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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Almaany dictionaries are now in Google Store as a smartphone app


Almaany dictionaries (Arabic-Arabic, Arabic-English, Arabic French etc) could now be downloaded both from the app store and from Google store. Here is the link for the Google store: Almaany.com dictionary. For Iphones , see here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/atef-sharia/id952606462 .

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Geology in Arabic

This is a snapshot of some bibliography ( in Arabic) about geology and geological terms in Arabic;

Ancient Greek Features in Arabic Literature, Ihsan Abbas (Lebanon 1993 2nd edition)

Ihsan Abbas, a Palestinian professor at AUB, traced Greek traces of Arabic literature in his book "Ancient Greek Features in Arabic Literature, Ihsan Abbas (Lebanon 1993 2nd edition). In the Preface he states that this book is an attempt to " answer two main questions: what did Arabs translate from Greek literature and how did the Arabic literature make use of the translated Greek culture, whether it was science, literary works, or philosophy." Below you can see the table of contents of this book (in Arabic).

(Thanks to my colleague and brother Mohammed Lafi for correcting my English)







Kalb (Arabic قلب) a programming language written in Arabic codes


Kalb or Arabic قلب is a programming language developed by Ramsey Nasser to explore the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavsScript.


All modern programming tools are based on the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin Characters and was originally based on the English Language. As a result, programming has become tied to a single written culture. It carries with it a cultural bias that favors those who grew up reading and writing in that cultural. قلب explores and challenges that by presenting a language that deviates almost entirely from ASCII.

More from here .

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Who is Who in Modern Egypt: Roshdi Rashed

Even though he has left Egypt, but he is still a typical example for an Egyptian in diaspora !


 
Roshdi Rashed (Arabic: رشدي راشد), born in Cairo in 1936, is a mathematician, philosopher and historian of science, whose work focuses largely on mathematics and physics of medieval Arab world. His work explores and illuminates the unrecognized Arab scientific tradition, being one of the first historians to study in detail the ancient and medieval texts, their journey through the Eastern schools and courses, their immense contributions to Western science, particularly in regarding the development of algebra and the first formalization of physics.

Read more about him in English (Wikipedia), French (Arabic Philosopher) and in Arabic (Arabic Philosopher).


Saturday, December 20, 2014

Hindawi Google-App for Arabic books

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Hindawi+Foundation+for+Education+and+Culture

Through the above link one can download "Hindawi" Google App in his tablet and enjoy a world of many  wonderful Arabic books for free.

This is Amazing !


Who is Who in Modern Egypt: Ahmed Amin


In my series "Who is Who in Modern Egypt", I will seek to spot some light on intellectual figures of modern Egypt. My "Modern Egypt" starts from the Napoleonic campaign in the Orient (Egypt and Syria) (1798–1801) until the very recent day. I will give the English biography of every person (mainly from Wikipedia) then I will give the Arabic one, which is the most important to me. The Arabic bibliography of each figure will be given, along with free downloadable books ( mainly from Hindawi Foundation).

The first one to begin with is "Ahmad Amin", below you can look at his short biography from wikipedia, and before that (and If you know Arabic !) you can find an Arabic biography of this writer plus all his works through this link.


أحمد أمين


Ahmad Amin (1886–1954) was an Egyptian historian and writer. He wrote a series of books on the history of the Islamic civilization (1928–1953), a famous autobiography (My Life, 1950), as well as an important dictionary of Egyptian folklore (1953).

After receiving a traditional religious education the University of Al-Azhar, he worked as qadi until 1926. He then taught Arabic literature at Cairo University, where he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts, until 1946. Ahmad Amin was one of the most brilliant intellectuals of his time: he was editor of the literary journals al-Risalah (1933) and al-Thakafa (1939), founder of Ladjnat al-ta'lif wa l-tardjama wa-l-nashr ("Literary Committee of Translation and Publication"). He worked as head of the culture department at the Egyptian Ministry of Education before leading the cultural division of the Arab League. He is most famous for his long history of Islamic culture, in three volumes (Fajr al-islam, 1928 ; Duha l-islam, 1933–1936 ; Zuhr al-islam, 1945–1953) which is the first attempt of its kind in the modern history of the Muslim world. He also left an autobiography (Hayati, 1950) while his main articles were published under the title Fayd al-khatir.

