With Teodozja I. Rzeuska, Anetta Łyżwa-Piber and Katarzyna Molga from the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, Polish Academy of Sciences, who have published a book (in Polish) on harems as described in the memoirs of Polish travelers, pilgrims, vagabonds and expatriates, we discuss the lives of women in the nineteenth-century Middle East.

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.

In recent years, a number of Iraqi intellectuals have participated in a discourse on pluralism in Iraq that includes a call to address the traumatic collective experiences of the country’s ethno-religious minorities. Such a confrontation with the “wounded memory” of these minority groups – along with a rewriting of the modern history of Iraq to incorporate their stories – would be an important step in creating a new collective memory, one of cultural pluralism, that could lead to a true coexistence among all Iraqis. Since it is very difficult to carry out this process due to deep sectarian divisions within Iraqi society, literature provides an alternative cultural field for the deconstruction and reformulation of existing “master narratives”. The purpose of the article is to examine literary representations of the “wounded memory” of minorities in Iraq. The examples used here are related to the 1915–1916 Armenian genocide in the former Ottoman Empire and the 1933 massacre of Assyrians in the northern Iraqi village of Simele. They can be found in the following novels written in Arabic by Iraqi authors of Christian origin: At-Tuyūr al-‘amyā’ (The Blind Birds, 2016) by Laylā Qasrānī, Sawāqī al-qulūb (The Streams of Hearts, 2005) by In‘ām Kaǧaǧī, ‘Irāqī fī Bārīs: sīra dātiyya riwā’iyya (An Iraqi in Paris: An Autobiographical Novel, 2005) by Samū‘īl Šam‘ūn, and Fī intizār Faraǧ Allāh al-Qahhār (Waiting for Farag Allah al-Qahhar, 2006) by Sa‘dī al-Mālih. This article is divided into three sections. An introduction is devoted to the aforementioned discourse. The second and solely descriptive section consists of three subsections focusing on literary characters who experience and/ or witness the tragic events and/or tell others about them. The third section contains concluding remarks and refers to several concepts formulated by researchers in cultural memory studies.

Polish scholarly magazines Biblioteka Warszawska [Warsaw Library] (1841–1914) and Ateneum (1876– 1901) devoted a quite a lot of attention to recent discoveries in the field of ancient history, cultural history and descriptions of foreign countries. This article discusses materials on the ancient Middle East published in both of these periodicals.

The illustrated weekly Wędrowiec (The Wanderer), published in 1863–1906, certainly lived up to its programmatic title and published a great deal of material on geography, history of culture and travels abroad. This article discusses the texts that dealt with the ancient history of the Middle East.

At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century, the field of Arabic and Islamic studies became enriched by a number of multi-facetted scholarly theories challenging the traditional account on the early centuries of Islam. An author of one of them was the Israeli scholar Yehuda D. Nevo (1932–1992), working in archaeology, epigraphy and historiography. He devoted much of his career to the studying of Arabic rock inscriptions in the Negev desert, as well as to investigating literary and numismatic evidence of nascent Islam. In his theory, the gradual development of the Islamic faith, inspired by Abrahamism with an admixture of Judeo-Christianity, went through a stage of “indeterminate monotheism”. Not earlier than since the end of the second century A.H. one can speak of the formation of the dogmatic pillars of Islam, similar to those we know today. This paper is an attempt to sum up Nevo’s insightful input into the field of modern Islamic & Quranic studies today. Although controversial and unorthodox, many later researchers repeatedly refered to Nevo’s plenty of inspiring theses in their quest for facts on Islamic genesis lost in the maze of time and shifting memory of generations.