Tag: Arabic Literature

New essay: “’Ghayn is for Ghazal” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

“The Arabic Alphabet” website (written by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi) – http://alifbatourguide.com/

Ghayn is for ghazal – https://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/ghazal/

Excerpt:

Shahrazâd’s opening story, the one which initiates the story-telling marathon, famously, keeps replicating itself in miniature. Shahrazâd is telling stories to save her life, but it’s not just her: time after time, in the manner of a fractal, characters in her stories are saved by story-telling too. (There is a beautiful essay by Tzvetan Todorov which says it plainly – that, in the Nights, stories are life. If you’re a character in a fiction, tell a story. What else keeps you alive? The plan is working for Shahrazad.)

In her, by now, familiar opening story, where the merchant, traveling on business, sits down to eat lunch under a tree, it’s familiar ground of traditional story-telling. The self-sufficient individual out alone on the road runs into an obstacle and encounters a challenge. Stories of chivalry in European tradition open that way; they hardly open any other way, with the knight setting off on a quest or perhaps just wandering. The reader is likely to imagine a context where the merchant’s business has taken him to the margin, the غایة , ghâya, limit of human society, a غابة, ghâba, a forest. In that opening scene, when he reaches into his pack, takes out lunch, and eats, innocently throwing the date pits over his shoulder behind him, he is the picture of vulnerability (not a knight out looking for adventure). It suggests (at least for me) a secure world where merchants can travel alone, settling down to غذاء, ghadhâ, food, without fear. When the ‘ifrit appears, huge and menacing, to say the merchant must die, it is enough of a disruption to be horrifying, but it’s funny too, and probably less familiar ground for a traditional story. The monster has a motive for being غضبان, ghad͎bân, angry, though the fact that a flying date pit has killed his son doesn’t register as tragic. We know that sons don’t always resemble their fathers, but an ‘ifrît’s son so fragile that he is killed by a date pit seems an extreme case. (Is this son legitimate?) We also know that we aren’t going to be very frightened by what follows.

The text tells us that everything we’re reading is a spoken story, since we are hearing Shahrzâd’s voice, but the truth is that we are reading it rather than hearing it. This has some advantages. Readers of a story can skip from episode to another, free to speed things up or slow them down. Such is the advantage the alphabet gives us over a listener like King Shahzamân. We can freeze-frame the story, knowing what will happen, and we can be surprised each time we read it (or imagine ourselves surprised, which may be just as good). When the merchant asks for a grace period to settle his affairs and say goodbye to his family, promising to be back at the beginning of the new year, a whole unexpected social world opens up because the‘ifrît accepts, immediately, without an argument. His hyperbolic trust is perhaps as funny as the date pit which kills his son — funny, but it is also, surprisingly, to me, moving. The `ifrît‘s surprising trust is one thing; then when the new year arrives and the merchant actually shows up (thus demonstrating that we can trust him too) we are at the extremes of trust. Exaggeration is funny, but I wonder if it also tells us something about the respect the culture shows for travelers. We expect them to keep their word. It is a world where traveling salesmen are positive figures.

Does everyone know the sequel? While the merchant is waiting to be executed, an old man walks by (the kind of respected mature individual referred to as a shaykh) leading a غزالة, a ghazâla on a chain. (Why just then? Don’t ask. No story, the Chinese proverb says, without a coincidence.) Later there will follow two additional shuyûkh, one with a pair of dogs and one with a she-mule, but it is the ghazâla we remember. In part, of course, the reason is on the surface: a ghazâla is synonymous with beauty.

غزالة is a beautiful word both in its Arabic form and in its guise as a loan word in English, gazelle. In European narrative tradition we are more likely to use the gazelle to characterize elegance of motion, but in Arabic its beauty is in the eyes, which are likely to resemble what Edgar Allan Poe emphasizes when he describes the title character in “Ligeia”: “They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad.” (In the interest of scrupulous accuracy – Nourjahad doesn’t exist in our world; a note in the edition edited by Hardin Craig notes that the phrase comes from a novel, History of Nourjahad [1767] by Sidney Bidulph, pseudonym of Mrs. Frances Sheridan. Poe almost makes you want to read it.) The esthetic of big eyes is everywhere. Cartoon figures and stuffed animals meant to appeal to our sentiments are often portrayed with oversize eyes. (Over the years Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse evolved eyes which hardly seem to leave room for brains.) I wonder if pandas would still have their reputation of cuteness if they didn’t have those big patches surrounding their eyes, looking as if they were eyes in reality.

New essay: “’Ayn is for Arab” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

New essay: “Ẓâ is for Ẓarf” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

New Essay: “Ṭâ Is For Talisman” on The Arabic Alphabet website

Me Talk Pretty Never: Learning Arabic, part 2

Me Talk Pretty Never: Learning Arabic, part 1

The first authentic (not classroom) Arabic I understood was in a grocery store: an Omani man asked a clerk “wayn shokolata?” (where’s the chocolate?). I think it was very fitting that my first identification involved candy. It is also fitting that there wasn’t a verb.

Arabic is the fourth foreign language I have studied and, given that I am dyslexic and didn’t really start learning it until I was 42 years old, I am stuck at an odd mix of linguistic abilities. I have inadvertently created my own pidgin.

I know hundreds of Arabic nouns. From teaching literature and metaphors, I know colors, animals, birds and geographical features, but I never remember the words for parts of the body such as arm, foot and ears. I know “eyes” because you need it for metaphors of love, but I have no idea about nose or fingers. I know many words for furniture, types of food, rooms in the house and clothes, but I don’t know the word for “fork.”

I know pronouns and lots of adjectives and thank heavens you don’t need the verb “to be” for basic Arabic sentences: just give a pronoun or noun and a modifier: I happy/ he sick

I can rarely conjugate the verbs ‘to go’ and ‘come’ as fast as I need them so I make do with a pronoun, preposition, noun and time-markers: I to store yesterday. It’s incorrect but I can make myself understood in most situations.

After I had been in Oman for 7 years, I paid for an intensive, 6-week, Arabic language summer school in Muscat. All the students lived in an apartment building and took the bus to school every morning – it was like being in summer camp.

When I got back to Dhofar, the first time I met the research guys I ended up (I can’t remember why) explaining the story of Joseph from the Bible. It was the first time I could do an extended story in Arabic and from then on, I gained more and more confidence telling stories and having long conversations and arguments. I paid for another 4-week Arabic language program at the same school the following year and solidified my low intermediate status.

Now I can talk for hours in Arabic with the research guys, but our communication has aspects of a personal language. For example the verb for “talk” has the root of t-k-l-m, and I grasped that as tatakeleum not conjugated, not inflected for gender or tense – whenever I needed to express anything to do with speech, I throw in that word and they extrapolate the meaning.

And then there is learning in the opposite direction, when you are a native speaker of English on the Arabian Peninsula, you are always relearning your own language. When I bought a slice of “coffee cake” I was surprised that it tasted like… coffee. “Coffee cake” is not supposed to taste like coffee; it’s supposed to taste like butter-sugar-flour-eggs-cinnamon.

When female students said: “My mister told me” I assumed they meant husband or father, but they meant teacher. And I had to grit my teeth at being called “Miss,” not “Miss” with my last name, just “Miss.”

And I had to reexplain English to my students, such as the fact that that they could not use the fun cuss words they heard in movies and songs in the classroom. It was so amusing when a shy, quiet student who never wanted to speak in class would yell “#&*)!” when their books slid off the desk. “No,” I would say shaking my head, “you can’t say that at the university.”

We also a lot of time delineating bear/ bare – profit/ prophet – fair/ fare – merry/ marry/ Mary. I clarify that “I’m sorry” in English means “I am not happy to hear your bad news”; in Arabic it means “I am entirely responsible for the negative event that occurred.” So in English if you tell me your father is sick, I say “I’m sorry” but if I say that to someone in Dhofar they will respond, “Why? You don’t make him ill.” And “How are you?” in English means “I am not planning to slap you in the next five minutes,” not “please tell me all the details of your life.”

But with all my efforts to translation words and meanings, I am often happy to have a language barrier. Sitting in cafés amidst a swirl of languages is relaxing; I don’t have to focus on what someone else is talking about. On picnics, the research guys chat in Gibali, and I could just admire the stars. A few times one of them would offer to teach me Gibali, but an unwritten language is a bridge too far for me.

