As the hereditary leader of the Safavid Sufi Order, Shah Ismail founded the Safavid dynasty in 1501. This study goes beyond Shah Ismail's historical legacy, however, to examine the pious and literary sources which have shaped a permanent place for him within the Alevi-Bektashi c…
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This dissertation argues for the importance of a feminist hermeneutics which refuses to submit to the dominant androcentric discourse of rabbinic literature. Analyzing the talmudic discussions of menstrual regulations (Niddah), it engages in readings of select texts which have a…
In this dissertation, I review the history of translation theories and then propose a new theory of translation, which I call "transformance." I use Bakhtinian dialogics as the theory's base and incorporate insights available from poststructuralism and deconstruction, postcoloni…
The argument for a parallel in the social and material conditions under which both the Southern United States writer William Faulkner and post-colonial writers, particularly from Latin America and the Arab world, worked and wrote begins with the many influence studies, which obs…
This study provides a comprehensive account, based on Hanafi fiqh literature, of the Islamic law of evidence as it bears upon the role of witnesses in the judicial process. The act of witnessing (shahadah) is of special importance in the study of Islamic law because witnesses ar…
The Rrekontamiento del rrey Alisandre is an Aljamiado-Morisca version of the legend of Alexander the Great published in 1929 by A. R. Nykl and then largely forgotten. Throughout the work the narrator refers to the hero as Dzulcarnain, 'the two-horned one,' a name by which the Ma…
The purpose of this thesis is to examine Diana Abu-Jaber's memoir, The Language of Baklava, and its approach to the question of identity. To this end the thesis utilizes close reading of passages to explore the relationship between language and identity in the memoir. The thesis…
Considered in the multi-faceted Palestinian context, the concept of identity is particularly complex because of its political ramifications and national dimension. The books by Elias Sanbar and Racha Salah that this dissertation examines share a historical background and a visio…
This work treats the oral Palestinian poetry duel, a genre performed most commonly at weddings in Northern Palestine and Israel. It begins by tracing the history of poetry dueling both in Arabic generally and within the Palestinian dialect. The historical sketch is followed by a…
Gloss literature, the writing of multiple commentaries on Islamic religious works, used to be handwritten in manuscripts, transmitted from generation to generation within the framework of an oral-aural transmission of knowledge; it thus played an important role in the traditiona…
This study investigated the main motif of Ibn Battuta's travel account, the Rihla. The focus of the study, therefore, was on the Rihla itself, which has been regarded as an important source of medieval Islamic history and culture as well as of the beliefs and rituals of people o…
The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of the Acts of the Apostles through an analysis of the motif of parresia. A narratological methodology, presented in chapter two, was used to examine parresia as it portrays the major characters in Acts. The …
My project proposes a revision of Modernism to account for marginal sexualities, race, and colonization in British, American, and Arabic Francophone literature. In order to make visible the "racial industry" at work in Modernism, I center my discussion on two recurrent figures: …
As a media of the representation of Arabness, Al-Jazira has become since 1996 a challenge from which Arabness continues to perceive itself and the modern world. It is in terms of communication and culture that this dissertation attempts to give an account of Arabness with its ep…
This dissertation, “The Inappropriable Voice,” is a theoretical exploration of voice that traverses written and oral Arabic works, North African and African-American texts. One of the major concerns of this comparative study is to examine what has been marked as Third World lite…
The purpose of this dissertation was to re-examine the question of Islamic influences on Dante's Divina Commedia, (which has been argued ever since the publication in 1919 of La Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia, by Miguel Asin Palacios) through a comparative intertextu…
The present study deals with translating Arabic literature into English and French, its main aspects, issues and effects on the representation of Arab culture in the West. It is essentially inspired by Lawrence Venuti's ideas on translation and the “formation of cultural identit…
The purpose of our thesis is to show the important role of the woman in the novelistic autobiography of Léon l'Africain. Inspired by the Description de l'Afrique, written by the famous arab geographer Mohamed al-Wazzan ez-Zayyati, Maalouf converted this autobiography to a quest …
In this dissertation I propose a revisionary history of rhetoric that emphasizes the influence of Near Eastern cultures in the construction of Western rhetoric. I trace this influence from classical times through the Middle Ages, with particular reference to the Muslim commentar…