Seminars

Arabic Studies

  • Founded
    1977
  • Seminar Number
    559

The concerns of this seminar are interdisciplinary and humanistic. In addition to Arabic language and literature, the range of interests includes topics of significance for Islamic studies: religion, philosophy, science, law and history of the Muslim world, and modern social and cultural history. The seminar affords an opportunity to members and guest speakers to discuss research in progress. Because the members come from several disciplines, the substantive discussions draw upon various fields to expand the sources, help reformulate questions, and anticipate future publications.

Chair
Muhsin al-Musawi
ma2188@columbia.edu

Rapporteur
Ruwa Mohammed Alhayek
rma2152@columbia.edu

Meeting Schedule

09/22/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM
The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability
Anna Ziajka Stanton, The Pennsylvania State University
Abstract

Abstract

The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability (Fordham University Press, 2023) explores the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of Arabic literature’s emergence as world literature in the contemporary era. Through case studies of English translations of Arabic literary works published since the 19th century, the book refutes assumptions of Arabic literature’s essential untranslatability or incommensurability to Anglophone modes of aesthetic expression. It argues that a practice of embodied translation attuned to the affects of linguistic form, phonetics, grammar, and orthography—insofar as these function aesthetically within the Arabic text—is capable of transmitting the text’s literariness to an Anglophone audience by engaging readers’ own bodies with the irreducibly material aesthetics of the source language. In a global Anglophone literary field that has long disavowed both the literariness of Arabic literature and its capacity for worldliness, such a translation practice constitutes an ethical intervention into how Arabic literature circulates and is read today.
10/26/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM
Other Places, Upside-down Places: Narrating the Nakba (1948) from the Future
Ada Barbaro, Sapienza University of Rome
Abstract

Abstract

There are crucial moments and turning points resulting from the progression of events that indelibly mark the texture of any artistic expression. These turning points are usually situated in the crevices of personal and shared history and in the significant traumas and watersheds that inevitably mark a “before” and an “after”. In these crevices, trauma becomes a source of inspiration that interrupts the continuity of daily life, thus causing disruptions that are expressed in literary works by artists who are trauma survivors themselves. The Nakba (1948) is undoubtedly the trauma par excellence for Palestine, with far-reaching repercussions for the entire Arab world: It is a symbolic burden from which generations of writers continue to draw inspiration, today as yesterday. Whilst the Nakba continues to be a source of inspiration for Palestinian literature, it seems that this trauma has prevented Palestinian authors from looking to the future. In fact, futuristic visions that variously run through the texture of Arabic science fiction (al-khayal al-‘ilmi) do not seem to find proper fulfillment in Palestinian fiction. “It is a luxury, to which Palestinians haven’t felt they can afford to escape” –Basma Ghalayini maintains in her foreword to Palestine + 100. What is generated in literature when, faced with the impossibility of adapting to real life, other – and often upside-down – worlds are portrayed to contest reality? How should we classify literary works that, in turning the world upside-down or imagining different, futuristic ones, produce dystopic scenarios? The contribution aims to shed light on narrative routes that seek to answer these questions.
12/07/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM
Authority and Truth in Islamic Medicine
Elaine van Dalen, Columbia University
Abstract

Abstract

This paper is part of a broader study of medical hermeneutics in classical Arabic. It focuses on ideas on authorship and authority among physicians writing in Arabic between the 9th and 13th centuries AD. Particularly, the paper explores the tension between perceptions of Hippocrates as authoritative, and a medical hermeneutics aiming to establish and understand the realities of human health and disease. Arabic physician-commentators considered Hippocrates’ works as medically accurate and worthy of commentary, yet they regularly encountered a Hippocratic text that did not correspond to their understanding of the medical world. This posed an exegetical challenge, as commentators aimed to interpret the Hippocratic text in ways that acknowledged its medical value, yet were philological sound and grounded in contemporary standards of medical rational empiricism. To complicate their task further, commentators upheld strict conventions of politeness in the genre of the sharḥ, which denounced direct criticism of the author. This led them to devise interpretive strategies which allowed them to preserve both their standing as grammarians and the reputation of Hippocrates, while communicating their own medical understandings as physicians.
01/25/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM

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02/29/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM

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03/28/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM

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04/25/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:00 PM

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