Adjusting to Oman: My Dangerous Taxi

New Essay: “Ṭâ Is For Talisman” on The Arabic Alphabet website

Practicalities: Managing a Short Business Trip to the Arabian Peninsula

Bibliography for ‘Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula’ (2025, Palgrave Macmillan)

Me Talk Pretty Never: Learning Arabic, part 1

My favorite depiction of language learning is in the movie The 13th Warrior. Antonio Banderas’ character, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, picks up Old Norse in a matter of weeks by merely listening. Once he understands the words, he begins speaking fluently with conjugated verbs and perfect accent! I wish it were that easy!

I started learning French in middle school, then switched to German in high school. After I got my BA in German literature, I started on Ancient Greek when I was doing my PhD. After graduation, I got a teaching job at a new university in the Emirates.

During the weeks before I moved to Sharjah, I sat in cafés in Bethesda, Maryland practicing my Arabic letters in a beginner’s language book. Sipping lattes and writing out the shapes in my new calligraphy pen, I felt like I was quite the woman of the world.

During my first year of teaching in the Emirates, it was all I could do to keep up with my own students, but at the start of the second year I was part of a group of expat faculty and staff who requested that the administration create an Arabic class for us. I gradually realized, as we jumped through hoop after hoop, that no one wanted the expats to learn Arabic. English was for whatever needed to be said in public; the real decisions were made in Arabic.

We finally got a Westerner who knew Arabic to teach us and we soldiered on twice a week at lunch time for 4 or 5 months. I could transliterate, say simple phrases and bargain in stores but not do anything really useful.

I went back to the States for a few years, then returned to the Middle East. The first semester I was in Oman, I was simply surviving and getting over my culture shock, then I finally got to the point where I was ready to start learning Arabic again. There was an official class but the teacher was not very pleasant, so I asked a Lebanese co-worker if we could met once a week for lessons.

He was a kind man but it took a long time to find the right level for me. He started me on children’s stories without diacritics. Short Arabic vowels are not written as a letter but as a small mark above or below the consonant it is pared with; in regular writing such as in a newspaper, you will see “ktb” and if you don’t know the word, you can’t know if it is kataba, kitibi, kutubu, katibu, kituba, etc. I would sound out the consonants painfully slowly, then make random guesses as to the consonants. Total speculation.

He finally moved to an easier children’s book with diacritics: the mean mouse and the friendly turtle who rescued him. But it was rough going. And at the end of the semester the professor moved away.

In the fall, another American woman happened to remark that she had studied Arabic. “Can you teach me?” I asked and I started my next attempt. She had a young son who she was trying to teach Arabic to, so it worked out well; she would read him baby books in Arabic, then hand them off to me to struggle through. It is amazing to work out a language from the beginning, like a child. Amazing meaning, of course, frustrating.

I am a grown woman. I have navigated foreign countries and unruly students; I have a car and an IRA, and what is that papa hedgehog saying to baby hedgehog – ‘come here’ or ‘I will come’? Is that a past tense verb or a preposition? Where’s the vowel? I read with perfect interest and concentration about Shelly the Shell who got a grain of sand stuck in her mouth, would she recover? Why is that squirrel crying? Will the frog help her friend the turtle turn over? If the painter put blue over the cat’s yellow leg, what would happen? Drama! Tension!

I was happy to pay for the teaching and many Arabic children’s books, but I was always hoping to find a class so I could learn with other students.

One chance was an Arabic class that was offered at a local language school. I went to the first meeting which was difficult as I kept getting stuck in cultural chasms. Most of the other students were expat teachers so they kept articulating their needs (I would like interactive speaking exercises, I would like to have graduated listening activities, etc.) but our Arabic teacher had never taught before, so it was unlikely that they would understand, much less be able to produce what the students wanted.

The second issue was the choice of vocabulary. When our teacher asked us what expressions did we want to know, I said, “You are a brilliant student!” The woman next to me said with scorn, “Oh, you just want someone to say that to you!”

I thought, most of us are teachers, wouldn’t we want to have something positive to say to our students? But no one else was interested in being positive. We did not  learn “please” or “thank you”; we learned third person commands: “Sit! stand up! read! repeat! listen!” as if we were in a dog-training class. We did learn, “Excuse me” but only because one expat wanted to know how to say, “Get out of my way!”

The third issue was the teaching style. During the third class, the teacher presented us with a list of 16 sentences in Arabic. He read them aloud, then we had to put the sentences in the correct order to make a conversation. As I was working on it, I asked him the meaning of one word. He said, “You can figure it out” and said the word slowly.

I said, “No, I don’t know that word, can you please tell me?” As the teacher was fluent in English, I knew that he knew the meaning.

He repeated the word again in Arabic and I said, “I am sorry – repeating it doesn’t help, I don’t understand, could you please just tell me in English what this word means?”

He said, “If you think about it, you will get it.”

I said, “This is not really effective. I am lost here, can you please tell me what this word means?”

He said it again in Arabic.

I didn’t return to that class, but I eventually found an Arabic language summer school to attend, and with the help of Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar’s books, I got to a low intermediate level.

Me Talk Pretty Never: Learning Arabic, part 2

Practicalities of Moving to the Arabian Peninsula: Using the Arabic Language

New essay: “’Ayn is for Arab” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

Selected Books on Dhofar in Arabic

One Year Away – Missing Oman

One Year Away – Missing Oman

I left Salalah a year ago and am still processing that loss. I miss my friends and so many aspects of Dhofari life, especially:

  • Long conversations – When you sit down to talk to a friend in Oman, it’s expected you will talk for hours. I miss having coffee with a female friend for 2 or 3 hours; picnic dinners with the research guys which could mean 6 or 7 hours of chatting.
  • Gorgeous Nature – Pristine, empty beaches; snorkeling over reefs; boat rides, skimming along next to pods of leaping dolphins; sitting in the desert or on a beach with no ambient lights so you could a dark night sky full of stars; green mountains in the monsoon season
  • Animals – lizards and chameleons; seeing foxes, hearing wolves; the parrots which came to my guava tree; flamingos; camels, especially baby camels
  • Plants – palm trees; banana trees; lemon trees; fig trees; my gardens with papaya trees, henna trees, neem trees, olive trees, hibiscus, bougainvillea, oleander, gardenia, jasmine, aloes, lemongrass, yellow trumpet flower
  • Food – fresh coconut milk, schwarmas, fresh Yemeni bread, lobsters cooked over coals, fresh fruit juice, Balbek (if you know, you know), fresh lemon and mint, fresh fish
  • Teaching literature and 98% of my students – Although it cost me $100s a year, it was fun buying and reading books as I searched for new poems and stories to teach. It was a joy to craft syllabi with texts from different time periods and cultures with similar characters, plots and/ or themes and then the best part, talking about these texts with students who had great insights and could make connections to other texts and their own lives. Some classes were an uphill climb but in some classes we laughed all semester.
  • Discussing religion – Everyone I knew believed in God and was up for talking about religious beliefs; I could say, “I will pray for you” and ask, “Will you pray for me?” as a part of ordinary conversations
  • Multi-cultural everythings – Walking through the grocery store and not knowing what I was looking at: new vegetables, new fruit, words I didn’t understand on jars; all different kinds of clothes and fabrics
  • Active ethnography – I was always watching, listening, trying to figure out what was going on: What was that word? Why did that person do that? It was exhausting but always interesting
  • Constantly learning – students were always teaching me new expressions and gestures; the research guys teaching me how to how to drive on sand (only getting stuck three times!), up steep inclines and over rocks
  • Language barriers – Being able to go through the day without understanding most of the conversations around me was relaxing; now I constantly overhear people venting when I walk home or sit in a café
  • My truck – Driving in Oman is so fun on flat desert roads, twisting mountain roads, roads that curve along the shoreline
  • Houses – High ceilings, archways, lots of counter-space in the kitchen, well-designed bathrooms

What’s nice about where I am

  • Being able to easily see/ talk to friends, my mom and family
  • Working with kind and competent people: no lying, no back-stabbing, no drama and every single person says “Hello”
  • Flower stores, especially Kendall Flower Shop, Brattle Square Florist and Petali
  • Breakfast sandwiches, pizza, salads and ice cream without freezer burn
  • Not sharing my apartment with mice, spiders, bees or armies of ants – quiet ACs

Outline and Chapter Abstracts for ‘Researching, Teaching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions’

Practicalities of Moving to the Arabian Peninsula: Using the Arabic Language

Ethnography – Finding the Middle Ground, part 1 of Discussing Photographs

Returning to USA – Culture Shock essays

Bibliography – Creating Effective Interactions: Researching, Teaching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula (forthcoming, Palgrave MacMillan)

Creating Effective Interactions – Dr. M Risse – working biobibliography 

(authors in bold have additional publications which are not included in this list)

Abdul-Jabbar, Wisam. 2024. “Towards a ‘Study at Home’ Education in the Arab Gulf Region: Reterritorializing the ‘Study Abroad’ Mode.” Journal of Gulf Studies 1.1: 21-39.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2016/1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

—. 2016. “The Cross-publics of Ethnography: The Case of ‘the Muslimwoman’.” American Ethnologist 43.4: 595-608.

—. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—. 2011. “Seductions of the Honor Crime.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22.1: 17-63.

—. 2008. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of CA Press.

—. 1991. “Writing Against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology. Richard Fox, ed. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. 137-62.

—. 1990. “Anthropology’s Orient: The Boundaries of Theory in the Arab World,” in Theory, Politics and the Arab World: Critical Responses. Hisham Sharabi, ed. New York: Routledge. 81-131.

 —. 1989. “Zones of Theory in the Anthropology of the Arab World.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 267-306.

—. 1985. “A Community of Secrets: The Separate World of Bedouin Women.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10: 637-57.

—. 1985. “Honor and Sentiments of Loss in a Bedouin Society.” American Ethnologist 12: 245-61.

Adra, Najwa. 2011. “Tribal Mediations in Yemen and its Implications to Development.” AAS Working Papers in Social Anthropology 19. Vienna: Institut für Sozialanthropologie. 1-17.

Adra, Najwa, Marieke Brandt, Steven Caton, Paul Dresch and Andre Gingrich, eds. 2021. Tribes in Modern Yemen: An Anthology (Denkschriften Der Philosophisch-historischen Klasse 531). Vienna: Institut für Sozialanthropologie der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Ahmed, Qanta. 2008.  In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks.

Al-Amadi, Dana, Mark David Major, Heba Tannous and Amina AlKandari. 2023. “Diving for the Spatio-functional Qualities of Exclusivity at The Pearl-Qatar.” Habitat International 138. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197397523001169?via%3Dihub

Al Farsi, Sulaiman. 2013. Democracy and Youth in the Middle East: Islam, Tribalism and the Rentier State in Oman. New York: I.B. Tauris.

Al-Ghanim, Kaltham, Andrew Gardner and Noora Lari. 2023. “Contemporary Women in Qatar: An Ethnographic Study of Their Challenges in Terms of Traditional Applications and Modern Requirements.” Sage Open. 1-17. DOI: 10.1177/21582440231196030

Al-Hajri, Hilal. 2006. “British travelers in Oman from 1627-1970.” Modern Oman: Studies in Politics, Economy, Environment and Culture of the Sultanate. Andrzej Kapiszewski, Abdulrahman al Salimi and Andrej Pikulski, eds. Krakow: Ksiegarnia Akademicka. 63-88.

Al-Hikmani, Hadi and Andrew Spalton. 2021. Dhofar: Monsoon Mountains to Sand Seas – Sultanate of Oman. Chicago: Gilgamesh Publishing.

Al Hussein, Mira. 2022, Nov. 10. “UAE: National Identity and the Social Contract.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/88371

—. 2021, Dec. 30. “The Economic Contracts of New Gulf Citizenships.” Orient XXI. https://orientxxi.info/magazine/the-economic-contracts-of-new-gulf-citizenships,5265.

—. 2021, Oct. “Citizenship in the Gulf.” Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Policy Report 40. https://www.kas.de/en/web/rpg/detail/-/content/citizenship-in-the-gulf

—.2021, Sept. 15. “The UAE’s ‘Foreign Talent’ Dilemma.” London School of Economics Blog. blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2021/09/15/the-uaes-foreign-talent-dilemma

Al Ismaili, Ahmed. 2018. “Ethnic, Linguistic, and Religious Pluralism in Oman: The Link with Political Stability.” Al Muntaqa 1.3: 58-73.

Al Maazmi, Ahmed. 2021. “The Apocalyptic Hijab: Emirati Mediations of Pious Fashion and Conflict Talk.” Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 19: 5–27.

Al Mutawa, Rana. 2024. Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai. Berkely: University of California Press.

—. 2022. “‘We’re Not Like the Newbies’: Belonging Among Dubai’s Long-term Residents.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2142105

—. 2022. “Navigating the Cosmopolitan City: Emirati Women and Ambivalent Forms of Belonging in Dubai,” in Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space Social, Political, and Cultural Dimensions. Antia Mato Bouzas and Lorenzo Casini, eds. New York: Berghahn Books. 67-85.

—. 2020, Dec. 9. “Dishdasha Blues: Navigating Multiple Lived Experiences in the Gulf.” London School of Economics Middle East Blog Posts https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2020/12/09/dishdasha-blues-navigating-multiple-lived-experiences-in-the-gulf/

—. 2019, Nov 8. “Dubai Mall or Souq Naif? The Quest for ‘Authenticity’ and Social Distinction.” London School of Economics Middle East Blog Posts. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2019/11/08/dubai-mall-or-souq-naif-the-quest-for-authenticity-and-social-distinction/

—. 2019, April 30. “You Can’t Sit with Us: Prejudice and ‘Othering’ between Khaleejis.” Sekka. https://sekkamag.com/2019/04/30/you-cant-sit-with-us-the-othering-within-arab-gulf-societies/

—. 2019. “The Mall Isn’t Authentic!: Dubai’s Creative Class And The Construction of Social Distinction.” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 48: 1-2: 183-223.

—. 2018, Dec.4. “Challenging Concepts of ‘Authenticity’: Dubai and Urban Spaces in the Gulf.” London School of Economics Middle East Blog Posts. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2018/12/04/challenging-concepts-of-authenticity-dubai-and-urban-spaces-in-the-gulf/

—. 2017. “Women and Restrictive Campus Environments: A Comparative Analysis Between Public Universities and International Branch Campuses in the UAE.” Higher Education in the Gulf States: Present and Future. 17-9.

Al-Nowaihi, Magda. 2001. “Resisting Silence in Arab Women’s Autobiographies.” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 33.4: 477-502.

Al-Qasimi, Noor. 2012. “The ‘Boyah’ and the ‘Baby Lady’: Queer Mediations,” in Wawa Series. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8.3. Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid Al Gharaballi, eds. 139-42.

—. 2010. “Immodest Modesty: Accommodating Dissent and the ’Abayah-as-Fashion in the Arab Gulf States.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6.1: 46-74.

Al-Rasheed, Madawi. 2013. A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—. 2013, Apr. 22. “Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Knowledge in the Time of Oil.” Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/28472/Theorizing-the-Arabian-Peninsula-Roundtable-Knowledge-In-the-Time-of-Oil

Al Salimi, Abdulrahman. 2018. Oman, Ibadism and Modernity (Studies on Ibadism and Oman). Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag.

Alsharekh, Alanoud, ed. 2007. The Gulf Family: Kinship Policies and Modernity. London: Saqi Books.

Altorki, Soraya, ed. 2015. A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

—. 1988. “At Home in the Field,” in Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society.  Soraya Altorki and Camillia El-Solh, eds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 49-68.

—. 1986. Women in Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior among the Elite. New York: Columbia University Press.

—. 1982. “The Anthropologist in the Field: A Case of “Indigenous Anthropology” from Saudi Arabia,” in Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries. H. Fahim, ed. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. 167-75.

—. 1980. “Milk-kinship in Arab Society.” Ethnology 19: 233-44.

Altorki, Soraya and Camillia El-Solh, eds. 1988. Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Ali-Karamali, Sumbul. The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing. Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 2008.

Ammann, Ludwig. 2002. “Islam in Public Space.” Public Culture 14.1: 277-79.

Anderson, Esther. 2021. “Positionality, Privilege, and Possibility: The Ethnographer ‘at Home’ as an Uncomfortable Insider.” Anthropology and Humanism 46.2: 212-25.

Antrosio, Jason. 2018. “Starbucks Enlightenment: Is Anthropology Better than Starbucks?” Living Anthropologically. https://www.livinganthropologically.com/starbucks-enlightenment/. First posted 28 April 2018. Revised 3 June 2020.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28.2: 356-61.

