This dissertation examines the poetic contribution of the extremely prolific and versatile 'Abbâsid poet, Ibn al-Rûmî (d. 283/896). Part I re-constructs the poet's life and times. It provides a glimpse into a rather fluid period of Arabic literary history, in which the boundary …
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After extensive study of the Ottoman Empire, one notes that the historiography focuses on events from the perspective of the sultan and/or the elites. This should come as no surprise as this has historically been the case. However, I felt an urge to know more about the lives and…
This dissertation explores exilic human rights literature as the literary genre encompassing under its aegis thematic and textual concerns and characteristics contiguous with dissident literature, resistance literature, postcolonial literature, and feminist literature. Departing…
The Maghreb Goes Abroad seeks to broaden and nuance our understanding of francophone North Africa by examining the ways in which some of its most well known literary and cultural works and figures have navigated a global market. This project analyzes the transnational movements …
The purpose of this study of Anglo-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif’s two novels, In the Eye of the Sun (1999), first published in 1992, and The Map of Love (2000), first published in 1999, is to examine how they are arenas for hybrid politics in the post-colonial Egyptian context a…
The dissertation is a study of man and society in the Luzumiyyat of Abu alʿAla' al-Maʿarrì, the Syrian philosopherpoet (973-1057 A. D.). Al-Maʿarrì looms as an important thinker in Islamic civilization. He is regarded as one of the most peculiar or unconventional Muslim thinkers…
This thesis investigates the differences between news stories pertaining to Saudi Arabs in western and Saudi Arab print and electronic media and literary texts. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's framework of "dramatism," which explains act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, and on Cli…
This dissertation offers a new perspective on the emergence and development of the Turkish novel from the 1880s to the 1970s, through an intellectual and social-historical investigation of the role of reason and rationality in the Turkish modernization project. Starting with the…
Apologetic is the rhetoric of self-defense. The motives of most public figures come under scrutiny at some point, and when allegations of malfeasance impugn their character, apologetic discourse serves to justify their behavior and restore their reputation. In the ancient Near E…
This is a study of the Aleppan civilian elite during the Ayyubid period (579-658/1183-1260), as portrayed by Ibn al-'Adim in the biographical dictionary and history of Aleppo, Bughyat al-talab fi ta'rikh Halab. My general goals in this dissertation are to discover who were the A…
Bilingual Arabic lexicography came into being at the end of the 9th century. Unlike monolingual lexicography, bilingual lexicography in the Arab world advanced little during the Muslim empire, and lay dormant under the Ottoman occupation. It was not until the beginning of the 19…
This dissertation examines the convergence of ruins and memory. It is an inquiry into the role ruins play in indexing, impeding and enabling memories of war through literary and non-literary media. My analysis is informed by a classical Arabic literary tradition of contemplating…
In the dissertation, I explore the translation, publishing, and marketing process of Arabic novels in English. My research examines how translations of Arabic novels are produced as a commodity within a globalized publishing industry and circulate in a highly-charged political c…
The most recent studies on the Islamic law of ritual purity argue, following Mary Douglas, that the underlying logic of the system is the reassertion of conscious control over the body after violations of its boundaries. This work argues that, while this theme is discernible in …
This dissertation explores the representative works of several contemporary Iraqi women's writing and the themes of war and exile employed in their narratives. Iraqi women focus their fictional narrative discourse and themes on the Iraqi war(s) and the political situation their …
This dissertation examines the relationship between childhood, literature, and politics, unpacking the influence of "childhood" on both narrative and political practices. Using Edward Said's literary theories and personal memoir as an opening framework, I read novels, memoirs, a…
European colonial interest in the Arab lands is generally assumed to have begun with Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. Bonaparte's expedition marked the beginning of the progressive subjection by the major European colonial powers of the time, France and Britain, o…
This two-fold study examines the status of women of Afghanistan and the reality of their lives as depicted in their Persian-Dari literature and a few of their autobiographies published in English. It presents several relevant objectives: first, it argues that the highly traditio…
The goal of this study was to discover the actual changes in Tunisian women's perception of their role in the family and society through an examination of literary works, in Arabic, of contemporary Tunisian women writers. The study traced the development of the expression of Tun…