In early Islamic Egypt, “Arab-style” Greek (and later Coptic) letters employing religiously neutral monotheistic formularies were sent in the name of Muslim officials to Christian administrators. By analyzing old and new evidence of Egyptian Christians using this epistolary template, this paper argues that in the first decades of Arab rule, probably only a few beneficiaries of the new regime employed the “Arab-style” prescript in their letters written to other Christians to demonstrate their close connection to the new government and thus their social standing. Later, however, the “Arab-style” prescript became commonplace in communication between Christians and Muslims and among Christians only in everyday life. Thus, the religiously neutral template created by the conquerors for official top–down communication became a mechanism for facilitating not only the smooth functioning of administrative structures, but also, in the long run, the social cohesion of Christians and Muslims.

Amongst the thousands of papyrus and paper documents from medieval Egypt written in Greek, Coptic and Arabic there are a large number of letters of requests and petition letters. This chapter examines how the senders of these letters used the argument of being alone and helpless to persuade the letter’s recipient to undertake some action to help the petitioners. By presenting the petitioner as someone without friends, family or anyone else to help them, a relationship is created with the petitioned who can help based on the social and moral expectations that prevailed in early Islamic Egyptian society.

Early language exposure is crucial for acquiring native mastery of phonology, and multilingual exposure results in enhanced phonetic/phonological learning ability in adulthood. It remains unclear, however, whether early language exposure has lasting benefits when the quantity and quality of speaking drop dramatically after childhood. We investigate the production and perception of Arabic in fifteen early-interrupted exposure (i.e., childhood) speakers and fifteen late-exposure (i.e., novice) speakers. We compare the production of both groups to that of a control group of fifteen early uninterrupted exposure (i.e., native monolingual) speakers. The experiment included tasks addressing language proficiency, word production, and speech perception. Early-interrupted exposure speakers outperformed late-exposure speakers on all tasks of the language proficiency diagnostic, while also displaying more native-like perception and production. Our study adds further support to the body of work on the measurable long-term benefits of early language experience for an individual’s phonetic and phonological skills, even when language experience diminishes over time.

This chapter addresses the shift from multilingualism to monolingualism associated with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It begins with a general overview of the linguistic conditions in the Ottoman lands, briefly surveying the historical dimensions of linguistic interactions reflecting the ebb and flow of Ottoman expansion and contraction, including the Westward movement of Turkic speakers into the central Islamicate lands and Anatolia from the eleventh century, the expansion of Ottoman rule into the Balkans from the fourteenth century, and the influx of Muslim refugees into the shrinking borders of the Empire as a result of military defeats and ethnic cleansing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter then focuses on three main factors affecting linguistic interactions in the Ottoman lands: (a) the inherently multilingual nature of Ottoman Turkish as an amalgam of three languages, namely, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian; (b) the lived linguistic experience in the Empire, including the lack of a clear correlation between ethnicity, religion, and mother tongue, e.g., large numbers of Armenians, Turks, and Greeks, whose first language was not, respectively, Armenian, Turkish, or Greek, and; (c) the ways in which the advent of nationalism and Western influence affected the linguistic scene in such a diverse and demographically mixed Empire. The chapter ends by considering post-Ottoman language policies and the monolingual orientation of the modern nation-state. The tensions between the two are often revealed when signs of the multilingual past emerge to disturb the monolingual assumptions of the modern, read “national,” era.

Spain is known for having multiple languages that coexist in different geographical regions with varying degrees of political and social recognition. At the same time, Spanish historiography, argues historian García Sanjuán (2012), has been dominated by the nationalist discourse that systematically distorts the past to construct a “Spanish” and an “Andalusian” identity predicated on the exclusion of anything associated with the Arabic language and Islam, all the while the tourism sector commodifies the “exotic” Arabic past. One of the key settings that distorts and reinvents the past are the festivals of moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians. Claiming to be true and faithful retellings of history, these festivals invoke a popular memory of the imagined past, while interlacing and mixing events from multiple time periods, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 to the so-called Christian reconquest, presented as an essential battle between Christianity and the Muslim invaders. In this article, I analyze one of the more popular and historically significant of these festivals, celebrated in the outpost village of Carboneras. I show that the festivals of moros y cristianos help engrain the legitimacy of nationalist ideas that seek to generate a specific hegemonic identity grounded in an affirmation of the Roman-Latin-Christian vision of the past. The language utilized in the festivals is purposefully selected to elevate and justify the actions and attitudes of the Christians and to amalgamate the identity of Moriscos, whose families had lived in these lands for centuries with that of moros from across the Mediterranean. The reenactments that skillfully play with, confuse, and obscure several periods in Spain’s history are a theatrical mirror of a real process of linguistic and social exclusion that reaches from the past to the present day.

