Based on ethnographic research that is part of a larger project on the role of music and sound among migrant Moroccan men in Italy, this article focuses
on ‘L-ḥərraga’, a song that narrates the voyage and the experience of undocumented migration that ends with the tragic death of a young
Moroccan man crossing the Mediterranean. Through ‘L-ḥər…[Read more]

‘L-ʿalwa’, a sung poem whose text recounts the pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine in Morocco, is celebrated for its ability to convey images and emotions stirred up by the sacred journey. As part of the repertory of ʿaita—a genre of sung poetry from the Moroccan plains and plateaus traditionally performed by professional female singer-danc…[Read more]

In the wake of modernism studies’ global turn, this article considers the role of translation in fostering Iranian modernism. Focusing on the poetic translations of Bijan Elahi (1945-2010), one of Iran’s most significant poet-translators, we demonstrate how untranslatability becomes a point of departure for his experimental poetics. Elahi used pre…[Read more]

The paper deals with the so called griffin lamps. In the group of early Christian bronze lamps, a relatively large number of those with handles in the form of griffin-shaped protome have been preserved. Griffin lamps could be called the prototype of Late Antique production, owing to the manner in which stylistic and iconographic elements of the…[Read more]

Jewish relation to representational art is determined mostly by the Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them.” As science has observed, the…[Read more]

Between 1880 and 1924, an estimated half million Arab migrants left the Ottoman Empire to live and work in the Americas. Responding to new economic forces linking the Mediterranean and Atlantic capitalist economies to one another, Arab migrants entered the manufacturing industries of the settler societies they inhabited, including industrial…[Read more]

Walt Whitman, a world poet and the father of American free verse, has been received by diverse audiences from around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have studied Whitman’s interaction with social, political and literary movements of different countries. Despite his continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in this country has rem…[Read more]

Bijan Elahi, “Five Scenes from Icarus,” The Kenyon Review issue XLI (2019): 75-77.

Three Poems by Bijan Elahi in the 25th-anniversary edition of Two Lines:

“My Scent that Doesn’t Pass” [بوی من که نمیآید]
“Dupin Detects” [Dupin Detects]
“Song of the Moon Hanging over the Fields of Damascus”
[معلقه‌ی ماه روی دشت‌های دمشق ]

This chapter explores the legacy of the Iranian reformer and intellectual Abd al-Rahim Talibuf (1834-1911), as viewed from Daghestan, where he passed the last decades of his life. Talibuf’s eight books shaped the trajectory of subsequent Iranian intellectual history, and inspired the revolutionary constitutional movement. Talibuf’s example e…[Read more]

This paper studies the interest of the early Mughals in the Shahnameh and survey the range of illustrated manuscripts of this text produced in North India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although there were several older copies of the Shahnameh in the imperial library, and the emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) is said to have enjoyed…[Read more]

On counterfactual conditional clauses in Turkish

On morphological features in Turkish dialects of Northeast Turkey developed by analogy.

On an Ottoman grammar book from 1730 written by a French Jesuit. The article focuses on the question whether the Ottoman language material given in Latin script reveals information on the state of the ongoing morphophonological changes from early Ottoman to modern Turkish.

Article on Turkish orthography and its acquisiton

Qurʾān in Hebrew script produced for a students’ exercise in a seminar entitled “One Language, Many Scripts: Allographic Traditions Used for Writing Arabic” with reference to Johannes den Heijer, Andrea Schmidt and Tamara Pataridze (eds.), Scripts Beyond Borders: A Survey of Allographic Traditions in the Euro-Mediterranean World (Louvain: P…[Read more]

Undotted consonantal skeleton of the Quranic text produced for a students’ exercise. The display is constrained by the limitations of the font and by no means meant to reproduce scribal practices of early Qurʾān manuscripts! Full document available on request (gs50[at]soas.ac.uk).

Undotted consonantal skeleton of the Quranic text produced for a students’ exercise. The display is constrained by the limitations of the font and by no means meant to reproduce scribal practices of early Qurʾān manuscripts! Full document available on request (gs50[at]soas.ac.uk).

While the trope of the Islamic pilgrimage (ḥajj) is well known, the impact of the imagery and concept of travel on poetic production from the Islamic world, particularly in Persian, has not merited the same scrutiny. This chapter introduces one of the most important and yet least-studied Persian travel narratives to an interdisciplinary r…[Read more]