William Granara is an American author, translator and scholar of Arabic language and literature. [1] He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Pennsylvania, obtaining his PhD from the latter in Arabic and Islamic studies. He has worked for the American University in Cairo and for the US State Department in Tunis. He is currently director of the Arabic language program at Harvard University.
Granara is an expert on the history of Muslim Sicily, and on the Sicilian Arab poet Ibn Hamdis. He has also contributed to a volume entitled The Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter in the Muslim Mediterranean City. Among his translations are:
Granara's work has appeared in Banipal magazine.
Granara is a member of the board of trustees at The American College of the Mediterranean (ACM), an American-style degree-granting institution in Aix-en-Provence, France which includes a study abroad institute for American undergraduate students, IAU College.
Gerard of Cremona was an Italian translator of scientific books from Arabic into Latin. He worked in Toledo, Kingdom of Castile and obtained the Arabic books in the libraries at Toledo. Some of the books had been originally written in Greek and, although well known in Byzantine Constantinople and Greece at the time, were unavailable in Greek or Latin in Western Europe. Gerard of Cremona is the most important translator among the Toledo School of Translators who invigorated Western medieval Europe in the twelfth century by transmitting the Arabs' and ancient Greeks' knowledge in astronomy, medicine and other sciences, by making the knowledge available in Latin. One of Gerard's most famous translations is of Ptolemy's Almagest from Arabic texts found in Toledo.
Translations of the Qurʻan are considered interpretations of the scripture of Islam in languages other than Arabic. The Qurʻan was originally written in the Arabic language and has been translated into most major African, Asian and European languages.
Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi ( Arabic: أبو زيد حنين بن إسحاق العبادي; ʾAbū Zayd Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq al-ʿIbādī was an influential Nestorian Christian translator, scholar, physician, and scientist. During the apex of the Islamic Abbasid era, he worked with a group of translators, among whom were Abū 'Uthmān al-Dimashqi, Ibn Mūsā al-Nawbakhti, and Thābit ibn Qurra, to translate books of philosophy and classical Greek and Persian texts into Arabic and Syriac.
Gilles Kepel, is a French political scientist and Arabist, specialized in the contemporary Middle East and Muslims in the West. Considered as one of the world’s leading authorities on Political Islam and the Middle East, he is Professor at Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program at PSL, based at Ecole Normale Supérieure. His latest english-translated book, Away from Chaos. The Middle East and the Challenge to the West was reviewed by The New York Times as “an excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region”. His last essay, le Prophète et la Pandémie / du Moyen-Orient au jihadisme d'atmosphère, just released in French, has topped the best-seller lists and is currently being translated into English and a half-dozen languages. The excerpt The Murder of Samuel Paty is presently released in the Issue 3 of Liberties Journal.
Nuh Ha Mim Keller is an American Islamic scholar, teacher and author who lives in Amman. He is a translator of a number of Islamic books.
Thomas Cleary was an American translator and writer of more than 80 books related to Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and Muslim classics, and of The Art of War, a treatise on management, military strategy, and statecraft. He has translated books from Pali, Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Old Irish into English. Cleary lived in Oakland, California.
An Arabist is someone, often but not always from outside the Arab world, who specialises in the study of the Arabic language and culture.
Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, known as H. A. R. Gibb, was a Scottish historian and Orientalist.
Omar ibn Said was a Fula Islamic scholar from Futa Toro in West Africa, who was enslaved and transported to the United States in 1807. There, while enslaved for the remainder of his life, he wrote a series of Arabic-language works on history and theology, including a short autobiography.
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is an American historian who is Gurney Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he taught courses on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East and is an expert on Iranian culture. Mottahedeh served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1987 to 1990, and as the inaugural director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University from 2005 to 2011. He is a follower of the Baha'i faith.
Ibn Ḥamdīs al-ʾAzdī al-Ṣīqillī was a Sicilian Arab poet.
Sinan Antoon, is an Iraqi poet, novelist, scholar, and literary translator. He has been described as "one of the most acclaimed authors of the Arab world." He is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Hamid Algar is a British-American Professor Emeritus of Persian studies at the Faculty of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He writes on Persian and Arabic literature and contemporary history of Iran, Turkey, the Balkans and Afghanistan. He served on the UC Berkeley faculty for 45 years. Algar remains an active scholar and his research has concentrated on the Islamic history of the Perso-Turkish world, with particular emphasis on Iranian Shi'ism during the past two centuries and the Naqshbandi Sufi order. Algar is a Shia Muslim.
Carool Kersten is a Dutch scholar of Islam and the author and editor of eleven books. Trained as an Arabist, Southeast Asianist and scholar of Religions, he currently is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Catholic University Leuven in Belgium and Emeritus Reader in the Study of Islam & the Muslim World at King's College London. His research interests focus on the modern and contemporary Muslim world, in particular political and intellectual developments in both regional and global contexts.
Jurji Zaydan was a prolific Lebanese novelist, journalist, editor and teacher, most noted for his creation of the magazine Al-Hilal, which he used to serialize his twenty three historical novels.
Ali Douagi or Ali el-Du'aji was a Tunisian literary and cultural icon who is considered to be one of the pioneers of modern Tunisian literature. He is best remembered as "the father of the modern Tunisian short story". Douagi was also known for his versatility as a sketch artist, songwriter, playwright, and journalist.
Arab studies or Arabic studies is an academic discipline centered on the study of Arabs and Arab World. It consists of several disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, historiography, archaeology, cultural studies, economics, geography, international relations, law, literature, philosophy, psychology, political science, and public administration. The field draws from old Arabic chronicles, records and oral literature, in addition to written accounts and traditions about Arabs from explorers and geographers in the Arab World.
Abū al-Qāsim Alī ibn Jaʿfar ibn Alī ibn Muḥammad al-Saʿdī, also known simply as Ibn al-Qatta' al-Siqilli was a renowned Arab philologist, lexicographer and anthologist of the Arabic language. His work is regarded as one of the major sources which preserve an abundance of knowledge about Arabic Sicilian poetry.
Fawzia Abd Al-Minem Al-Ashmawi is an Egyptian academic, writer, and translator. She works as a Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Civilisation in the University of Geneva. She had won the Golden Award in Sciences and Arts from Egypt.
Victor Danner was a Mexican-American author, researcher, and translator specializing in comparative religion and Islamic mysticism.