Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Orient Institute of Beirut marks 50th birthday

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Daily Star

Mubarak’s speech

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

Text of Speech via Reuters

Autograph of Maqrizi’s Khitat revealed at Univ. of Michigan

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Graduate Student Discovers Arabic Manuscript in al-Maqrizi’s Own Hand

Just published in the newsletter of the Near Eastern Studies Department of the University of Michigan:

“Noah Gardiner, a third-year graduate student in the [Near Eastern Studies] Department’s AAPTIS division, is a member of the team that is re-cataloguing and digitizing our Library’s splendid collection of Islamic manuscripts. (This three-year project, “Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan,” is funded with a grant from the Mellon Foundation, see http://www.lib.umich.edu/collaboration-cataloging-islamic-manuscripts-michigan and http://www.lib.umich.edu/islamic/ .) In early April, Noah set to work on a manuscript of Volume 3 of al-Mawa‘iz wal-i‘tibar fi dhikr al-khitat wal-athar (or al-Khitat), a well-known work on the topography of Cairo and the history of Egypt. The author of the work is the famous and prolific Egyptian writer al-Maqrizi (1364-1442). This particular manuscript belongs to the A.S. Yahuda Collection and has been in our Library for decades. However, like most of these manuscripts, it was incompletely and sparsely catalogued and described. Noah soon noticed a discrepancy: while the paper seemed right for the late Mamluk era (when Maqrizi lived), the handwriting did not.”

The entire article can be read at this link: http://www.umich.edu/~neareast/newsletter2008-2010.pdf

Syrian writer wins Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Syrian writer Khalil Sweileh received this year’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for his novel “Warrak Al-Hub” (The Scribe of Love) in an awards ceremony at the American University in Cairo in the presence of the jury, AUC Press President Mark Linz, the AUC Provost and an audience of journalists, writers and artists.

For the full story, see http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=26438

Virtual Museum of Iraq Website to be launched in early 2010

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

[The Virtual Iraq Museum has been initiated with the cooperation of Google and YouTube, consisting of 14,000 photos with text in Arabic, English, and French. It will be officially inaugurated in early 2010.]

http://www.virtualmuseumiraq.cnr.it/homeENG.htm

تم افتتاح موقع متحف العراق الوطني السمعي المرئي

هذا مشروع ضخم تم اطلاقه بالتعاون مع شركة قوقل واليوتيوب لانشاء موقع الكتروني كامل تستطيع زيارة متحف العراق الوطني ..وشارك في دعم هذا المشروع وزارة الخارجية الامريكية التي قامت بطرح هذه الفكرة بعد زيارتهم للعراق في ابريل الماضي
يحتوي الموقع على 14 الف صورة رقمية لمحتويات المتحف …وقام بتصويرها وتصميم المشروع شركة قوقل واليوتيوب وسوف يتم التعديل عليه الى ان يطلق بشكل رسمي في بداية 2010

الموقع مصمم بالعربي والانجليزي والفرنسي والان فقط الانجليزي يعمل والباقي تحت التجربة

shared on MELANET-L by
Aseel Nasir Dyck

Digitization of early Christian MSS in Middle Eastern monasteries

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Read entire article here.

A Benedictine monk, the Rev. Columba Stewart of St. John’s Abbey and University (College­ville, Minn.)–executive director of the abbey’s Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, and a historian of the early monastic period–leads the museum’s ambitious and longstanding effort to find and digitize manuscripts held in monastic communities in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. “Our primary focus is Christian traditions, because that’s our expertise,” Father Stewart says.

The work began in the 1960s, when a monk at St. John’s decided to microfilm manuscripts fading away in Austrian monasteries.

The project is currently active at more than 20 sites, but most of the museum’s current activity focuses in and around the Middle East, including Lebanon, Malta, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. The museum also does intermittent work in Ethiopia.

slightly abridged & edited from the full article by Jennifer Howard
appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education
29 November 2009

Lalami on Moroccan bookstores and Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Leila Lalami writes about one of her favorite bookstores in Rabat, with a nice photo of what real bookstores used to look like – and some still do:  http://lailalalami.com/2009/support-your-bookstore/

Also check out Lalami’s timely review of Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, in the Dec. 14, 2009, issue of The Nation, available online at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091214/lalami/single

Andras Riedlmayer
Harvard University

Archaeologists publish first map of contested sites in Middle East

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

A team of archaeologists from UCLA, USC, Israel and Palestinian territories has developed the first map detailing Israeli archaeological activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem – much of it never publicly disclosed.

“The fully searchable online map, which serves as a window into thousands of years worth of archaeological sites in the Holy Lands, has won the 2009 Open Archaeology Prize from American Schools of Oriental Research, the main organization for archaeologists working in the Middle East.”