AN ARABIAN MASTER.

I have written before about Abdelrahman Munif and his untranslated masterpiece Ard Al-Sawad, about early nineteenth-century Iraq, and I recently came across an entire issue (pdf) of the MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies devoted to Munif. It includes, among many other pieces, an extensive article by Sabry Hafez called “An Arabian Master” that discusses in detail his life and works and one by Ferial Ghazoul specifically on Ard Al-Sawad. It’s annoying that it’s only available as a 217-page pdf—you’d think they could at least provide each article separately—but hey, it’s free, and anyone interested in Munif will find it worth the minor trouble involved.

Comments

  1. I could chop it up into smaller PDFs, but I can’t read it anyway because of the abominable type color: too faint, too gray.

  2. Separate PDFs are here.

  3. Excellent! Many thanks, MMcM.

  4. OK, this pisses me off. MIT apparently discontinued their Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies in 2008 or 2009; at least, the last hit I get from the Wayback Machine is from 2008. That’s fine, nothing lasts forever in this sublunar world and they have a right to end it if they choose… but they also erased it from the internet! I can understand it if a private individual without many resources decides they can’t afford hosting fees for a site any more, but (to quote from MIT’s own brochure) “In FY2023, the endowment’s value was $23.6B, including pledges, and contributed $1.1B to the Institute’s $3.3B campus revenues.” With all that moola, you’re too cheap or lazy to keep a valuable resource like MIT-EJMES available? Vaffanculo! There was one precious capture of the issue link, the 217-page pdf, so I’ve substituted it in the post, but I don’t know if it works — I get bored waiting for it to load and back out. MMcM’s “Separate PDFs” link is gone forever. I was already prejudiced against MIT because of their linguistics department, but this is unforgivable.

  5. PlasticPaddy says

    @hat
    I conclude that you have been the victim of a typographical error, and the quoted sentence should read “In FY2023, the endowment’s value was $23.68, including pledges, and contributed $1.18 to the Institute’s $3.38 campus revenues.” With thls correction you can see the state of MIT’s finances, which i think provides a sufficient explanation both for the removal of the site and for the unfortunate typo (an internal investigation suggests that the copyediting was carried out by the Provost’s 6-year old son on this occasion). Perhaps you might consider coming out of retirement to help out. This mght enable you to meet your hero NC in person.

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