arabic Puns in the Holy Quran

The pun is a tricky use of a word or phrase which has very different meanings that are closely interrelated, or of words with the same sound but different meanings. The Pun is a term with a dual meaning: “close” using obvious reference, and “far” using obscure reference. The hidden is usually meant. The close meaning is the sooner that comes to the listener’s mind. However, the speaker targets at the far one yet use the close to hide it. Translating the Quran text always raises several serious challenges in translation; these challenges are due to the different translations of puns and the misinterpretations between the intended meanings of a pun with their basic concepts, which could result in a certain amount of ambiguity. The study examines the Quranic corpus and its three versions of English translations. The study utilizes the typology of Delabastita?s for horizontal puns, Nida’s techniques of dynamic and formal equivalent and Newmark’s translation methods. This research attempts to investigate the semantic meaning of puns in the Quran translation and to define the translation techniques applied in translating the Quranic puns from Arabic into English.     

Nanjing Fascinated by Arabic Charms

On June 27, 2006, the Arabic Arts Festival （Nanjing leg）, jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of China, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, Jiangsu Provincial Culture Department and Nanjing Municipal Government, was launched in Nanjing Culture and Arts Center. The Arabic Arts Festival, the first of its kind jointly presented by 22 Arab nations in China, was a significant cultural event following the establishment of China-Arab Cooperation Forum in 2004. Major activities of the festival were presented in Beijing and as the only leg besides Beijing, Nanjing host several large-scale performances of Arabic singing and dancing arts.     

Adaptation of the Vancouver Index of Acculturation to Turkish and Arabic

Researching the acculturation processes of Syrian refugee children in Turkey is essential in terms of the mental health of both the host society and the migrant community. To this end, this study adapts to the Turkish and Arabic languages the Vancouver Index of Acculturation (VIA), which has been developed as a bidimensional instrument assessing acculturation in the 11–18 age group. Data were collected from 957 Syrian refugee children as part of the present study. Analyses showed that the two-dimensional structure each consisting of 10 items and named identification with the heritage culture and identification with the mainstream culture in the original version was supported by both the Turkish version and Arabic version. In conclusion, construct, convergent and discriminant validity as well as composite and Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient for the Turkish and Arabic forms of the 20-item VIA were determined to be sufficient.     

Non-Descender and All-Cap Arabic Writing

Contrary to the common belief of Arabic language users that the Arabic writing system has descenders as an inherent quality, some historical examples demonstrate that there were some artistic attempts to create non-descender, all-cap calligraphic systems, but they have never been studied as a phenomenon. This article draws attention to the existence of these examples, and analyses and classifies them according to their form.

The article begins with an analysis of the current Arabic writing system in terms of descenders, differentiating between artistic and functional writing, defining the need for harmonious balance in artistic writing, and demonstrating that descenders do disrupt the balance in Arabic writing, which could be considered as an ascender-system.

Then, historical examples of the non-descender system are introduced, categorised into four visual stages, and the descender handling for each stage is described; all-capital letter examples are then introduced.

Finally, some historical texts describing the beauty of calligraphy in this specific system of writing are analysed.

Abbreviations: MET: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org; LACMA: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, www.lacma.org; No. : Accession Number     

The Poet and Daughter of the Sea: Animated Ships in Andalusian Arabic Poetry

The Mediterranean Sea has stirred the imagination of Andalusian poets of the tenth and eleventh centuries. They wrote many poetic maritime scenes with lively details about sea and ships. Describing ships as camels ranging over the land is the central core-image of these scenes. The poets’ perspective of ships reveals their unique character and aspires to an aesthetic truth. This article will concern itself with some of the ships’ depictions in Andalusian Arabic poetry, and will illustrate, in particular, the ways by which poets refer to the ships’ external characteristics in order to represent them as animated beings in the sea vista. These epithets coincide with the medieval perception of animals that generally particularize their appearance by some qualitative characteristics. By means of some of animal epithets like physiological features, anatomical references, behavioural traits and feminine characters, poets succeeded in referring to ships as the most animated objects on the maritime scene.     

Longing for Granada in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetry

While a great many studies have dealt with medieval poetry, they have failed to discuss the poetry of longing (?anīn) as a separate genre, independent of other genres, especially elegies (in particular poems that lament the fate of cities) and poems of salvation and lament. Nor has any study so far undertaken a comparison between works of this genre by Muslim and by Jewish poets.

In this article, we shall discuss the growth of the poetry of longing in Muslim Spain and provide a number of examples of verses composed by Muslim and Jewish poets who were born in the cities of Andalusia and shared a common fate: many of them were persecuted for a variety of reasons and forced into a life of wandering and exile, and suffered banishment, imprisonment and torture. The ways they expressed their longing for their native cities possessed similarities but also differences, depending on the way each such poet perceived the land of the west and the scenes of his native city. The differences were particularly marked with respect to the way Jewish poets viewed the cities in which they had been born.     

Hispano‐Arabic studies in the new millennium: Spain

The present article offers a general view of the state of Arabic studies in Spanish public universities and research centres today, focussing mainly on postgraduate studies and the lines of research that are being developed. This is preceded by a summary of Arabism in Spain up to the twentieth century, as well as Arabic studies in universities in the 1960s compared to modern times.     

Louis IX in Medieval Arabic Sources: The Saint,the King,and the Sicilian Connection

This article examines the portrayal of Louis IX in medieval Arabic historiography to show the importance of cross-cultural Mediterranean interaction. It argues that the image of Louis was influenced by information originating from the Sicilian Hohenstaufen court and reports that Frederick II sent to Egypt. Arab historians connected to the courts of Frederick and Manfred disseminated a “Sicilian narrative” that shaped Louis's portrayal in Arabic historiography. This argument on the importance of cross-cultural transfer in understanding Arabic historiography is buttressed by reports about the King, the Pope, and the Emperor that are traced back to the entourage of prominent Muslims closely linked to Sicily. Moreover, it is argued that Arab authors were aware of Louis's proto-sanctity and pious reputation. This led to the infusion of medieval Arabic historiography with Western ideas about sacrosanctity. Finally, this research assesses how the portrayal of King Louis during his captivity was used in internal Muslim rivalries.