Geert Jan Van Gelder
Biographic Data
| ID | 510135 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geert Jan Van Gelder |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geert Jan |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Gelder |
| SIGNATURE | VAN GELDER G J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Emergence of Arabic Poetry: From Regional Identities to Islamic Canonization , By Nathaniel A. Miller
Rayḥāna “The Mad”: Her Persona and Poetry
This article on the intriguing second-/eighth-century Iraqi Muslim ascetic poet Rayḥāna al-Majnūna, or Rayḥāna “The Mad,” consists of two parts: (1) a study contextualizing her persona and corpus and arguing that her historical and folkloric identity as a black woman poet situates her at a creative nexus of wisdom, madness, and worship, and (2) appendices including translations of her poems and their anecdotal frameworks as they are preserved in …
History and Memory in the ʿAbbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature By Letizia Osti
Journal Article History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature By Letizia Osti Get access History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic LiteratureBy Letizia Osti (London: Bloomsbury, 2022. The Early and Medieval Islamic World), xiv + 183 pp. Price HB £76.50. EAN 978–1788319232. Geert Jan van Gelder Geert Jan van Gelder University of Oxford E-mail: gerard.vangelder@ame…
Approaches to the Study of Pre-modern Arabic Anthologies, edited by Bilal Orfali and Nadia Maria El Cheikh
All the World Is Awry: Al-Maʿarrī and the Luzūmiyyāt , Revisited By R. Kevin Lacey
There are probably few people who have read Luzūm mā lā yalzam by the prolific poet and prose writer Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1057) from beginning to end; I certainly have not. One of those who may well have done so is R. Kevin Lacey. In his book he calls the collection (ca. 13,000 verses) ‘long; overwrought; repetitious; excessively clever technically; relentlessly pessimistic and skeptical where not absolutely cynical; misanthropic as we…
Portrait of an Eighth-Century Gentleman: Khālid ibn Ṣafwān in History and Literature, written by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila
Der verstohlene Blick: Zur Metaphorik des Diebstahls in der arabischen Sprache und Literatur. By Manfred Ullmann
Der verstohlene Blick: Zur Metaphorik des Diebstahls in der arabischen Sprache und Literatur. By Manfred Ullmann. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017. Pp. 292. €78 (paper
Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl's Mamluk Cairo. By Li Guo
The Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl's Mamluk Cairo. By Li Guo. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 93. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xiii + 240. $136
Men in Women’s Clothes: Some Curious Cases of Protection from Arabic Literary Sources
Disguise is a form of protection. Women’s clothes, which normally hide more of the body than men’s clothes, sometimes provide a suitable disguise. The article presents and discusses some cases, taken from classical Arabic sources, of men receiving the protection and assistance of women who enable them to escape in women’s clothes or to hide under them (as did the pre‐Islamic brigand‐poet al‐Sulayk who hid under a helpful woman’s skirt). The stori…
Licit Magic: The Life and Letters of al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995)By Maurice A. Pomerantz
Appearing not long after Literature and the Islamic Court: Cultural Life under al-Ṣāḥib Ibn ʿAbbād by Erez Naaman (London: Routledge, 2016), Maurice Pomerantz’s Licit Magic (a revised version of his doctoral dissertation of 2010 at the University of Chicago) is another monograph on a remarkable figure. A ṣāḥib is a ‘companion’; it is also a title sometimes given to a vizier, honouring him as the ‘companion’ of the ruler. Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAbbād (d. 38…
Gleanings of Curiosities from the Harvest-Fields of Arabic Literature: Chapter 87 of Kitāb al-Zahrah by Ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣbahānī (d. 297/910)
Muḥammad Ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣbahānī (d. 297/910) was a theologian who lived in Baghdad, where he succeeded his father as the leader of the juridico-theological school called al-Ẓāhiriyyah. He wrote several books but the only one that is preserved is a work of literature and poetry. His al-Zahrah ( The Flower ) consists of one hundred chapters, mostly containing poetry by many poets including himself, as well as some anecdotes and passages in prose. Th…
The Hunt in Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic By Jaroslav Stetkevych
