Power, Marginality, and the Body in Medieval Islam

Fedwa Malti-Douglas is College Professor and The Martha C. Kraft Professor of Humanities at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is also Adjunct Professor of Law in the School of Law. She is the author of numerous scholarly books and the winner of the 1997 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Letters. Her recent work, THE STARR REPORT DISROBED (Columbia University Press, 2000), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

• Contents: Preface; Islamic biography; Controversy and its effects in the biographical tradition of al-Khatîb al-Baghdâdî; The interrelationship of onomastic elements: isms, dîn-names, and kunyas in the 9th-century A.H.; Pour une rhétorique onomastique: les noms des aveugles chez as-Safadî; Dreams, the blind, and the semiotics of the biographical notice; Mentalités and marginality: blindness and Mamlûk civilization; The classical Arabic detective; Texts and tortures: the reign of al-Mu`tadid and the construction of historical meaning; Classical Arabic crime narratives: thieves and thievery in Adab literature; Yûsuf ibn `Abd al-Hâdî and his autograph of the Wuqû` al-Balâ' bil-Bukhl wal-Bukhalâ; Structure and organization in a monographic Adab work: al-Tatfîl of al-Khatîb al-Baghdâdî; Maqâmât and Adab: al-Maqâma al-Madîriyya of al-Hamadhânî; Playing with the sacred: religious intertext in Adab discourse; Index.