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.
