Search results for ""author muhsin j. al-musawi""

Arabic Disclosures presents readers with a comparative analysis of Arabic postcolonial autobiographical writing. In Arabic Disclosures Muhsin J. al-Musawi investigates the genre of autobiography within the modern tradition of Arabic literary writing from the early 1920s to the present. Al-Musawi notes in the introduction that the purpose of this work is not to survey the entirety of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic but rather to apply a rigorously identified set of characteristics and approaches culled from a variety of theoretical studies of the genre to a particular set of autobiographical works in Arabic, selected for their different methodologies, varying historical contexts within which they were conceived and written, and the equally varied lives experienced by the authors involved. The book begins in the larger context of autobiographical space, where the theories of Bourdieu, Bachelard, Bakhtin, and Lefebvre are laid out, and then considers the multiple ways in which a postcolonial awareness of space has impacted the writings of many of the authors whose works are examined. Organized chronologically, al-Musawi begins with the earliest modern example of autobiographical work in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s book, translated into English as The Stream of Days. Al-Musawi studies some of the major pioneers in the development of modern Arabic thought and literary expression: Jurjī Zaydān, Mīkḫāˀīl Nuˁaymah, Aḥmad Amīn, Salāmah Mūsā, Sayyid Quṭb, and untranslated works by the prominent critic and scholar Ḥammādī Ṣammūd, the novelist ʿĀliah Mamdūḥ, and others. He also examines the autobiographies of a number of women, including Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī and Fadwā Ṭūqān, and fiction writers. The book draws a map of Arab thought and culture in its multiple engagements with other cultures and will be useful for scholars and students of comparative literature, Arabic studies, and Middle Eastern studies, intellectual thought, and history.

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In The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, Muhsin J. al-Musawi offers a groundbreaking study of literary heritage in the medieval and premodern Islamic period. Al-Musawi challenges the paradigm that considers the period from the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919 as an "Age of Decay" followed by an "Awakening" (al-nahdah). His sweeping synthesis debunks this view by carefully documenting a "republic of letters" in the Islamic Near East and South Asia that was vibrant and dynamic, one varying considerably from the generally accepted image of a centuries-long period of intellectual and literary stagnation. Al-Musawi argues that the massive cultural production of the period was not a random enterprise: instead, it arose due to an emerging and growing body of readers across Islamic lands who needed compendiums, lexicons, and commentaries to engage with scholars and writers. Scholars, too, developed their own networks to respond to each other and to their readers. Rather than addressing only the elite, this culture industry supported a common readership that enlarged the creative space and audience for prose and poetry in standard and colloquial Arabic. Works by craftsmen, artisans, and women appeared side by side with those by distinguished scholars and poets. Through careful exploration of these networks, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters makes use of relevant theoretical frameworks to situate this culture in the ongoing discussion of non-Islamic and European efforts. Thorough, theoretically rigorous, and nuanced, al-Musawi's book is an original contribution to a range of fields in Arabic and Islamic cultural history of the twelfth to eighteenth centuries.

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