The Explanation of the Religions (Bayān al-Adyān, 1091-2) is the first surviving Persian encyclopedia of comparative religions completed before the better-known Arabic-language the Book of Sects and Creeds (Kitāb al-Milāl wa al-Niḥal) by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm Aḥmad al-Shahrastānī from 1127-8. Beyond that, it is the earliest s…[Read more]

This essay considers the shortfalls of globalizing tendencies in nineteenth-century
literary studies with a focus on the Ottoman Turkish articulation of romanticism, i.e.,
hayaliyyun. Retrieving a historically and geographically hybrid genealogy of romanticism
through the Ottoman Turkish context, my discussion situates romantic imaginary…[Read more]

Centering on the poetry of Şeyh Galib (1757–1799), this article considers Ottoman imperial sovereignty in tandem with the discourse of mysticism that underpinned it. A key rhetorical device that enables the abstraction of the politics of empire in this discourse is the metaphor of the beloved sovereign. In the mystical writing of Galib, this me…[Read more]

Registered in Romantic depictions of imperial ruins is the endurance of empire in its immateriality: the imageries of empire’s ruination announce a future where imperial sovereignty maintains its presence spectrally. Using Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, and recruiting further insight from political theory, this essay argues that emp…[Read more]

Abstract | The final scene of Elia Suleiman’s film, It Must be Heaven (2019), ends with the actor/director sitting in an Arab bar in the city of Haifa, while the young crowd is dancing to “Arabyon Ana” (2000) by Lebanese singer Yuri Mrakadi. The Arabic music is a testimony to a Palestinian-Arab culture that resists erasure.

The songs in Sulei…[Read more]

Thomas à Kempis wrote that everyone desires peace but not the things that make for peace. Such a universal desire would be a hopeful sign, a foundation to build on as we contemplate (and, no doubt, debate) “the things that make for peace.” I offer as murder is to crow as a record of “perchings” in my contemplation of things that make for peace.…[Read more]

‘Modernism and Religion’ argues that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse is carried over into the modernist epiphany. Modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights, Christian…[Read more]

Line breaks are arguably the defining feature of poetry, in the absence of which a text becomes prose. Consequently, the translation of line breaks is a decisive issue for every poetry translator. Classical and modern literary theorists have argued that the potential for enjambment, which we understand as the effect that makes line breaks possible…[Read more]

In his writing, Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has often argued that an image or a set of images has the capability of condensing a number of attributes into a single picture, producing a misleading representation of what other people and cultures are like. As a result, multiple stories evolve into the one story that is told repeatedly and usually…[Read more]

the epic opposite is the tenth of a series of ten collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back, that is…[Read more]

solitude is another matter is the ninth of a series of ten collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back,…[Read more]

a composition of fractions is the eighth of a series of ten collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back,…[Read more]

The seventh of ten notebooks, drafted between June 2008 and March 2009. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here.

The sixth of ten notebooks, drafted between June 2007 and June 2008. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here. Many of the poems in part two are included in a dim sum of the day before, published by Ink…[Read more]

This working paper deals with the potentials of visual paronomasia and misreading in Persian poetics, and what they imply for textual criticism. In Arabic and Persian poetry, words gain an aesthetic value for their shape, the way they appear in writing. A visual parallelism between words defines a special kind of paronomasia known as script…[Read more]

The fifth of ten notebooks, drafted between April 2006 and June 2007. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here. While particular places are referenced in the text of some of the poems in this volume, only…[Read more]

The fourth of ten notebooks, drafted between February and August 2006. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here. This fourth volume differs from the first three in that all of the compositions are clearly…[Read more]

The third of a series of collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back, that is what I found myself doing…[Read more]