Arciniega, Luzilda Carrillo. 2018, May 24. “Starbucks, Racism, and the Anthropological Imagination.” Anthropology News. https://www.luzilda-arciniega.com/public-scholarship/project-two-kzr4a

Arebi, Saddeka. 1994. Women and Words in Saudi Arabia. New York, Columbia University Press.

Armstrong, Karen. 1994. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. New York: Ballantine Books.

Asad, Talal. 1986. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Occasional Papers Series, Center for Contemporary Arab. Georgetown University.

Aslan, Reza. 2011/2006. No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. New York: Random House.

Asmi, Rehenuma. 2016. “Finding a Place to Sit How Qatari Women Combine Cultural and Kinship Capital in the Home Majlis.” Anthropology of the Middle East 11.2: 18-38.

Assaf, Laure. 2020. “‘Abu Dhabi is my Sweet Home’: Arab Youths, Interstitial Spaces and the Building of a Cosmopolitan Locality.” City 24.5-6. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1837562.

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Valeri, Marc. 2022. “Une affaire de famille: Reconfiguration du pacte oligarchique dans les monarchies de Bahreïn et d’Abou Dhabi au début du XXIe siècle.” Mondes En Developpement 198: 55-71.

—. 2017. “Towards the end of the Oligarchic Pact? Business and Politics in Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Oman,” in The Changing Security Dynamics of the Persian Gulf. Kristian Ulrichsen, ed. London: Hurst. 77-98.

—. 2010. “High Visibility, Low Profile: The Shi’a in Oman Under Sultan Qaboos.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42.2: 251-68.

—. 2009. Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State. New York: Columbia.

van der Geest, Sjaak. 2021. “Vanity in Anthropology: About the Art of Showing through Non-Showing.” Etnofoor 33.1: 91-106.

Varenne, Herve. 2007. “Difficult Collective Deliberations: Anthropological Notes Toward a Theory of Education.” The Teachers College Record 109.7: 1559-88.

Vivanco, Luis. 2017. Field Notes: A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vogler-Fiesser, Gisela and Musallem Hassan Al Mahri. 2023. Dhofar’s Nomads How Oman’s Renaissance Changed a Way of Life Forever. Online publisher: Nomad Publishing.

Volpp, Leti. 2011.“Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and the Discourses of Tradition.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22.1: 90-110.

—. 2001.“Feminism versus Multiculturalism.” Columbia Law Review 101.5: 1181-1218.

—. 2000. “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior.” Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 12: 91-116.

vom Bruck, Gabriele. 2018. Mirrored Loss: A Yemeni Woman’s Life Story. New York: Hurst.

—. 2017. “Bodies on the Move: Gender Dynamics on a Sanaani Minibus,” in Architectural Heritage of Yemen: Buildings that Fill my Eye. Trevor Marchand, ed. London: Gingko Library. 187-93.

—. 2005. “The Imagined ‘Consumer Democracy’ and Elite Re-Production in Yemen.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11.2: 255-75.

—. 1997. “A House Turned Inside Out: Inhabiting Space in a Yemeni City.” Journal of Material Culture 2.2: 139-72.

Vora, Neha. 2018. Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

—. 2013. Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

—. 2013, Apr. 22. “Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Unpacking Knowledge Production and Consumption.” Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/28473/Theorizing-the-Arabian-Peninsula-Roundtable-Unpacking-Knowledge-Production-and-Consumption

Watson, Janet and Abdullah Musallam Al-Mahri. 2023. “Developing Resources for Modern South Arabian Languages,” in Communicating Linguistics: Language, Community and Public Engagement. Hazel Price and Dan McIntyre, eds. New York: Routledge. 168-79.

Watson, Janet, Jon Lovett and Roberta Morano, eds. 2023. Language and Ecology in Southern and Eastern Arabia. London: Bloomsbury.

Watson, Janet, Miranda J. Morris, Abdullah al-Mahri, Munira al-Azraqi, Saeed al-Mahri and Ali al-Mahri. 2019. “Modern South Arabian: Conducting Fieldwork in Dhofar, Mahrah and Eastern Saudi Arabia.” Arabic Dialectology 11. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:210624878}

Weir, Shelagh. 2007. A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Weiss, Nerina, Erella Grassiani and Linda Green, eds. 2023. The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World. London: Routledge.

Wikan, Unni. 1982. Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilkinson, J.C. 2013. Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia (Studies on Ibadism and Oman) New York: Georg Olms Verlag.

—. 2010. Ibâḍism: Origins and Early Development in Oman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—. 1987. The Imamate Tradition of Oman. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

—. 1983. “Traditional Concepts of Territory in South Arabia.” Geographical Journal 149.3: 301-15.

—. 1971. “The Oman Question: The Background to the Political Geography of South-East Arabia.” The Geographical Journal 137.3: 361-71.

Willis, John. 2013, Apr. 22. “Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Writing Histories of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place.” Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/28485/Theorizing-the-Arabian-Peninsula-Roundtable-Writing-Histories-of-the-Arabian-Peninsula-or-How-to-Narrate-the-Past-of-a-NonPlace

Wilson, Alice. 2023. Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

—. 2016. “Oman’s Consultative Council Elections: Shaking up Tribal Hierarchies in Dhufar.” Middle East Report 281: 41-3.

Wilson, G. Willow. 2012. Alif the Unseen. New York: Grove Press.

—. 2011. Butterfly Mosque. New York: Grove Press.

Wippel, Steffen, ed. 2023. Branding the Middle East: Communication Strategies and Image Building from Qom to Casablanca Studies on Modern Orient, 38. Berlin: de Gruyter.

—. 2013. Regionalizing Oman: Political, Economic and Social Dynamics United Nations University Series on Regionalism 6. Heidelberg: Springer.

Wippel, Steffen, Katrin Bromber and Birgit Krawietz. 2016. Under Construction: Logics of Urbanism in the Gulf Region. London: Routledge.

Yadav, Stacey Philbrick. 2018. “Ethnography Is an Option. Learning to Learn in Yemen,” in Political Science Research in the Middle East and North Africa: Methodological and Ethical Challenges. Janine A. Clark and Francesco Cavatorta, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 165–74.

Yamani, Mai Ahmed Zaki. 1986. “Birth and Behaviour in a Hospital in Saudi Arabia.” Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 13.2: 169-76.

Yateem, Abdullah. 2001. “Aspects of Social and Symbolic Boundaries Amongst the Bedouin of the Emirates.” Journal of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies 103: 49-87.

Zimmerle, William. 2017. Crafting Cuboid Incense Burners in the Land of Frankincense: The Dhofar Ethnoarchaeology Preservation Project. Washington: Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center/Liberty House Press.

Marielle Risse

Books

Houseways in Southern Oman. Routledge, 2023

This book explains how modern, middle-class houses are sited, designed, built, decorated and lived in with an emphasis on how room-usage is determined by age, gender, time of day and the presence of guests. Combing ethnography and architectural studies, the author draws on over sixteen years of living in the Dhofar region to analyze the cultural perceptions regarding houses and how residential areas fit within the urban areas in southern Oman. Dhofari houses are also compared to houses in other Arabian Peninsula countries and positioned within the theoretical frameworks of the “Islamic city” and the “Islamic house.”

Foodways in Southern Oman. Routledge, 2021

This book examines the objects, practices and beliefs relating to producing, obtaining, cooking, eating and disposing of food in the Dhofar region of southern Oman. The chapters consider food preparation, who makes what kind of food, and how and when meals are eaten. Foodways connects what is consumed to themes such as land usage, gender, age, purity, privacy and generosity. It also discusses how foodways are related to issues of morality, safety, religion, and tourism. The volume is a result of fourteen years of collecting data and insights in Dhofar, covering topics such as catching fish, herding camels, growing fruits, designing kitchens, cooking meals and setting leftovers out for animals.

Community and Autonomy in Southern Oman. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

This book explores how, in cultures which prize conformity, there is latitude for people who choose not to conform either for a short time and how the chances to assert independence change over time. The main focus is on how the traits of self-control and self-respect are manifested in the everyday actions of several groups of tribes whose first language is Gibali (Jebbali/ Jebali, also referred to as Shari/ Shahri), a non-written, Modern South Arabian language. Although no work can express the totality of a culture, this text describes how Gibalis are constantly shifting between preserving autonomy and signaling membership in family, tribal and national communities.

