News
Thursday, 18 March 2010

“Acts of Inheritance, Scenes of Mourning: Moments in the Oeuvre of the
Pakistani Artist, Sadequain”. Lecture by Professor Nauman
Naqvi. Time and location to follow. All welcome.
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
“Reconfiguring Islam and Modernity”. Lecture by Pofessor Samira
Haj. Time: 2:30 pm, room 017. All welcome.
Our warmest congratulations to Dr. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi on
this publication
16 November 2009
Warmest congratulations to Reza Pourjavady who was awarded honorable
mention by the Foundation for Iranian Studies for his Ph.D.
dissertation: "A Shi`i Theologian and Philosopher of Early Safavid
Iran: Najm al-Din Hajji Mahmud al-Nayrizi and His Writings" in the
competition for the Best Ph.D. Dissertation on a Topic of Iranian
Studies, 2009. The committee noted the dissertation's "high
scholarship, originality, clarity, and significant contribution to
Iranian Studies." More
information.
Congratulations to Professor Michelle Hartman who has won
second prize in the Banipal Translation Prize competition this year
(Best work translated from Arabic to English)

Roger Allen writes for the judges:
“Iman Humaydan Younes’s beautifully crafted narrative tells a familiar
story of life in a Lebanese village, and yet her narrative method and
the poetic style that she invokes to tell her story make of this work a
very different and unique portrait of a small societal unit that finds
itself in confrontation with the processes of change, reflected in a
clash of family values — most especially within the framework of gender
issues, the tensions involved in either remaining in the homeland or
travelling into exile abroad, and the relationship between present and
past. Michelle Hartman’s excellent translation provides the reader with
an English text that manages to mirror with both accuracy and
readability the narrative traits of the Arabic original.”
Francine Stock comments: “The translation never overstates, allowing
the reader to see how the woman’s life is circumscribed by political
and economic forces within her relationships with friends and family,
so her father’s adherence to the silkworms that feed on the mulberry
tree, for example, presages financial trouble. The detail here is all.”
Marilyn Booth commented that “her translation illuminates the
juxtaposition of artless narration and complex structures of memory,
social rootedness and its erosion, local and panoramic.” In his earlier
review of Wild Mulberries, also published in Banipal 33, Aamer Hussein
wrote: “Humaydan’s spare style, sensitively replicated in Michelle
Hartman’s translation, pays homage to a number of influences, both Arab
and European, through her prose, reflective, intelligent and pared down
to necessities, is ultimately very much her own.”
more
info
Adam Gacek: Arabic Manuscripts. A Vademecum for
Readers

Arranged alphabetically by subject and/or concept, the present handbook
has been conceived, for convenience sake and quick reference, as an aid
to students and researchers who are often puzzled or even sometimes
intimidated by the ‘mysterious’ world of Arabic manuscripts and the
technical language that goes with it. A companion volume to the
recently published The Arabic Manuscript Tradition (2001) and
its Supplement (2008), the vademecum comprises some 200
entries of varying lengths dealing with almost all aspects of Arabic
manuscript studies (codicology and palaeography). It is richly
illustrated with specimens from manuscripts and expertly executed
drawings. The main sequence is followed by a number of appendices
covering abbreviations, letterforms, sūrah-headings, major reference
works and a guide to the description of manuscripts, as well as charts
of major historical periods and dynasties.
Readership: All those interested in Arabic works in manuscript
form, the world of the scribe and scholar and their writing materials,
the make-up of codices and writing styles, transmission of texts, and
the arts of the book.
Malek Abisaab: Militant Women of a Fragile
Nation

In Militant Women of a Fragile Nation, Malek Abisaab takes a gendered
approach to labor conflicts, anticolonial struggles, and citizenship in
modern Lebanon. The author traces the conditions and experiences of
women workers at the French Tobacco Monopoly. Challenging the
prevailing assumptions about culturally inscribed roles for Middle
Eastern women, the book highlights traditions of public activism and
militancy among rural women that are in turn adapted to the spaces of
the factory. Women employed distinct strategies involving kinship,
sectarian, gender, and class ties to enhance their work conditions and
social benefits. Drawing on extensive ethnographic data, the author
convincingly argues that the condition of women can only be explained
by exploring the shifting relationship between culture, societal
arrangements, and economic settings. Abisaab’s richly detailed work
illuminates the impact of class and gender in the transformation of
modern Lebanon.
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