Non-fiction
Sarajevo Firewood
A Novel
Saïd Khatibi - 2021
Sarajevo Firewood, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) award in 2020, explores the legacy of the recent histories of two countries ― Algeria and Bosnia-Herzegovina ― both of which experienced traumatic, and ultimately futile, civil wars in the 1990s. The novel narrates the lives of two main characters, with their friends and families: Salim, an Algerian journalist, and Ivana, a young Bosnian woman, both of whom have fled the destruction and hatred of their own countries to try to buil...
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The Madness of Despair
A Novel
Ghalya F.T. Al Said - 2021
Living in London, far from their Arab homelands, Nafie and his young wife Maliha become good friends with Doctor Nadim, a fellow exile. In the twists and turns of the friendship, the men’s nostalgia for their old lives – and their old ways of living – are in constant conflict with Maliha’s ambition to live and love freely now she’s in London. Though ready to throw off the constraints of her arranged marriage at the slightest turn, Maliha is ill-prepared for the fire of emotions that overcomes her, leading to unforeseen conse...
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Fadhil Al-Azzawi's Beautiful Creatures
Fadhil Al-Azzawi - 2021
This open work was written in defiance of the “sanctity of genre” and to raise the question of freedom of expression in writing. First published in Arabic in 1969 to great acclaim, it has been variously called a novel or a prose poem, while the author calls it an epic in prose, divided as it is into cantos. In mid-1960s Iraq such an open-ended form, in which different genres could come together and blend into each other, was difficult to even imagine. For Iraqi writer Fadhil al-Azzawi it was the core of a new vision of life...
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Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind
Atheism and Freethought in Islam
Ibn Warraq - 2020
»This beautifully written book is a tour-de-force of astonishing scholarship.« (Richard Dawkins) »Ibn Warraq exemplifies the rarely combined qualities of courage, integrity, and intelligence.« (Bernard Lewis) »Warraq’s work has been responsible for a paradigm shift, revivifying the light of reason as it bears upon the dominant notions about the meaning of the Qur'an in our times.« (Judith Mendelsohn Rood) Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind begins with a pioneering study of freethought and atheism in both Classical and Mod...
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Mansi
A Rare Man in His Own Way
Tayeb Salih - 2020
Tayeb Salih is internationally known for his classic novel Season of Migration to the North. With humour, wit and erudite poetic insights, Salih shows another side in this affectionate memoir of his exuberant and irrepressible friend Mansi Yousif Bastawrous, sometimes known as Michael Joseph and sometimes as Ahmed Mansi Yousif. Playing Hardy to Salih's Laurel Mansi takes centre stage among memorable 20th-century arts and political figures, including Samuel Beckett, Margot Fonteyn, Omar Sharif, Arnold Toynbee, Richard Crossma...
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Sultan und Volk - Oman auf dem Weg zur Demokratie?
Sultan and People - Oman on the Way to Democracy?
Fred Scholz - 2018
Essay, zweisprachig (Haupttext in deutsch und englisch), mit einem Anhang zu Regierungsformen der arabischen Golfstaaten (nur in deutsch), einem umfassenden Literaturverzeichnis und einem Bildteil mit Fotografien in schwarzweiß. Der Westen fordert spätestens seit »Nine-Eleven« insbesondere in den Ländern Vorderasiens Demokratie als Grundlage für Entwicklung und Frieden. Die USA schreckten nicht einmal davor zurück, für die Umsetzung dieser Forderung militärisch aktiv zu werden. Die Folgen sind ernüchternd und furchterregend...
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Muscat - Then and Now
Geographical Sketch of a Unique Arab Town
Fred Scholz - 2014
Hardcover halbleinen mit Schutzumschlag im Schuber + Extraschuber mit Beilagen 86 grafische Abbildungen, teils farbig, davon 13 in Übergröße zum Ausklappen; 5 Tabellen, 95 Fotos, davon 86 farbig. Beilagen in Extra-Schuber: 8 Luftbilder s/w mit Begleittext (39,6 x 20 cm) 6 große geographische Karten, teils farbig (64 x 46 cm) Limitierte Auflage The town of Muscat on the south-eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula has a long and chequered history. Omani tradition as well as external influences have given it a particula...