Amin lectured on Egyptian literary history between the years of 1939 and 1946.[1] It was during this time that Amin stated his initial belief that Egyptians had not contributed toArabic poetry during the Middle Ages the way other Arab populations had. Amin's student Shawqi Daif claimed that the dearth of properly published Egyptian works from the period made such a judgement tenuous, and suggested that he and Amin republish the Egyptian sections in anthologies of poetry from the period.[2] Amin agreed to write the introduction while Daif wrote the preface,[2] while fellow scholar Ihsan Abbas assisted the team with editing the folios for printing from 1951 until 1952.[1]

See the full entry in Wikipedia through this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Amin

Friday, December 19, 2014

Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, UCP 2011

Disarming Words

Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt
Shaden M. Tageldin 

Univesity of California Press 2011

[Thanks to Mohammed Lafi for the reference]

In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt—by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882—in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves “equal” to or even “masters” of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves toward—virtually into—the European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby repressing its inherent inequalities. She considers, among others, the interplays of Napoleon and Hasan al-'Attar; Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Silvestre de Sacy, and Joseph Agoub; Cromer, 'Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Siba'i, and Thomas Carlyle; Ibrahim 'Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat; and Salama Musa, G. Elliot Smith, Naguib Mahfouz, and Lawrence Durrell. In conversation with new work on translation, comparative literature, imperialism, and nationalism, Tageldin engages postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Emile Benveniste, and Jacques Derrida.

Contents 

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration

Overture | Cultural Imperialism Revisited: Translation, Seduction, Power
1. The Irresistible Lure of Recognition
2. The Dismantling I: Al-'Attar's Antihistory of the French in Egypt, 1798–1799
3. Suspect Kinships: Al-Tahtawi and the Theory of French-Arabic "Equivalence," 1827–1834
4. Surrogate Seed, World-Tree: Mubarak, al-Siba'i, and the Translations of "Islam" in British Egypt, 1882–1912
5. Order, Origin, and the Elusive Sovereign: Post-1919 Nation Formation and the Imperial Urge toward Translatability
6. English Lessons: The Illicit Copulations of Egypt at Empire's End
Coda | History, Affect, and the Problem of the Universal

Notes
Index


More about the book from the publisher's website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520265523 .

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Eurocentrism,European Civilization, and European exceptionalism

From Wikipedia; Eurocentrism is:

Eurocentrism is a political term coined in the 1980s, referring to the notion of European exceptionalism, a worldview centered on Western civilization, as it had developed during the height of the European colonial empires since the Early Modern period.

The term Eurocentrism itself dates to the late 1980s and became prevalent in the discourse of political correctness and cultural relativism during the 1990s, especially in the context decolonization and development aid and humanitarian aid offered by industrialised countries ("First World") to developing countries ("Third World").

More about it is to be found in Wikipedia through this link

There is no Arabic translation of this article in Wikipedia, so I translate this passage as follows:

المركزية الأوروبية هو مصطلح سياسي يشير الى فكرة الاستثنائية الأوروبية ؛ وهى نظرة إستعلائيه عن العالم تنطلق من و تتمحور حول فكرة "تفوق الحضارة الأوربية-الغربية كما أُسس لها أثناء أوج إذهار وتوسع دول الإستعمار الأوربية منذ "أوائل العصر الحديث".
ويعود هذا المصطلح  "المركزية الأوروبية" تحديداً إلى أواخر العقد الثامن من القرن التاسع عشر الميلادى( 1970-1979) حيث ساد بعد ذلك في خطاب الباقة السياسية و النسبية الثقافية  بعدها بعقد من الزمن(1980-1989)، وخاصة في سياق محاولة إنهاء تبعية الدولة المستعمرة سابقا لدول الإستعمار وذلك في إطار "مساعدات التنمية" و "المساعدات الإنسانية" التي تقدمها البلدان الصناعية ( "العالم الأول") إلى البلدان النامية ( " العالم الثالث ").

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Encyclopedia of Mediterranean Humanism (EMH), Houari Touati, Bayt al-hikma La Maison de la sagesse des Abbassides

Houari Touati, « Bayt al-hikma : la Maison de la sagesse des Abbassides », in Houari Touati (éd.), Encyclopédie de l’humanisme méditerranéen, printemps 2014, URL = http://www.encyclopedie-humanisme.com/?Bayt-al-hikma.




Monday, December 15, 2014

Journal for the History of Arab Science, Aleppo Volumes I-XV ( Free download)

Through the below link, one could donwload pdf-files of the  first 15th volumes (1977-1997) of Journal for the History of Arab Science published by The Insititute of Arabic scientific heritage in Aleppo Univerisity (Syria). The links to download the volumes are to be found here.

Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Dimitri Gutas, Routledge 1998



Greek Thought, Arabic Culture
The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.) (Arabic Thought and Culture),  Dimitri Gutas, Routledge 1998





From the middle of the eighth century to the tenth century, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books, including such diverse topics as astrology, alchemy, physics, botany and medicine, that were not available throughout the eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East, were translated into Arabic.
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture explores the major social, political and ideological factors that occasioned the unprecedented translation movement from Greek into Arabic in Baghdad, the newly founded capital of the Arab dynasty of the 'Abbasids', during the first two centuries of their rule. Dimitri Gutas draws upon the preceding historical and philological scholarship in Greco-Arabic studies and the study of medieval translations of secular Greek works into Arabic and analyses the social and historical reasons for this phenomenon.
Dimitri Gutas provides a stimulating, erudite and well-documented survey of this key movement in the transmission of ancient Greek culture to the Middle Ages.
Table of contents

Title Page                                                                    iii

Contents                                                                      ix

Preface                                                                                    xiii

Note on Dates, Names, and Transliteration                xvii

Introduction                                                                1

Part I - Translation and Empire                                   9

1 - The Background of the Translation Movement     11

2 - Al-ManṢŪr                                                            28

3 - Al-MahdĪ and His Sons                                        61

4 - Al-Ma’mŪn                                                           75

Part II - Translation and Society                                 105

5 - Translation in the Service of Applied and Theoretical Knowledge107

6 - Patrons, Translators, Translations                          121

7 - Translation and History                                         151

Epilogue187

Appendix: Greek Works Translated into Arabic        193

Bibliography and Abbreviations                                 197

Chronological Bibliography of Studies on the Significance of the Translation Movement for Islamic Civilization                                                        212

General Index                                                              216


Index of Manuscripts                                                  230

Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused, Garth Fowden Princton University press 2013.



Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it. Despite intensive study of late Antiquity over the last fifty years, even generous definitions of this period have reached only the eighth century, whereas Islam did not mature sufficiently to compare with Christianity or rabbinic Judaism until the tenth century. Before and After Muhammad suggests a new way of thinking about the historical relationship between the scriptural monotheisms, integrating Islam into European and West Asian history.
Garth Fowden identifies the whole of the First Millennium--from Augustus and Christ to the formation of a recognizably Islamic worldview by the time of the philosopher Avicenna--as the proper chronological unit of analysis for understanding the emergence and maturation of the three monotheistic faiths across Eurasia. Fowden proposes not just a chronological expansion of late Antiquity but also an eastward shift in the geographical frame to embrace Iran.
In Before and After Muhammad, Fowden looks at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alongside other important developments in Greek philosophy and Roman law, to reveal how the First Millennium was bound together by diverse exegetical traditions that nurtured communities and often stimulated each other.
Garth Fowden is Research Director at the Institute of Historical Research, National Research Foundation, Athens, and Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths at the University of Cambridge. His books include The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind and Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (both Princeton).

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Prefatory Note and Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Chapter 1. INCLUDING ISLAM 1
The West and the Rest 1
Edward Gibbon 5
Islam and late Antiquity 9
Summary 15
Chapter 2. TIME: BEYOND LATE ANTIQUITY 18
The roots of late antique studies 18
Burckhardt to Strzygowski 23
The Orient and Islam: Views from Vienna 30
Pirenne to the present 37
Chapter 3. A NEW PERIODIZATION: THE FIRST MILLENNIUM 49
Decline versus transformation 49
Maturations 53
Monotheist historiography 68
For and against the First Millennium 82
Chapter 4. SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT 92
Discovering the Mediterranean 92
Discovering the East 96
Empires and commonwealths 101
The Mountain Arena 116
Chapter 5. EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1: ARISTOTELIANISM 127
Greek Aristotelianism 129
Christian polemic 136
Aristotle in Latin, Armenian, and Syriac 139
Alexandria to Baghdad 146
Arabic Aristotelianism 153
Chapter 6. EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2: LAW AND RELIGION 164
Roman law 166
Rabbinic Judaism 173
Patristic Christianity 181
Islam 188
Chapter 7. VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000: ?US, BASRA,
BAGHDAD, PISA 198
Tus/Iran 199
Basra/Encyclopedism 204
Baghdad/Rationality 207
Pisa/The Latin West 212
Prospects for Further Research 219
Map: the Eurasian Hinge, with Circum-Arabian Trade Routes 106

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

The Arabic Islamic Consummatum in Translation and Cultural Dialoge: From Baghdad to Toledo by Ahmed Etman, 2013 (posthumously)


It seems to me that the late Ahmed Etman has left us a very powerful message. You have to read only the title of the book written by him and published posthumously. The book is entitled " The Arabic Islamic Consummatum in Translation and Cultural Dialoge: From Baghdad to Toledo" and published by the Egyptian General Writers` Association 2013.  I'm eager to know what did Ahmed Etman state about the translation movement between Greek, Latin and Arabic.

