This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, each genre elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form. The West, South, and East Asian genres each cultivated a met…[Read more]

Building on the multivalent meanings of the Arabo- Persian tarjama (‘to interpret’, ‘to translate’, ‘to narrate’), this essay argues for the relevance of Qur’ānic inimitability (i’jāz) to contemporary translation theory. I examine how the translation of Arabic rhetorical theory (‘ilm al-balāgha) into Persian inaugurated new trends within the study…[Read more]

While the cosmopolitan turn in political and literary theory encourages us to move beyond national frameworks, the Caucasus remains mired in ethno-national categories from the Soviet past. This essay examines how these categories are being mobilized in the service of a nominally cosmopolitan agenda in the contemporary memorialization of the writer…[Read more]

This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. The methodology of hard…[Read more]

Discusses 1) Kalām and the Syro-Arabic transmission of Galen’s medico-philosophical writings, in particular On the Usefulness of the Bodily Parts, and Nemesius of Emesa’s On the Nature of Man; 2) the reception of Abū Bakr al-Rāzī in 10th and 11th century Muʿtazilī thought; includes an edition and translation of two chapters of Abū Jaʿfar Muḥamma…[Read more]

This palaeographical guide grew out of a workshop («A Jewish Theologian’s Arabic Guide to State Administration: Mukhtaṣar fī ṣināʿat al-kitāba of Sahl b. al-Faḍl al-Tustarī»), organised by Dr. Luke Yarbrough at the NYU Abu Dhabi, 29-30 March 2017. Comments and corrections are welcome (g.schwarb@gmail.com).

This paper examines a 9th-century Arabic text of genethlialogical astrology, arguing that while it presents itself as heir to a Greek science deriving from India, it is also a testament to the pervasive role played by Sasanian intellectual culture in the 8th- to 10th-century Greek-Arabic translation movement. After a description of the…[Read more]

The article offers a bibliographical aperçu of Zaydī-Muʿtazilī Kalām-studies from the 15th through 18th centuries based on MS Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod. arab. 1294. This codex contains ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Naǧrī’s as yet unedited K. Mirqāt al-anẓār, a major kalām textbook which for almost three centuries constituted the b…[Read more]

The article offers a bibliographical aperçu of Zaydī-Muʿtazilī Kalām-studies from the 15th through 18th centuries based on MS Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod. arab. 1294. This codex contains ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Naǧrī’s as yet unedited K. Mirqāt al-anẓār, a major kalām textbook which for almost three centuries constituted the b…[Read more]

Surveys the Begriffsgeschichte of istiṭāʿah (< τὸ αὐτεξούσιον; τὸ ἐφ´ ἡμῖν) in antique and late antique philosophical and theological/patristic texts, the Syriac&Arabic reception history of the Nicomachean Ethics, Alexander of Aphrodisias's Maqāla fī l-istiṭāʿa, Nemesius of Emesa's K. Ṭabīʿat al-insān, and early Christian-Arabic literature, and…[Read more]

Discusses the Graeco-Syriac-Arabic transmission of Nemesius of Emesa’s Περὶ φύσεως ἀνθρώπου and related texts. The focus is on the notions of istiṭāʿah (τὸ αὐτεξούσιον; τὸ ἐφ´ ἡμῖν), irāda, qaṣd and ikhtiyār (προαίρεσις) in philosophical theories of action, the reception history of the Nicomachean Ethics, and their historical and conceptual relati…[Read more]

Surveys the Begriffsgeschichte of istiṭāʿah (< τὸ αὐτεξούσιον; τὸ ἐφ´ ἡμῖν) in antique and late antique philosophical and theological/patristic texts, the Syriac&Arabic reception history of the Nicomachean Ethics, Alexander of Aphrodisias's Maqāla fī l-istiṭāʿa, Nemesius of Emesa's K. Ṭabīʿat al-insān, and early Christian-Arabic literature, and…[Read more]