Congrès Mondial des Études sur le Moyen-Orient et l'Afrique du Nord

Barcelone, du 19 au 24 julliet 2010

· Institution: University of Leeds (UK)

· Organisateur: Zahia Smail Salhi

· Langue: English

· Description: This panel gathers a very varied bouquet of papers presented by postgraduate students of the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leeds.
These diverse papers revolve around Arabic language and literature and the ways in which they interact with other languages and cultures.
While one paper investigates the translation of an Arabic literary text into other languages and in this case Malay, another discusses the translation of a foreign text into Arabic and has Harry Potter as case study.
Arabic language has also been through a process of transformation and innovation due to various elements.
While some of these are local elements as explored in one paper, some others are a result of the encounter with other cultures and nations. While some of these encounters took place during the heights of the Islamic Empire when Arabs were in positions of power, more recent encounters occurred through processes of occupation of the Orient and subsequent waves of migration to the occident.

Chair: Zahia Smail Salhi (University of Leeds)

Discussant: Dr. Ronak Husni (Herito-Watt University, UK)

Paper presenter: Idris Mansor (University of Leeds), "The influence of Arabic on Malay and its effect on Arabic-Malay translation"
The connection between Arabic and Malay has influenced the development of Malay lexical items. For that reason, Arabic is considered as the second important source of the Malay borrowings. There are a huge number of Arabic words that have been borrowed into Malay. The influence is not only limited to the lexical transfer but also to the structural. The flood of Malay borrowing words from Arabic resulted from several factors, the most important of which is the religious aspect. The aim of this paper is to examine patterns of Malay borrowings from Arabic and how do they influence the process of translation from Arabic into Malay. These include lexical and structural borrowing. Lexical borrowing comprises (i) the Malay borrowing words from Arabic which entered the target language without introducing any phonemes or other structural interference, and (ii) the words that have gone through the process of nativization or naturalisation where the process requires several alterations and adjustments in order to suit the nature of the Malay language. For example, Arabic sounds that are foreign to Malay are replaced by closest equivalents in the native Malay inventory. Meanwhile, in accepting Arabic words, Malay has incorporated and adapted some aspects of Arabic structure. This does not only occur in morphology, but also in phonology, syntax and semantic. Examples of these borrowings involve word classes, the Arabic plural suffixes -in and -at, the tah marbutah suffix, Arabic suffixes -iyy and -iyyah, Arabic genitive constructions and also the article -al. However, there are some issues related to the structural borrowing such as the change of the function of word classes when they are transferred into Malay, different consideration of article ?al in borrowing words, the distribution of -ah and -at as an equivalent to tah marbutah suffix in Arabic. In order to examine effects of these trends on Arabic into Malay translation, a manual analysis will be conducted on some selected data taken from the Malay translation of Rihlat Ibn Battuta.

Paper presenter: Mazin Al-Harthi (University of Leeds), “The Linguistic Journey of the Word in Arabic Literature”
This paper is an attempt to follow the journey of meanings in Arabic literature by looking at some Arabic literary views, opinions and ideas. The journey starts from al-Jahiz who says: “ Meanings are scattered in the way; they are available to Arabs and non-Arabs” ( المعاني مطروحة في الطريق يعرفها العربي و الأعجمي ).
Diya’ al-Din Ibn al-Athir comes up with a new idea about meanings when he innovates an imaginary column of meanings which refers to their foundations.
What this dissertation aims to do is to deal with the issue of inter-textuality, also known as ‘Poetic borrowings’, referred to in Arabic as ( السرقات الشعرية ); a phenomenon which can lead us to discover the journey of some ‘meanings’ in Arabic literature.

Paper presenter: Ahmed Al-Shilabi (University of Leeds), “Western Orientalism versus Middle Eastern Occidentalism: The “I-Other” and the “Other-I” interactions”
The intellectually based relation between East and West is as old as the dialectic interaction between them, and the writings of whatever type by each one commenting on, describing, portraying, depicting and ,or dialoguing with the other seems continuous since the advent of that interaction. Although the said relation seems, sometimes, nearly one-sided in favour of the West, the interaction, in a way or another, has always been there. Accordingly, two broad concepts seem to have emerged reflecting the tendency of each to knowledgeably recognise the other, later terminologically crystallized in what is called: Orientalism and very recently, Occidentalism! How is Occidentalism different from Orientalism in terms of their components? This is the main question this paper is trying to answer?
While the main focus is the representation of the Other in both Orientalist and Occidentalist discourse, Occidentalism in the Libyan novel will be the case study in this paper.

Paper presenter: Alaa Alghamdi (University of Leeds), “Home and Identity in the Work of Hanif Kureishi”
This paper examines issues of home and identity formation among immigrant subjects in two works by Hanif Kureishi. Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia was one of the first to deal with the identity of ethnic minority subjects; set in the 1970s, the novel makes reference to a changing British culture which was, by the author’s own analysis, remarkably hopeful with regard to the possibility of building a truly multicultural society. Issues of home and identity are explored through various characterizations through which various models of identity formation are explored.
The exploration of successful and unsuccessful models of home and identity formation among immigrant subjects runs through Kureishi’s body of work. Postcolonial concepts of identity, including hybrid identity, and the conventions of the immigrant genre of literature, which emphasizes the disparity between generations, add to the understanding of Kureishi’s work and how it fits into the postcolonial genre.

Paper presenter: Abdullah Al-Fawzan (University of Leeds), "Is there really an Arabic Fictional City?"
From birth until death, people are often associated with certain places, and there is a double impact between them as each one depends on the other. The city as one such place is one of the most significant aesthetic elements in the novel’s construction, as events of the story revolve around it. A symbiotic relationship exists between the ‘city’ and the ‘novel’. The novelist uses aspects of the city in his work. In turn the city becomes immortalized in the author’s work. Furthermore, as time takes its toll on the city, the city changes physically but literarily it remains the same. Over the past almost three centuries, the city has continued to provide a generous and valuable source of material for novelists, while novelists have remained loyal, continuing to draw on the city’s landmarks and shapes. The city creates the world before being used as a depiction of the world; hence it is a fictional city. However, there are some real cities which have tempted the novelist to write about them, thus the construction of the novel's city is based mostly on the actual city as is the case in the Arab world, such as Cairo in the work of both Naguib Mahfouz and Yūsif al-Gu`īd, or Fez in the work of Abdulkarim Ghallāb and Tahar ben Jellūn.
This paper will discuss the aforementioned two issues by relying on the thematic approach, and finally will illustrate the ways in which the Arab City does exist in Arabic fiction.