Category: Arabic Language Contributions

Egypt’s Suhayr Al-Qalamawi, FIRST Woman to Obtain a Doctorate in Literature in MENA region

Suhayr al-Qalamawi is an icon of literature and politics in the Arab world in general and in Egypt in particular.

She greatly influenced cultural life in Egypt and the Arab world and it was her idea to establish the Cairo International Book Fair.

Qalamawi was born in Cairo, in a family that focused on educating their daughters. Her father was a surgeon and her mother spoke various languages. This upbringing helped her complete her education, and she graduated from the American College for Girls in 1928.

Her father also played a major role in developing her linguistic and cultural skills. She excelled reading the holy Qur’an with her father. Qalamawi’s father also owned a library where she was able to feed her infinite hunger for reading.

She was able to benefit from her father’s vast library of works at an early age, and it seems that writers such as Taha Hussein, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi and Ibn Iyas greatly contributed to her literary talent and shaped her voice as a writer.

Her father encouraged her to specialize in Arabic literature, and she became the first young girl to attend Cairo University and the first woman among 40 men to study Arabic literature. After obtaining a Master of Arts, she then received a scholarship to conduct research in Paris for her Ph.D. in 1941. After the completion of her doctoral thesis, she became the first woman to obtain a doctorate from Cairo University.

During her educational career, she was influenced by a number of personalities, most notably the dean of Arabic literature Taha Hussein, who was head of the Arabic language department and editor-in-chief of the Cairo University Magazine at the time. He made her assistant editor-in-chief of the magazine in 1932, and Qalamawi became the first woman to obtain a permit to practice journalism in Egypt.

Suhayr al-Qalamawi started her career after graduation as the first female lecturer at Cairo University in 1936. Soon she became a university professor and later the head of the Arabic language department between 1958-1967, in addition to becoming the president of the Egyptian Feminist Union.

She became the president of the Egyptian General Authority for Cinema, Theater and Music in 1967 and the head of the Child Culture Society in 1968. Qalamawi was also the head of the administration of the General Egyptian Book Organization, from 1967 to 1971, and the head of the censorship authority from 1982 to 1985.

In addition, Qalamawi was able to make outstanding contributions within the cultural field. During her tenure as head of the General Egyptian Book Organization, she worked to expand the range of readers, encourage young writers, and advance the book industry in 1967. From here, she established the first book fair in the Middle East, which is the Cairo International Book Fair in 1967.

Suhayr al-Qalamawi’s contributions were not limited to the cultural community, but she also contributed to the struggle of women, in order to preserve their rights through her literary works, in addition to her participation in many conferences on Arab women, and in 1960, she was the president of the International Conference on Women.

Furthermore, Qalamawi’s journey was also full of political work, and the beginning was when she entered politics as a member of Parliament in 1958 , and was nominated again in the period from 1979 to 1984.

Qalamawi’s career was crowned with a number of awards, as she was awarded the Arabic Language Academy Award in 1954 and the State Appreciation Award in Youth Literature. She also received the State Encouragement Award, the State Appreciation Award in Literature, The First Class Order of the Republic, the Medal of Achievement, and an Honorary Doctorate from the American University in Cairo.

After an enriching career, Suhayr al-Qalamawi passed away in 1997.

source/content: egypttoday.com (edited)

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EGYPT

Winners of 2022 King Faisal Prize Awards Honored in Riyadh : March 2022

Awards made for services to Islam, Arabic language, literature, medicine, and science.

The winners of this year’s King Faisal Prize on Tuesday received their awards at a glittering ceremony staged in Riyadh.

The annual gongs — held under the auspices of King Salman — are the most prestigious in the Muslim world and recognize outstanding achievement in services to Islam, Islamic studies, Arabic language and literature, medicine, and science.

The service to Islam prize was jointly awarded to former Tanzanian President Ali Hassan Mwinyi and Egyptian scholar Prof. Hassan Mahmoud Al-Shafei.

The Arabic language and literature award went to Prof. Suzanne Stetkevych and Prof. Muhsin Al-Musawi from the US.

American Prof. David Liu secured the medicine prize while the science accolade was shared by Prof. Martin Hairer of the UK and Prof. Nader Masmoudi of Tunisia.

The Islamic studies prize, that this year focused on the Islamic heritage of Al-Andalus, was withheld because the nominated works did not meet the necessary criteria.

Mwinyi was honored for actively participating in Islamic advocacy and promoting religious tolerance. He established Islamic schools and translated many resources and references in hadith, jurisprudence, and the Prophet Mohammad’s biography into Swahili, the language spoken by millions of people in East Africa.

Al-Shafei, who was president of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo from 2012 to 2020, held several academic positions and established a series of institutes concerned with Al-Azhar. He also contributed to the establishment of the International Islamic University in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.

The Arabic language and literature prize was jointly presented to Stetkevych, chair of the department of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, and Al-Musawi, professor of Arabic and comparative literary studies at Columbia University.

Stetkevych’s extensive research and numerous works have analyzed Arabic literature with unmatched depth from the pre-Islamic period to the Nahda/revivalist period. Her research approach, which is characterized by its application of varied methodologies, resulted in the renewal of the critical perspective and methods of studying classical Arabic poetry.

