The aim of this workshop, May 2-3, 2016, at NYUAD was to discuss among experts technical issues that arise when dealing with oral traditions and written texts in the poetic idiom or vernacular of spoken language on the Arabian peninsula.
The linguistic, literary, historical, geographical, and cultural aspects of these traditions and texts cannot be studied in separation from the classical Arabic heritage. Throughout history these have been intertwined and in constant interactive flux. But whereas the domain of classical Arabic is firmly based on a long-established body of codes and rules, its non-classical counterpart has until recently been treated as a poor cousin. The vernacular traditions are by definition diverse, even within the scope of a single area like the Arabian peninsula. Ipso facto techniques that are being developed for translating these traditions into text must be tailored to meet the needs of this diversity in expression.
The workshop devoted sessions to the following aspects: a) rendering oral traditions and texts written in Arabic script, including MS, in transliteration that brings out its linguistic features in the proper way; b) techniques for the translation of Nabaṭi and other Arabian vernacular texts, especially poetry, also seen from the classical corpus; c) special requirements and issues for the establishment of dictionaries of Arabian non-classical texts; d) prosody of Nabaṭi and other non-classical poetry also in relation to classical Arabic prosody. Parallels between vernacular and classical will be explored throughout the sessions of the workshop. Many of these technical issues are analysed in detail in relevant chapters of Dr. Saad Sowayan’s Nabaṭi Poetry: Popular Taste and the Authority of the Text (in Arabic, الشعر النبطي, ذائقة الشعب وسلطة النص).
Participants
Sultan al-Amimi is a critic, poet and author, and researcher who is the director of the United Arab Emirates Academy of Poetry. One of the Academy’s activities of world-wide renown is the organization of the competitions of The Million’s Poet (in the Nabaṭi mode) and The Prince of Poets (in classical Arabic). He is also member of the competition’s jury. He has published the collections of poetry of Salim al-Jamri, Rashid al-Khudr, al-Majidi ibn Zahir and many other Emirati poets in addition to his own poetry, stories, essays and other literary writings.
Ghassan al-Hasan was born in Jordan and obtained his doctoral degree at Ayn Shams University. His doctoral thesis Nabaṭi Poetry in the Gulf Region and the Arabian Peninsula was republished in an enlarged two volume edition. From 1977 to 2005 he worked in the Abu Dhabi Ministry of Information and Culture. As from 2006 he is counsellor for the Abu Dhabi Organization for Culture and Heritage, including the Million Poet’s competition where is a jury member, and the Prince of Poets competition.
Claude Audebert is an Emeritus professor in Classical Arabic literature and language at the department of Middle Eastern studies at the Aix-Marseille University. She has published extensively on classical Arabic literature and language. Her special interest is in classical Arabic poetry and oral poetry in Oman and Yemen. Presently she works with a team on a contextual Arabic-French Dictionary of verbs (Cairene Egyptian).
Mohammed Bakhouch is professor in classical Arabic literature and director of the department of Middle Eastern studies at the Aix-Marseille University. He has published extensively on classical Arabic literature and has a special interest in the flytings of Jarir and al-Akhtal. He has also done research on oral poetry in Oman. His latest scholarly work is Poetics of Eulogy, panegyrics in the poetry of al-Akhtal (2015, in French).
Clive Holes was Khalid bin 'Abdallah Al Sa'ud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford from 1997 until his retirement in 2014, and before that (1987-1996) taught Arabic, Arabic Linguistics, and Arabic Popular Literature at the University of Cambridge. His books include Poetry and Politics in Contemporary Bedouin Society, Ithaca Press, 2009; The Nabati Poetry of the UAE, 2011. He has edited a collection of eleven essays under the title Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches, (Oxford University Press, 2017). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002.
Saad Abdullah Sowayan is professor at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in anthropology and social sciences. He published a library of authoritative studies on the subject ever since his dissertation Nabaṭi Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia, published by University of California Press in 1985. In 2014 he was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his The Saga of Human Evolution.
Katrien Vanpee is Director of the Arabic Language Program at the University of Minnesota. She lived and worked for three years in Qatar. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the role of nabati poetry in Qatari and Emirati projects of nation-building and the construction of national history.
William Tamplin is a second-year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He has published articles on the political poetry of Bedouin poet Muhammad Fanatil al-Hajaya. His interests include apocalyptic literature, the literature of the Andalus, and translingual writers. He was a 2013-14 Fulbright scholar to Jordan and taught English the year before in Alexandria, Egypt.
Fatima Ali Fadhel az-Zawa has been active in cultural and educational fieldwork in Yemen since 1983, including women’s rights and campaign against early marriage, with the support of local oral tradition and heritage as well as theatre and dance productions. She recorded oral heritage for TV and radio, including on children’s games and songs of the Yemeni folk heritage; old marriage traditions, women’s songs, poetry and stories; and animal stories in popular culture. In 2013 she published the collected poetry of the poetess Khadija al-Habashi from Hadramawt who lived more than a century ago.
From NYUAD
Reindert Falkenburg is Professor of Early Modern Art and Culture, and serves as Vice Provost of Intellectual and Cultural Outreach, at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute. Earlier he was chair of the Art History Department at Leiden University, The Netherlands; Professor of Western Art and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; Deputy Director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History; and Research Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. His scholarly interest regard in particular early Netherlandish painting and late-medieval carved altarpieces. His books include Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life (Amsterdam / Philadelphia 1988); The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450-1550 (Amsterdam / Philadelphia 1994); The Land of Unlikeness. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (Zwolle 2011), French edition: Bosch: Le Jardin des délices, Paris 2015.
