Reprint of a classic text, this volume gives an insight into the rebirth of national literature in the national language and traces the course of its development and full maturity from the beginning of the ninth to the end of the fifteenth ...

This book examines the stories' sexual and homoerotic language and suggests that its ambiguity provides fresh ways of understanding ideas of gender and sexuality in the ancient Near East.

Millennia after its composition, Gilgamesh continues to speak to us in myriad ways.

In 1253, the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck encountered Muslims where he may well not have expected, and certainly did not wish, to find any.

This volume of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature covers artistic prose and poetry produced in the heartland and provinces of the 'Abbasid empire during the second great period of Arabic literature, from the mid-eighth to the ...

In this comprehensive and up to date history, from prehistoric proto-Indo-Iranian times to the post-Soviet period, Richard Foltz traces the complex linguistic, cultural and political history of the Tajiks, a Persian-speaking Iranian ethnic ...

These essays explore Nizami s influential role and his portrayal of issues related to love, women, and science, stressing his preoccupation with the art of speech as a major impetus behind his literary activity.

This book traces the history of the idea that the king and later the messiah is Son of God, from its origins in ancient Near Eastern royal ideology to its Christian appropriation in the New Testament.

In this book, Muhsin Mahdi, whose critical edition of the text brought so much praise, explores the complex literary history of the "Nights," bringing to fruition the search for the archetype that constituted the core of the surviving ...

Cohen-Mor examines the concept of fate in the Arab world through readings of religious texts, poetry, fiction, and folklore.