The ritual aspects of hunting in traditional Arab society have been studied in an article by A. F. L. Beeston (‘The Ritual Hunt’, Le Muséon 61 [1948] 183–96) and a monograph by R. B. Serjeant (South Arabian Hunt, London, 1976). Given the interest in rituals evident in many of Jaroslav Stetkevych’s publications (where Arabic poetry itself is described as having ritual aspects) one is surprised not to see these two studies mentioned in his book The…
Sound and Sense in Classical Arabic Poetry
Ghawani l-ashwaq fi malhringani l-lhringushshaq/A Treatise on the Concept of Love in Classical and Medieval Arabic Heritage * By lhringAbd al-Mulhringin ibn Ahmad Ibn al-Bakkarhring al-Balkhi, edited …
The anthology of anecdotes and poems about love by Jaʿfar ibn Aḥmad al-Sarrāj (d. 500/1106) titled Maṣāriʿ al-ʿushhāq set a trend in titles rhyming in -āq: similar works on love are called Aswāq al-ashwāq (al-Biqāʿī, ninth/fifteenth century), Tazyīn al-aswāq (Ibn Dāwūd al-Anṭākī, tenth/sixteenth century), and Asʿār al-aswāq (Anon., tenth/sixteenth century). The present edition offers another. According to the English title page its author, who di…
A Poet of the Abbasid Period: Abu al-Qasim al-Zahi (lhringAli b. Ishaq b. Khalaf al-Zahi), 313-352 AH/925-963 CE. His Life and Poetry * Annotated, edited with an introduction by KHALID Sindawi
Al-Zāhī, cotton merchant and poet, was one of the many Arabic minor poets of the fourth/tenth century who were overshadowed by al-Mutanabbī. Little more than two pages, with 19 verses, are allotted to him in the large anthology Yatīmat al-dahr by al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038), who calls him a poet good at description, rich in ‘pleasantries and novelties’, kathīr al-mulaḥ wa-l-ṭuraf (thus, for the sake of the rhyme and syntactic parallelism, instead …
The Poetic Qurrhringan: Studies on Qurrhringanic Poeticity * By THOMAS HOFFMANN
In traditional Arabic-Islamic culture, the Qurʾān cannot be called ‘poetry’; indeed, the text itself (e.g. Q 36. 69, 69. 41) seems to support this view, and the absence of the strict prosodic conventions of metre and rhyme that define shiʿr in pre-modern times clearly distinguishes Qurʾān from poetry. Some mediaeval critics denied that the essence of poetry lay in such formal matters, defining it rather as eloquent speech built upon imaginative ‘…
Das Bild der Liebe im Werk des Dichters Ǧamīl ibn Ma'mar: Eine Studie zur 'uḏritischen Lyrik in der arabischen Literatur des späten 7. Jahrhunderts. (Diskurse der Arabistik, 13) . Martin Jagonak
Stelae from Egypt and Nubia in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, c.3000 BC–AD 1150
The volume provides a detailed catalogue of 127 stelae (many funerary) deriving from the Nile Valley, now part of the Egyptian collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The stelae are written in various scripts – Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic, Carian, Greek, Coptic and early Arabic – and cover a date-range of over 4000 years. Few museums have published their complete holdings of such material, and the carefully described and …
Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful: The Paradox in Classical Arabic Literature
Normally, the function of poetry or rhetoric, according to writers on poetics and literary criticism, is to represent good things as good and bad things as bad. However, already in ancient Greece poets and orators delighted in perversely describing good or beautiful things as bad or ugly, and vice versa . The same is found in Arabic literature, where this ability was sometimes called the hallmark of excellence in a poet. Going against received op…
To eat or not to eat elephant: A travelling story in Arabic and Persian literature
A traveller in distress vows to God, piously but apparently pointlessly, that he will never eat elephant flesh. Subsequently, the oath would seem to be his perdition, yet in the end he is saved because of it, unlike his fellow travellers. This entertaining story is told by al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) in two almost identical versions. It is also found in other sources, both Arabic and Persian, among them translations or adaptations of al-Tanūkh ̄ (by …
Mirror for princes or vizor for viziers: The twelfth-century Arabic popular encyclopedia Mufīd al-'ulūm and its relationship with the anonymous Persian Bahr al-fawā'id
There are close links between the anonymous Persian twelfth-century Bahr al-fawā'id, translated by Julie Scott Meisami as The sea of precious virtues: a medieval mirror for princes (Salt Lake City, 1991) and an Arabic work entitled Mufīd al-'ulūm wa-mubīd al-humūm, variously attributed but probably by a certain Jamāl al-Din Abū 'Abd Allāh Muhammad Ihn Ahmad al-Qazwīnī who wrote it in 551/1156, only a few years before the Persian work was complete…