Publications – scholarly articles and chapters – anthropology/ culture/ travel writing

“Lifeways of Traditional Fishermen in Dhofar, Oman,” in Fish as Food: Lifestyle and a Sustainable Future. Helen Macbeth, ed. International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition – Alimenta Populorum series. 2024: 155-170. https://archive.org/details/macbeth-young-and-roberts-ed-fish-as-food-anthropological-and-cross-disciplinary

“An Ethnographic Discussion of Fairy Tales from Southern Oman,” Fabula: Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung / Journal of Folktale Studies / Revue d’Etudes sur le Conte Populaire 60.3-4 (De Gruyter, Berlin) 2019: 318–335.

 “Understanding Communication in Southern Oman,” North Dakota Quarterly 84.1 (Special Issue on Transnationalism) 2017: 174-184.

“Generosity, Gift-giving and Gift-avoiding in Southern Oman,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 45 (Oxford: Archeopress) 2015: 289-296. 

“Understanding the Impact of Culture on the TESOL Classroom: An Outsider’s Perspective,” TESOL Arabia’s Perspective 18.2, 2011: 15-19.

“Cultural Refraction: Using Travel Writing, Anthropology and Fiction to Understand the Culture of Southern Arabia,” Interdisciplinary Humanities 26:1, 2009: 63-78.

Publications – scholarly articles and chapters – literature/ pedagogy

“Using Cultural Understandings to Improve Teaching in Oman,” in Unpackaging Theory and Practice in Educational Sciences. Abdülkadir Kabadayı, ed. Lyon: Livre de Lyon. 2023: 129-141.  https://www.livredelyon.com/educational-sciences/unpackaging-theory-practice-in-educational-sciences_595.

“Teaching Paired Middle Eastern and Western Literary Texts,” in Advancing English Language Education. Wafa Zoghbor and Thomaï Alexiou, eds. Dubai: Zayed University Press, 2020: 221-223.

“Teaching Literature on the Arabian Peninsula,” Anthropology News website, October 7 2019. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/10/07/teaching-literature-on-the-arabian-peninsula/

“Selecting the Right Literary Texts for Middle Eastern Students: Challenges and Reactions,” in Focusing on EFL Reading: Theory and Practice. Rahma Al-Mahrooqi, ed. Muscat: Sultan Qaboos University Press, 2014: 165-188.

 “Frosty Cliffs, Frosty Aunt and Sandy Beaches: Teaching Aurora Leigh in Oman,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 43.4, 2013: 123-145.

“Who Are You Calling ‘Coddled’?: ‘Cloistered Virtue’ and Choosing Literary Texts in a Middle Eastern University,” Pedagogy 13.3, 2013: 415-427.

“Do You know a Creon?: Making Literature Relevant in an Omani University,” in Literature Teaching in EFL/ESL: New Perspectives. Rahma Al-Mahrooqi, ed. Muscat: Sultan Qaboos University Press, 2012: 302-314.

“Reader’s Guide” for the English version of Khadija bint Alawi al-Thahab’s My Grandmother’s Stories: Folk Tales from Dhofar (Translated by W. Scott Chahanovich, U.S. Fulbright Scholar at Dhofar University, 2009-2010). Washington, D.C: Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, 2012: 17-23.

Conference Presentations – anthropology/ culture/ travel writing

“Conducting Research on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions,” Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference. Nov. 14, 2024.

“Windguru and Other Gurus: Fishing off the Coast of Dhofar, Oman,” Navigating the Transcultural Indian Ocean: Texts and Practices in Contact Conference, sponsored by the Rutter Project. June 5, 2024

“Crafting a Home: Interior Home Design in Southern Oman.” Home/Making Symposium, Concordia University. Montreal. May 12, 2023. https://www.concordia.ca/finearts/events/home-making.html

“Good Governance and Open Spaces: How the State and Residents Negotiate the Use of Government Land in Dhofar, Oman.” AnthroState Talks for the European Association of Social Anthropologists Network on Anthropologies of the State. May 4, 2023. https://easaonline.org/networks/anthrostate/talks

“Explorations in the North-west Indian Ocean: The Research Journeys of the ‘Palinurus’ along the Omani Coast in the mid-1800s.” Research Expeditions to India and the Indian Ocean in Early Modern and Modern Times, sponsored by the German Maritime Museum / Leibniz Institute for Maritime History. Nov. 3, 2022.

“Private Lives in Public Spaces: Perceptions of Space-Usage in Southern Oman.” Middle East Studies Association annual conference. Montreal, Quebec. December 2, 2021.

“The Costs and Benefits of Fishing in Southern Oman.” Fish as Food: Lifestyle and a Sustainable Future, annual conference of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, hosted at the University of Liverpool. Sept. 1, 2021.

“Ethical Eating in Southern Oman.” Just Food, virtual conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society; Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society; Canadian Association for Food Studies and the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, hosted by the Culinary Institute of America and New York University. June 12, 2021.

“Foodways in Southern Oman,” for the session “Uncovering Truths, Building Responsibility in A Pandemic: Insights from Emerging Monographs at the Nexus of Culture, Food, and Agriculture.” American Anthropological Association. Nov. 9, 2020.

with Keye Tersmette. “Ghurba at Home – Views from Oman.” The Arab World as Ghurba: Citizenship, Identity and Belonging in Literature and Popular Culture, University of Warwick. June 21, 2019.

“Accounts from the Journeys of the Brig ‘Palinurus’ Along the Dhofar Coast in the mid-1800s.” Maritime Exploration and Memory Conference, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. Sept. 15, 2018.

“Recent Views on Oman.” British Society for Middle East Studies, University of Edinburgh. July 6, 2017.

“Female, Femininity, Male and Masculinity in the Gibali-speaking Tribes of Southern Oman.” The Gulf Research Conference, Cambridge University. August 2, 2017.

“‘Words Mean Nothing’: Fluency in Language and Fluency in Culture in Anthropology Fieldwork in Southern Oman.” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Wales. July 15, 2016.

“’Why Would I Hurt a Woman?’: Respectful/ Respecting Women in Southern Oman.” Middle East Studies Association Conference, Denver. Nov. 21, 2015.

“Generosity, Gift-giving and Gift-avoiding in Southern Oman.” British Foundation for the Study of Arabia’s Seminar for Arabian Studies, The British Museum, London. July 27, 2014.

“‘I Do Not Need the Night’: The Gibali Conception of Self-Respect in Southern Oman.” Middle East Studies Association Conference, New Orleans. October 12, 2013.

“They Came, They Saw, They Fought, They Compromised, They Left: The Foreign Military Presence in the Dhofar War (Oman, 1965-1975).” Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference; Edinburgh. July 3, 2012.

 “Waiting for [both] the Barbarians”: Tourism in the Dhofar Region of Oman.” Traditions and Transformations: Tourism, Heritage and Cultural Change in the Middle East and North Africa Region; Amman, Jordan. April 6, 2009.

Conference presentations – literature/ pedagogy

“Finding the Right Texts for Teaching Literature, Cultures, and Empathy in the Middle East.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference. April 9, 2021.

“‘I Came to You for Good’: An Ethnographic Discussion of Folk Tales from Southern Oman.” Third Joint Seminar of The Folklore Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute, Royal Anthropological Institute, London. Oct. 26, 2017.

“Antigone, Alcestis, Deanira and Philoketes visit the Empty Quarter: The Reception of Greek Drama on the Arabian Peninsula.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, University of Utrecht. July 8, 2017.

“‘A Man Was Always Catching Fish’: Fairy Tale Elements in the Ali al-Mahri/ Johnstone/ Rubin Gibali Texts from Southern Oman.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. March 18, 2016.

“Analyzing Arabic Teaching to Improve English Teaching.” TESOL Arabia Annual Conference; Dubai. March 14, 2014.

 “John Clare Looks Good in a Dishdash: Linking John Clare to Middle Eastern Poetry.” Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Chicago. January 7, 2011.

“How Can You Hate the Sun?: Translating Western Conceptions of Nature.” Humanities Education and Research Association, Chicago, Illinois. April 9, 2009. 

“Do You Have Anything on Cowboys?: Creating a University Library in the Middle East,” with Chris Sugnet. Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque. Feb., 2000.

Creative Non-fiction

“Yemen with Yul,” in Emanations 11. Independently published, 2024: 417-429.

“Questions About Food and Ethics,” in Emanations: When a Planet was a Planet. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2021: 403-408

“Ok Kilito, I Won’t Speak Your Language: Reflections after Reading Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language,” in Octo-Emanations. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2020: 233-236.

