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This study of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity which have emerged in Arab societies in the last 40 years. During this period, autobiographical texts moved away from exemplary life narratives and toward more unorthodox techniques, such as erotic memoir writing, postmodernist self-fragmentation, cinematographic self-projection, and autobiographical blogosphere. The book argues that the Arabic autobiographical genre has evolved into a mobile, unrestricted category arming authors with narrative tools to articulate their selfhood. Reading works from such Arab nations as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon, the author connects the century's rapid political and ideological developments to increasing autobiographical experimentation in Arabic works. The scope of the study also forces a consideration of film and cyber forms of self-representation as new autobiographical sub-genres. The monograph offers a novel theoretical framework to these diverse modes of autobiographical cultural production and situates Arabic autobiographical discourse as an integral part of global identity-making cultural production.

This two-volume work represents a textual and contextual study of an early Arabic mirror for princes, the book known as Naṣīḥat al-mulūk (‘Counsel for Kings’) and attributed to the jurist and polymath Abū l-Ḥasan al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058). Following earlier studies, Wisdom and Politics in Tenth-Century Iran finds the Arabic mirror’s traditional ascription to al-Māwardī to be unlikely, and proposes instead an early tenth-century dating, and an eastern Iran setting. On this assumption, Wisdom and Politics interprets the mirror as a product of and reflection on the political culture and social and cultural conditions of the early Samanid period, portrayed through the critical argument and counsel of an author, referred to as Pseudo-Māwardī, likely to have resided in or near the city of Balkh. Pseudo-Māwardī’s perceptions and opinions reflect a largely Ḥanafite legal affiliation and strongly Muʿtazilite patterns of thought, of a kind associated with Abū l-Qāsim al-Kaʿbī al-Balkhī (d. 319/931), who furthered the ‘Baghdadi’ branch of Muʿtazilite theology in eastern Iran. Naṣīḥat al-mulūk also displays an affinity with the philosophical perspectives of Abū Zayd al-Balkhī (d. 322/934), and a thorough familiarity with Arabic literary culture. Volume I explores the context in which Naṣīḥat al-mulūk arose and to which it responds. Against an early tenth-century Samanid background, it studies Pseudo-Māwardī’s portrayal of kingship and governance, his arguments for the ruler’s optimal treatment of the various social groups, his references to the diversity of the region’s religious culture, his largely inclusive but also boundary-establishing assertions regarding religious beliefs and practices, the literary representations of heterodoxy that shaped his mentality and the resonance of his text in the setting that produced it.

This book provides a commentary on a neglected, but illuminating, area of postcolonial fiction, and makes a timely contribution to the understanding of wider Iraqi culture and society. It is designed to fill a gap in existing research in English on modern Arabic fiction, which has barely begun to address the work of Iraqi novelists. It first explores early pioneering works and then moves towards an outline of the vibrant Baghdad cultural scene during the 1940s and 1950s. Particular attention is paid to detailed textual analysis and the evaluation and comparison of the aesthetic and poetic qualities of the key works of the four writers who form the central subject of the book: ‘Abd al-Malik Nuri (1921-1998), Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman (1927-1990), Mahdi Isa al-Saqr (1927-2006) and Fu’ad al-Takarli (1927-2008), all of whom began to write in or around the pivotal decade of the 1950s. It is in these writers’ works that Iraqi fiction came of age and reached artistic maturity. The best of these writers’ works are among the most complex portrayals of the particularities of life in Iraq and the human condition in general to come out of the Arab world.

In memoirs, Arab writers have invoked solitude in moments of deep public involvement. Focusing on Taha Hussein, Sonallah Ibrahim, Assia Djebar, Latifa al-Zayyat, Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Edward Said, Haifa Zangana, and Radwa Ashour, this book reads a range of autobiographical forms, sources, and affinities with other literatures. Taking a comparative approach, the book shows the local sources of contemporary Arab autobiography, adaptations of a global genre, and cultural exchange. It also examines different aspects of the contemporary autobiography as it has evolved in the Arab world during the past half-century, focusing on the particularity of the genre written in different languages but pertaining to one overarching Arab culture. Drawing on memoirs, testimonies, autobiographical novels, poetic autobiography, journals, and diaries, it examines solitude and national struggles in contemporary Arab autobiography.

This book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of the literary history of the diverse production of contemporary Arabic literary texts and the reasons for their canonization. Based on the achievements of historical poetics, the book offers flexible, transparent, and unbiased tools for understanding these texts and their contexts. The aim is to enhance understanding of Arabic literature, throw light on areas of literary production that traditionally have been neglected, and stimulate others to take up the challenge of mapping out and exploring them. Three categories are used: The first is the investigation of the literary dynamics in synchronic cross-section ― potential inventories of canonized and non-canonized texts in both the standard language, fuṣḥā, and the vernacular, ‘āmmiyya, in three subsystems: texts for adults, children’s literature, and translated texts for adults and children. The internal and external interrelations and interactions between the various subsystems need to be studied if we wish to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of Arabic literature. The second category consists of the study of the historical outlines of the literary system’s diachronic development, that is, the interactions with other extra-literary systems that have determined the historical course of Arabic literature since the nineteenth century. The third category is intended to concentrate on the historical diachronic development that each genre underwent and on the relationships between the various genres. Since literary genres do not emerge in a vacuum, the issue of generic development cannot be confined to certain time spans; emphasis must be laid on the relationship between modern literature and classical and postclassical literature.

Mad love in the Arabic novel is an expression of the anxiety surrounding Arabic novel's search for form. It is symptomatic of nostalgia for the future that, in the absence of a viable trajectory in the Arab world's disappointment in the nation-state and modernisation, retreats into the past, arguing with it and looking in it for a resolution for the love triangle it creates for nation-state, modernity and tradition. This book uncovers the politics of nostalgia inherent in the Arabic novel, places these in the context of the birth of the Arabic novel in the intercultural networks of exchange between East and West, past and present, and traces them to the discourses on aesthetics, ethics and politics relevant to cultural and literary transformations of the Arabic speaking world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nostalgia and madness are the tropes through which the Arabic novel writes its own history as a story of grappling with and resisting the hegemony of both the state and tradition.

This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.

The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual examines the figure of the intellectual as prophet, national icon, and exile in contemporary Arabic literature and film. Staging a comparative dialogue with writers and critics such as Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Jurji Zaidan, and Mahmoud Darwish, Halabi focuses on new articulations of loss, displacement, and memory in works by Rabee Jaber, Elia Suleiman, Rawi Hage, Rashid al-Daif, and Seba al-Herz. She argues that the ambivalence and disillusionment with the role of the intellectual in contemporary representations operate as a productive reclaiming of the 'political' in an allegedly apolitical context. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual invites us to engage in a practice of criticism that is inherently retrospective and evaluative, putting into question the very foundation of what constitutes the modern Arab intellectual legacy. It suggests a methodology to understand the evolving relations between intellectuals and power; authors and texts and generates a politics of reading that locates the political in the hitherto uncharted contemporary era.