A Dish of Carrots: A Recipe from Scents and Flavors
The thirteenth-century Syrian cookbook Scents and Flavors comes out in paperback this month with a new foreword by Claudia Roden, author of A Book of Middle Eastern Food.
To mark the occasion, translator and culinary expert Charles Perry has recorded a video to show us how to make one of the book’s recipes for carrots, called simply “A Dish of Carrots.” Check out the video and written recipe below, and stay tuned for another recipe video to be released soon!
If you try this recipe or any of the recipes from Scents and Flavors, we’d love to hear about it on Twitter and Facebook.
On Longing for Home: An Excerpt from The Discourses by al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī
The Discourses by al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī is a collection of essays on a wide variety of subjects, including theology, literature, and history, by an influential Moroccan scholar who began writing in 1084/1685, at the age of roughly fifty-four. In this excerpt, translated by Justin Stearns, al-Yūsī writes about why we as humans long for our homelands:
There are three reasons [that a person likes to identify with his city and boast about it]: (1) Generally, a person knows no other place. (2) Exalted God has caused people to love their homes so that they remain in them and the earth to be cultivated in accordance with Exalted God’s decree. It is as the Prophet said, God bless and keep him: “God made Medina beloved to us to the same extent as Mecca, if not more.” (3) Natural inclination, for everyone feels affection for his land, just as he does for his mother or father. Thus, people continue to long for their home, or any place where they have experienced happiness and intimacy. There is a saying: “A noble person longs after his country, just as the camel rider longs for the watering hole.” (more…)
Teaching Religion with the Library of Arabic Literature
Elias G. Saba writes about his experience teaching religious studies at Grinnell College using books from the Library of Arabic Literature, from al-Shāfiʿī’s Epistle on Legal Theory to Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s Leg over Leg.
I have been teaching religious studies at Grinnell College for the past four years. As I develop my courses, texts from the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) have become key components of many of my syllabuses. I have used some of the paperback editions and made extensive use of the digital editions of these texts, available through Grinnell’s library. In this post, I will discuss the various ways these texts have enriched my classes, some obvious and some less so. I hope that by providing an overview of how I have used these texts in class, I will start a conversation about how these books may serve other scholars in teaching classes for undergraduates.
In my entry-level course “Traditions of Islam,” we read from three different LAL texts. Early in the class, we focus on the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad. This section of the course ends with three selections from Maʿmar ibn Rāshid’s The Expeditions (translated by Sean W. Anthony). The stories “Those Who Emigrated to Abyssinia,” “The Story of the Slander,” and “The Marriage of Fatimah” (more…)
Lemon-Pistachio Stuffing: A Recipe from Scents and Flavors
Image credit: CC0 via Pixabay.
With Thanksgiving just around the corner, allow us to suggest this flavorful stuffing recipe from the 13th-century Syrian cookbook Scents and Flavors, with pistachios, lemon juice, and a variety of herbs and spices including parsley, mint, caraway, thyme, and cinnamon. Of course, there were no turkeys in 13th-century Syria, but we think substituting turkey for chicken in this recipe will work just fine.
Here’s what you’ll need: (more…)
Join us at MESA and AAR!
Image credit: “Plane Flying” by Fuzz. CC0 via Pixabay
We’re headed to New Orleans for MESA this week and to San Diego for AAR next week! If you’ll be at either conference, please come say hello to us at our booth in the exhibit hall. We’ll have tote bags, mugs, and of course lots of books.
At MESA, from November 15 to 17, we’ll be at booths 57 and 58. If you can’t make it to the conference, you can browse the books we’ll have at the conference (and find a special discount code) here.
At AAR, from November 23 to 26, we’ll be at booth 1007. For a preview of the books that will be available at the booth, click here.
See you soon!
Teaching the Global Middle Ages: Reading ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād’s War Songs in a Medieval Survey Class
Patrick DeBrosse, a PhD student in History at Fordham University, writes about his experience teaching withʿAntarah ibn Shaddād’s War Songs in his course “HIST 1300: Understanding Historical Change – Medieval Europe.” This article expands on some of the ideas he shared on Twitter here.
One of the challenges of teaching a survey history class for the first time is the task of finding the right primary sources to assign to your students. You want to choose authors whose voices reveal the complexities of a historical period, but who also strike a balance between approachable and mysterious. Your students must, in short, enjoy the challenge of reading the primary source, and walk away with more questions than they had when they began.
As a graduate student preparing for my first semester of teaching the history of medieval Europe, I had to think long and hard about the best primary source options available for each class topic. The part of the course that gave me the most pause was the week where I stepped away from Europe to teach the early history of Islam. I decided that covering the beliefs of Muhammad and his followers, the creation of the caliphates, and the flourishing of culture in Abbasid Baghdad would help my class reflect upon the general perspective of our course, as well as upon the similarities of (and connections between) “the West” and “the Islamic World.”
