Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy

Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy
Author: Esra Akin-Kivanc
Publisher:
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2020
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0253049237

Muthanna, also known as mirror writing, is a compelling style of Islamic calligraphy composed of a source text and its mirrored image placed symmetrically on a horizontal or vertical axis. This style elaborates on various scripts such as Kufi, naskh, and muqahhaq through compositional arrangements, including doubling, superimposing, and stacking. Muthanna is found in diverse media, ranging from architecture, textiles, and tiles to paper, metalwork, and woodwork. Yet despite its centuries-old history and popularity in countries from Iran to Spain, scholarship on the form has remained limited and flawed. Muthanna/Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy provides a comprehensive study of the text and its forms, beginning with an explanation of the visual principles and techniques used in its creation. Author Esra Akın-Kıvanç explores muthanna's relationship to similar forms of writing in Judaic and Christian contexts, as well as the specifically Islamic contexts within which symmetrically mirrored compositions reached full fruition, were assigned new meanings, and transformed into more complex visual forms. Throughout, Akın-Kıvanç imaginatively plays on the implicit relationship between subject and object in muthanna by examining the point of view of the artist, the viewer, and the work of art. In doing so, this study elaborates on the vital links between outward form and inner meaning in Islamic calligraphy.

Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict

Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict
Author: Sandra Mackey
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2009-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393333744

In this clear, concise volume, Mackey provides a unique view of the tortured and tortuous Arab region through the lens of Lebanon.

Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic

Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic
Author: Nadia Bou Ali
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474409857

Nadia Bou Ali shows how a curious relationship was forged between language and politics, one driven both by a desire for modernity and anxiety about it.

Enemy in the Mirror

Enemy in the Mirror
Author: Roxanne L. Euben
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 1999-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 069105844X

This text draws on different diciplines, including postmodernist and critical theory, comparative politics, and anthropology, to examine Islamic fundamentalisim.

America in An Arab Mirror

America in An Arab Mirror
Author: K. Abdel-Malek
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2016-02-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 023012058X

This distinguished anthology presents for the first time in English travel essays by Arabic writers who have visited America in the second half of the century. The view of America which emerges from these accounts is at once fascinating and illuminating, but never monolithic. The writers hail from a variety of viewpoints, regions, and backgrounds, so their descriptions of America differently engage and revise Arab pre-conceptions of Americans and the West. The country figures as everything from the unchanging Other, the very antithesis of the Arab self, to the seductive female, to the Other who is both praiseworthy and reprehensible.

'His Pen and Ink Are a Powerful Mirror'

'His Pen and Ink Are a Powerful Mirror'
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2020-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004407545

'His Pen and Ink are a Powerful Mirror' is a volume of collected essays in honor of Ross Brann, written by his students and friends on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The essays engage with a diverse range of Andalusi and Mediterranean literature, art, and history. Each essay begins from the organic hybridity of Andalusi literary and cultural history as its point of departure, introduce new texts, ideas, and objects into the disciplinary conversation or radically reassesses well-known ones, and represent the theoretical, methodological, and material impacts Brann has had and continues to have on the study of the literature and culture of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in al-Andalus. Contributors include: Ali Humayn Akhtar, Esperanza Alfonso, Peter Cole, Jonathan Decter, Elisabeth Hollender, Uriah Kfir, S.J. Pearce, F.E. Peters, Arturo Prats, Cynthia Robinson, Tova Rosen, Aurora Salvatierra, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Jessica Streit, David Torollo.

Sisters in the Mirror

Sisters in the Mirror
Author: Elora Shehabuddin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2024-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520402308

"A must read."—CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "Holds up a mirror to the unifying, braided futures underlying so-called 'Western' and 'Muslim' feminism that are both undermined by the power of capital, the world trade order, and cynical geopolitics."—2023 Association for Asian Studies Coomaraswamy Book Prize A crystal-clear account of the entangled history of Western and Muslim feminisms. Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Muslim women, like other women around the world, have been engaged in their own struggles for generations: as individuals and in groups that include but also extend beyond their religious identity and religious practices. The modern and globally enmeshed Muslim world they navigate has often been at the weaker end of disparities of wealth and power, of processes of colonization and policies of war, economic sanctions, and Western feminist outreach. Importantly, Muslims have long constructed their own ideas about women’s and men’s lives in the West, with implications for how they articulate their feminist dreams for their own societies. Stretching from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror present, Sisters in the Mirror shows how changes in women’s lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics. Muslim women, like non-Muslim women in various colonized societies and non-white and poor women in the West, have found themselves having to negotiate their demands for rights within other forms of struggle—for national independence or against occupation, racism, and economic inequality. Through stories of both well-known and relatively unknown figures, Shehabuddin recounts instances of conflict alongside those of empathy, collaboration, and solidarity across this extended period. Sisters in the Mirror is organized around stories of encounters between women and men from South Asia, Britain, and the United States that led them, as if they were looking in a mirror, to pause and reconsider norms in their own society, including cherished ideas about women’s roles and rights. These intertwined stories confirm that nowhere, in either Western or Muslim societies, has material change in girls’ and women’s lives come easily or without protracted struggle.

What is “Islamic” Art?

What is “Islamic” Art?
Author: Wendy M. K. Shaw
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1108474659

An alternate approach to Islamic art emphasizing literary over historical contexts and reception over production in visual arts and music.

Reel Bad Arabs

Reel Bad Arabs
Author: Jack G. Shaheen
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2012-12-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1623710065

A groundbreaking book that dissects a slanderous history dating from cinema’s earliest days to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters that feature machine-gun wielding and bomb-blowing "evil" Arabs Award-winning film authority Jack G. Shaheen, noting that only Native Americans have been more relentlessly smeared on the silver screen, painstakingly makes his case that "Arab" has remained Hollywood’s shameless shorthand for "bad guy," long after the movie industry has shifted its portrayal of other minority groups. In this comprehensive study of over one thousand films, arranged alphabetically in such chapters as "Villains," "Sheikhs," "Cameos," and "Cliffhangers," Shaheen documents the tendency to portray Muslim Arabs as Public Enemy #1—brutal, heartless, uncivilized Others bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners. Shaheen examines how and why such a stereotype has grown and spread in the film industry and what may be done to change Hollywood’s defamation of Arabs.