Mu¿ammad al-Tunisi

In Darfur (eBook, ePUB)

An Account of the Sultanate and Its People
Übersetzer: Davies, Humphrey

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A merchant's remarkable travel account of an African kingdom

Müammad al-Tunisi (d. 1274/1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian merchants trading with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Al-Tunisi was raised in Cairo and a graduate of al-Azhar. In 1803, at the age of fourteen, al-Tunisi set off for the Sultanate of Darfur, where his father had decamped ten years earlier. He followed the Forty Days Road, was reunited with his father, and eventually took over the management of the considerable estates granted to his father by the sultan of Darfur.

In Darfur is al-Tunisi's remarkable account of his ten-year sojourn in this independent state, featuring descriptions of the geography of the region, the customs of Darfur's petty kings, court life and the clothing of its rulers, marriage customs, eunuchs, illnesses, food, hunting, animals, currencies, plants, magic, divination, and dances. In Darfur combines literature, history, ethnography, linguistics, and travel adventure, and most unusually for its time, includes fifty-two illustrations, all drawn by the author.

In Darfur is a rare example of an Arab description of an African society on the eve of Western colonization and vividly evokes a world in which travel was untrammeled by bureaucracy, borders were fluid, and startling coincidences appear almost mundane.

An English-only edition.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bonnier Books UK
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. September 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781479804436
• Artikelnr.: 59072517

Autorenporträt

Müammad al-T¿nis¿ (Author) Müammad al-T¿nis¿ (d. 1274/1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian merchants who traded with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Raised in Cairo, al-T¿nis¿ spent ten years traveling through the Darfur Sultanate. On his return to Egypt, he played an important part in Müammad ¿Al¿'s modernization project, supervising the translation of veterinary and medical texts and editing the first printed editions of classical Arabic texts. Humphrey Davies (Edited and Translated by) Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of some twenty-five works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, five novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and A¿mad F¿ris al-Shidy¿q's Leg over Leg. He has also made a critical edition, translation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-period Brains Confounded by the Ode of Ab¿ Sh¿d¿f Expounded by Y¿suf al-Shirb¿n¿, as well as editions and translations of al-T¿nis¿'s In Darfur and al-Sanh¿r¿'s Risible Rhymes from the same era. In addition, he has compiled with Madiha Doss an anthology in Arabic entitled Al-¿¿mmiyyah al-mi¿riyyah al-makt¿bah: mukht¿r¿t min 1400 il¿ 2009 (Egyptian Colloquial Writing: selections from 1400 to 2009) and co-authored, with Lesley Lababidi, A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo. He read Arabic at the University of Cambridge, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and previous to undertaking his first translation in 2003, worked for social development and research organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Sudan. He is affiliated with the American University in Cairo.