This book presents a collection of articles that put forward original research and significant insight regarding several key issues related to knowledge and language in Middle Eastern societies. The aspects studied include: the role of knowledge and language in affirming and negating political agendas and self-identities within areas of conflict and tension; ideas regarding the usefulness and interaction of religious and secular knowledge; and the attributes that render knowledge and language, especially that which is believed to be of divine origin, outstanding and worthy of admiration. The selection of studies has been purposefully diverse to include a variety of languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew and Persian, within multiple traditions, including Hellenism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, while focussing on a range of periods, from the classical to the mediaeval to the modern, and examining a range of issues, such as methods of analysing and interpreting Persian, Turkish and Arabic literature, literary and other attributes of the Bible and the Qur’an, diglossic languages, the Turkish modernisation project, Turkish-Kurdish tensions, Andalusian music, Azerbaijani politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By underlining the substantial commonalities that exist between such seemingly different fields of research, the book highlights the idea—increasingly on the wane in departments of Middle Eastern Studies across many universities—that a shared area of study, viz. the Middle East, naturally and inherently entails a shared cultural, historical, and sociological milieu. It suggests that academics who engage in different branches of research related to this area should—rather than focussing singly on their own field—avail substantially and meaningfully of one another’s scholarship, learn from each other’s methodologies, and collectively build upon a body of knowledge that should never be seen as dissociated.

Teachers and Students: Reflections on Learning in Near and Middle Eastern Cultures. Collected Studies in Honour of Sebastian Günther contains essays on the developments, ideals, and practices of teaching and learning in the Islamicate world, past and present. The authors address topics that reflect – and thus honour – Sebastian Günther’s academic achievements in this particular area. The volume offers fresh insights into key issues related to education and human development, including their shared characteristics as well as their influence on and interdependence with cultures of the Islamicate world, especially in the classical period of Islam (9th-15th century CE). The diverse spectrum of topics covered in the book, as well as the wide range of innovative interdisciplinary approaches and research tools employed, pay tribute to Sebastian Günther’s research focus on Islamic education and ethics, through which he has inspired many of his students, colleagues, and friends.

The examination of literary genres in the Middle East opens the possibility of gaining new insights into the intellectual universe of Middle Eastern societies, the question of production of meaning, what “literature” meant in different historical periods, and the underlying epistemology of producing knowledge, and how this epistemology has changed over time. This book comprises 12 case studies from the three major Middle Eastern languages – Arabic, Persian, and Turkish – written by experts in the field. It brings together a wide range of approaches – from the study of epics to an analysis of travelogues, and from classical poetry to novels. Instead of focusing on one period or juxtaposing the classical genres and the West-induced development of “modern genres,” the studies in their totality apply a broad diachronic and synchronic perspective, with the potential to create a comparative framework for the study of the sociocultural and narratological dimensions of genre in the Middle East.

An ethnographic tapestry of personal and institutional narratives about Jerusalem’s social history. Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalemby Dana Hercbergs continues the dialogue surrounding the social history of Jerusalem. The book’s starting point is the border that separated the city between Jordan and Israel in 1948–1967, a lesser-known but significant period for cultural representations of Jerusalem. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book juxtaposes Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives about the past with contemporary museum exhibits, street plaques, tourism, and real estate projects that are reshaping the city since the decline of the peace process and the second intifada. What emerges is a portrayal of Jerusalem both as a local place with unique rhythms and topography and as a setting for national imaginaries and agendas with their attendant political and social tensions. As sites of memory, Jerusalem’s homes, streets, and natural areas form the setting for emotionally charged narratives about belonging and rights to place. Recollections of local customs and lifeways in the mid-twentieth century coalesce around residents’ desire for stability amid periods of war, dispossession, and relocation—intertwining the mythical with the mundane. Hercbergs begins by taking the reader to the historically Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, whose streets are a battleground for competing historical narratives about the Israeli-Arab War of 1948. She goes on to explore the connections and tensions between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians living across the border from one another in Musrara, a neighborhood straddling West and East Jerusalem. The author rounds out the monograph with a semiotic analysis of contemporary tourism and architectural ventures that are entrenching ethno-national separation in the post-Oslo period. These rhetorical expressions illuminate what it means to be a Jerusalemite in the context of the city’s fraught history. Overlooking the Border examines the social and geographic significance of borders for residents’ sense of self, place, and community, and for representations of the city both locally and abroad. It is certain to be of value to scholars and advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Middle Eastern studies, history, urban ethnography, and Israeli and Jewish studies.

Offering a new reading of Islamic ethical and political thought in the Būyid period (334-440/946-1048), this book focuses particularly on the philosopher Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī who lived in Baghdad and what is now western Iran. Ethics in Islam provides the first major treatment of al-Tawhīdī's ethics, political thought, and social idealism, investigating the complex influences that shaped this thought and especially his concept of friendship, which is analysed in the unique context of Būyid society. Al-Tawhīdī revives the value of friendship in politics. He introduces it as the best way to reform social and political order and as a means to the good life, to restrain passion and self-interest, to bring about cooperation and promote reason, and for action in opposition to religious zeal. Instead of seeing him as alienated from society, supposedly rejecting traditional Muslim beliefs, this book places him in his historical and intellectual contexts, and shows that while he was original in many ways, his outlook was firmly rooted in the Islamic culture in which he was educated. Contributing to modern discussions of Islam and political ethics, this book is of interest to scholars and researchers of political philosophy, comparative ethical thought and Islamic studies.

Draws together analyses of new approaches to peacebuilding and conflict resolution in a politically turbulent region and offers students and researchers an in-depth and theoretically guided empirical analyses of post-Western and decolonial approaches to peacebuilding in Eurasia.

The rhetorical trope of irony is well-trod territory, with books and essays devoted to its use by a wide range of medieval and Renaissance writers, from the Beowulf-poet and Chaucer to Boccaccio and Shakespeare; however, the use of sarcasm, the "flesh tearing" form of irony, in the same literature has seldom been studied at length or in depth. Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to pick out in a written text, since it relies so much on tone of voice and context. This is the first book-length study of medieval and Renaissance sarcasm. Its fourteen essays treat instances in a range of genres, both sacred and secular, and of cultures from Anglo-Saxon to Arabic, where the combination of circumstance and word choice makes it absolutely clear that the speaker, whether a character or a narrator, is being sarcastic. Essays address, among other things, the clues writers give that sarcasm is at work, how it conforms to or deviates from contemporary rhetorical theories, what role it plays in building character or theme, and how sarcasm conforms to the Christian milieu of medieval Europe, and beyond to medieval Arabic literature. The collection thus illuminates a half-hidden but surprisingly common early literary technique for modern readers.