“Predator Anthropologists, Anthropologist Predators: Anthropological Metaphors in Popular Movies,” Open Anthropology Research Repository. Aug. 25, 2020. https://www.openanthroresearch.org/doi/abs/10.1002/oarr.10000333.1

“What’s in Your Bag?” Anthropology News. American Anthropological Association. Oct. 30, 2019. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/07/23/whats-in-your-bag-2019-edition/

“Living Expat,” in Emanations: Chorus Pleiades. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2018: 308-318.

“Research in Foreign Cultures,” in Emanations: Foray into Forever. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2014: 355-358.

 “Throwing Children in the Street: Explaining Western Culture to Omanis,” in Emanations: Third Eye. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2013: 265-274.

 “To Learn Arabic, You Have to Talk the Talk,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. May 31, 2012. http://chronicle.com/article/To-Learn-Arabic-You-Have-to/132057

“Your Zimbabwe Stories” and “Memsahib 101,” in Emanations: Sidestepping Academic Dicta into the Higher Ecstatic Ethos. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2012: 305-312.

 “Bringing Theory Home in Oman,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. July 10, 2011: B24.

            http://chronicle.com/article/Bringing-Theory-Home-in-Oman/128139/

“In the House of the Infidel or Perfume: The Great Healer,” Button 16, 2011: 6-9.

 “For Middle East expats, a fake-holly, not-so-jolly Christmas,” The Washington Post, Dec. 23, 2009: C3.

 “An Open Letter to Alice Walker,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Feb. 20, 2009: B11.

            http://chronicle.texterity.com/chronicle/20090220b/?pg=11#pg11

 

 

Bibliography – Arabian Peninsula Literature: Fiction, Drama, Poetry and Secondary Sources

This is a selected bibliography of texts related to Arabian Peninsula/ Middle Eastern literature.

[writers who are underlined are major authors with many other publications]

Arabian Peninsula Writing

general

Akers, Deborah and Abubaker Bagader, eds. and trans. 2008. Oranges in the Sun: Short Stories from the Arabian Gulf. London: Lynne Rienner.

Alshammari, Shahd. 2017. Notes on the Flesh. Malta: Faraxa Publishing.

Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. 1988. The Literature of Modern Arabia: An Anthology. London: Kegan Paul International.

Michalak-Pikulska, Barbara. 2016. Modern Literature of the Gulf. Bern: Peter Lang GmbH.

Meguid, Ibrahim Abdel. 2006. The Other Place. Farouk Abdel Wahab, trans. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

Wilson, G. Willow. 2012. Alif the Unseen. New York, Grove Press.

also note:

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation [https://www.banipaltrust.org.uk/prize/

Banipal Magazine [ https://www.banipal.co.uk/ ] which has special issues on specific countries, for example: Yemen [ https://www.banipal.co.uk/back_issues/73/issue-36/ ]

Emirates

Al Murr, Mohammad. 2008. Dubai Tales. Peter Clark and Jack Briggs, trans. Dubai: Motivate Publishing.

—. 1998. “The Wink of the Mona Lisa” and Other Stories from the Gulf. Jack Briggs, trans. Dubai: Motivate Publishing.

Al-Suwaidi, Thani. The Diesel.

Johnson-Davies, Denys, ed. 2009. In a Fertile Desert: Modern Writing from the United Arab Emirates. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.

Krishnadas. 2007. Dubai Puzha: When Seagulls Fly Over Dubai Creek. ‎Thrissur, Kerala: Green Books.

Michalak-Pikulska, Barbara. 2012. Modern Literature of the United Arab Emirates. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press.

Unnikrishnan, Deepak. Temporary People.

Kuwait

Abulhawa, Susan. 2020. Against the Loveless World.

Al Nakib, Mai. 2023. An Unlasting Home. Mariner Books: New York.

Alsanousi, Saud. The Bamboo Stalk.

Oman

Al Farsi, Abdulaziz. 2013. Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs: A Modern Omani Novel. Nancy Roberts, trans. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press.

Alharthi, Jokha. 2019. Celestial Bodies. Marilyn Booth, trans. New York: Catapult.

Hamed, Huda. I Saw Her in my Dreams.

Ibrahim, Sonallah. 2001. Warda. Hosam Aboul-Ela, trans. Yale University Press: New Haven.

Michalak-Pikulska, Barbara. 2002. Modern Poetry and Prose of Oman. Krakow: The Enigma Press.

Saudi

Al-Khamis, Omaima Abdullah. Al-Bahriyat.

Alireza, Marianne. 2002. At the Drop of a Veil.

Alsanea, Rajaa. 2007. Girls of Riyadh. London: Penguin.

Benyamin. 2021. Goat Days. Joseph Koyippally, trans. Efinito.

Ferraris, Zoe. 2008. Finding Noof. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: New York.

—. 2010.  City of Veils. New York: Little Brown.

—. 2012. Kingdom of Strangers. New York: Little Brown.

Munif, ‘Abd al-Rahman. 1989. Cities of Salt. Peter Theroux, trans. Random House: New York.

Yemen

‘Abd al-Wali, Mohammad. They Die Strangers.

Ba-Amer, Salih. 1988. “Dancing by the Light of the Moon,” in The Literature of Modern Arabia: An Anthology. S. K. Jayyusi, ed. London: Kegan Paul International. 318-22.

Bajaber, Khadija Abdalla. 2021. House of Rust.

Dammaj, Zayd Mutee. 1994. The Hostage. Interlink Books: Northampton, MA.

Hunter, Barry Stewart. 2017. Aden.

Classical/ Pre-Modern Fiction and Poetry

Allen, Roger. 2005. The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of its Genres and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Arberry, A.J. 1965. Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Farrin, Raymond. 2011. Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Irwin, R. 2002. Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature. New York: Anchor.

Sells, M., trans. 1989. Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes by Alqama, Shanfara, Labid, Antara, Al-Asha and Dhu al-Rumma. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Folk/fairy tales

Al Taie, Hatim and Joan Pickersgill. 2008. Omani Folk Tales. Muscat, Oman: Al Roya Press and Publishing House.

al-Thahab, Khadija bint Alawi. 2012/ Stories of My Grandmother. W. Scott Chahanovich, ed. Washington, D.C:  Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center.

Behnam, Mariam. 2001. Heirloom: Evening Tales from the East. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ElMahi, Ali Tigani and Ahmed Mohamed al Khatheri. 2015. “A Folk Story from Dhofar: A Pathway to Indigenous Knowledge.” Journal of Arts and Social Sciences 6.2: 5-12. DOI:10.24200/jass.vol6iss2

Hamad, Abdulsalam. 2006. Omani Folk Tales. Seeb: Al-Dhamri Bookshop.

Johnstone, T.M. 1974. “Folklore and Folk Literature in Oman and Socotra.” Arabian Studies 1: 7-24.

Johnstone, T.M. 1983. “Folk-Tales and Folk-lore of Dhofar.” Journal of Oman Studies 6.1: 123-127.

—. 1978. “A St. George of Dhofar.” Arabian Studies 4: 59-65.

—. 1974. “Folklore and Folk Literature in Oman and Socotra.” Arabian Studies 1: 7-24.

Kamal, M. 1999. Juha: Last of the Errant Knights. J. Briggs, trans. Dubai: Motivate Publishing.

Mershen, Birgit. 2004. “Ibn Muqaarab and Naynuh: A Folk-tale from Tiwi.” Journal of Oman Studies 13: 91-97.

Paine, Patty, Jesse Ulmer and Michael Hersrud, eds. 2013. The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf.  Highclere, Berkshire: Berkshire Academic Press.

Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange. 2014. Malcome Lyons, trans. London: Penguin.

Todino-Gonguet, Grace. Halimah and the Snake, and other Omani Folk Tales. 2008. London: Stacey International.

Wilson, G. Willow. 2012. Alif the Unseen. New York, Grove Press.

Poetry

al Hajri, Hilal. 2014. The Night is Mine. Khalid al Balushi. trans. Muscat: Ministry of Heritage and Culture.

Al Balushi, Khalid, ed. and trans. 2016. Contemporary Omani Poetry in English. Muscat: Ministry of Heritage and Culture.

Handal, N., ed. 2001. The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology. New York: Interlink.

Johnstone, T. M. 1972. “The Language of Poetry in Dhofar.” The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 35.1: 1-17.

