Islam and Literature

Bibliography

Allen, Roger. An Introduction to Arabic Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Altoma, S. J. “Westernization and Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 20 (1971): 81-88.

Badawi, M. M. “Islam in Modern Egyptian Literature,” in Modern Arabic Literature and the West. London: Ithaca Press, 1985.

Baldick, Julian. Mystical Islam: An Introduction to Sufism. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

Bin Tyeer, Sarah. The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Brugman, J. An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1984.

Cacchia, Pierre: An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990.

Donohue, John and John Esposito, eds. Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Gafaïti, Hafid, “Notes on Islam and Literature,” Religion and Literature 41. 2 (2009): 45-52.

Grunebaum, G. E. Von. “The Spirit of Islam as Shown in Its Literature,” Studia Islamica 1 (1953): 101-19.

Hitti, Philip K. Cities of Arab Islam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Kadi, Wadad and Billah, Victor. Islam and Education – Myths and Truths. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Le Gassick, Trevor. “The Path of Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,” Religion and Literature 20: 1 (1988): 97-109. 

Morrison, S. A. “Arab Nationalism and Islam,” Middle East Journal 2 (1984): 147-59.

Al-Musawi, Muhsin. Islam on the Street: Religion in Modern Arabic Literature. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.

—–. The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Knowledge Construction. University of Notre Dame Press. 2015.

—–. Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition. London: Routledge, 2006.

—–. The Postcolonial Arabic Novel. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

—–. Scheherazade in England. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1981.

Najjar Fauzi M, “Islamic Fundamentalism and the Intellectuals: The Case of Naguib Mahfouz,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25: 1 (1998): 139-68.

Sharabi, Hisham. “Islam and Modernization in the Arab World,” in Modernization of the Arab World, ed. J. H. Thompson and Robert D. Reischauer. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1966.

Skreslet, Paula Youngman and Rebecca Skreslet. The Literature of Islam: A Guide to the Primary Sources in English Translation. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006.

Smith, Charles. “The ‘Crisis of Orientalism’: The Shift of Egyptian Intellectuals to Islamic Subjects in the 1930s,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 382-410.

Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode. Indiana University Press, 2002.

—–. The Mantle Odes: Arabic Praise Poems to the Prophet Muhammad. Indiana University Press, 2010.

Stetkevych, Yaroslav. Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth. Indiana University. 1996.

—–.The Modern Arabic Literary Language: Lexical and Stylistic Developments. Georgetown University Press. 2006.

—–. The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasib.  University of Chicago Press. 1993.

—–. Arabic Poetry and Orientalism.  St John’s College, 2004.

Stewart, Tony K. Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination. University of California Press, 2019.

Toorawa, Shawkat M. “Hapless Hapaxes and Luckless Rhymes: The Qur’an as Literature.” Religion and Literature. 41.2 (2009): 221-227.

—–. “Modern Arabic Literature and the Qur’an: Creativity, Inimitability… Incompatibilities?” Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures. Eds. Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick. London: Routledge, 2005. 239-257.

Further readings on the Qu’ran as Literature can be found in the full Bibliography

Online Bibliographical Resources

• Index Islamicus (Brill)
• Index Islamicus (EBSCO)
• Encyclopaedia of Islam
• Quran.com (THE NOBLE QUR’AN) Verse by verse Qur’anic text with numerous translations and recitations

• Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR)
• Corpus Coranicum
• Formation of Islam Bibliographies
• The Great Debate: Critical Race Theory and Muslims | Sapelo/Maydan Series on CRT
• Guide to Research in Islamic Art and Architecture (András Riedlmayer, Harvard)
• Islam and Islamic Studies Resources (Alan Godlas, UGA)
• The Islamic Liberation Reading List (Asad Dandia)
• Islamic Liberation Theology Reading List (Asad Dandia and Sharmin Hossain)
• Islamic Philosophy Online
• Oxford Islamic Studies Online
• Race and Slavery in Muslim Societies Bibliography (Margari Aziza)
• The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to the Hadith (2020)
• The MAYDAN

“an online publication of Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, offering expert analysis on a wide variety of issues in the field of Islamic Studies for academic and public audiences alike, and serving as a resource hub and a platform for informed conversation, featuring original articles and visual media from diverse perspectives.”

