This Project Is Reviving Fascinating Arabic Literary Classics

The Arabic literary tradition, although arguably one of the world’s richest, is scandalously overlooked. For centuries, the language served as a lingua franca, with religious scholars, poets and philosophers from Andalusian Spain in the West to the royal courts of Central Asia in the East penning works across an eclectic range of genres and disciplines. Some of these, like the epics "1001 Arabian Nights" and "Khalila wa Dimnah," remain integral to popular culture. However, many others, outside of rarefied academic circles, have been lost to obscurity.

Much of this tradition is written in a classical 'high form' of Arabic, whose archaic grammatical constructions and linguistic subtlety, while undeniably beautiful, are often impenetrable even to native Arabic speakers. Looking to revive these works, the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) project at NYU Abu Dhabi—under the stewardship of its head editor, Professor Philip Kennedy—has been sharing fresh translations of Arabic literary classics by scholars at leading global universities with a wider audience.

LAL’s corpus spans poetry and fiction, as well as writings on travel, science, history and Islamic mysticism, offering readers a mirror into a variety of milieus—from the harsh nomadic world of Arabia’s Pre-Islamic jahiliyyah and the golden age of Islam under the Abbasid caliphs, right up to the twilight of the classical tradition in the early 20th-century when writers began experimenting with novel literary forms in the face of encroaching European imperialism.

From 10th century descriptions of Viking ritual human sacrifice to a biting satire about Egypt under colonial British rule,  these are the Library’s most beguiling works…