Adam Talib
American University in Cairo, Arab and Islamic Civilizations, Faculty Member
- Arabic Literature, Persian Literature, Ottoman Literature, Classical Arabic Poetry, Arabic Poetry, Translation Studies, and 31 moreModern Arabic Literature, English Literature, African American Literature, History of Pre-Islamic Arabia, Comparative Literature, Semitic Philology, South Arabian Culture, Gender Studies, Islamic Studies, Ottoman History, Sufism, Middle East Studies, Early Modern History, Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Islamic History, Medieval Islam, Middle East History, Medieval Islamic History, Mamluk Studies, Mamluk History, Cairo, Mamluk Cairo, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Cultural History, Arabic Language and Linguistics, Near Eastern Studies, Literary translation, Women's Studies, and Rape Cultureedit
- See here: http://www.adamtalib.comedit
The qaṣīdah and the qiṭʿah are well known to scholars and students of classical Arabic literature, but the maqṭūʿ, a form of classical Arabic poetry that emerged in the thirteenth century and soon became ubiquitous, is as obscure today as... more
The qaṣīdah and the qiṭʿah are well known to scholars and students of classical Arabic literature, but the maqṭūʿ, a form of classical Arabic poetry that emerged in the thirteenth century and soon became ubiquitous, is as obscure today as it was once popular. These poems circulated across the Arabo-Islamic world for some six centuries in speech, letters, inscriptions, and, above all, anthologies. How Do You Say “Epigram” in Arabic? is the first study of this highly popular and adaptable genre of Arabic poetry. This literary-historical lacuna is an occasion for us to consider how categories of world literature are applied to the classical Arabic literary tradition and to confront larger questions of generic commensurability and translatability.
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This volume collects eighteen essays on all facets of obscenity in classical and modern Arabic literature to celebrate the career of one of the most important living Arabists, the newly emeritus Laudian Professor of Arabic Geert Jan van... more
This volume collects eighteen essays on all facets of obscenity in classical and modern Arabic literature to celebrate the career of one of the most important living Arabists, the newly emeritus Laudian Professor of Arabic Geert Jan van Gelder, FBA. My own contribution to the volume is entitled "Caricature and obscenity in mujūn poetry and African-American women's hip-hop" In it, I compare modes of caricatured obscenity in classical Arabic mujūn poetry and African-American women's hip-hop to arrive at a compelling analysis, which suggests that both genres are ultimately oriented to be parodic and camp.
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Philology was more than a scholarly tool in the system of classical Arabo-Islamic writing; it was a cognitive model. This cognitive model was embodied by scholars and repeatedly performed by them in oral and written expression. It can be... more
Philology was more than a scholarly tool in the system of classical Arabo-Islamic writing; it was a cognitive model. This cognitive model was embodied by scholars and repeatedly performed by them in oral and written expression. It can be understood as a habitus. This article takes seriously pre-modern critiques of a revisionist darling al-Ṣafadī’s masterful commentary al-Ghayth al-musajjam fī sharḥ «Lāmiyyat al-ʿAjam» to consider the cognitive logic of this philological habitus and the ways in which modern scholarly agendas manipulate the chronological plane of Arabic literary history.
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Fiction and Truth both rely on tropes to fill in narrative gaps and skip over logical inconsistencies. In classical Arabic literature and in contemporary discourse, patriarchy (in all its manifestations) is a very useful trope indeed.... more
Fiction and Truth both rely on tropes to fill in narrative gaps and skip over logical inconsistencies. In classical Arabic literature and in contemporary discourse, patriarchy (in all its manifestations) is a very useful trope indeed. This article explores the ramifications of this trope in Abbasid-era mythical history and in scholarship and public perceptions of the Middle East today.