Morris, Miranda. 1985. “A Poem in Jibbali.” Journal of Oman Studies 7: 121-30.

Arabic/ Islamic Drama, Fiction and Poetry

Al Aswany, Alaa. 2006. The Yacoubian Building (Egypt). Harper: New York.

Alghosaibi, Ghazi. 1996. An Apartment Called Freedom (Egypt). Leslie McLoughlin, trans. Kegan Paul.

Al-Hakim, T. 1981. Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts of Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Volume One. W. M. Hutchins, trans. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press.

Carlson, M, ed. 2005. The Arab Oedipus: Four plays. New York: Martin E. Segal Theater Center Publications.

Charara, H, ed. 2008. Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab-American Poetry. Fayetteville, AK: The University of Arkansas Press.

Elmusa, S. 2008. Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987-2008. Northhampton, MA: Interlink.

Husni, R. and Newman, D., eds. 2008. Modern Arabic Short Stories: A Bilingual Reader. London: Saqi.

Johnson-Davies, Denys. ed. 2006. The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction. New York: Anchor Books/ Random House.

Johnson-Davies, Denys, ed. 1994. Arabic Short Stories. Berkeley: University of CA Press.

Kabbani, Nizar. 1999. Arabian Love Poems. B. K. Franieh and C. R. Brown, trans. London: Lynne Rienner.

Kahf, M. 2003. E-mails from Scheherazade. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

Kaldas, P. and Mattawa, K, eds. 2009. Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction. Fayetteville, AK: The University of Arkansas Press.

Kamal, M. 1999. Juha: Last of the Errant Knights. J. Briggs, trans. Dubai: Motivate Publishing.

Kanafani, Ghassan. 1998. Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories. Hilary Kilpatrick, trans. Boulder: ‎Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Mahfouz, Naguib. 1990. The Cairo Trilogy. Doubleday: New York.

Mersal, I. 2008. These are not Oranges, My Love. Riverdale, NY: Sheep Meadow Press.

Nye, N. S. 2002. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East. New York: Greenwillow.

—., ed. 1996. This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World. New York: Aladdin.

Qabbani, Nizar. 2006. On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani. Lena Jayyusi and Sharif Elmusa. trans. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing.

Salih, Tayeb. 1995. “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid,” in Global Voices: Contemporary Literature from the Non-Western World. Arthur Biddle, ed. Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Blair Press. 512-522.

Washburn, K. and Major, J, eds. 1998. World Poetry. New York, W.W. Norton.

Williams, D. 1993. Traveling Mercies. Cambridge, MA: Alice James Books.

Literature/ language/ multi-cultural learning

Al Harthi, A. 2005. “Distance Higher Education Experiences of Arab Gulf Students in the United States: A Cultural Perspective.”  International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 6.3: 1-14.

Amin-Zaki, Amel. 1996. “Religious and Cultural Considerations in Translating Shakespeare into Arabic,” in Between Language and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, eds. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 223-44.

Baer, Brian James. 2020. “From Cultural Translation to Untranslatability – من الترجمة الثقافية إلى استحالة الترجمة: Theorizing Translation outside Translation Studies.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 40: 139-63.

Bell, Duncan. 2003. “Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity.” The British Journal of Sociology 54.1: 63-81.

Booth, Marilyn. 2010. “‘The Muslim Woman’ as Celebrity Author and the Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riyadh Go on the Road.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6.3: 149-82.

Boyd, F. 2002. “Conditions, Concessions, and the Many Tender Mercies of Learning through Multicultural Literature.” Reading Research and Instruction 42.1: 58-92.

Brooks, W. 2006. “Reading Representation of Themselves.” Reading Research Quarterly, 41, 372-392.

Gatling, Benjamin. 2020, Summer. “There Isn’t Belief, Just Believing: Rethinking Belief as a Keyword of Folklore Studies.” The Journal of American Folklore 133.529: 307-28.

Grosjean, François. 2015. “Bicultural Bilinguals.” International Journal of Bilingualism 19.5: 572–86.

Halstead, J. M. 2004. “An Islamic Concept of Education.” Comparative Education 40: 517-29.

Heble, Ayesha. 2007. “Teaching Literature On-line to Arab students: Using Technology to Overcome Cultural Restrictions.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 6.2: 219-226.

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Mazawi, Andreas. 2010. “Naming the Imaginary: ‘Building an Arab Knowledge Society’ and the Contested Terrain of Educational Reform for Development,” in Trajectories of Education in the Arab World: Legacies and Challenges. Osama Abin-Mershed, ed. London: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and Routledge.

McDermott, Ray and Varenne, Herve. 2007. “Reconstructing Culture in Educational Research,” in Innovations in Educational Ethnography, G. Spindler and L. Hammond, eds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 3-31.

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Webb, Allen. 2012. Teaching the Literature of Today’s Middle East. London: Routledge.

Using Creative Writing Prompts in Foreign Language Learning

Teaching: Reflections on Culture Shocks

Teaching Literature and Staying au courant – The Man from Nowhere and the Ancient Greeks

Navigating without Language

Poems

New essay: “’Ayn is for Arab” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

“The Arabic Alphabet” website (written by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi) – http://alifbatourguide.com/

‘Ayn is for Arab – http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/ayn/

 

‘Ayn is for Arab  –  illustration by Houman Mortazavi   

If we are predisposed to linguistic timidity this is the sound that scares us off. Strictly speaking it is simply the voiced equivalent of ح. But.

I had met Sayed a few months before, in Australia, where he’d tutored me in Arabic. Our lessons foundered on the gagging “ah” sound that has no equivalent in English – or in any other language. “You sound as if you’re choking on spaghetti,” Sayed would say, correcting me. “Just choke. Forget the spaghetti.” He usually gave up after fifteen minutes and tutored me in the wiles of Cairo instead. (Tony Horwitz, Baghdad Without a Map, 72-73)

Even a respected linguist makes it sound a little forbidding: ‘Ayn (that’s its name) is

…the voiced pharyngeal fricative, the most characteristic sound of Arabic . . . the throat muscles are highly constricted with the vocal cords vibrating to produce a sound close to a gag.” (W.M. Thackston (in Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic, xvi)

A manual teaching the Urdu script, by a linguist who has evidently read Thackston, says that in Urdu the letter is a simple glottal stop, but that in Arabic it was “a sound made when the throat muscles are highly constricted and the vocal cords vibrate . . .” and adds “similar to the sound made when retching” (Richard Delaney, Beginner’s Urdu Script, 89). William Jones, long ago, in his grammar of Persian (1771) describes the sound in Arabic as “harsh,” and adds, quoting the 17th-century scholar Franciscus Meninski, that it resembles vox vituli matrem vocantis, which I believe means “the sound of a calf calling for its mother.”

Jonathan Raban, in an account of his own study of Arabic, resists the ‘Ayn temptation. It’s still a difficult sound, but it’s not frightening. He even makes it sexy.

continued at: http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/ayn/

New essay: “Ẓâ is for Ẓarf” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

New Essay: “Ṭâ Is For Talisman” on The Arabic Alphabet website

New essay: “Ṣâd is for Zero” on the Arabic alphabet website

New essay: “D͎âd is for Drubbing” on the Arabic alphabet website

The Arabic Alphabet: A Guided Tour – http://alifbatourguide.com/

by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi

D͎âd is for Drubbing – http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/dad/

 excerpt:

If your informant is a speaker of Persian, Turkish or Urdu, and no doubt other languages about which I know even less, Ramadan will be pronounced Ramazan. This is because the D of Ramadan, in Arabic, represents a sound which exists hardly anywhere else, and (like ذ and ظ), it becomes just another way to say Z. Speakers of Arabic are aware they have a letter of their own: Arabic is called لغة الضاد lughat aḍ-Ḍâd, the language of Ḍâd. (For the record, an authoritative article in Wikipedia says that the sound of ض does occur in a few other languages, among them well-known languages like Dutch and Korean.)

As with Ṣâd, it may be useful to know that the tongue is pressed more tightly against the roof of the mouth than with the familiar D of Dâl. The vowel which follows ض sounds broader. The student who is not particularly fastidious about exact pronunciation does not need to know that D͎âd is a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) Steingass’s Persian dictionary makes the distinction clear from the Persian point of view, as clear as it needs to be: it is pronounced “in Persian very much like z, whilst in Arabic the pronunciation inclines toward d.”) To my ear, it is not unlike the D in the English word “duh.”