Dubious Genres: On some Poems by Abū Nuwās
Abū Nuwā tient sa celebrite litteraire de ses poemes bacchiques et erotiques. A travers quelques poemes d'Abū Nuwā, on constate que sa loyaute reste toujours ambigue. Lui-meme est un mawlā et non su'ūbī. Il est partisan des tribus arabes du sud mais parvient a capter les bonnes grâces des Taqafites du nord de l'Arabie pour la bonne marche de son affaire avec Ganān selon les sources. Si l'on rencontre une opposition entre bedouin et habitant de la…
The Terrified Traveller Ibn Al-Rūmīs Anti-Rahīl
A Muslim Encomium on Wine: The Racecourse of the Bay (ḥalbat Al-Kumayt) by Al-Nawāg;ī (D. 859/1455) as a Post-Classical Arabic Work
L'analyse comparative de trois auteurs arabes ayant ecrit de maniere poetique sur le vin (Ibn al-Mu'tazz, al-Raqīq al-Qayrawānī et al-Nawāgī) et l'etude du livre de al-Nawāgī montrent que ce dernier ne peut etre considere comme un post-classique mis a part le fait qu'il ait ecrit au 15 eme siecle. La poetisation de la prose et la « litteralisation » du sujet ne sont pas des techniques nouvelles. Al-Nawāgī utilisa de maniere originale et imaginati…
The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasîb
The Abstracted Self in Arabic Poetry
Whatever must be accepted from new insights in the nature of collective and oral composition, and the concomitant shakiness of the status of 'the poet', there can be no doubt that the poet himself, or rather his 'lyrical I' is very much present in classical Arabic poems. In almost every poem, and certainly every nasFb, the poet speaks himself, or about himself, or even to himself; although his persona usually speaks in a somewhat impersonal way.-…
The Poet as a Body-Builder: On a Passage From Al-Hatimi's Hilyat Al-Muhādara
THE POET AS A BODY-BUILDER: ON A PASSAGE FROM AL-HATIMI'S HILYAT AL-MUH DARA Although a poem exists, first of all, as something oral/aural, critics and poets of all ages have spoken of the poem as a visible and concrete object. "Monuments more lasting than brass", paintings with or without purple patches, "well wrought urns"-examples abound. It is, in fact, impossi- ble to avoid it altogether. The very words "text", "structure" or "verse" ultimat…
The Abstracted Self in Arabic Poetry
Whatever must be accepted from new insights in the nature of collective and oral composition, and the concomitant shakiness of the status of 'the poet', there can be no doubt that the poet himself, or rather his 'lyrical I' is very much present in classical Arabic poems. In almost every poem, and certainly every nasFb, the poet speaks himself, or about himself, or even to himself; although his persona usually speaks in a somewhat impersonal way.-…
Against Women, and Other Pleasantries
The Neckveins of Winter: The Controversy over Natural and Artificial Poetry in Medieval Arabic Literary Criticism
The Conceit of Pen and Sword: On an Arabic Literary Debate
THE CONCEIT OF PEN AND SWORD: ON AN ARABIC LITERARY DEBATE Get access GEERT JAN VAN GELDER GEERT JAN VAN GELDER UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Semitic Studies, Volume XXXII, Issue 2, Autumn 1987, Pages 329–360, https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/XXXII.2.329 Published: 01 October 1987
The Most Natural Poem of the Arabs: An Addition To the Diwan of Al-Kumayt Ibn Zayd
Das Verhaltnis von Poesie und Prosa in der arabischen Literaturtheorie des Mittelalters
The Alchemy of Glory: The Dialectic of Truthfulness and Untruthfulness in Medieval Arabic Literary Criticism
The Middle East and Europe: Encounters and Exchanges
Mixtures of Jest and Earnest in Classical Arabic Literature
MIXTURES OF JEST AND EARNEST IN CLASSICAL ARABIC LITERATURE PART I 1. Introduction 1.1 Jest & Earnest: Jest vs Earnest Like its equivalents in Western literatures, the Arabic antonymous pair "jest and earnest" serves both as a common expression and a topos. The standard terms are hazl and jidd, but especially for the former there are several near-synonyms. In pre- and early Islamic idiom the opposite of jidd "earnest" is very often mazh, muzäb, l…
Arabic Poetics Revisited
Die Kritik der Prosa bei den Arabern (vom 3./9. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des 5./11. Jahrhunderts)
Studies in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetics
Orientalisches Mittelalter
A Muslim Encomium on Wine: The Racecourse of the Bay (ḥalbat Al-Kumayt) by Al-Nawāg;ī (D. 859/1455) as a Post-Classical Arabic Work
L'analyse comparative de trois auteurs arabes ayant ecrit de maniere poetique sur le vin (Ibn al-Mu'tazz, al-Raqīq al-Qayrawānī et al-Nawāgī) et l'etude du livre de al-Nawāgī montrent que ce dernier ne peut etre considere comme un post-classique mis a part le fait qu'il ait ecrit au 15 eme siecle. La poetisation de la prose et la « litteralisation » du sujet ne sont pas des techniques nouvelles. Al-Nawāgī utilisa de maniere originale et imaginati…