*** This article is a quasi-sequel to my article "Topoi and Topography in the Histories of al-Hira" ***
*** This article is a quasi-sequel to my article "Topoi and Topography in the Histories of al-Hira" ***
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Ibn Nubātah’s printed Dīwān is not a reliable source and has led to erroneous conclusions, among them the suggestion that we can perceive a difference in Ibn Nubātah’s treatment of his wife’s death and that of his concubine (jāriyah). In... more
Ibn Nubātah’s printed Dīwān is not a reliable source and has led to erroneous conclusions, among them the suggestion that we can perceive a difference in Ibn Nubātah’s treatment of his wife’s death and that of his concubine (jāriyah). In fact the poems on which these conclusions are based were written for the same woman. Equally problematic for scholarship is the existence of poems that occur in multiple versions. This article treats the case of Ibn Nubātah al-Miṣrī’s (686–768/1287–1366) parallel mourning and includes a critical edition of the texts under discussion based on more than ten manuscript copies of the poet’s Dīwān. In doing so, it proposes that Ibn Nubātah’s opportunistic mourning is an efficient metaphor for the status of polyontic poetry (poems which occur in different versions in different contexts) in scholarship. In most cases, the longest version of a poem is granted the status of poetic original while all other instances of a poem, including those that appear in anthologies, are often treated as subsidiary. I argue that if we can learn to tolerate multiple instances of mannered mourning, we ought to be able to read polyontic poems in parallel.
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There is a particular rhetorical facet of Arabic poetry that I argue is analogous to camp (see e.g. in my forthcoming article, ‘“Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me”: The frustrated narrative of an anonymous Ottoman-era Arabic love... more
There is a particular rhetorical facet of Arabic poetry that I argue is analogous to camp (see e.g. in my forthcoming article, ‘“Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me”: The frustrated narrative of an anonymous Ottoman-era Arabic love poem’). I propose to explore one such example of this tendency in poetic discourse—what I would describe as caricatured obscenity—in this article. I will attempt to compare this phenomenon in pre-modern Arabic mujūn poetry with a like mode in contemporary hip-hop by female rappers, some of whom have decided to redeploy masterfully the so-called vulgar discourse of ‘gangsta rap’ to exaggerate—and, I would argue, caricature—stereotypical depictions of hyper-masculinity (or machismo) in hip-hop culture.
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This article presents a critical edition and study of a 17th/18th-century poetry collection that had previously been mistaken for al-Ṯaʿālibī’s lost Kitāb al-Ġilmān. It provides a codicological analysis of Berlin MS Wetzstein II 1786 in... more
This article presents a critical edition and study of a 17th/18th-century poetry collection that had previously been mistaken for al-Ṯaʿālibī’s lost Kitāb al-Ġilmān. It provides a codicological analysis of Berlin MS Wetzstein II 1786 in which the poetry collection is contained and also explains and corrects long-held misconceptions regarding al-Ṯaʿālibī’s connection with the text. Finally, the article situates this poetry collection in the context of Mamluk- and Ottoman-era epigram anthologies and the critical apparatus to the edition demonstrates the key features of intertextuality and popularity that characterised these poetry collections.
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Review of a conference: Les Mots du désir, la langue de l'érotisme arabe et ses traduction (Paris, May 2016)
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Research Interests: Arabic Literature, Gender and Sexuality, Classical Arabic Poetry, Islamic History, Medieval Islamic History, and 4 moreMedieval Islamic and Turco-Iranian world, Mongol world empire, Seljuk, Mongol, post-Mongol, and Ottoman Anatolia (1200-1500), Comparative empire, frontier, and political culture, and Persian and Ottoman Turkish historical writing
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Gorgias Press is delighted to announce the launch of its new inter-disciplinary book series: The Modern Muslim World. The series will provide a platform for scholarly research on Islamic and Muslim thought, emerging from any geographic... more
Gorgias Press is delighted to announce the launch of its new inter-disciplinary book series: The Modern Muslim World. The series will provide a platform for scholarly research on Islamic and Muslim thought, emerging from any geographic area and dated to any period from the 17th century until the present day. Academics dealing with any aspect of the Muslim world, irrespective of their specialisations (history, theology, philosophy, anthropology, science, art, economics, etc.), are invited to contribute to the series.