The objective of this paper is the Arabic edition and the English translation of the Dissertation on thirst (الكلام في العطش), an anonymous text included in the miscellaneous manuscript nº 888 of the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Madrid (Spain). This small treatise describes what thirst is, the types of thirst that exist, the causes why hydroponics are averse to water, the reason why diabetic people are continuously thirsty, the causes why people with fever are thirsty, the reason why some foods produce thirst and others do not, and so on. The whole manuscript is composed of fourteen works, written by the same copyist along 170 folios under the general title The book of medical and philosophical curiosities and utilities (كتاب النكت والثمار الطبية والفلسفية) and their subject are curious matters that are generally out of the span of most works on these two branches of knowledge.

It is difficult to give an unambiguous answer for the question presented in the title. J.B. Glubb considered himself to be a friend of Arabs and the Arab issue. At the same time he was a loyal officer of the British Army. He did not see any contradiction in this. J.B. Glubb began his work in the Transjordan Emirate in 1931. In the beginning he commanded the border guard made of Bedouins and since 1939 the whole army of Transjordan, namely the Arab Legion. During World War II he considerably developed these armed forces. In 1946 Transjordan gained independence. Despite this J.B. Glubb maintained his command over the Arab Army until 1956. In 1948 he commanded the army during the conflict with Israel that was coming into being. During his military service he attempted to care about the interests of the House of Hashimites. Basically, he associated the Arab issue with the interests of this house. He believed that it was possible to permanently combine Arab interests viewed in that perspective with the influence of the British in the Middle East. Such reasoning turned out to be an absolute misconception. The officer was becoming more and more hated by a large part of Arabs. For many he was a symbol of being enslaved by the British. His reasoning of the Arab issue was becoming an anachronism. Eventually, he became a nuisance also for the Hashimites. Therefore, in march 1956 young king Husayn took the command from him and removed him from Jordan. Despite such ending of his military and political career one must admit that he was one of more interesting figures of the late British Empire.

This article approaches the nature of Classical Arabic from the ideological discourse about it. More specifically, it investigates the controversy about “pure” and “Arabized” Arabs which was raised during the Umayyad period. The paper claims that underlying this controversy was an attempt by northern and southern Arabians to appropriate the symbolic capital of the sacred language. The tribal genealogies developed during the same period are also claimed to reflect political alliances. A third claim made in this connection is that Basran and Kufan grammarians were probably also involved indirectly by selecting data on which they based their linguistic analyses.

In her reflections on cultural memory, which “is based on communication through media,” Astrid Erll uses the term “remediation” in order to “refer to the fact that memorable events are usually represented again and again, over decades and centuries, in different media: in newspaper articles, photography, diaries, historiography, novels, films, etc.” Some of these events may even become sites of memory. In my article, in relation to cultural memory studies, I contemplate the genocide of the Yezidis in the Sinǧār district, which was committed by ISIS militants in August 2014 and in the following months, as reflected in four Iraqi novels written in the Arabic language. They are: Raqṣat al-ǧadīla wa-an-nahr (“The Dance of the Braid and the River”, 2015) by Wafā’ ‘Abd ar-Razzāq, ‘Aḏrā’ Sinǧār (“Sinǧār’s Virgin”, 2016) by Wārid Badr as-Sālim, Šamdīn (“Šamdīn”, 2016) by Rāsim Qāsim, and Šaẓāyā Fayrūz (“The Shattered Fragments of Fayrūz”, 2017) by Nawzat Šamdīn. By analysing the ways in which these writers depict ISIS persecution of the Yezidis, I aim to answer, among others, the following questions: What are their reasons for a literary documentation of these events? Is the iconic image of the genocide which emerges in the four novels similar to that outlined in the West media coverage? Therefore, the first part of the article concentrates on attitudes of the above-mentioned Iraqi writers to the Sinǧār tragedy. In the second part, the plots of their novels are briefly described with the focus on how the reality intermingles with fiction. In the third and in the fourth parts, literary modes of expression, which serve to create a symbolic resistance of Yezidi victims against their oppressors, by giving them voice and showing alternative realities and fantastic events, are examined.

The aim of the article is to present the issue of loneliness of Iraqi women on the basis of selected novels written by Iraqi female writers in the 21st century. The first part of the article, which is preceded by an introduction to the topic, includes general information about the development of novels by Iraqi women writers since the second half of the 1990s and some remarks about their methods of portraying female characters. The second part of the article provides examples of lonely women in their narratives whereas the third part depicts a story of Riyām, the heroine in the novel Riyām wa-Kafā (Riyam and Kafa, 2014) by Hadiya Husayn, in a more detailed way.

The paper first gives a survey of all the etymologies proposed so far for the Greek term for „pyramid” within the Greek language and the Oriental languages. Then the elaboration of a wholly new suggestion is ventured on the basis of phonological criteria in the context of the supposed Late Egyptian source language.

In recent reflections on the current situation of ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and the threat of their extinction, a number of Iraqi intellectuals have stressed they cannot imagine their society without the plurality and diversity that have contributed to the creation of a common interethnic and interreligious Iraqi identity and historical memory. Among them are writers who raise this issue not only in essays, articles and interviews, but also in their fiction. The aim of the present article is to show the interweaving of literary discourse on Iraqi minorities and the wider debate among Iraqi intellectuals on the deteriorating condition of Iraqi Christians – which has led to their mass emigration – as reflected in a number of post-2003 Iraqi novels. The literary image of this exodus cannot be discussed without addressing the position of Christians among other Iraqi communities currently and in the past, as well as the question of their identity. This article refers to the following novels: Taššārī (Dispersion, 2012) by In‘ām Kaǧaǧī, I‘ǧām (Diacritics, 2004) and Yā Maryam (Ave Maria, 2012) by Sinān Antūn, Sīra dātiyya riwā’iyya (An Iraqi in Paris: An Autobiographical Novel, 2012) by Samū’īl Šam‘ūn, Frānkanštāyn fī Baġdād (Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2013) by Ahmad Sa‘dāwī, and Sabāyā dawlat al-hurāfa (Slaves of the Imaginary State, 2017) by ‘Abd ar-Ridā Sālih Muhammad. The article is divided into four parts, including an introduction in which the above-mentioned debate is presented. The second part depicts the plight of Iraqi Christians after 2003 through a brief outline of the lives of four literary characters. The third part focuses on the situation of Iraqi Christians before 2003 by relating the memories of five fictional protagonists. These two descriptive parts are followed by some final remarks. The theoretical framework of this article is based on the reflections of Birgit Neumann and Astrid Erll concerning the role of literature as a medium in the construction of cultural memory.