Studying Modern Arabic Literature: Mustafa Badawi, Scholar and Critic

This book is about the career and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of Modern Arabic Literature in Western academe in the second half of the 20^th century. During the decades after his appointment in Oxford in 1964, he communicated to students and the wider public the extent to which this literature is such a vibrant component of global culture, freeing it from the more traditional approaches of academic Orientalism. The first section of the book is largely biographical as it describes Badawi’s early life and career in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean city of Alexandria. It also assesses his role as a public intellectual in the Arab World and the West, and considers the manner in which his initial career as a scholar of English literature affected his teaching and research in Arabic and also his role as a translator. The second section provides examples of the work of eminent scholars in the field who are adding to Badawi’s heritage, in some cases in areas of work which were developed under his tutelage.

Roger Allen retired in 2011 from his position as the Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He was Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations. In 2009-10 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). Among his published works are: A Period of Time (1st [microfiche] edition, 1974; 2nd edition 1992); The Arabic Novel: an historical and critical introduction (1st edition 1982, Arabic edition, 1986; 2nd edition 1995, 2nd Arabic edition 1998); and The Arabic Literary Heritage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 (abbreviated paperback edition [2000] Introduction to Arabic Literature; in Arabic, Muqaddima li-al-adab al-Arabi, Cairo: Al-Majlis al-Ala, 2003). In addition to a large number of studies in book, encyclopedia and article form on modern and pre-modern Arabic literature, he has translated fictional works by a number of Arab writers, including Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Abd al-rahman Munif, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Hanan al-Shaykh, Salim Himmich and Ahmad al-Tawfiq.
Until 2009 Robin Ostle was Official Fellow in Modern Arabic at St. John’s College, University of Oxford. He is now Emeritius Research Fellow in Modern Arabic at St. John’s College, and is currently President of the Academic Council of the Maison Mediterraneenne des Sciences de L’Homme in the University of Aix-Marseille. His most recent major publication was the edited volume Sensibilities of the Islamic Mediterranean (I.B.Tauris 2008).