فهرست مطالب حیدر خضری

The love story of Majnun Layla, a legend that originated in the Middle East, has been translated and retold so often that it has become part of our global literary imagination. The story has been often received, compared, and studied in connection to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. This is despite the fact that there are fundamental differences between the two masterpieces, not to mention that the reception of Majnun Layla has exceeded literary reception, extending to other media. The first part of the article presents new social, political, religious, and literary interpretations of Majnun Layla. The second part of the article discusses the legend’s migration from seventh-century Arabic culture to its operatic adaption in Azerbaijan in 1908 (the first opera to be staged in an Islamic context), its first cinematic adaptation in Malay language in 1933 in Bangladesh, its first scholarly treatment in comparative literature in Iran in 1938-1940, and finally its most recent cinematic representation in the 2011 American movie Habibi. The article notes the most important achievements and elements that have been added to the story during the legend's cross-cultural and multidisciplinary journeys. The article concludes by proposing that the multiple-horizontal-circle model of comparative literature and post-colonial studies is more adequate for understanding texts like Majnun Layla than the conventional binary-vertical-linear model for research in Arabic and Middle Eastern comparative literature and world literature.

This article studies the appearance and development of comparative literature in Turkey. In the first part of the article, the researcher discusses how the culture of “comparisons” in Turkish classic literature is related to the geography of Islamic/Islamicate world, especially to that of the Persian or Arabic culture. The second part of the article is focused on how the comparative approach in contemporary Turkish literature has been defined in terms of the Greco-Roman, French, German and recently English cultures. Challenges and tensions resulted by the temporal and spatial discordance between Eastern and western cultures, classic and contemporary literary traditions and their impact on comparative literature in Turkey will be elucidated. This article reaches its conclusion by proposing an "on-border" hybrid identity for comparative literature in Turkey with regard to the questions of time and place, and also by providing a bibliography of original and translated researches.

This article is intended to re-read the rise of comparative literature and its development in the Islamic world in general and the Arab countries and Iran in particular, highlighting on the eastern islamic trend that have been marginalized by the western islamic trend on which the comparative studies in these countries have been centered, in order to gain access to a fuller and wider identity for comparative literature in the Muslim world, and in order to complement the picture of the reality of global comparative literature. The article try, also, to remove from the western islamic trend the virtue of temporal priority in using the term "comparative literature" and attributed it to the eastern islamic trend, in addition to trying to assign a part of the virtue of establishment of comparative literature in the Islamic world to the classical Arabic and Persian literatures. The article deals with the most important phases of comparative studies between the literatures of Muslim peoples, as well as the changes in comparative literature created by certain forums - as "Arab unity" and "Islamic unity"- for political and religious purposes, to make comparative literature consistent with the eastern and and Islamic societies. These things in comparative literature in the islamic world lead to focus on the "French School" in Comparative Literature, as well as the to the rise of the terms "Arab School" and "Islamic School" in the face of of other western and eastern trends in comparative literature, and led, on the level of time, to focus on the classical period, in which the islamic world had the ideal unity of all its aspects, and, finally, lead, on the geographical level, to the narrowing of the circle of comparative literature to the literatures of islamic peoples and delete the other western and eastern literatures from the circle of its interest, in order to go out of the margins of the western center, which does not see in the literatures of islamic peoples, in particular, any weight in the international comparative literature.