Experts on what is increasingly being referred to as the Global Middle Ages have pointed out that teachers who focus exclusively on Europe in their classes leave their students with a sense of empathy for medieval Europeans, but with a hostile and distorted view of non-Europeans. Such an outcome is tragic in and of itself, while also being exclusionary for students from minority backgrounds who might otherwise found medieval studies attractive. That outcome is also dangerous for society—since white supremacists often use distorted images of the Middle Ages in their propaganda. Many medieval historians now recognize the need to devote time and attention to people who lived outside of Europe—the urgency of which is reflected in the fact that the Medieval Academy of America dedicated this year’s conference to the Global Middle Ages. But what, then, to give the students as a primary source? My own research focuses on the crusades, and although I find the Islamic accounts of that period fascinating and moving, I did not want to introduce the students to Islam through the lens of holy war. As my advisor has often warned me, such an introduction to Islam feeds straight into discredited models of “a clash of civilizations” between East and West. Much better to find a source that lets the students see the Islamic world on its own terms. (more…)
Announcing Our New Podcast
We are excited to announce the launch of the Library of Arabic Literature podcast! Wherever you may be, and whatever you find yourself doing—walking, driving, flying, cooking—steal a moment and listen to the episodes on SoundCloud, featuring conversations with our LAL fellows as they discuss their upcoming projects.
Episodes are available in English and Arabic. Click here to listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to our SoundCloud channel!
Opposites Attract: An Excerpt from The Philosopher Responds on the Nature of Affection
In this excerpt from The Philosopher Responds: An Intellectual Correspondence from the Tenth Century, the litterateur Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥidī asks the philosopher Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh why opposites seem to attract, and Miskawayh offers a response on the nature of and reasons for affection.
On why friendship arises between apparently dissimilar individuals—a volitional and ethical question
Why does reciprocal affection arise between two individuals who do not resemble each other in external appearance, are dissimilar in physical build, and do not dwell in physical proximity, so, say, one hails from the city of Farghānah, the other from Tāhart, one is tall and well-built, the other short and unattractively diminutive, one is lean and meager, the other sturdy and tough, one is hirsute and covered in thick hair, the other smooth and with very little hair, one is more tongue-tied than Bāqil, the other more eloquent than Saḥbān Wāʾil, one is more generous than a rain cloud after a lightning storm, the other more avaricious than a dog nursing a fleshless bone it toiled to secure, so that the divergence and discordance between the two provoke the spectator and inquirer to wonder? (more…)
The Excellence of the Poets: Poetry and the Shaping of History in Ibn Qutaybah’s Excellence of the Arabs
In this guest post, Jonny Lawrence, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, considers the powerful role of poetry in The Excellence of the Arabs by Ibn Qutaybah, translated by Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb. “How mighty the pen, how feeble the sword,” he writes.
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no poet to record it, did the tree really fall?
In The Excellence of the Arabs, Ibn Qutaybah, a third/ninth-century polymath and Arabophile, frames much of the titular excellence around the Arabs’ innate claim to fields of knowledge not shared by other cultures, notably, for him, that of the Persians. Poetry and a few other arts and sciences—pre-Islamic methods of divination, the art of horse-husbandry, and the Islamic fields of jurisprudence (fiqh) and grammar (naḥw)—are “particular to the Arabs. Non-Arabs can master them only by learning and parroting; the Arabs alone possess the brilliance and glory of having developed them,” as Ibn Qutaybah writes. All the other branches of knowledge are “common to all peoples,” including the Arabs. But it is poetry which truly sets the Arabs apart: theirs is the knowledge of prosody, rhyme, and description.
Poetry is at the heart of Arab Excellence: technically brilliant and aurally stunning, pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabic poetry also serves as the very record of that Excellence. It is both a technical and narrative wonder, appreciated both by Ibn Qutaybah and by his readers, contemporary and modern. Most strikingly in the first, more polemical, section of The Excellence of the Arabs, poetry serves as evidence for the general statements about Arab Excellence that Ibn Qutaybah makes. (more…)
War Songs longlisted for the National Translation Award
The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the longlists today for the 2019 National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. Included on the longlist for poetry is War Songs by ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, translated by James E. Montgomery with Richard Sieburth!
The National Translation Award, now in its 21st year, is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work. Featuring authors writing in 13 different languages, this year’s longlists expand the prize’s dedication to literary diversity in English. The selection criteria include the quality of the finished English language book, and the quality of the translation. ALTA will highlight each book on the longlists with features written by the judges on the ALTA blog: https://literarytranslators.wordpress.com/
The Complete 2019 National Translation Award Longlist in Poetry:
War Songs
by Antarah ibn Shaddad
translated from the Arabic by James E. Montgomery with Richard Sieburth
(Library of Arabic Literature/NYU Press)
Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poems
by Pablo de Rokha
translated from the Spanish by Urayoán Noel
(Shearsman Books)