This working paper presents in full translation four texts of the Uzbek early 20th-century jadid reformist Abdurrauf Fitrat. Identifying educational reform as the main key to progress, he advocated for the emancipation and nationalisation of the Chaghatay/Uzbek language as a tool to educate the masses rather than to serve the interests of a…[Read more]

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This part…[Read more]

In this essay we reinterpret Camus’s novel The Plague in light of the urgency of history, that with Covid 19 pandemia made us face a real pestilence, thus allowing us to read reality and fiction as even. Our rereading relativizes the traditional allegoric interpretation of critics, while at the same time it widens its perspectives. It is in fact i…[Read more]

This article takes up the insurrection in Washington DC, and the paranoid politics of QAnon. It analyzes the gamification of paranoia across QAnon and related paranoid publics, tracking such gamification as a political-economic demand generated by neoliberalism. Taking seriously Sigmund Freud’s insight that delusional formations are attempts at…[Read more]

In classical manuals of Persian science of eloquence (balāgha), poetry translation (tarjama) is classified as a figure of speech along with other rhetorical devices, such as metaphor (istiʾāra), simile (tashbīh), and paronomasia (jinās). In this working paper, I have translated sections related to the rhetorical device tarjama from Tarjuman al-b…[Read more]

The translation of a short treatise on paranomasia, simile, and metonymy, by the foremost Persian-Turkish lexicographer of the 15th century, Lütfu’llāh el–Ḥalīmī. The text combines a rather dense and elliptic prose style with a remarkably lucid and clear-cut typology of seven types of tajnīs, seven types of tashbīh, and nine types of majāz, ofte…[Read more]

This essay/ article examines the provenance and the implications of a literary archive acquired by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Queen’s University Belfast and now fully catalogued by Brian Caraher and Emma Hegarty under the auspices of the British Academy. The state-of-the-art. fully annotated, online catalogue establishes the…[Read more]

A review article focused on phenomenological method and Christian thought in Marie-Aimée Manchon’s book _Alentour du verses: Petite phénoménologie des Mystère_ (Ad Solem, 2019).

This essay explores Dante Alighieri’s notion of projectile motion in relation to spiritual fulfillment in the first canto of Paradiso. The notion of impetus, or projectile motion, stood at the confluence of Greek philosophical rationality (mediated by a substantial Arabic corpus) and Christian thought, and it provides a unique window through…[Read more]

This chapter examines the plight of Fra’ Alberigo in light of philosophical questions of personal identity and embodiment. I argue that Fra’ Alberigo’s individuality and his punishment in Tolomea provides insight into Dante’s unique interpretation of the complex relationship between body and spirit and the issue of material continuity in the…[Read more]

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]

Pedagogical edition, transcription, and translation of the Aljamiado-Morisco Legend of the Damsel Carcayçiyona (Aragón, ca. 1587) found in MS J57 of the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, Madrid. A variant of the folktale of the “handless maiden,” this narrative details the conversion of the pagan princess Carcayçiyona to Islam and the trials t…[Read more]

Pedagogical edition, transcription, and translation of the Aljamiado-Morisco Legend of the Damsel Carcayçiyona (Aragón, ca. 1587) found in MS J57 of the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, CSIC, Madrid. A variant of the folktale of the “handless maiden,” this narrative details the conversion of the pagan princess Carcayçiyona to Islam and the trials t…[Read more]

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the second centennial of Ākhūndzade’s birth, three Azerbaijani texts in translation by the Molière of Azerbaijan. The texts—one poem, one letter, and one prose text—reflect Ākhūndzāde’s sharp, sometimes vitriolic, take on Rūmī ’s teaching (a dangerous, incomprehensible word jumble), most poetry and po…[Read more]

Omar Paton was one of the last Castilian Muslims to complete the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. He undertook the journey from his home city of Ávila (Castile), departing in 1491. Upon his return from the East, Paton depicted the experiences and emotions he lived during his long and dangerous pious expedition in his Memoir of the Journey to and…[Read more]