Books in the Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies series

Sibawayhi, a non-Arab, was the first to write on Arabic grammar and the first to explain Arabic grammar from a non-Arab perspective. Both Sibawayhi and his teacher al-Farahidi made the earliest and most significant formal recording of the Arabic language.

Arabic Belles Lettres brings together ten studies that shed light on important questions in the study of Arabic language, literature, literary history, and writerly culture.

The "inquisition" (Mihnah) unleashed by the seventh Abbasid caliph, 'Abdallah al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833), has long attracted the attention of modern scholars of the intellectual, political, and religious history of the early Abbasid era. Historians have seen it as the key to a wide array of puzzles and problems in early Islamic history.

This book examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Said). In conducting close readings of key moments from their respective poetry, the author illustrates how both of these writers, in their own unique ways, construct poetry as a form of spiritual practice, that is, as a way of transforming both the poet's and the implied reader's ontological, perceptual, and creative relationships with their internal and external worlds.