The research and studies of literary critic and novelist Al-Musawi have had a great impact on Arabic studies students and researchers in the Arab world and the West, through his distinctive methods of presentation, analysis, critical interpretation, and openness to Arab and international creative texts in prose and poetry.

Meanwhile, the medicine prize concentrated on gene-editing technologies. Its winner Liu, director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, invented the first so-called base editor to make alterations on DNA and genes by replacing letters in the DNA base.

Hairer, chair in probability and stochastic analysis at Imperial College’s mathematics department, was one of the science prize recipients. His work has been in the general area of probability theory with a focus on the analysis of stochastic partial differential equations. He recently developed the theory of regularity structures which gave a precise mathematical meaning to several equations that were previously outside the scope of mathematical analysis.

The other joint science award winner, Masmoudi, a professor of mathematics at the New York University of Abu Dhabi, unlocked the mystery surrounding many physics problems which have remained unsolved for centuries.

He found a flaw in (Leonhard) Euler’s mathematical equations, which for more than two centuries had described the motions of fluids under any circumstance. Masmoudi discovered that the equations did not apply to all circumstances, as previously thought, and his findings helped to solve a raft of conundrums related to fluid-modeling, such as weather predictions.

Each winner received a $200,000 prize, a 24-carat gold medal, and a certificate written in Arabic calligraphy signed by the Chairman of the prize board, Prince Khalid Al-Faisal.

source/content : arabnews.com (edited)

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Winners of 2022 King Faisal Prize awards honored in Riyadh. (SPA)

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SAUDI ARABIA / EGYPT / TANZANIA / TUNISIA

English Loanwords and the Arabic Origins of ‘Magazine’

During the Arab occupation of Iberian Peninsula their language spread throughout the area and entered Latin.

A large number of words from donor languages have been absorbed in English, mostly from Latin, French, Greek and the Germanic languages. But many more entered the lexicon during centuries of the British Empire that at one time spanned all continents. Familiar English words often have foreign origins, with research discovering more links beyond the British Isles.

Unknown to many, English speakers all speak a little bit of Arabic, thanks to history. In the early eighth century, Arab fighters invaded and took control of the Iberian Peninsula, modern-day Spain and Portugal. During the occupation, their language spread throughout the area, and entered Latin, the language spoken by the locals, and over the next several centuries, Christian-led forces took control of the peninsula. But by this time the language spoken there had been forever influenced by the Arabic language. As Latin began to influence English, some of the Arabic words were passed on.

John Simpson, editor of the third edition of Oxford English Dictionary (OED), offers the example of ‘magazine’, which is of Arabic origin. The word’s history was not mentioned in earlier editions, but the word ultimately derives from makhazin, the Arabic term meaning ‘a storehouse’, which appears in a Latin form magazinus in an Italian document of 1214. He writes: “The Italian form magazzino (recorded from 1348) is the source of Middle French magasin (recorded from 1409, and from 1389 in the form maguesin).

The English word derives from the French, and is first recorded in 1583, in the sense ‘a place where goods are kept in store’. Many of the later English senses parallel earlier meanings in other European languages, but it is of some interest that the meaning ‘periodical publication’ is an English innovation, not recorded in its French form until later. Needless to say, one of the essential components of a viable etymology for a loanword such as ‘magazine’ is an established record of cultural contact between speakers of the languages involved, as is here the case with Arabic, Italian, and French. Not surprisingly, the Arabic word also appears in various forms in early Spanish.”

Other Arabic-origin words in English include: camphor, carat, caravan, cotton, elixir, kohl, monsoon, nadir, safari, serendipity, sofa, sugar, syrup, henna, jar, tariff, zenith, admiral, arsenal, alchemy, assassin, azimuth, algebra, coffee, lemon.

Another major non-European donor to the language is the Indian subcontinent. The link between India and Britain began in 1600, when the East India Company was formed. Over the centuries a large number of Indian words entered the English language, the most prominent collection being Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, by Henry Yule and AC Burnell, published in 1886. It had over 2,000 entries, but independent India has continued to lend more words to the language.

Indian words recently recorded in OED include ambari, Angrezi, chuddies, kirana, satta, shishya, udyog and updation.

According to Pingali Sailaja of the University of Hyderabad, there are five major types of words in Indian English that are distinct from words seen across other varieties of English: borrowings from Indian languages; novel constructions through processes of affixation and compounding; hybrid constructions which bring together English and Indian languages; loan translations or calques; and, words that are used with different meanings from those one finds in other varieties.

The British Council collated 10 ‘surprising’ expressions of Indian English: ‘I am doing my graduation in London’, ‘I passed out of college’, ‘My neighbour is foreign-returned’, ‘My daughter is convent-educated’, ‘I belong to Delhi’, ‘Where’s the nearest departmental store?’, ‘My teacher is sitting on my head’, ‘My friend is eating my brain’, ‘Monkey cap’, ‘Why This Kolaveri Di?’

source/content: khaleejtimes.com / Prasun Sonwalkar

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pix: filephoto / khaleejtimes.com

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ARABIC LANGUAGE