This book presents a collection of articles that put forward original research and significant insight regarding several key issues related to knowledge and language in Middle Eastern societies. The aspects studied include: the role of knowledge and language in affirming and negating political agendas and self-identities within areas of conflict and tension; ideas regarding the usefulness and interaction of religious and secular knowledge; and the attributes that render knowledge and language, especially that which is believed to be of divine origin, outstanding and worthy of admiration. The selection of studies has been purposefully diverse to include a variety of languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew and Persian, within multiple traditions, including Hellenism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, while focussing on a range of periods, from the classical to the mediaeval to the modern, and examining a range of issues, such as methods of analysing and interpreting Persian, Turkish and Arabic literature, literary and other attributes of the Bible and the Qur'an, diglossic languages, the Turkish modernisation project, Turkish-Kurdish tensions, Andalusian music, Azerbaijani politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By underlining the substantial commonalities that exist between such seemingly different fields of research, the book highlights the idea-increasingly on the wane in departments of Middle Eastern Studies across many universities-that a shared area of study, viz. the Middle East, naturally and inherently entails a shared cultural, historical, and sociological milieu. It suggests that academics who engage in different branches of research related to this area should-rather than focussing singly on their own field-avail substantially and meaningfully of one another's scholarship, learn from each other's methodologies, and collectively build upon a body of knowledge that should never be seen as dissociated.
Bruno De Nicola is a final year PhD candidate in Persian Studies at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His research deals with the social and intellectual history of Mediaeval Iran and Central Asia, particularly the interaction between Sedentary and Nomadic societies, and the role of women in Inner Asia. He has contributed to various academic publications in Germany, France, Spain and the UK. Yonatan Mendel is finishing his PhD at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His research deals with the politics of Arabic language studies in the Israeli-Jewish society through an analysis of the place of the military and the Ministry of Defence in devising language policies. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books, writing mostly about Israeli society and politics. Husain Qutbuddin received his PhD in Qur'anic Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2009. He has held a EUME-fellowship at Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Academy of Advanced Studies in South-Asian Islam and Arabic (AASSIA), Mumbai. He has contributed to several publications in the EU, India, and the US, primarily on Qur'anic interpretation by the Fatimid-Ismailis as well as present-day Muslim communities.
