ArabLit Quarterly: Winter 2021: FOLK

This special DOUBLE ISSUE of ArabLit Quarterly centers on FOLK stories, songs, and poetry from the last millennium, from Andalusia to Yemen, with stops across the cities in between. It features folk-tale and folk-poem adaptations, essays that trace the same folk story across the centuries (like Alaa Murad’s “Al-Yamama”), short stories, poetry, reflective essays, and a full graphic novel (“Um Hmaar Returns!”)i by the fantastically talented Zainab Almahdi. As always, work ranges over eras, and includes poetry by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Dakhil (731–788); the litterateur known as Nasir who wrote in Judeo-Arabic and enjoyed local acclaim in Mamluk-era Cairo around the year 1300 CE; a look at the history of Bahrain through the lens of folk narratives; folk poetry and a recipe from mid-twentieth-century Iraq; and (sometimes frightening) folk fiction from Yemen, Egypt, Palestine, and Saudi.