Preface

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. List of Figures vii
4. Preface viii
5. 1. The Untranslatability of the Qurʾānic City 1
6. 2. Local Historians and their Cities: the Urban Topography of al-Azdī’s Mosul and al-Sahmī’s Jurjan 19
7. 3. Against Cities: On Hijāʾ al-Mudun in Arabic Poetry 38
8. 4. The Literary Geography of Meaning in the Maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī and al-Óarīrī 63
9. 5. “Woe is me for Qayrawan!” Ibn Sharaf ’s Lāmiyya, the Plight of Refugees and the Cityscape 81
10. 6. In Memory of al-Andalus: Using the Elegy to Reimagine the Literary and Literal Geography of Cordoba 103
11. 7. The Mamluk City as Overlapping Personal Networks 124
12. 8. Citystruck 138
13. 9. Between Utopia and Dystopia in Marrakech 165
14. 10. Revolutionary Cityscapes: Yūsuf Idrīs and the National Imaginary 186
15. 11. Lost Cities, Vanished Worlds: Configurations of Urban Autobiographical Identity in the Arabic Literature of the 1980s 206
16. 12. The Sufis of Baghdad: A Topographical Index of the City 223
17. 13. Ba‚rayātha: Self-portrait as a City 247
18. 14. Of Cities and Canons in an Age of Comparative Consumption 268
19. 15. Everyday Writing in an Extraordinary City 287
20. 16. Translating Cairo’s Hidden Lines: The City as Visual Text in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro 306
21. About the Contributors 326
22. Index 331