Jurji zaydan autobiography rangers

Community Reviews 0. Loading Related Books. May 25, Edited by ImportBot. May 4, August 9, Edited by IdentifierBot. April 24, Edited by Open Library Bot. Though his novels did not follow a logical timeline, they were all centered on some aspect of Islamic history. Next, he would read all available sources on the topic in order to gain the most thorough understanding possible.

Then, he would build a skeleton outline based entirely on historical fact. Finally, he would dream up characters and a romance through which he would relate the history. The scholar's accuracy with which he approached each novel is further demonstrated by his frequent inclusion of documented sources, frequent footnotes and introductory chapters that provided historic, cultural and geographic context to the historic event of choice.

His plots were often weak, relying mostly on convenient coincidences between characters to drive the love story and mystery, with almost all of his novels ending in a happy ending. His characters were often one-dimensional, with no insight given on their skills, background or their view of the time, institutions or society of which they were.

Because he would present all character traits and personalities within the first mention of each character, character development was never present. The static characters, coupled with his straightforward, journalistic style were ideal for relating an objective and accurate history in the clearest way possible to the broad Arab public.

Along with providing the general population with education, he also aimed to develop " philosophy of language ", which has the explicit purpose of informing, educating and enlightening. He was critical of writing that was accessible to only a small group of people, especially the esoteric language in religious scholarship. In , the newly opened Egyptian University offered Zaydan a professorship in Islamic History, which Zaydan accepted only reluctantly because of his unpopularity amongst conservative Muslims.

He was dismissed before beginning in response to significant outcry from the Muslim public, who objected to his Christian origins and secular leanings. Zaydan's secular take on history was particularly controversial in Tarikh al-Tamaddun al-Islam The History of the Islamic Civilization, published — , in which he offers a critical secular reading of Islamic history in at least five volumes.

The experience embittered him until his unexpected death in Leaving behind a legacy that includes 23 published novels, numerous scholarly works, and a magazine then circulated in Persia, India, Japan, Western Africa, Zanzibar, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, and North and South America, he was one of the most prolific and renowned Arab writers of the time.

His impact left a lasting impression on the general Arab population as well as such literary giants as Taha Hussein , Naguib Mahfouz and poet Fadwa Tuqan. Beyond the amount of work that he produced in his life though, there is the shift in thinking he brought to the Nahda and those who followed it. Because the Arabic novel was written in an accessible language, individualized education took a huge step away from the religious elite and towards the general population.

His printing press greatly aided in this attempt to spread new knowledge and ideas to people of all backgrounds. Until recently, Zaydan's works were not available in English, but they have been translated in a dozen other languages. George Zaidan to promote Arab culture, has commissioned translations of five of his twenty-two historical novels.

The work began in , and the books were released in and It won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. His Life and Thought. Wiesbaden, Germany: Steiner Verlag, for which he wrote an introduction. It is followed by selected letters on subjects that were dealt with in his autobiography and that Zaidan wrote mostly to his son Emile while he was studying at the American University in Beirut.

Click here to read. Jurji Zaidan was a prolific writer whose objective was to inform and educate his Arab contemporaries about the modern world, as well as about their past and their national identity.

Jurji zaydan autobiography rangers

He is considered to have been one of the intellectual leaders in laying the foundation for a pan-Arab secular national identity. Zaidan was the archetypical member of the Nahda at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He belonged to a new intellectual elite whose education was not based on traditional or religious learning.

Zaidan was an autodidact whose only college training was one year spent in the medical department of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. His writings as a historian, as a linguist and as a political and social commentator and analyst bore the strong imprint of his scientific and evolutionary outlook and shaped his analytical approach in all these areas.

His works gave a distinctly secular outlook to the emergence of the Arab nationalism of the times. Many other Arab writers both Muslim and Christian like himself promoted similar political and social values, but he was one of its leaders. His writings in all these areas were used, in a mutually re-enforcing way, to develop and promote a national sense of pan-Arab secular identity.

In he founded one of the earliest and most successful monthly magazines called Al-Hilal The Crescent Moon which has been published without interruption to this day. Al-Hilal remains a treasure trove for the student of intellectual and social history of the time. The twenty-two historical novels he wrote were all serialized in that magazine.

In addition to the novels, he also wrote articles in his magazine on a large number of topics: the history of Islamic civilization, and the history and development of languages, as well as on political, social, educational and ethical issues. He thus played a very important role in making readers of Arabic more aware of the important events in their history and in developing a sense of national identity.

Dar al-Hilal is still today one of the largest publishing houses for periodicals in the Arab world. Zaidan may be best remembered today as one of the pioneers in the composition of historical novels within the modern Arabic literary tradition and in their serialization in magazines. The novels cover an extensive period of Arab history, from the rise of Islam in the seventh century until the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th.

The particular manners, lifestyles, beliefs and social mores of those periods, as well as political events, provided the context within which Zaidan weaved adventure and romance, deception and excitement. Jurji Zaidan wrote several books on history and perhaps his most noteworthy contribution was a five volume work on the History of Islamic Civilization 2 in which he attempted to provide, for the first time, a secular national interpretation of Arab history, related and yet distinct from the traditional Muslim religious interpretation of the past.

In this context he wrote a book about the early history of the Arabs before Islam. Jurji Zaidan wrote several books on linguistics and had a major role in influencing the evolution of the Arabic language during his time. At the theoretical level he analyzed the attributes of various languages and their evolution, judging Arabic to be one of the more developed languages.

As an Arab nationalist he strongly felt that classical rather than colloquial Arabic should be the vehicle for this modernization thereby becoming an even stronger bond strengthening all Arabic-speaking peoples. He worried that using local Arabic dialects for that purpose would erode and divide the Arab world just as the evolution of Latin into European languages spawned competing nationalisms.

He was especially concerned about spreading education to as many people as possible — as his efforts for the establishment of a simplified, modern, standard written Arabic show. He wrote extensively, mostly in al-Hilal , on a wide range of social and other issues. These articles dealt with, not only topics on history and language that were covered more extensively in his written books, but also a variety of social and political subjects.

Areas covered in these writings included such topics as the relationship between religion and science, ethics and society, the role of women, morality, work ethics among others 3. He was a strong supporter of the social emancipation of women but within the respect of her traditional role in the family. Last but not least, he was one of the strongest proponents for, and instrumental in, the establishment of the first Egyptian University.

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