title: A Reader of Classical Arabic Literature (Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies) (English and Arabic Edition)
author: S. A. Bonebakker and M. Fishbein (eds)
description: Professor Seeger A. Bonebakker (19231995), a native of the Netherlands, began teaching at UCLA in 1969 and retired as Professor of Arabic in 1991. Bonebakker was a superlative Arabist, with interests inter alia in adab, poetics, rhetoric, and literary theory; he was also an avid cellist. Dr. Michael Fishbein, a student of Professor Bonebakkers, received his Ph.D. in Arabic from UCLA in 1988 and taught Arabic language and literature there from 1988 until his retirement in 2009. He lives in Los Angeles.
zlib_text: # MEDIEVAL ARABIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
  
  _Medieval Arabic Historiography_ is concerned with social contexts and
  narrative structures of pre-modern Islamic historiography written in Arabic in
  thirteenth-century Syria and Egypt. Taking up recent theoretical reflections
  on historical writing in the European Middle Ages, the study combines
  approaches drawn from social sciences and literary studies and focuses on two
  well-known texts by Abū Shāma (d. 1268), _The Book of the Two Gardens_ , and
  Ibn Wāṣil (d. 1298), _The Dissipater of Anxieties_ . Both texts describe
  events during the life of the sultans Nūr al-Dīn (d. 1174) and Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn
  (d. 1193), who are primarily known as the champions of the anti-Crusade
  movement. This book shows that the two authors were active interpreters of
  their societies and had considerable room for manoeuvre in both their social
  environment and the shaping of their texts.
  
  Through the use of a new theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic
  historiography, this book pre