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Knife Sharpener
Selected Poems
Sargon Boulus - 2009
Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) remains one of the Arab world's best-known and influential of contemporary poets. Born into an Iraqi Assyrian family and growing up in Al-Habbaniyah, Kirkuk and Baghdad, he started publishing his own work in 1961, in the ground-breaking Shi'r [Poetry] magazine in Beirut. After settling in San Francisco in the late 1960s, he became an unstoppable translator of most of the major English-language modern poets into Arabic and many others, and dedicated his life to reading, writing and transla...
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The Spectrum of Islamist Movements
Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies - 2007
The Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (Cairo) introduces this study series of Islamist movements with a novel and felicitous taxonomy of the Islamist spectrum. Several well-known groups, influential works and thinkers are scrutinized in detail and - a rare exception not only for an English-language work - have their practice and worldview cautiously juxtaposed with mainstream orthodox Islamic positions. This book does not only provide data about its subjects, which would make it one of many: more crucially,...
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The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran
A Contribution to the Decoding of the Koran
Christoph Luxenberg - 2007
This book approaches the Koran with the tools of modern scientific philology, and outlines a method to shed light onto koranic passages that are among those counted as »dark« or »mysterious«. Revised and expanded translation of the wave-making German original. »The most fascinating book ever written on the language of the Koran, and if proved to be correct in its main thesis, probably the most important book ever written on the Koran.« (The Guardian)...
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Arabic in Chains
Structural Problems and Artificial Barriers
Robert Marzari - 2006
What distinguishes Marzari‘s work is his ability to explain complicated matters in clear and even entertaining language. Linguists often cut a poor figure here, given their propensity to gallop non-stop through the brushwood of grammar. Not so Marzari. He illustrates the potentials and limits of a language that over 300 million Muslims in the Middle East call their mother tongue, aside from the many others elsewhere in Africa as well as in Asia, who recite Arabic as the language of the Qur'an. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz /Der Tage...
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Unterwegs am Golf Along the Gulf
Von Basra bis Maskat
Annegret Nippa / Peter Herbstreuth - 2006
Burchardt liebte sein Leben als Kaufmann nicht. Nach dem Tod seines Vaters benutzte er sein kleines Erbe, um Privatier zu sein. Doch zog es ihn hinaus in die Welt. Auf seine Abenteuer bereitete er sich vor, indem er die Sprachen der Bewohner an Afrikas Küsten, Suaheli, und in Arabiens Wüsten erlernte. So ging er in den Orient. Bald, 1903, reiste er den Persischen Golf entlang, in hundert Tagen von Basra nach Maskat. Diese Reise erhellen seine Fotos. Ein Buch nicht nur für Weltenbummler, das zu Vergleichen von damals und heut...
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Who Cares About Somalia
Hassan's Ordeal - Reflections on a Nation's Future
Hassan Ali Jama - 2005
This book is about a Somali civil war and the fall of the Siad Barre regime. It is about how people living there at the time did really suffer from it as a result. Although it principally relates to a family,the book tells an applicable story of flight, provisional shelter and finally exile. It is also about the political history of Somalia and about Somali ethnicity in general, and the book discusses the future of the Nation and how international and regional powers are involved in playing their sometimes influential roles ...
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Civil Society in the Middle East
Amr Hamzawy (ed.) - 2003
The internal Arab, Iranian and Israeli debates on civil society in the 1980s and 1990s have only partly found their way into Western studies on the issue. An analysis of the discursive structures of the local debates, which represents the major objective of the current edited volume, may help shifting the nexus of the academic discussion to Middle Eastern perceptions and actors. Amr Hamzawy analyses the Arab sociological and political discussion on civil society, depending on the intellectual literature of the last ten years...
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Handbook of Arabic Dictionaries
Abit Yasar Koçak - 2002
This book is a brief guide to Arabic dictionaries. It aims on assisting learners of Arabic to cope with the difficulties that encounter with the various dictionary movements over centuries. The dictionary movement mainly developed over three centuries between the end of the II. Century of the Hegira and the end of the IV. Century, in accordance with their respective leaders and their works: Madrasah al-Taklîbât, a school established by al-Khalîl...
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Somalia's Development
Jörg Janzen (ed.) - 1999
What are Somalia's Development Perspectives? Science between Resignation and Hope? Proceedings of the 6th SSIA-Congress: With contributions by Franz Ansprenger, Mohamed Haji Mukhtar, Faduma Awow Mohamed, Ulrich Scholz, Jörg Janzen a.o....
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