Middle Eastern Library Program

From the publisher’s introduction to ”EI Three Preview,” a booklet that arrived in my mail today:

“In the spring of 2007 the first instalment of EI3 will appear, exactly 100 years after the first printed articles of EI1 were presented to the international scholarly community. … The question of why EI3 starts so soon after the English version of the Second Edition was finished, is relevant here. The answer lies not in the moment EI2 was completed, but when it began.  This happened in the mid-1950s, the first volume appearing in 1960.  Since that time Western scholarship concerning the Islamic world has changed considerably.  The social sciences have entered the field and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) has sparked a fierce scholarly debate about Western (re)presentations of Islam and Muslim societies–to mention only two factors.”

The booklet consists of the articles for “Alf laila wa-laila”/”Arabian Nights” from each successive edition and it’s quite instructive to compare them side-by-side in this way.  For example, J. Oestrup’s 1913 article in EI1 includes sentences like:

“Like all Orientals the Arabs from the earliest times enjoyed imaginative stories.  But the intellectual horizon of the true Arabs being rather narrow, the material for these entertainments was borrowed mainly from elsewhere. … ”

In the EI2, E. Littmann’s 1960 article on the same subject included this unfortunate “observation” and much of the rest of Oestrup’s original article, while adding a discussion of the various genres of the stories.

The new article for the EI3 has been completely rewritten by U. Marzolph, the leading scholar of today on the subject, and offers a balanced survey of all the important aspects of the Arabian Nights.

Why not try this: select articles on the same subject from all three editions plus the Supplement, and compare their treatment and coverage of that subject over time?

A U.S. government compilation of interviews and other public statements issued by Usama bin Laden between 1994 and 2004 is now publicly available (pdf).

The texts were translated by the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (which has since been succeeded by the Open Source Center).

The 289-page collection has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News. See “Compilation of Usama Bin Laden Statements, 1994 – January 2004,” Foreign Broadcast Information Service, January 2004.

“Western books: the Middle East from the rise of Islam” is a collection of 10,000 microfiche containing over 2,500 pre-1921 Western-language titles, selected from the collections of the Harvard University library.  I did some spot checking and found that the collection is partially but by no means completely duplicated by titles available in Google Books.

Click here to view an online guide that you can browse or search to get an idea of the titles contained in this amazing resource.  The guide is indispensible because the individual titles are not traced in UT’s online library catalog. A complete description of the collection is also available.

For the next few months (until 31 March), the first volume of Encyclopaedia Islamica (containing articles from “A” to “Abu Hanifah”) is available in online format. During this period of trial access, you can get to the text by choosing “Encyclopedia of Islam” from the list of articles and databases on the library’s web page.

This volume of Encyclopaedia Islamica is the first of a projected 16-volume publication, consisting of an abridged and edited translation of the Persian Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif-i Buzurg-i Islāmī, one of the most comprehensive sources on Islam and the Muslim world. One unique feature of this work of reference lies in the attention it gives to Shiʿi Islam and its rich and diverse heritage, which makes it complementary to other encyclopaedias. In addition to providing entries on important themes, subjects and personages in Islam generally, it offers the western reader an opportunity to appreciate the various dimensions of Shiʿi Islam, the Persian contribution to Islamic civilisation, and the spiritual dimensions of the Islamic tradition.

I am pleased to announce that a trial of full-text Arabic e-books is available for faculty & students at UT to try. The database on trial, http://kotobarabia.eastview.com/, can be accessed through an on-campus computer (let me know if you have access problems & I’ll try to help out). Please have a look and let me know what you think of its offerings–one interesting category is “banned books”!

http://www.artstor.org/news/n-html/an-080605-wade.shtml

David Wade has partnered with ARTstor to distribute approximately 1,500 images of Islamic art in the Digital Library. These images illustrate patterns and design features found throughout the Islamic world, from the Middle East and Europe to Central and South Asia. The collection has been drawn from Wade’s photographic archive of over 4,000 images, which he has made available on his website, Pattern in Islamic Art. In addition to works photographed during his travels, Wade has supplemented the collection with drawings and diagrams produced for his various publications. These additional materials reflect Wade’s particular interest in symmetry and geometry. They illustrate common patterns, analyzing and breaking them down into their basic geometrical elements, thereby revealing the underlying principles of order and balance in Islamic art. Islamic artists and craftsmen employed these intricate patterns to adorn all types of surfaces, such as stone, brick, plaster, ceramic, glass, metal, wood, and textiles. The collection will contain examples of ornamentation from monumental architecture to the decorative arts.