The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasîb
The Terrified Traveller Ibn Al-Rūmīs Anti-Rahīl
Dubious Genres: On some Poems by Abū Nuwās
Abū Nuwā tient sa celebrite litteraire de ses poemes bacchiques et erotiques. A travers quelques poemes d'Abū Nuwā, on constate que sa loyaute reste toujours ambigue. Lui-meme est un mawlā et non su'ūbī. Il est partisan des tribus arabes du sud mais parvient a capter les bonnes grâces des Taqafites du nord de l'Arabie pour la bonne marche de son affaire avec Ganān selon les sources. Si l'on rencontre une opposition entre bedouin et habitant de la…
Mirror for princes or vizor for viziers: The twelfth-century Arabic popular encyclopedia Mufīd al-'ulūm and its relationship with the anonymous Persian Bahr al-fawā'id
There are close links between the anonymous Persian twelfth-century Bahr al-fawā'id, translated by Julie Scott Meisami as The sea of precious virtues: a medieval mirror for princes (Salt Lake City, 1991) and an Arabic work entitled Mufīd al-'ulūm wa-mubīd al-humūm, variously attributed but probably by a certain Jamāl al-Din Abū 'Abd Allāh Muhammad Ihn Ahmad al-Qazwīnī who wrote it in 551/1156, only a few years before the Persian work was complete…
Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful: The Paradox in Classical Arabic Literature
Normally, the function of poetry or rhetoric, according to writers on poetics and literary criticism, is to represent good things as good and bad things as bad. However, already in ancient Greece poets and orators delighted in perversely describing good or beautiful things as bad or ugly, and vice versa . The same is found in Arabic literature, where this ability was sometimes called the hallmark of excellence in a poet. Going against received op…
To eat or not to eat elephant: A travelling story in Arabic and Persian literature
A traveller in distress vows to God, piously but apparently pointlessly, that he will never eat elephant flesh. Subsequently, the oath would seem to be his perdition, yet in the end he is saved because of it, unlike his fellow travellers. This entertaining story is told by al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) in two almost identical versions. It is also found in other sources, both Arabic and Persian, among them translations or adaptations of al-Tanūkh ̄ (by …
Stelae from Egypt and Nubia in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, c.3000 BC–AD 1150
The volume provides a detailed catalogue of 127 stelae (many funerary) deriving from the Nile Valley, now part of the Egyptian collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The stelae are written in various scripts – Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic, Carian, Greek, Coptic and early Arabic – and cover a date-range of over 4000 years. Few museums have published their complete holdings of such material, and the carefully described and …
The Poetic Qurrhringan: Studies on Qurrhringanic Poeticity * By THOMAS HOFFMANN
In traditional Arabic-Islamic culture, the Qurʾān cannot be called ‘poetry’; indeed, the text itself (e.g. Q 36. 69, 69. 41) seems to support this view, and the absence of the strict prosodic conventions of metre and rhyme that define shiʿr in pre-modern times clearly distinguishes Qurʾān from poetry. Some mediaeval critics denied that the essence of poetry lay in such formal matters, defining it rather as eloquent speech built upon imaginative ‘…
Das Bild der Liebe im Werk des Dichters Ǧamīl ibn Ma'mar: Eine Studie zur 'uḏritischen Lyrik in der arabischen Literatur des späten 7. Jahrhunderts. (Diskurse der Arabistik, 13) . Martin Jagonak
Ghawani l-ashwaq fi malhringani l-lhringushshaq/A Treatise on the Concept of Love in Classical and Medieval Arabic Heritage * By lhringAbd al-Mulhringin ibn Ahmad Ibn al-Bakkarhring al-Balkhi, edited …
The anthology of anecdotes and poems about love by Jaʿfar ibn Aḥmad al-Sarrāj (d. 500/1106) titled Maṣāriʿ al-ʿushhāq set a trend in titles rhyming in -āq: similar works on love are called Aswāq al-ashwāq (al-Biqāʿī, ninth/fifteenth century), Tazyīn al-aswāq (Ibn Dāwūd al-Anṭākī, tenth/sixteenth century), and Asʿār al-aswāq (Anon., tenth/sixteenth century). The present edition offers another. According to the English title page its author, who di…
Art (34 works) · Islamic Studies and History (27 works) · Literature (26 works) · Arabic (23 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · History (19 works) · Linguistics (19 works) · Historical and Linguistic Studies (18 works) · Poetry (18 works) · Archaeology and Historical Studies (13 works)