I don't have a copy of it now to give the table of contents, but I will seek to have it of course.
[Thanks to Belal Sobhy of the reference]


Saturday, December 6, 2014

Galen. Commentary on Hippocrates' Epidemics Book I


Vagelpohl, Uwe

Galeni In Hippocratis Epidemiarum librum I commentariorum I-III versio Arabica /
Galen. Commentary on Hippocrates' Epidemics Book I

Edidit, in linguam Anglicam vertit, commentatus est

The present volume offers the first critical edition of Book I of the medieval Arabic translation of Galen's Commentary on the Hippocratic Epidemics produced by Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. ca. 870). The edition is based on all extant Arabic textual witnesses, including the Arabic secondary transmission.
The translation of this text became a crucial source for the development of medicine in the Islamic world, especially in the nascent field of clinical medicine; the number and extent of quotations in later Arabic medical works and the wide range of didactic writings created on the basis of this translation attest to its importance.
The English translation, which aims to convey some of the favour of the Arabic translation, comes with extensive notes on the differences between the Greek original and the Arabic translation. A thorough comparison between the two versions of the commentary provided important insights into the translation style and terminology of Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his associates.

for more see here.

Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages


Charles Burnett (2009)Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages, Ashgate Variorum

This collection of Charles Burnett's articles on the transmission of Arabic learning to Europe concentrates on the identity of the Latin translators and the context in which they were working. The articles are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning with the earliest known translations from Arabic at the end of the 10th century, progressing through 11th-century translations made in Southern Italy, translators working in Sicily and the Principality of Antioch at the beginning of the 12th century, the first of the 12th-century Iberian translators, the beginnings and development of 'professional' translation activity in Toledo, and the transfer of this activity from Toledo to Frederick II's entourage in the 13th century. Most of the articles include editions of texts that either illustrate the style and character of the translator or provide the source material for his biobibliography.


Contents: Preface; King Ptolemy and Alchandreus the philosopher: the earliest texts on the astrolabe and Arabic astrology at Fleury, Micy and Chartres; Physics before the Physics: early translations from Arabic of texts concerning nature in MSS British Library, Additional 22719 and Cotton Galba E IV; Adelard of Bath and the Arabs; Antioch as a link between Arabic and Latin culture in the 12th and 13th centuries; 'Magister Iohannes Hispalensis et Limiensis' and Qusta ibn Luqa's De Differentia Spiritus et Animae: a Portuguese contribution to the Arts curriculum?; John of Seville and John of Spain, a mise au point; The coherence of the Arabic-Latin translation program in Toledo in the 12th century; Michael Scot and the transmission of scientific culture from Toledo to Bologna via the court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Master Theodore, Frederick II's philosopher: Addenda and corrigenda; Indexes.


About the Author: Charles Burnett is Professor of the History of Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute, University of London, UK

Look at the content from. here

Friday, December 5, 2014

Creative Commons license

Creative Commons (CClicense is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwisecopyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

This is from Wikipedia, to know more see here.

Digital Averroes Research Environment

Access here.
The Digital Averroes Research Environment (DARE) collects and edits the works of the Andalusian Philosopher Averroes or Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad Ibn Rušd, born in Cordoba in 1126, died in Marrakesh in 1198.
DARE makes accessible online digital editions of Averroes's works, and images of all textual witnesses, including manuscriptsincunabulaand early prints. Averroes's writings and the scholarly literature are documented in a bibliographical database.
At the same time, DARE is a research platform, giving scholars who work on Averroes the opportunity to present their research and to discuss questions related to Averroes's thought in theForum. A collaborative, evolving, and open-ended project hosted by DARE is the Averroes Encyclopaedia, designed to document Averroes's philosophical, scientific and technical vocabulary.
Launched by the Thomas-Institut in February 2010, DARE will continue to evolve during the next years before reaching the complete documentation and digitization of Averroes's works that is intended. DARE is funded by DFG.

Brief Bibliographical Guides in Medieval Islamic Philosophy and Theology

see here.

Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Open Access)

To some extent, scholars disagree about the role of the Greek sources in Arabic and Islamic philosophy (henceforth falsafa, the Arabic loan word for φιλοσοφία). While acknowledging the existence of a Greek heritage, those who consider the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition as the main source of inspiration for falsafa claim that the latter did not arise from the encounter of learned Muslims with the Greek philosophical heritage: instead, according to them falsafa stemmed from the Qur’anic hikma (“wisdom”). As a consequence, the Greek texts in translation are conceived of as instruments for the philosophers to perform the task of seeking wisdom. read more from here.