Search Results for: Yarbrough

  • Part 2: Luke Yarbrough on grammar nerd humor in 13th-century Egypt

    Luke Yarbrough’s interests, he says, lie at the intersection of intellectual, political, and administrative histories in the pre-modern Middle East. Yarbrough, an assistant professor at St. Louis University, found all that and more in his editing and translation work for ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī’s The Sword of Ambition: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt. The text […]

  • An interview with Luke Yarbrough on Ibn al-Nābulusī and the reasons to translate “bigot lit”

    Luke Yarbrough’s interests, he says, lie at the intersection of intellectual, political, and administrative histories in the pre-modern Middle East. Yarbrough, an assistant professor at St. Louis University, found all that and more in his editing and translation work for ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī’s The Sword of Ambition: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt. The text […]

  • “The Secretarial Art Is a Noble Craft”: An Excerpt from The Sword of Ambition

    In this excerpt from The Sword of Ambition: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt, translated by Luke Yarbrough, the unemployed bureaucrat ‘Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi describes what he believes are essential qualifications for being a good secretary. The work as a whole makes a polemical argument against the employment of non-Muslims as secretaries and offers us “an […]

  • LAL at MESA: Get thee to booth 72!

    And we’re off to the 2016 annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association this week (Nov. 17-19), with our usual array of discounted books—and, yes, swag—in tow! Come visit us at booth 72 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place starting tomorrow at 4 P.M. to stock up on new publications: Light in the Heavens Sayings of the Prophet […]

  • August rains praise on LAL

    The dog days of summer bear their final fruits before the start of the new academic year—and they couldn’t be sweeter. Here are some recent publicity highlights: Islamic Sciences names Luke Yarbrough’s “admirable translation” of Sword of Ambition, available since May, “one of the best translations published in the series” and “an amazing narrative that combines erudition, poetry, belles lettres, history, law, and anecdotal accounts into […]