A Return to Baghdad, an Arab Spring Prison Memoir, and More – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY
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At Rest in the Cherry Orchard, by Azher Jirjees, tr. Jonathan Wright (Banipal Books)
From the publisher:
Said Mardan flees Iraq when a colleague reports him for a joke about Saddam Hussein. He obtains asylum in Norway, learns the language, and becomes a postman. He marries his Norwegian language teacher Tona, even adopts her family name Jensen, and starts writing satirical stories in Norwegian for the Dagposten newspaper. However, he suffers throughout from all too vivid visitations from the ghost of his dead father, who was seized and killed by the regime before Said was born. “Where’s my grave?” his father always asks. Said’s life is upturned after his wife dies suddenly and he struggles with growing depression, headaches and cruel, haunting nightmares while painful and bloody memories keep rising to the fore, possibly aided by the ketamine he has been prescribed. He is urged by e-friend Abir to come immediately back to Baghdad, where a mass grave that probably contains his father’s remains is about to be opened. He goes back at short notice, only to find that Baghdad after the US invasion of 2003 is not the paradise he has been promised. On the contrary the city is exhausted and in the poisonous thrall of competing religious militias: he has to carry two sets of false IDs to oblige whichever one stops him. After a brutal encounter and finding himself in a large cemetery, he recalls fondly his old Norwegian neighbour Jakob who bought an orchard of cherry trees so that he could be laid to rest there, and according to old legend, reincarnate into a cherry tree. At the mass grave, Said takes a photo of his father – an incomplete father, that is, just a skull and some bones – to fill the empty frame he brought with him. After his shattering experiences, can he also find rest in a cherry orchard?
From the publisher:
In Gaddafi’s Clutches: Aljazeera Caught in The Arab Spring, is a Prison Story of Aljazeera team of journalists, including the author, during the Arab spring in Libya in 2011. The author gives an unprecendented and personal account of his arrest and imprisonment by Gaddafi’s battalions. Once out of prison, Ahmed Vall Dine wrote this Memoir, which reports on the events of the war and details his experiences of capture, imprisonment and the politics that ultimately led to his release from prison. As an Al Jazeera journalist, the author had a front-row seat to the devastating events of the war and his firsthand experiences that add a unique and powerful perspective to the story. This book is not just a gripping tale of survival, but also a powerful commentary on the dangers and challenges faced by journalists reporting on conflicts, and the impact of war on both individuals and society. It is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the realities of Arab Spring, war and the resilience of the human spirit.
The Rules of Logic, by Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī, edited and translated by Tony Street (Library of Arabic Literature
From the publisher:
In the Muslim East, logic was an integral part of the syllabus of schools and found to be especially helpful for legal studies. It was at this time that The Rules of Logic was composed by Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī, a scholar of the Shāfiʿī school of law.
The Rules of Logic is the most widely read introduction to logic in the Arabic-speaking world. It has probably enjoyed a longer shelf-life than any other logic textbook ever written, having been in use by madrasah students from the early eighth/fourteenth century up until the present day. Building on the theories of Avicenna, al-Rāzī, and other pioneers of logic, al-Kātibī discusses the many pitfalls of building arguments and setting out unambiguous claims in natural language. The enduring nature of the text is a testament to al-Kātibī and his impact on concepts of formal discourse and argument. This new translation of The Rules of Logic brings to both an Arabic and English readership an influential text that has shaped the work of scholars of logic for centuries
