The 1960s and early 1970s were a moment of literary exchange, collaboration, translation, and experiment between the poles of the Maghreb and Levant. "Global Form, Regional Exchange" reconstitutes the literary systems that authors created to connect two avant-garde movements -- Souffles-Anfas in Morocco and the "60's generation" in Iraq -- to the regional hub for Arabic literary print culture, Beirut. It tracks practices of translation (between French, Arabic, and English) that authors like Sargon Boulus and Abdellatif Laabi, on opposite sides of the region, developed to renew Arabic literature, attending to instances of 'linguistic terrorism' and deployments of untranslatability; theories of a global Arabic; and efforts to emulate the linguistic standards of the Levantine avant-garde. Finally, through a reading of Algerian author Kateb Yacine's work with Beirut-based journals, this article argues for a brief and understudied moment of experiment with Maghrebi literature in standardized Arabic.

This chapter takes up a small part of the writings of a group of Muslim intellectuals from China who studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s and worked to think through the connections between China, Islam, the Arab world, and literatures in Chinese and Arabic. Through a close reading of Recollections of Childhood (Tongniande huiyi), Ma Junwu’s translation of the first volume of Taha Husayn’s The Days (al-Ayyām), we see how the Sino-Muslim Azharites provide a valuable historical example and theoretical resource for our own scholarly practice at a time when attempts to go beyond the boundaries of national literatures and languages default all too quickly to monolingual approaches.

The caliphate of al-Mu'tasim continues the religious policies of al-Ma'mun but with a key military shift to reliance on a new cadre of Turkic and Central Asian troops. The new Abbasid capital at Samarra becomes a hub of new palaces for the next half-century (most famously the palace of Jawsaq al-Khaqani/Dar al-Khilafa).Abbasid society experiences a range of new trends in Arabic literature and lifestyle, mostly felt in the reign of al-Mutawakkil.The increasingly secluded caliphs at Samarra embolden domination by the Turkic soldiery, who make and unmake a series of caliphs. Recovery is achieved under al-Mu'tadid, who echoes the reign of al-Ma'mun, but the reign of the child caliph al-Muqtadir invites another phase of disarray. Ministerial rivalries, harem intrigue, expansion by the Byzantines, and challenges by millenarian Shi'i movements, such as the Qaramita and the Fatimids, lead to a weakened Baghdad. The rising Buyids of western Iran dominate the Abbasids from 945 to 1055, and the caliphs are reduced to a merely symbolic position.

This chapter reveals how graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum contributed significantly to the creation of an authentic national culture for Egypt during the first forty years of British occupation (1882–1922). It demonstrates that projects of modernity, nationalism, and the nahda cultural renaissance, were not only advanced by Egypt’s political and intellectual elite, but also by educational experts working within lower and middle levels of state institutions and within grass-roots movements. The resistance of elite nationalists to cultural change under British occupation was selective: they fought education cutbacks and Anglocentric policies, but accepted European critiques of Islamic knowledge and pedagogies. This increased the sociocultural value not only of the civil school capital that many elite nationalists possessed, but also the hybrid civil-religious capital of the darʿamiyya. Reform of al-Azhar was driven in part by the number of talented religious school students trying to leave for Dar al-ʿUlum and its short-lived sister school, the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ al-Sharʿi). Dar al-ʿUlum teachers and graduates contributed significantly to the revival of Arabic literature, the reform of Arabic language and how it was taught, and the rejuvenation of Islamic practice through grass-roots associations (jamʿiyat).