Time and death in compiled adab "biographies"

In mediaeval Arabic belles-lettres (adab), accounts of lives are usually made up of quite short reports akhbār. These akhbār. are arranged in different ways, one of which is chronological order, but the compilers of such accounts apparently accord relative insignificance to chronological order. This paper examines some "biographies" compiled by al-Ṣūlī and Abū 1-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī, showing that temporal progression can exist in a "biographical" presentation, either alone or more often combined with other ways of organising the material. It then focuses on the placing of subjects' deaths in life accounts and on how they are integrated with the rest of the material. In conclusion, I suggest that when temporal progression is absent in "biographical" presentations, this should be seen as reflecting a mediaeval Arabic approach to life writing which differs from modem expectations but has its own rationale.En el género árabe medieval del adab (bellas letras), los relatos de vidas están normalmente compuestos a base de pequeñas noticias (ajbār). Estos ajbār están organizados de distintas maneras, una de las cuales es el orden cronológico, aunque los compiladores de tales noticias dan aparentemente poca importancia a tal orden. Este artículo estudia algunas «biografías» recogidas por al-Ṣūlī y Abū 1-Faraŷ al-Iṣbahānī, y muestra que la progresión temporal puede existir en las presentaciones «biográficas», sola o junto con otras formas de organizar el material. En él se analiza también el lugar que las muertes de los personajes ocupan en el relato de sus vidas, y cómo se integran en el resto del material. En conclusión, propongo que si la progresión temporal está ausente en las presentaciones «biográficas», ello se debe a la manera característica que la literatura árabe medieval tiene de enfocar los relatos de vida, que posee su propia lógica, aunque difiera de las concepciones contemporáneas

The Inter-communal Poetry of Niqūlāwus as-Sā’iḡ (1692–1756)

After discussing the background to the emergence of several noted Christian writers in Aleppo around 1700, this article presents the life and work of one of them, Niqūlāwus a s- S ā ’i ḡ (1692–1756), a Greek Catholic monk who was mainly responsible for establishing the Shuwayrite Basilian Order in his Church. While most of his poetry is religious, a few poems are dedicated to secular and non-Christian personalities, most of them political notables on whose support the Order depended. The article examines in detail a panegyric of members of the Druze Abī al-Lam‘ family and a poem in reply to one of A s - S ā ’i ḡ’s friends, a Šī‘ī religious dignitary, showing how A s - S ā ’i ḡ works within the conventions of Arabic poetry of his time. It is noteworthy that he refers to the religious and historical heritage of the addressees of his poems, while at the same time reminding them that he himself is a Christian monk

De Venise à Alep : l’imprimerie de la Bible dans le monde orthodoxe

The Bible, as the etymology of the word indicates, refers not to one book but to many. The Christian Bible is made up of the Old Testament, that is, the Jewish Scriptures, and the New Testament; moreover, for some Churches, among them the Orthodox, certain books commonly called the Apocrypha , which were added to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, also fonn part of the Bible. The Bible is thus a small library, and as is common in libraries, some books are more popular than others. Long before the introduction of printing, the varying degrees of importance accorded to different books of the Bible led to some of them being translated before others. For instance, in Anglo-Saxon England, interlinear glosses (i.e. crude word-by-word translations) were made of the Gospels and Psalms, and separate portions of the Bible, including the Gospels, were rendered into Old English (Anonymous 1997: 200). Likewise, the earliest known written translations of parts of the Bible into Arabic are of the Gospels and Psalms; they can be dated to the 8th century. Oral translations are older, going back to pre-Islamic times (Graf 1944: 114-115, 138; Griffith 2012: 123-126). By contrast, the first attempt to produce a complete Bible in Arabic occurred only in the l 61h century (Graf 1944: 89-90)

Histoires de chansons. Adab et art musical dans le Kitāb al-Aġānī

Kilpatrick Hilary. Histoires de chansons. Adab et art musical dans le Kitāb al-Aġānī. In: L’Orient au cœur : en l’honneur d’André Miquel