Empire Online provides full text access to primary source documents from the British Empire (the Empire encompassed Africa, the Americas, Australia, Oceania, and South Asia).  The documents include travel accounts, the literature of Empire, photography and illustration, religious material, and records on issues of race and class in the colonial context.  The years of coverage are from 1492 until 2007.

Empire Online is available from the library’s “Databases & Indexes to Articles” page, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/titles.html?let=E

On Monday, June 23, we will be adding content from LibraryThing for Libraries into the Library Catalog.  In a nutshell, when you look at the full record for an item which is also a part of LibraryThing, you will see tags generated by LibraryThing users and “recommended books” in a box at the bottom of the full record.  This box is clearly labeled as content from LibraryThing.com.

LibraryThing (www.librarything.com) is a way for any individual to catalog their books.  You just add your book, tag it with whatever keywords come to mind, and add any ratings or reviews.  You are automatically connected with every other LibraryThing user who has that book and can see other reviews, other books they are reading, etc.  According to LibraryThing, there are 28 million books in LibraryThing.

LibraryThing for Libraries takes the content generated by LibraryThing users, cleans it up and makes it available for us to load into our catalog.  Patrons may find the tags useful as an additional discovery tool to subject headings and find the “recommended books” useful as a readers’ advisory (in other words, people who read Harry Potter also read the Golden Compass).

(re-posted from the Adabiyat list)

From: <whassan@uiuc.edu>
To: adabiyat@listhost.uchicago.edu
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:12:47 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [Adabiyat] CFP: Arabic Literature Now

Arabic Literature Now: Between Area Studies and the New Comparatism
A Special issue of Comparative Literature Studies
Edited by Amal Amireh and Waïl S. Hassan

Interest in Arabic literature in the United States has been sparked by Naguib Mahfouz’s winning of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, by multiculturalism, and by postcolonial studies, particularly Edward Said’s critical legacy. But in recent years, this interest has intensified because of the two Gulf wars, 9/11, and the on-going “War on terror.” Studying Arabic literature in the American academy and beyond cannot be abstracted from a context of Middle East politics and is taking place in the shadow of a “clash of civilization” ideology that posits the Arab and Muslim worlds as the dangerous other of western civilization.

As editors of a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies devoted to Arabic literature, we are seeking papers that take into account the complex contexts in which Arabic literature is being studied outside the Arab world at this historical juncture. Among the questions we are interested in are the following: What is the status of Arabic literary studies today? Has Arabic studies freed itself from the legacy of Orientalism? What is the impact of postcolonial theory on Arabic literary studies? What is the place of Arabic literature in the new articulations of comparative literature (from Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline to Haun Saussy’s Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization) and world literature (e.g. Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova)? What roles have postcolonial theory, feminist theory, translation theory, and reception theory played, or can play, in such articulations? What are the points of contact between Arabic literature and those of Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Australia? How do issues of gender, sexuality, war, nationalism, globalization, and human rights figure in Arabic literature today? What are the pedagogical implications and challenges of the current interest in Arabic literature and culture?

We invite articles that reflect on these and related questions in connection with Arabic-language texts written in the Arab world and elsewhere as well as texts by Arab writers of Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Spanish expression.

The issue is scheduled to appear in late 2010. Completed papers will need to be submitted no later than 30 January 2009.  500-word proposals and brief CV are due by 30 September 2008 to Amal Amireh aamireh@gmu.edu and Waïl S. Hassan whassan@uiuc.edu. Contributions should conform to CLS style, and be between 6000 and 10,000 words. See the CLS style guide at http://cl-studies.psu.edu/submissions.shtml for further information.

Waïl S. Hassan
Associate Professor
Program in Comparative and World Literature
Center for African Studies
Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Mailing address:
Program in Comparative and World Literature
3080 Foreign Languages Building
707 South Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801