Taha Hussein and the [Ancient] European Civilization

I do know now what is the meaning of my department's name in Ain Shams University : The Ancient European Civilization. It's basically a Greek and Latin (Philology) department, but I've always wondered why it is so called and who coined this name. Taha Hussein, the one who revived Greek and Latin in Egypt, is the one who coined it. Below is p. 386 of the Arabic translation of Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge University Press 1983), which states that Taha Hussein was one of the Arabic intellectuals of the so-called "liberal age", who saw the European civilization as "the superior civilization of the human history". To name "Greek and Latin" (philology) departments in Egypt as the department of "Ancient European Civilization", would have been, back then, very prestigious both for scholars and students alike.

In 2015, I don't think though that this remains the case. Simply because "πάντα ῥεῖ"  and πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει" καὶ "δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης (Plato, Cratylus ,402a). The middle east now, as we all know and see, in a state of radical change; not only (geo)politically, but also socially and mentally too.

Jones, The cities of the eastern Roman provinces (Amsterdam 1983) into Arabic Ihsan Abbas

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones's Book (Amsterdam 1983) The cities of the eastern Roman provinces, was translated by  the  late Palestinian professor at the American University of Beirut Ihsan Abbas.  Its main interest to me is in the fact that in this Arabic translation one finds the modern Arabic names side by side ( usually in square brackets) with the ancient names of the levantine cities. The book was published in 1987 by Dar El-Shorok publishing house in Amman (Jordan).  

Ain Shams' Classics go digital

 Abdel-Monem Zaki, my Friend and colleague in Ain Shams University, has begun blogging in Arabic about digital humanities. His newly started blog is called : Digital Humanities: A New Reading of the Arab Cultural Heritage.

I'm excited to see and fellow what he will be posting in this. I think also that his students will be very much appreciated for this contributions to this field of study which we seek to implement, in cooperation with colleagues from Europe and the USA, in the curricula and study programs of classics department in Ain Shams and else where in Egypt.

This is an excellent start and I wish him all the success and hoping for more to come.

Rethinking Late Antiquity—IAQS' Review of Garth Fowden's BAM by Michael Pregill

Rethinking Late Antiquity—A Review of Garth Fowden, Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused

Posted on March 17, 2014




By Michael Pregill


Beginning in the 1970s, the work of Peter Brown revolutionized the way scholars approach the “fall of Rome,” the decline of Roman and Sasanian power in the Middle East, and the rise of Islam in Late Antiquity. In his classic The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750 and other works, Brown argued that the emergence of Islam and the establishment of the caliphal empire was not a radical disruption of the course of history, but rather represented the continuity of older cultural, political, social, and religious patterns. Despite the wide influence of Brown’s work and the general recognition of Islam’s importance in the overall trajectory of Mediterranean and even European history, substantial obstacles to a full integration of ancient, early Christian, Jewish, and Islamic phenomena into a general history of the civilization of Western Asia remain.


To read the whole review go here: https://iqsaweb.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/rla/

Academia.edu News: New Horizons in Graeco-Arabic Studies

D. Gutas and S. Schmidtke, New Horizons in Graeco-Arabic Studies = Intellectual History of Islamicate World 3 (2015) (forthcoming).

See the content here; New Horizons.

Plato's Menexenus into Arabic by Abullah Almosalammy

Menexenus (dialog) of Plato was translated into Arabic by Abullah Almosalammy  of Ain Shams University (Cairo) . The translation was published in Libya by the faculty of Arts of the Libyan University in 1972 while the late professor of Ain Shams University was teaching Greek and Latin there.

Menander's Dyskolos into Arabic by Abdel Moaty Shaarawy

Abdel Moaty Shaarawy of Cairo University has translated the only new comedy preserved for us in almost a complete form i.e. Dyskolos (Δύσκολος) into Arabic. The translation has been published in the first month of this year (January 2015) by the Kuwaiti National Council of Culture, Arts and Literature (KNCCAL).

  

Characters of Theophrastus (Ἠθικοὶ χαρακτῆρες) into Arabic by Adel Elnahas

Adel Elnahas, the head of the Cairo department of Greek and Latin Studies, has just announced the publication of his translation of Character of Theophrastus (Ἠθικοὶ χαρακτῆρες) into Arabic. The translation is published by the NCT Cairo (2015). Congratulations for the translator and looking for more.

About Theophrastus see http://catalog.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cite:perseus:author.1394 and cf. also  Philosophia Antiqua Vol. 54 William Fortenbaugh et alli (eds.) Theophrastus of Eresus. Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought and Influence, Brill 1993.

My Review of Garth Fowden's BAM at Al-Araby al-jadeed Newspaper (London) 27.01.2015

My Review of Garth Fowden's Before and After Muhammad:The First Millennium Refocused
Princeton University Press 2014. The review is in Arabic and don't pretend to be exhaustive, but I have tried to highlight the main ideas treated in the book. A special emphasis has been given to his apt critics to the Eurocentricity of European histories in neglecting the role of Islam in history.

The Review is written in Arabic and you will find it in this link : http://www.alaraby.co.uk/culture/7c5266ba-21c6-48ad-85e7-6c6979849c37.

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 .

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 .

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).

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

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 .

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 ").

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.

À leur avènement, les Abbassides entreprennent de constituer à Bagdad une bibliothèque qui va devenir la plus prestigieuse de toutes, après celle fondée par les Ptolémés à Alexandrie. Au temps d’al-Mansûr (754-775), leur deuxième calife, cette institution bibliothécaire reçoit le nom de « trésor de la sagesse » (khizânat al-hikma). Á ce titre, elle est conçue comme un « dépôt » (mustawda‘) et comme un lieu de travail pour les grands lettrés de la cour qui y venaient lire pour écrire. S’agissant d’Aristote, c’est certainement ici que Jâhiz a consulté son Histoire des animaux, ses Catégories et ses Analytiques. C’est peut-être là aussi que le grand écrivain de Basra installé à Bagdad a pris connaissance d’Euclide dont il cite les Éléments, de Galien auquel il emprunte sa monographie sur l’ours, d’Hippocrate dont il démarque le Livre des aphorismes, de l’Anonyme indien qui a composé les Siddhanta en astrologie, connus sous le nom arabe de Sindhind. Mais si la bibliothèque n’était pas accessible à tous les lecteurs, ses livres l’étaient paradoxalement moins. Ses maîtres avaient fait le choix d’une étonnante modernité en les faisant porter à la connaissance de tous les lettrés de l’empire. Presque aussitôt traduits, les livres étaient disponibles en librairie. Dans les années 820, l’Almageste de Ptolémée et les Éléments d’Euclide étaient vendus vingt dinars dans une belle édition reliée par un libraire de Bagdad et enseignés au domicile de l’un des astrologues d’al-Ma’mûn. Pour les acquérir, un futur chef des astrologues de ce même calife, encouragé par l’accueil qui était fait aux savants à la cour, commet l’irréparable en volant la monture de son père (Ahmad b. Yûsuf al-Kâtib,Kitâb al-Mukâfa’a, 141-142).

Read the full article here URL = http://www.encyclopedie-humanisme.com/?Bayt-al-hikma , there is an Arabic version of it !

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.