• Sapelo Square

“…Sapelo Square intervenes in the marginalization and erasure of Black Muslims in the public square by building an online forum that places Black Muslims at the center. Our mission is to celebrate and analyze the experiences of Black Muslims in the United States to create new understandings of who they are, what they have done, and why that matters.”

• Black Islam Syllabus (curated by Kayla Renée Wheeler)

“The goal of this project is to provide teachers, professors, researchers, journalists, and people interested in learning more about Islam with resources on Black Muslims to promote a more inclusive approach to the study of Islam…”

• Quranic Arabic Corpus

Annotated linguistic resource which shows the Arabic grammar, syntax and morphology for each word in the Holy Quran.

• Sunnah.com

Database of several hadith collections searchable in Arabic and English taken from numerous unspecified editions

• HadithCollection.com

Portal for browsing and searching several hadith collections in English translation

• ALTAFSIR.COM

Open access online collection of commentary, translation, recitation and other Qur’anic resources, Arabic & English

• SHARIASource (Harvard Law School)

Platform to house primary sources of Islamic law.

المكتبة الشاملة | Shamela

Thousands of Arabic books (including various editions of important classical texts) available for browsing, download, and search.

• المكتبة الشاملة الحديثة

مشروع تقني يهدف لتوفير خدمات بحث وتصفح متقدمة لمحتوى المكتبة الشاملة

• المكتبة الوقفية

Vast collection of digitized Arabic books and manuscripts relevant for Islamic studies including numerous classical texts.

• شبكة المشكاة الاسلامية

Platform with a multitude of digitized Islamic texts (drawn from various editions) and reference works on a range of subjects including tafsīr, fiqh, ʻaqāʾid, and more.

• E-Kitap (PDF) Kütüphanesi

Publications of the Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı available for browsing and PDF download.

• Muftiships Web Archive

“These websites cover the responses of leading judicial authorities to current events in their respective countries (and in some cases well beyond).”

Other Digital Resources

• African Online Digital Library
• Automatic Transcription of Historical Handwritten Arabic Texts (British Library)
• BL Digital Scholarship Efforts with OCR for handwritten Arabic
• Digital Islamic Humanities Project (Elias Muhanna, Brown University)
• Important New Developments in Arabographic Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Islamicate Digital Humanities
• Middle East Librarians Association | Digital Scholarship Interest Group
• Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI)
• The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (OpenITI AOCP)
• QATIP – An Optical Character Recognition System for Arabic Heritage Collections in Libraries
• Resource List (Middle East Librarians Association Digital Scholarship Interest Group = MELA DSIG)

Additional Resources

• The Blackwell Companion to the Qurʼan (2006 ed.)
• Dictionary of Qurʾanic Usage
• Historical Atlas of Islam
• How to Read the Qurʼan: a New Guide, with select translations (Carl Ernst)
• The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies (2020)
• Persian E-Books Miras Maktoob: Persian and Arabic books on Islamic history and culture, published by the Written Heritage Research Institute (Miras Maktoob)

Graduate Programs

Grants

This is a list of external funders that provide grants for graduate students:

American Research Center in Egypt (pre-dissertation and dissertation research grants)

American Institute for Maghrib Studies (short-term and long-term grants)

Cosmos Club Foundation (research grants for students at Washington area universities)

Council of American Overseas Research Centers

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Program

Fulbright U.S. Student Program

Institute of Turkish Studies

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships

Orient Institute Beirut

Palestinian American Research Center

Social Science Research Council (Dissertation Proposal Development Program, Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship)