Le fonds documentaire de la Genizah du Caire livre de nombreuses informations sur la vie des femmes juives des sociétés méditerranéennes au Moyen Âge. Les deux lettres reproduites ici pour la première fois sont traduites du judéo-arabe. La première, un contrat passé par un mari avec sa femme afin de lui permettre de subsister durant son absence, révèle la grande mobilité que connaît cette société. La seconde, une lettre écrite au xiie siècle par une femme de Fustat, en Égypte, (...) à son frère, alors qu’il voyage pour son commerce, exprime des soucis personnels ainsi qu’une relation frère/sœur particulièrement forte. (shrink)

The study pursues two aims. The first part is dedicated to the deciphering and editing of a new text preserved as palimpsest on a parchment bifolio. It belongs to a small collection of documents from the Cairo Genizah owned by the University of Geneva. The fragment reveals an extract from an early version of a Passion of St Plato of Ancyra, a saint who is best known through Byzantine menologia. His Passion was also reworked by Symeon Metaphrastes in (...) the 10th century. However, the new text is closest to an anonymous pre-metaphrastic version available in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca. The second aim of the paper (developed in Part 2) is, therefore, to establish the relation between different versions of the Passion and locate the new witness from the Cairo Genizah in the history of the transmission of this text. (shrink)

Sābūr ibn Sahl's al-Aqrābādhīn al-saghīr is the earliest Arabic pharmacopoeia known to have survived. Finding fragments of Sābūr's pharmacopoeia in the Cairo Genizah shows that it was used by the medical practitioners of the Jewish community of Cairo, possibly long after it is supposed to have been superceded by other works. We present here a synoptic edition of two Arabic fragments, T-S Ar. 40.5 and Ar. 41.90. These fragments overlap to a large extent, but are not exactly (...) the same. We suggest that one may be the work of a professional scribe, while the other was copied by a practitioner for his personal use. (shrink)

This article deals with the additional phrases found in the Cairo Genizah fragment related to Bavli, Tractate Eruvin 4b-5a, identified as Cambridge UL T-S F1 44. FGP No. C 96446. Some of these additional phrases have not been found in any version of the various manuscripts and printed versions, and some were found in only one version. The purpose of the article was to examine whether these additional phrases preserve an ancient version that was only preserved in this (...) Genizah fragment or whether they are a type of errors in the fragment. The conclusions of the article with regard to these additional phrases are varied; some of the phrases preserve an ancient version and some do not. (shrink)

A partir de uma perspectiva decolonial pretendo mostrar, por um lado, que o tratamento habitual das fronteiras ignora a génese colonial do sistema-mundo moderno e não distingue entre duas lógicas, duas formas jurídicas, duas políticas de delimitação e demarcação de fronteiras, que se podem observar com grande precisão no cenário escolhido para esta análise. Por outro lado, tentarei questionar as visões evolucionistas do território e as fronteiras que pensam a pós-modernidade a partir do centro do sistema-mundo.

In the Cairo Genizah were manuscripts with Gregorian notation and Hebrew script. They also appeared documents that point to author of the scores at Giovanni-Obadiah, a twelfth century Christian monk, born in southern Italy, who converted to Judaism. Until now, the study of this personage has been realized almost exclusively from the Jewish point of view. Nevertheless, like Obadiah synthesizes the traditions Christian and Jewish in its notation when copying Hebrew melodies with Christian notation, also it does in (...) his texts. Obadiah transcribed a Latin appointment of Joel to Hebrew characters. This article pretends to oppose his conversion to Judaism with his ordination as a Christian monk through the prophecy of Joel, which implies an intense dialogue between the two traditions. (shrink)

Does nostalgia for one’s time at university predict current intentions to engage with the university? In Study 1, United States participants’ nostalgia for their university experience (university nostalgia) at a southern public university predicted stronger intentions to socialize with fellow alumni, attend a future reunion, volunteer for their university, and donate money to their university. Study 2 replicated these findings with alumni from a northeastern private university, and extended them by finding that the links between university nostalgia and university engagement (...) emerged even when controlling for the positivity of university experience. In both studies, feelings of university belonging mediated most of the associations between university nostalgia and university engagement. In Study 2, the positivity of the university experience moderated the relation between university nostalgia and two indices of university engagement. Specifically, university nostalgia was more strongly associated with intentions to attend a reunion and donate money among those who had a relatively negative university experience. Nostalgia for one’s university past predicts future engagement with the university as well as its members. (shrink)

Nostalgia is a fond longing for the past that has been shown to increase feelings of meaning, social connectedness, and self-continuity. Although nostalgia for personal memories provides intra- and interpersonal benefits, there may be negative consequences of group-based nostalgia on the perception and acceptance of others. The presented research examined national nostalgia, and its effects on group identification and political attitudes in the United States. In a sample of US voters, tendencies to feel personal and national nostalgia are associated with (...) markedly different emotional and attitudinal profiles. Higher levels of national nostalgia predicted both positive attitudes toward President Trump and racial prejudice, though there was no evidence of such relationships with personal nostalgia. National nostalgia most strongly predicted positive attitudes toward president Trump among those high in racial prejudice. Furthermore, nostalgia's positive relationship with racial prejudice was partially mediated by perceived outgroup threat. Results from this study will help us better understand how the experience of national nostalgia can influence attitudes and motivate political behavior. (shrink)

Following the eclectic itineraries of ‘Near East’ expert, R. M. Graves, this article tells a story of an ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) of small and large legal decisions. Without reducing the human catastrophe of the event of the Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian forced exodus), it engages with it as a legal event that crosses (in this story at least) from Cairo to Jerusalem, from the League of Nations’ era (1920–1946) to the United Nations’ era (1945–), from the governance of labour (...) and gender, to labour partition, and finally to the governance of municipalities through law and expertise. Graves’ relationship to both Cairo and Jerusalem was materialized through different forms of affective legal governance. Graves, who in his own dichotomous words was ‘neither a Zionist nor an anti-Semite’, managed Jerusalem across national lines in the wake of the UN Partition Plan (1947), and as the old empire was withdrawing right before Jerusalem itself became a site of the catastrophe—right before the Nakba. (shrink)

This article contemplates symbols and values inscribed on Cairo’s landscape during the 2011 revolution and the period since, focusing on Tahrir Square and the role of the Egyptian flag in street discourses there. I start by briefly pondering how intertwined popular narratives readied the square and flag as emblems of dissent. Next I examine how these appropriations shaped protests in the square, and how military authorities who retook control in 2013 re-coopted the square and flag, with the reabsorption of (...) each critical to that of the other and executed in the same place: Tahrir. Pro-military factions have created the pretense that they were for the revolution by altering the square and structures around it. Furthermore, the square has remained open to the public, but ceased to be inviting. This relates to post-revolutionary alterations that psychologically repel entry. I consider these changes in light of affordance theory, value sensitive design research and especially the defensible space model, arguing that Tahrir Square has been symbolically cordoned and closed. (shrink)

Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies: Studies on Diplomacy and Diplomatics. Edited by Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 161. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxvii + 881. $179, €149 ; $162, €135.

Egyptian workers have long fought for fundamental rights denied by the U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak regime. Kamal is right to invoke the solidarity that has long been the driving force of the labor movement worldwide, and to compare their struggles for labor rights and democracy.

In 1862 the leading British photographer Francis Bedford was commissioned by Queen Victoria to accompany her son and heir, the future King Edward VII, on an ambitious journey around the Middle East. This book documents that journey.

This article explores the recent urban transformations of downtown Cairo, in particular around the area of Mohammed Mahmud Street and Tahrir Square, after a year and a half of violent confrontations between the protesters and the military junta. The article first looks at how these confrontations led to the segregation of the city through the use of buffer-concrete walls, army tanks, check-points and barbed-wire barricades that made life for its inhabitants impossible. The squeezing of Tahrir and its surroundings created (...) mostly a delineated and restricted war zone. This was undertaken after a series of killings and massacres took place. The article reflects upon the explosion of sardonic graffiti and epic murals that followed these events as a vibrant expression of dissenting street art, as well as the creation of a memorial space. (shrink)

This essay reviews two recent volumes containing editions of important early quranic codices. One of these is the so-called Sanaa Palimpsest, whose lower text at present remains our only known material witness to a recension of the quranic text that is different from the canonical one; the other is the Codex Amrensis. The essay devotes particular attention to the question of the textual relationship between the Quran’s standard text and that documented by the lower layer of the Sanaa Palimpsest, and (...) to Asma Hilali’s claim that the Sanaa Palimpsest never constituted a full quranic codex but only “a collection of disparate leaves.”. (shrink)

The metropolis of Cairo has witnessed unprecedented transformations since the January revolution of 2011. It witnessed evidently an escalation of war zones and confrontations between protesters and police forces; it also witnessed the militarization and policing of the urban sphere, the creation of segregating buffer walls that paralysed entire areas. However, the Tahrir effect remains evident in that it revolutionized the very notion of what a public space is about. It succeeded in imposing an entirely unprecedented novel choreography for (...) the city in which the ‘stage’ of Tahrir was the exemplary moment that triggered extended and replicated dramaturgical violent public confrontations, public performances and occupations in all the squares of Egypt. This article traces the transformations in relation to the debates pertaining to the ‘right to the city’ relating to the expanding visibility of the street vendors. Despite the military taking over after the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, Cairo has witnessed for the past three years a mesmerizing flourishing art scene. (shrink)

We argue that analyses of civil religious ideologies in civil rights contention must include the interplay of both movement and countermovement ideologies and must recognize the ways in which such discourse amplifies conflict as well as serves as a basis for unity. Based on in-depth interviews, archival research, and content analysis of civil religious language, this article examines how priestly and prophetic civil religious discourses, and the infusion of Black power ideologies, provided significant and dynamic resources for both movement and (...) countermovement ideologies during periods of civil rights contention in Cairo, Illinois, especially from 1969 to 1972. We compare the ways in which Cairo’s civil rights leaders mobilized prophetic versions of civil religion, and concomitantly, how white countermovement organizations used a priestly civil religion. On the prophetic side the themes of “equality,” “freedom,” “justice,” and the “right to revolt” against worldly socio-political arrangements were employed. On the priestly side, the theme of “law” and “order” was played up, with a secondary theme that connected religious acquiescence to worldly power with God’s will. The former rhetoric saw calls for economic and employment integration within God’s will and the nation’s destiny. The latter rhetoric contrasted civil rights claims as essentially “un-American.”. (shrink)

This article documents the existence of a vibrant republic of letters stretching from Cairo to Karachi in the middle of the twentieth century. On the basis of private letters, memoirs, and modern editions of classical texts, this article recreates the scholarly and personal commitments of a new class of professional editors. These editors were responsible for the emergence of some of the most influential publishing houses in the Islamic world, and their contribution to the production and circulation of pre-modern (...) texts has had a profound impact on the intellectual development of Islam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They believed that cultivating a republic of letters was necessary because it served the world of learning and scholarship. In this way was fashioned a virtual community, separated by national and political borders, but united by visions of history and a shared sense of moral and intellectual duty. (shrink)