Romano-arabica

Abstract

This article proposes an examination of the theme of alienation and freedom in Sadeq Chubak’s short story “The Baboon Whose Buffoon Was Dead”. Through the character of Makhmal, a domesticated baboon bound to his deceased master, Chubak constructs an allegory that explores the existential and social dimensions of alienation within the context of Iran’s rapid modernization.
Using Jaeggi’s philosophical concept of alienation as powerlessness and internal division, alongside Seeman’s social-psychological model, the study investigates how Makhmal’s symbolic struggle with the death of his master reflects broader issues of autonomy, subjugation, and existential anxiety. The analysis reveals how Makhmal’s attempts at liberation are restrained by existential fears and the remnants of oppressive societal chains. The study contributes to existential discourse by connecting the narrative’s themes to broader socio-political dynamics, positioning Chubak’s work as a reflection of alienation in transitional societies like Iran.

Abstract

The aim of this research paper is to delve into the paths of Arabic discourse to reveal the humanization of animals and the way they are used in Arabic literature. It goes beyond the stereotypical narrative and descriptive styles associated with human characters to writing about animals or through their voices. In the latter the animals evolved into primary protagonists who create events and penetrate deeply into human existences, thus taking a prominent place within literary composition. Consequently, the animal turns, in the process of writing, into a rational and dreaming being, capable of comforting the individual and compensating for his loneliness.

What is striking about the issue of employing animals is the writer’s attention to the imaginative and symbolic aesthetic aspect without neglecting the underlying repercussions and goals. Hence, this style of writing enjoyed great importance and a unique position in Arab culture, ancient and modern.

Abstract

Although the state of the art of dialectological and sociolinguistic research concerning Moroccan dialect is nowadays satisfactory when compared to other areas of Northern Africa, the varieties of some regions still lack a comprehensive description and have never been analyzed from a structural point of view. Consequently, the aim of the present paper is to take a closer look at the variety spoken in one of those areas: Mohammedia. One of the possible reasons that lie behind this variety being not much studied may be its proximity, both dialectologically and geographically, to other mainstream cities, that have been the object of historical and linguistic studies for a long time. Thus, with the awareness that exposure to new socio-economic environments and the expansion of social networks are often responsible for language variation2, this research aims at providing a description of the Arabic spoken in Mohammedia, and the way this latter is phonologically evolving, through the adoption of a cross-generational point of view. To this end, fieldwork was conducted in the city in August 2022, and data were collected through audio recordings involving informants, all women, who may represent three different age stages: early, middle and later adulthood, with the oldest informant aged 78 years old, and the youngest one 21. In this way, I will try to identify some obsolete as well as new emerging traits of the dialect in question, besides making more general considerations about it. 

Abstract

We present a statistical analysis of the realization of definiteness in Tunisian Arabic (TA) texts written in Arabizi, a hybrid system reflecting some features of TA phonetics (assimilation), but also showing orthographic features, as the use of arithmographs. In §1, we give an overview of definiteness in TA from a semantic and syntactic point of view. In §2 we outline a typology of definite articles and show that TA normally marks definiteness with articles or similar devices, but also presents zero-markings or weak definites. In §3 we discuss TA and how definiteness is instantiated in TA. In §4, we present data from the Tunisian Arabizi Corpus (TAC), a multidisciplinary work with a hybrid approach based on dialectological questions, corpus linguistics standards, and deep learning techniques. In §5 we define the behavior of TA with respect to what we observed in §1, §2 and §3, describing our TAC-based analysis.

Abstract

With their genuine colloquial Lebanese, their tenacious commitment to preserve Lebanese popular traditions and folklore, the Rahbani Brother’s theatre managed to save a precious heritage and helped make their diva interpreter Fairouz one of the most famous 20th century singers in the Arab World. Her short songs combined traditional and popular musical influences, setting them apart from the long repetitious songs in the colloquial Egyptian that were the order of the day. While the Rahbani Brothers’ musical theatre was conceived and performed in colloquial Lebanese, most of the research on the topic carried out so far is in Arabic and their works have become vulnerable to misrepresentations by Western scholars. This article aims into illustrating and partially translating one of the Rahbani’s operetta, namely, al-Chakhs / al-Shakhs (The Puppet Person).

Abstract

Narratio brevis, in the renewed form of the short story (SS), gained the spotlight in the Arabian Peninsula and played the role of cultural rendez-vous or multaqā in Arabic. Michalak-Pikulska noted that the short story (qiṣṣa qaṣīra QQ) expresses the awareness and sense of injustice suffered in many contexts. In addition to this, Ramsay and Bū-Ša‘īr summarized some main tendencies of the
short story, spanning from (magical) realism to folklore, up to (refuse of) modernism. War and conflict are of course found in the Kuwaiti narrative, triggered by the Gulf War events. Al-Ḫarrāṭ individuated the rise of a new sensitivity (ḥassāsiyya ǧadīda) as the underpinning factor for the QQ, and he also defined it a phenomenon of transgeneric writing (al-kitāba ‘abra al-naw‘iyya).
Taking into due account all the above, and the historical factors that framed the literary production, this paper traces the main steps and literary developments of the SS in the Peninsula and focuses on the recent production of Khaldoun al-Dali (Ḫaldūn al-Dālī), a young Yemeni writer who is author of very short stories. The aim is to provide an overall but representative outlook of the literary developments, after al-Faraǧ the Kuwaiti pioneer of SSs in the area. 

Abstract

Zahra Ali brings together the most relevant scholars, researchers and activists in what is called Islamic feminism in a second edition of this volume that captures the latest developments in the field. The work starts with two fundamental desiderata: the need to decolonize the reading and understanding of feminism in the Islamic space and to place it in the continuation of efforts to reform Islamic societies by reinterpreting its fundamental sources. In the introduction to the book Zahra Ali draws attention to the danger of generalization in approaching the Islamic world and the social status of Muslim women who live in a variety of environments each of them contextualized politically, economically and culturally. The editor warns that the articles making up the volume are in clear
rupture with the orientalist and racist vision that characterizes the controversies about women in the Islamic world. Islamic feminism as conceptually described by the authors of this volume develops within the Islamic religious system by strongly challenging the patriarchal dimension of the reading of the Koranic text, overturning several general lines present in the common perception, Western and Islamic alike. 

Abstract

More than Just Labels Relating TAFL to CEFR Levels is a volume edited by Professors Giolfo and Salvaggio that brings together contributions from distinguished scholars with the aim to find answers and, more important, to raise awareness about the question of whether to relate the teaching of Arabic to European standards.