Robert Irwin

Bio: Robert Irwin is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Shadow (psychology) & Power (social and political). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 11 citations.

Political Thought in The Thousand and One Nights

Abstract: It is a preposterous title, of course. Should we also look for political thought in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Or in the slapstick films of Laurel and Hardy? Or in Superman comics? Surely, whereas politics is "the art of the possible," The Thousand and One Nights (henceforth: Nights) is, in large part at least, the art of the impossible. Yet a moment's reflection allows one to realize that the title is not so very preposterous after all. To start with, the exordium to the Nights, with its references to doomed and vanished dynasties ("Thamud, 1Ad and Pharaoh of the Vast Domain") and its promise to provide lessons based on "what happened to kings from the beginning of time," strongly suggests that political concerns were not wholly alien to those who contributed to the Nights (Mahdi 1: 56; Haddawy T). In listening to Sheherezade, Shahriyâr is supposed to be learning from past examples (even if the political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, once described the study of history as something the historian loves "as a mistress of whom he never tires and whom he never expects to talk sense" [182]). In the light of the opening exordium, the whole of the Nighis can be considered to be an overblown and out-of-control example of the literary genre of mirror-for-princes (German Furstenspiegel). In the mirror-for-princes section of Nasihat al-muluk, a work spuriously attributed to the eleventh-century theologian and Sufi, al-Ghazâli (d. 1111), the reading of stories about past kings is advocated as a royal duty: "He must also read the books of good counsel . . . just as Anushirvân . . . used to read the books of former kings, ask for stories about them and follow their ways" (Crone, "Did alGhazali Write a Mirror for Princes?" 184). To look at the politics of the Nights from another angle, when Elie Kedoune, in a study of modern Middle Eastern politics, came to discuss the medieval and Islamic legacy to the politics of the modern Middle East, he touched on the despotic powers of the caliphs and specifically of Abbasid Caliph Hârun al-Rashid, and he had this to say: "The emblem of his terrible power is the black executioner who, in the Nights, is shown to be in constant attendance on Hârun al-Rashid. Nearness to supreme power is perilous. The constant care of the ordinary subject is to avoid the attention of authority. A story in the Nights concerns a householder who, coming back from work in the evening, finds a corpse near his door. He is terrified to report his discovery to the police, lest they accuse him of murder. . . ." Having given (a slightly garbled) version of "The Tale of the Hunchback" with its migratory corpse, Kedourie made the point that for most people under a premodern Islamic regime, happiness was dependent on having as little as possible to do with the rulers, and he went on to quote Hârun al-Rashid's son and successor, the Caliph al-Ma'mun, who declared that "the best life has he who has an ample house, a beautiful wife, and sufficient means, who does not know us and whom we do not know" (15). Historically it was probably quite easy for middle- or lower-class Baghdadis to avoid the real Hârun. But in the fictions of the Nights, humble folk were not so lucky, and for many of them, their story, and their peril begin when they come up against the nocturnally prowling caliph and suddenly find themselves talking for their lives. Modern political textbooks tend to be drab productions. This was not always the case in medieval times, when storytelling was an accepted way of transmitting religious, political, and moral ideas. Political treatises are not the only possible expressions of political thought (even if the academic prejudice inclines that way). Mobs and mob violence, carnivals and kings-for-a-day shadow theatre and storytelling can all furnish examples of the politics of the street. For all its apparent wildness, the politics of the street has tended to be conservative. Mobs in eighteenth-century England were more likely to riot against freethinkers and Roman Catholics than they were to demonstrate against the government (White 104-20; cf. …

