This essay is concerned with a contemporary art intervention in Berlin's Museum of Islamic Art, in the context of the Mshatta Façade's move. Sketching out Mshatta's relocation history, the essay highlights how the dynamic of connection and disconnection plays out in a museum setting and is embedded in epistemic concepts mobilized in knowledge-making about objects. Specifically, it focuses on an installation entitled “Goodbye Mschatta. Ich bin ein Fremder. Zweifach Fremder” (“Goodbye Mshatta. I Am a Stranger: Twofold a Stranger”), by a Syrian-born German visual artist who was commissioned to bid farewell to the Façade in its most recent location before it moves to the Pergamon Museum's north wing. Entering into a dialogue with Mshatta, his sculptural intervention pivoted around the themes of incompleteness, mélange, and in-betweenness. It revealed multiple connections and disconnections with regard to the Façade’s biography, while ostensibly disengaging from the debate on historical justice and imperial legacies.

This article is dedicated to the study of the question of generic contiguities within Berber (Kabyle) literature. It is devoted more particularly to the study of the boundaries between novels (ungal) and short stories (tullist). I show that the identities of literary genres do not depend only on a norm coming from elsewhere (from the West in particular) but that they are also shaped by the context from within which they evolve and by the function assigned to these genres.

Amazigh literature has undergone a veritable historic shift from oral to written form, following the constitutional and institutional recognition of this indigenous language in Morocco and Algeria. We intend to seize this historic moment by focusing on a titrological analysis which, in our view, would be able to highlight the pragmatic side of a stammering literature that would like to proclaim its rebirth and speak to the world. The titular discourse of these novels, still in an experimental phase, informs us about the semiospheres that nourish and irrigate this writing that defossilizes a buried memory, repressed and threatened by the inexorable desymbolization process that traditional cultures are undergoing. This body of work could never be reduced to a simple scription of a narrative folklore that provides it with its cultural semantics; it is driven by the desire to integrate the international literary heritage by dialoguing with it and drawing inspiration from it.

The use of script as an aesthetic device is longstanding in Islamic art. Indeed, one of the earliest forms of Islamic art are terracotta oil lamps with text inscribed on their surface.2 These inscriptions are not merely decorative but also reference the light emitted from the lamps as a metaphor for revelation. As I will show, the use of script in Islamic art is not only meant to delight the eye; it is, moreover, a cognitively faceted aesthetic device. Following an overview of script as an aesthetic device in Islamic art, I survey its legacy in the contemporary art world of the Middle East.

This article analyzes the narration and representation of space in Amar Mezdad's novel Tettḍilli-d ur d-tkeččem. Concretely, we highlight the relation between the spatial dimension and the narrative fulfillment of the novel. The main objective is to accentuate the way in which the spatial dimension is inscribed in the narration and in moments of narrative suspension (commentaries, descriptions, secondary tales, dialogues) and to present a more global reflection on the organization and the meaning of the space as well as the writing style of Mezdad.

This article highlights, through a poetic approach, the onomastics of the character in a genre called tullist in the Amazigh language. The article works through the first ten collections of texts designated by the terms Tullizt / Tullist that mark the beginnings of this genre (1998–2008). An in-depth analysis then reveals the different naming processes that Kabyle writers use in assigning names to their characters. The article concludes by offering a brief sociological discussion on the semantics of the assigned names.

Until the nineteenth century, Kabyle literature was primarily oral, passed down through word of mouth and limited to various genres such as poetry, proverbs, riddles, tales, myths, and legends. The nineteenth century marked the beginning of the transition to writing in the Kabyle language through the transcription of oral literature. However, the true departure from orality occurred in the twentieth century with the emergence of an intellectual movement within the Kabyle community that started to write in Kabyle to develop it as a written language. These writers introduced new universal literary genres such as novels, short stories, and theater.

The transition to writing in a language long confined to orality was not without its challenges. Writers often drew upon the rich oral expressions of the Kabyle language to overcome the difficulties of expressing new ideas, which became a hallmark of the writing of that era. Mohia Abdellah (1950-2004), faced the particular challenge of promoting his language by translating and adapting universal theater texts. Nevertheless, his translations and adaptations found great success by leveraging the Kabyle language's rich lexicon, especially its proverbs, which contributed to elevating the status of the Kabyle language as a written medium. This article examines some of these Kabyle proverbs reinvested by the dramatist Mohia Abdellah in his play titled “Menttif akka wala seddaw uẓekka” (literally, “better this than being in the grave”), an adaptation of the Russian playwright Nicolai Erdman's work “The Suicide.” Through an intertextual approach, the article highlights the significance of proverbial expressions in Kabyle writing due to their exceptional ability to convey complex ideas from another world. To achieve this, the article initially defines the traditional functions of Kabyle proverbs and subsequently compares them with their counterparts in the source text to better appreciate Mohia's efforts in translating and adapting foreign texts.

Taskla means literature in Tamazight. A neologism, taskla has been used since the 1980s by a group of Kabyle cultural activists, who had joined together in the academic association Imdyazen, to refer to modern literary genres that have been emerging in the field of Amazigh creation since at least the 1960s. Members of the Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange (AMREC) also adopted the term to encapsulate the work they were doing to construct the new Amazigh literature. This article reconstructs the choices that Moroccan Amazigh activists undertook to establish a full-fledged literary field between 1967 and the early 2000s. Contextualizing this new literature in a longer history of lmāzghī (Amazigh writing in Arabic script), the article reveals how a process of intentionality and active construction of the field has led to the development and current flourishing albeit changing, landscape of Amazigh literature.

This article examines the literary and spiritual initiatives undertaken by Henri Bosco and his collaborators, notably Captain Léopold Justinard, in interwar colonial Morocco. Focusing on the Revue Aguedal, inaugurated by Bosco in Rabat in 1935, I highlight the revue's primary role as a cultural conduit between French and indigenous Amazigh and Arab intellectuals. Bosco's concept of a “poetic church,” championed by contributors such as René Guénon and Ahmed Sefriou, sought to document, safeguard, and translate Amazigh and North African literature. Although the Aguedal literary project experienced interruptions during World War II, it accentuated indigenous perspectives through sections like “Propos du Chleuh,” overseen by Justinard. I also underscore Bosco's simultaneous advocacy for French culture, challenging stereotypical colonial narratives while amplifying Amazigh voices within them. Despite financial challenges leading to the revue's demise after the war, the literary circle fostered enduring literary relationships and left an indelible mark on the nexus of colonial scholarship, literature, and spirituality.

The following interview took place via Zoom with Moroccan film director, producer, and writer Nabil Ayouch on Tuesday, March 22, 2022 at 11:00 AM EST. Lightly edited for ease of comprehension.

The third meeting of OSARK, an international Ottoman Studies conference founded by members of the Sakarya University History Department, was hosted and coordinated by Istanbul Medeniyet University between September 7 and 9, 2022. It was supported by TİKA (Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency), YTB (Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities), the Üsküdar Municipality, and Turkish Airlines.

Nezar Alsayyad And Heba Safey Eldeen, eds., Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Modernity from Reel to Real (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2022). xxxiii + 288pp., £49.95 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-64903-133-4.