This chapter examines the development of the āshob genre in the late 1870s and its contrasts with the post-1857 tradition. The context of the Russo-Turkish war prompted the circulation of shahr āshobs in the periodical press, which expanded to mourn worldwide ruin. Two distinct practices developed simultaneously: while the Awadh Punch built on the inherent plaintive dimension of grief to denounce oppression from the colonial state, Aligarh writers linked grief to regret to call their coreligionists to self-reformation. The emotional style of Altaf Husain Hali’s Musaddas (1879) and Shikwah-e Hind (1888), related to medieval Arabic elegies, became widely popular. The chapter shows how the Aligarh movement of Syed Ahmed Khan used it extensively to bolster elite community cohesion, especially during the anti-Congress campaign of 1888. Aligarh was then criticised for its manipulative recourse to emotion. The chapter highlights how Aligarhian discourses and practises were further criticised in light of the rise of early twentieth-century communal politics.

This first chapter traces the characteristics and development of the mirror literatures in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. It discusses the range of forms and styles, and the varied functions, of these advisory texts, and their generic designations in the original languages. The chapter identifies and discusses four major periods: the Early or Formative Period (eighth and ninth centuries); the Early Middle Period (tenth to twelfth centuries); the Later Middle Period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries); the Early Modern Period. At several points, the discussion indicates parallels and affinities among the mirror literatures produced in contemporaneous Muslim and Christian settings. The chapter ends with a discussion of the appearance, presentation and reception of mirrors for princes.

From the Georgia Sea Islands to Jamaica to Brazil, enslaved African Muslims precariously re-established textual traditions and networks by writing letters in Arabic and transcribing sacred texts from memory. Bearing witness to their rich and cosmopolitan educational backgrounds, African Muslims in the New World used Arabic literacy to subjectively and objectively overthrow the chains of slavery. They narrated as well as propelled their itinerant diasporic histories through literary and epistolary models, from Scheherazade to al-Hariri, studied in the markets and madrasas of Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in the West Indies but resident for the majority of his life in Liberia, engaged deeply with the Islamic culture of the Sahel. He provided extensive documentation about Islam in West Africa, attuned to the ways it was woven together with the Islamic world of the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean world. His research and travels frame how future researchers, scholars, and activists would perceive the cosmopolitanism of African Muslims such as Job ben Solomon, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, and Nicholas Said among many others, and how they sought to re-member their narrative, familial, and sacred ties to Arabic and Islam.

The chapter begins with a section on the Egyptian Marxist Louis Awad’s radical modernist poetic project Plutoland from 1947. The chapter engages Awad’s critical intervention to lay out the transnational roots of Arabic poetry from the premodern period to the twentieth century before moving on to address the intricacies of the Arabic prosodic rules he wanted the modernists to break. In the second section, I give technical details about how I represent poetic meters throughout the rest of the book and explain the science of Arabic prosody. Next, the chapter covers critical approaches to modernist poetry in both Arabic and Persian, paying particular attention to the critics’ positions on the possibility of composing politically committed poetry. I then transition into a long section on the history of literary commitment, its philosophical foundations, and the role it played in Arabic and Persian poetic criticism. In a brief conclusion, I suggest a way out of the debates that took shape around literary commitment and offer further details on my balancing of formalist and contextual analytical approaches to the poetry I read in the later chapters.

The early decades of the twentieth century saw the articulation of new approaches to literature in Iran and the Arab world as Arabic and Persian literary modernisms developed out of the Arab nahḍah “renaissance” and the neoclassical Persian bāzgasht movement of “literary return. Modernist poetry in Arabic and Persian, which emerges in many ways on its own and draws on this other, local history, thus stands outside and against a singular understanding of modernism as a European phenomenon and calls us to consider what it might look like if we situate the center of our modernist map in the Middle East. The introduction deploys a range of recent literary theory on modernism, transnationalism, and modernity in the Arab world and Iran to argue for a re-orientation of our perspective and to treat Middle Eastern modernism on its own terms. By relocating our modernist center to an “Eastern” geography, the chapter argues for a new way of looking at modernist poetic developments within the region and across the border between the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds. Considering modernism from this relativist perspective shows how Arabic and Persian poetries form a significant modernist geography within the broader movement of modernism.

The poetry of Langston Hughes has traveled extensively into Arabic through translation, both in formal publications and on the internet. This chapter explores a range of these translations, in Arab American contexts in the United States and within the Arab world, focusing in particular on one poem, “Harlem [2].” It examines the use of Hughes as a symbol of Black America, and representative of Black poetry and arts, as well as some of the intricacies of English-Arabic translation, including a focus on content and meaning over form and stylistics in rendering his work in Arabic.