Society and Culture in Early Modern France

Abstract: taking as his central theme the problem of the declining hold of the church on late nineteenth-century Europe. The reasons for this recession are multiple, as is obvious, and they include the new technology, German materialism, a cheap press, the organization of the working man, together with the impact of Marx, evolutionary science, scientific history and politics. \"Secularization\" is the term selected by the author to describe this phenomenon, and it denotes \"a process, a fundamental change in attitudes and ways of life\". As is to be expected, this is a brilliant work of scholarship, which deals lucidly with an enormous and complex topic; it represents intellectual history at its best, with ideas and suggestions leaping from almost every page. The author traces the many strands which make up the pattern, one of them being the outstanding polemic of science versus religion (pp. 161-188), and the revolution incited by Darwin. This technique renders the book episodic in nature, but this is inevitable and does not detract from its overall worth. For the historian of science and of medicine of the nineteenth century Professor Chadwick's book will be essential reading, for it helps to provide the\"external\" background to the \"internals\" minutiae of his research if he is studying technical advances. For the student of the social aspects of Victorian science or medicine a close acquaintance with this book will be even more mandatory. They explore the competing claims of innovation and tradition amongst the mostly illiterate peasants and artisans of sixteenth-century France, in a series of case studies linked historically. A great deal of literature and source material providing data on them has been surveyed, and they first deal with the social, vocational and sexual context of the Reformation, in so doing revealing the consequences for urban women and the new attitudes to poverty which, for example, were common in Catholic or Protestant in Lyons. Other essays consider the political and social uses made by festive occasions, and analyse the meaning of symbols in cultural play, the festive reversal of sex roles, and the ritualistic and dramatic structure of religious riots. The last two discuss the interaction between literate and oral culture, the impact of printing on the lower orders. This leads to a survey of the collecting of proverbs and medical folklore: 'Proverbial wisdom and popular error'. The second of these, and other parts of this scholarly work, will be …

Folktales of Egypt

Abstract: In this book Hasan M. El-Shamy has gathered the first authentic new collection of modern Egyptian folk narratives to appear in nearly a century. El-Shamy's English translations of these orally presented stories not only preserve their spirit, but give Middle Eastern lore the scholarly attention it has long deserved. \"This collection of seventy recently collected Egyptian tales is a major contribution to African studies and to international distribution studies of folktales. In the face of the recent anthropological trend to use folkloric materials for extra-folkloric purposes, the preeminence of the text must be asserted once more, and these are obviously authentic, straightforwardly translated, fully documented as to date of collection and social category of informant, and for all that . . . readable.\"-Daniel J. Crowley, \"Research in African Literatures\" \"Western knowledge of virtually all facets of contemporary Egyptian culture, much less the roots of that culture, is woefully inadequate. By providing an interesting, varied, and readable collection of Egyptian folktales and offering clear and sensible accounts of their background and meaning, this book renders a valuable service indeed.\"-Kenneth J. Perkins, \"International Journal of Oral History\

The Age of the Crusades. The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517@@@The Middle East in the Middle Ages. The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250-1382

Abstract: For over two hundred and fifty years the Mamluks ruled one of the great territorial Empires of the Middle Ages, centered on Egypt and Syria and controlling, at times, most of the Middle East.Irwin now provides the first scholarly history of this period in any Western language. He makes clear the unique political system of the Mamluks, in which the governing class consisted of a white slave elite. At the zenith of their power, the Mamluks were the only regime to inflict a series of defeats on the Mongols and were able to eliminate the last vestiges of the Crusader states from the Middle East.The Mamluk sultanate, during which both Islamic Architecture and technology flourished, was an important epoch in the development of Islam. It was also a period of great growth in trade between Europe and Asia and the flow of scholarship from the Arab world to Renaissance Europe.

The Reception of The Arabian Nights in World Literature

Abstract: Through the last three centuries, The Arabian Nights has contributed to various literary styles in the field of the oriental tale. Being so, The Arabian Nights has been a subject of utilization, reversal, reformulation, parody, pastiche, and adaptation for many writers. In this paper, my focus will be on the direct and indirect influence of The Arabian Nights on diverse literary genres. Therefore, the study deals with the influence of The Arabian Nights on in world literature. It is literature review on a theoretical introduction of the importance of The Arabian Nights in world literature. It emphasizes its transformation into literary genres, namely, poetry, drama, novel, and the short story. It will also show some comparative critical theories on The Arabian Nights , especially concerning the oriental tale, narration techniques, and the socio-political continuum. Therefore, it introduces the outstanding literary aspects of The Arabian Nights which inspired different literary genres of different cultural backgrounds. Apparently, a number of poets, playwrights, and novelists pay indebtedness to the forms as well as the thematic styles of The Arabian Nights .