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| Aims and Scope
By Middle Eastern we mean those cultures for whom edebiyât (or adabiyât) means "literature," the cultures molded by the evolution of the Islamic patterns of life. (We might have said "Near Eastern.") Marshall Hodgson's coinages "islamicate" and "islamdom" (in The Venture of Islam, vol. 1, p. 57) never really caught on, but they would have been an appropriate substitute for Middle or Near Eastern. We encourage critical essays about and translations from works in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and we also encourage the array of other literature in the same cultural stream, including Urdu, Kurdish, Armenian, Uighur, Bosnian, or francophone writing from North Africa. We mean to define "literatures" broadly too. We want to provide a forum for criticism of all kinds-comparative, theoretically informed, historical, old and new-on either written or oral forms of narrative, lyric, theatre or belles lettres. This can include relationships with the other arts: music, painting, architecture, film. Are we making it clear that we would like to be surprised from time to time? Edebiyât publishes articles, translations, book reviews and short notes on the field. |