Ibn Shalabi, like many Egyptians, is looking for a job. Yet, unlike most of his fellow citizens, he is prone to sudden dislocations in time. Armed with his trusty briefcase and his Islamic-calendar wristwatch, he bounces uncontrollably through the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods, with occasional return visits to the 1990s. Along the way, he meets celebrities such as Jawhar, the founder of Cairo. He also encounters other time travelers, including the historian Maqrizi. In every age, he is forced to match wits with ordinary Egyptians from all walks of life. After his cassette recorder fails to impress a Fatimid caliph, he finds himself trapped in the 1300s. He joins the barbarians, cannibals, and prisoners of war who have taken over the monumental Storehouse of Banners and set up their own state in defiance of the Mamluk order. Forced to play the role of double agent, Ibn Shalabi is caught up in the struggle between the rebels and the ruling dynasty.

Product Description: Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of “the Fariyaq,” alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women’s rights, sexual relationships between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures, all the while celebrating the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language...read more

Product Description: A satirical take on time travel, written before HG Wells, that starts in Paris in the late nineteenth century and takes the reader to China, Pompeii, and Mount Ararat at all the key moments in history. Witty and playful, it is at once a biting commentary on human arrogance as well as a lively panorama of 19th-century cultural life seen largely through the eyes of an eccentric Spaniard...read more

Premodern Arabic biography has served as a major source for the history of Islamic civilization. In the first book-length study to explore the origins and development of classical Arabic biography, Michael Cooperson demonstrates how Muslim scholars used the notions of heirship and transmission to document the activities of political, scholarly and religious communities. The author also explains how medieval Arab scholars used biography to reconstruct the life stories of important historical figures. He then examines the careers of four of these figures, analyzing their relationships and their place in later biography.

Product Description: Approaches to elements of Arabic-Islamic civilization, including linguistics, literature, literary theory, religion, ritual, economics and zoology, as well as related topics in the Old Iranian, Persian, Greek and Byzantine traditions, through the discussion of select terms, concepts and phenomena...read more

Product Description: This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars...read more

Product Description: In this text Kilito argues that genre - not authorship - is at the heart of classic Arabic literature. He examines love poetry and panegyric, the Prophet's Hadith and the literary anecdote, as well as such themes as memorization, plagiarism and forgery and the dream visions of the dead...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)