Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Sometime in early 2010 I was visiting my favourite bookshops in the al-Halbouni suburb of Damascus.Al-Halbouni is an Arabic bibliophile's paradise: it has dozens of bookshops door-to-door packed with books of all genres and types.Closely scanning the shelf before me, my hand went instantly for a volume with a blank spine, a good sign that it was a facsimile of a rare text printed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.My intuition did not fail me: I had stumbled on a commentary of a classical Arabic philosophical text that was new to me.But my excitement was soon replaced by astonishment as my eyes went down the page.I stopped and stared at the two lines of Cyrillic text.The accompanying Arabic told me that this book was printed in 1901 in Kazan, in what was then the Russian Empire.I had seen texts printed in many places before; from Leipzig to Lucknow and many others in between.But this book elicited new emotions and thoughts.I felt like I had discovered a new planet, a new world yet unexplored-which prompted a question: is Arabic studies generally taught too narrowly? Reconfiguring Arabic Studies in AustraliaToday, Arabic is mostly thought of as the language of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam.Arabic, and its literary heritage, is much more than a
Source: Melbourne Asia Review
Author: Tarek Makhlouf
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3037830385