Michael Cooperson is professor of Arabic at UCLA and currently a fellow of the Library of Arabic Literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research interests include early Abbasid cultural history, Maltese language and literature, and time travel as a narrative device. His most recent publication is the LAL edition and translation of Ibn al-Jawzi's Virtues of Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
Philip F. Kennedy, the founding Faculty Director of the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, is associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, and affiliate faculty member of NYU Abu Dhabi. As author or editor, Kennedy has published many writings on Arabic literature, including The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oxford: Oneworld 2005 — in the series Makers of the Muslim World); On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature; (Harrassowitz Verlag 2004 — in the series Studies in Arabic Language and Literature); and Islamic Reflections, Arabic Musings; (co-editor with Robert Hoyland, Oxford: Oxbow for the E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust Series 2004). As a student, he studied in Oxford, Cairo, Madrid, Aix-en-Provence, and the United Arab Emirates.
Muhamed Osman Al Khalil is associate professor of Arabic and the director of the Arabic Studies program at New York University in Abu Dhabi. Dr. Al Khalil received a BA in English literature from the University of Damascus (1993), an MA in applied linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1998), and a PhD in Modern Arabic Literature from the University of Arizona (2005). He has received a Fulbright scholarship and taught at universities in the United States, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Al Khalil’s research interests include Arabic language computing, Arabic corpora, biography, language policy, and the interplay of the literary and political in modern Arabic literature. His articles appear in Arabic media. He is currently producing an anthology of Arabic fictional works on the United States, a sample of which have appeared in Arabic and English in the spring issue of NYUAD’s Electra Street Journal. Dr. Al Khalil is also leading several research projects on digitizing Arabic and creating corpus-based learning resources for the language, notably the Database of K12 Arabic Reading Textbooks (DKART).
Marcel Kurpershoek is senior humanities research fellow at NYUAD. He specializes in the cultural heritage of the Arabian peninsula, particularly (oral) poetry and traditions from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Currently he is preparing two volumes of editions and translations of the poetry of Hmēdān al-Shwē’ir and ‘Abdallah ibn Sbayyil for the Library of Arabic Literature (2017). Among his publications in his current field are Oral Traditions & Narratives from Central Arabia (5 vols. 1994-2005, Brill Publishers). The account of his fieldwork Arabia of the Bedouins (Saqi books 2001) was translated into Arabic as al-Badawi al-Akhir (The Last Bedouin). At the end of 2015 he retired from the Netherlands Foreign Service after numerous postings including as Dutch ambassor to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Poland, and special envoy for Syria.
Nizar Habash is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). He is the director of the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab at NYUAD. He received his PhD in 2003 from the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland College Park. He later joined Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems where he co-founded in 2005 the Columbia Arabic Dialect Modeling group (CADIM). His research includes work on machine translation, morphological analysis, generation and disambiguation, syntactic analysis, and computational modeling of Arabic and its dialects. Professor Habash has over 100 publications including a book titled Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing. His website is www.nizarhabash.com
Nasser Isleem served as a professor of teaching Arabic as a foreign language at UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, Meredith College. At NYUAD since 2012 he inaugurated Emirati dialect and culture course. Isleem pioneered in studies on songs, proverbs, and other cultural expressions and components in teaching Arabic language. Some publications: "Popular Proverbs with DVD: An Entrance to Palestinian Culture," ALUCEN Learning, 2008, "Perspectives: Arabic Language and Culture through Film," ALUCEN Learning, 2009; "Colloquial Palestinian Arabic with DVD," ALUCEN Learning, 2010, "Kalima wa nagham, A Textbook for Teaching Arabic, Volume 1, UT Press, 2014 (volume 2 forthcoming July 2016)", "Ramsah, an introduction to Emirati dialect and culture" by Kuttab Publishing, 2015 and "Hakini Arabi, Colloquial Palestinian/Jordanian Arabic textbook", 2015. Isleem is working on two projects that involve teaching Arabic through integration of Emirati Films and Popular Emirati proverbs, see also www.arabiyyaat.com.
Nathalie Peutz is completing a book manuscript on heritage engineering and conservation-based development in Socotra. She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University. Her research, based on fieldwork conducted in Somaliland and in Yemen, focuses on questions of migration and mobilities, conservation and development, and identity and heritage in the Arab and Western Indian Ocean worlds. Her publications include articles and a co-edited volume on deportation, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (winner of the 2011 Bronze Award from the Association for Borderlands Studies), and several articles on the recent transformation of Yemen's Socotra Archipelago into a World Heritage site.
Justin Stearns taught at Middlebury College in the Religion Department from 2005 to 2010 before coming to NYU Abu Dhabi. His research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. Stearn’s first book is titled Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and he has published articles in Islamic Law and Society, Medieval Encounters, Al-Qantara, and History Compass. He is working on a book on the social status of the natural sciences in early modern Morocco entitled Revealed Science: The Natural Sciences in Islam in the Age of al-Hasan al-Yusi (d. 1691) as well as on an edition and translation of al-Yusi’s Muhadarat for the Library of Arabic Literature.