Official English transcription when it attempts to represent the Arabic pronunciation of ض probably deals with the dilemma as well as possible: a roman D with a dot underneath (Ḍ, like the Ṣ in Ṣâd). As for languages where ض is pronounced Z, you have a choice. You could just write Z, as it is pronounced, or, if you want to make it clear which written letter it is, you could write it as you transcribe it, not as you say it (Ḍ plus dot). The International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, in their official list of equivalents, gives you a widely used way to transcribe ض with languages other than Arabic, which is Ż. It has the advantage that the dot is over the letter (like the dot in ض), but there is also something awkward about it – perhaps because it looks a little like, خ which is flowing and elegant, but a deformed خ made angular and flat. You won’t see it here. I’m going with Ẓ. (Granted, two chapters further on there’s another letter you could render as Ẓ. I’ll take my chances. TBD.)

Arabic includes, altogether, four such emphatic letters, which official transcription into English handles by adding dots underneath: in the standard sequence they occur huddled in a row: Ṣâd, Ḍâd Ṭâ and Ẓâ’ (ص,ض ,ط and ظ), no doubt to show their phonological kinship. All four are variants of other Arabic sounds : Sin, Dâl, Ta and Za (س,د, ت and ز).

Arabic seems to have sounds which didn’t exist in the predecessor languages. (There is evidently no equivalent of ض in Aramaic or Phoenician). Thus the dots over ض and ظ , which seem to be playing the same role as the dots in academic English, to identify newcomers.

The dots which distinguish ص from ض, (or ط, from ظ ) must have some other function than the dots we use in English transcription, since all four are emphatic. Evidently Ḍâd was heard at one time as a variant of Ṣâd, with the dot to differentiate them. I don’t hear the resemblance, but I assume the dots don’t lie.

New essay: “Ṣâd is for Zero” on the Arabic alphabet website

The Arabic Alphabet: A Guided Tour – http://alifbatourguide.com/

by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi

“Ṣâd is for Zero” – http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/sad/

excerpt:

The shape of Ṣâd shares something with the letters of the Roman alphabet: the appearance of weight, the feeling that it stands, or reclines, rather than floats. Granted, that cushion shape doesn’t look particularly heavy or solid. In fact it looks a little squishy, rounded on the right, flattened down to a point on the left, but it’s wide and substantive enough to have some substance, to function as a base or stand.

The sound in Arabic is not quite that of Sîn. The term for the sound of Ṣâd is S “velarized.” It has to do with the position of the tongue. It feels more emphatic. Non-native speakers of Arabic who don’t always hear the distinction may try focusing instead on the vowel sound which follows it, particularly if the vowel is an A. After Ṣâd, that A is lengthened a little. In other words, ص is pronounced something more like the S in English “sod” than the S in “sad.”) A cunning student might learn to approximate it by lengthening that A before learning how to pronounce the consonant. Textbooks may not say this, but non-native speakers of Arabic who don’t differentiate Sîn from Ṣâd will still be understood. They’ll have a speech impediment, but there are worse obstacles.

In fact your listener may prefer you to have the accent. There is a funny and profound essay by Abdelfattah Kilito in which he confesses to discovering an anxiety in himself: “One day I realized that I dislike having foreigners speak my language…” and adds that the anxiety increases with the fluency of the non-native speaker. “What if this stranger speaks exactly, and expresses himself as clearly as we do?… This person who came from a faraway place causes confusion, not only because he undermines our sense of superiority but also because he suddenly robs us of our language, the principle of our existence, what we consider to be our identity, our refuge, ourselves.” He gives the example of a meeting with an American woman who spoke Moroccan Arabic like a native. He is surprised at his own reaction: “for the first time I felt that my language is slipping away from me, or rather that the American woman had robbed me of it” (Kilito, Thou Shalt not Speak my Language, 87, 91). Perhaps it’s a little like the paradox of animation technology: we admire the skill that makes the image on the screen look real, as it imitates the world outside more and more accurately, but there’s a point beyond which, if the images become too realistic, they start to look a little creepy. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try.

New essay: “Shin is for Saracen” on the Arabic alphabet website

New essay: “Sîn is for Zenith” on the Arabic alphabet website

New essay: ‘Zhe is for Bijan’ on the Arabic alphabet website

New essay: “Za” on the Arabic Alphabet website

New essay: “Ra” on The Arabic Alphabet website

Teaching Literature and Staying au courant – The Man from Nowhere and the Ancient Greeks

There is a profound joy in introducing students to classic texts. I am very grateful that I have spent so much of my working life among the splendors of ancient Greek plays, Romantic Era poets, Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde.

And I am happy that as I teach I have gotten better at choosing classics which speak to my students, from 20th century writers such as Tawfiq al-Hakim to more modern writers such as Mohammed Al Murr and Badriyah al Bashar. And it’s fun help them get over the newness of Moushegh Ishkhan, Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Ryszard Krynicki, T’ao Yuan Ming, Tomas Tranströmer and Wisława Szymborska.

When I start the poetry class, I know that there is at least one student will be blown away by the Cold Mountain poems, Basho, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye or Fowziyah Abu-Khalid. Someone will fall in love with  “Embroidered Memory” by Lorene Zarou-Zouzounis; someone else will champion “About Mount Uludag” by Nazim Hikmet.

It’s a delight to read familiar lines and see how students relate to familiar characters. Who is going to defend Ismene this semester? Who will argue on Creon’s behalf? Who is going to laugh when Patty in Quality Street talks about her hopefulness?  If we read Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, who will my students pick as the one who deserves Chris – Kitty, Margaret or Jenny?

At the same time, it is good for me to be in the position of not knowing, to remember how it feels to be confused by a text. I became a better teacher after I spent two summers studying Arabic in Muscat. Sitting in a classroom as a student, panicking when a teacher asked me a question I did not understand, studying for a test and waiting anxiously for my grade made me more understanding of my own students.

So I try to seek out new texts to read and, perhaps, use for teaching. I scan shelves in bookstores and ask friends for suggestions. Since I don’t know Spanish writers, I asked a friend who has expertise and, following her suggestions, found “Marta Alvarado, History Professor” by Marjorie Agosín and “New Clothes” by Julia Alvarez, as well as “Tula” and “Turtle Came to See Me” by Margarita Engle.

Over the past few years, I have realized that I few students are into K-pop (BTS! Blackpink! Twice! NCT!) and so I decided to dip a toe into that cultural tradition.

The easiest way to start was movies so I duly looked at “top 10 Korean movie” lists and rented The Man from Nowhere (2010). One review mentioned that it was similar to Léon: The Professional (1994) in that it involved a young girl who is taken in and protected by a hired assassin. I thought knowing the plot would help me but there were a lot of differences, making the movie both interesting and confusing. For example, the ending surprised me. At the end of Léon, the girl is re-enrolled at her boarding school and she finally plants the small tree that she has been carrying around with her, symbolizing that she is now rooted.

At the end of The Man from Nowhere, the anti-hero asks the police for one favor and he brings the young girl he has been trying to protect back to her old neighborhood, goes into a small convenience store and buys her some composition books, writing supplies and a back-pack. Then he asks her if she will be ok. She nods, they hug and then he turns to go back into the police car.

I stared at the screen in astonishment. “That’s the end?!?” I wondered. Her father left long ago, her mother died at the start of the film, the girl was kidnapped and brutally treated for weeks, and now, with a few stationary supplies, the girl is now alone and supposed to take care of herself?

Over the next few weeks, I watched a few more and was astounded by whole new levels of plotting. It often feels like I am watching several movies at one: Assassination (2015) has freedoms fighters betrayed by team members (shades of Guns of Navarone), funny but doomed killers (shades of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and twin sisters on opposite sides of an immense cultural, educational and temperamental divide (a grown-up, super spy equivalent of the Parent Trap).

I am often bewildered as I try out comedies, historical fiction and modern thrillers such as The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008), Masquerade (2012), The Villainess (2017) and War of the Arrows (2011).

It takes a lot of concentration to understand each movie, not because of the sub-titles but the  work of trying to create new templates and figure out new tropes. How can I visually tell the difference between good guys and bad guys? Is the behavior of this woman showing that she is good or bad? Does this style of house indicate that the owners are rich, poor, old-fashioned or trend-setters? Is the meal the characters being served haute cuisine or everyday fare? Is this behavior normal or odd?

Sometimes it is good to be lost.