UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST

CENTER FOR ARAB STUDIES

ROMANO-ARABICA

XV

Graffiti, Writing and Street Art in the Arab World

editura universităţii din bucureşti ®

– 2015 –

Editors:

George Grigore (University of Bucharest, e-mail: gmgrigore@yahoo.com)

Laura Sitaru (University of Bucharest, e-mail: lauramariana.sitaru@g.unibuc.ro)

Associate Editor:

Gabriel Biţună (University of Bucharest, e-mail: gabrielbituna@gmail.com)

Assistant Editors:

Georgiana Nicoarea (University of Bucharest, e-mail: nicoareageorgiana@yahoo.co.uk)

Ovidiu Pietrăreanu (University of Bucharest, e-mail: ovidiupietrareanu@yahoo.com)

Blind peer reviewed

Editorial and Advisory Board:

Jordí Aguadé (University of Cadiz, Spain)

Andrei A. Avram (University of Bucharest, Romania)

Ramzi Baalbaki (American University of Beirut, Lebanon)

Ioana Feodorov (Institute for South-East European Studies, Bucharest, Romania)

Pierre Larcher (Aix-Marseille University, France)

Jérôme Lentin (INALCO, Paris, France)

Giuliano Mion (“Gabriele d’Annunzio” University, Chieti-Pescara, Italy)

Luminiţa Munteanu (University of Bucharest, Romania)

Bilal Orfali (Ohio State University, Columbus, USA)

Stephan Procházka (University of Vienna, Austria)

Valeriy Rybalkin (“Taras Shevchenko” National University of Kiev, Ukraine)

Mehmet Hakkı Suçin (Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey)

Shabo Talay (Free University of Berlin, Germany)

Irina Vainovski-Mihai (“Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University, Bucharest, Romania)

Ángeles Vicente (University of Zaragoza, Spain)

John O. Voll (Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA)

Photo (The Wall of the American University of Cairo, Tahrir Square, Egypt, September 24, 2012): Georgiana Nicoarea

Cover Design: Gabriel Bițună

Published by:

© Center for Arab Studies

Pitar Moş Street no 7-13, Sector 1, 010451, Bucharest, Romania

Website: http://araba.lls.unibuc.ro/ Phone: 0040-21-305.19.50

© Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti

Şos. Panduri, 90-92, Bucureşti – 050663; Telefon/Fax: 0040-21-410.23.84

E-mail: editura.unibuc@gmail.com; editura_unibuc@yahoo.com

Internet: www.editura.unibuc.ro ISSN 1582-6953

Contents

I. Graffiti, Writing and Street Art in the Arab World

Ashour Abdulaziz. The Emergence of New Forms of Libyan Public Expression: Street Art in

Tripoli………………………………………………………………………………………………

9

Ea Arnoldi. Renaming Shuhada Street: Palestinian Activism, Spatial Narratives and Graffiti in

Hebron……………………………………………………………………………………………...

17

Anne-Linda Amira Augustin. “Tawra, ṯawra yā ğanūb”: Graffiti and Slogans as Means of

Expression of the South Arabian Independence Struggle………………………………………….

39

Frédéric Imbert. Califes, princes et poètes dans les graffiti du début de l‟Islam………………… 59

Pierre Larcher. Épigraphie et linguistique. L‟exemple du graffito arabe préislamique du Ğabal

‟Usays……........................................................................................................................................

79

Georgiana Nicoarea. The Contentious Rhetoric of the Cairene Walls: When Graffiti Meets

Popular Literature………………………………………………………………………………….

99

David Novak; Mohammad Sedigh Javanmiri. Graffiti in Iraq: Focus on Sulaymaniyah in

Northern Iraq………………………………………………………………………………………

113

II. Studia Varia

ااألراك ابي حان ااألذلسي ألممرذاًا اإلدراك للسان: المعجم ثنائي اللغة في التراث العربي. أمين عبد الرحيم منتصر ………. 135

Andrei A. Avram. An Early Nubi Vocabulary……………………………………………………. 155

Maurizio Bagatin. The Arabic Manuscripts on Grammar from the Kahle Fonds: Some Research

Proposals...........................................................................................................................................

193

Ioana Feodorov. Appellations de l‟éclair et du tonnerre chez les Roumains et les Arabes………. 211

Jairo Guerrero. Preliminary Notes on the Current Arabic Dialect of Oran (Western Algeria)….. 219

Najib Jarad. From Locative to Existential: The Grammaticalization of “fī” in The Spoken

Arabic of Aleppo…….......................................................................................................................

235

Elie Kallas. Aventures de Hanna Diyab avec Paul Lucas et Antoine Galland (1707-1710)……... 255

Giuliano Mion. Réflexions sur la catégorie des « parlers villageois » en arabe tunisien………... 269

Ovidiu Pietrăreanu. Conceptual Orientational Metaphors of the „Head‟ in Literary Arabic…… 279

Grete Tartler Tabarasi. On Migration, hiğra, in al-Fārābī‟s Moral Philosophy………………...

291

III. Book Reviews

299 (أمين عبد الرحيممنتصر . )مكتبة لبنان: بحروت. صناعة المعجم التاريخي للغة العربحة .2014. القاسمي علي. د…………

Necim Gül. 2013. Siirt Arapçasını Kurtarmak. Ankara: Sage Yayıncılık. (Gabriel Bițună)…….. 303

István Kristó-Nagy. La pensée d‟Ibn al-Muqaffa‟. Un agent double dans le monde persan et

arabe. Paris: Editions de Paris (Studia Arabica XIV). (Laura Sitaru)…………………………….

307

Pierre Larcher. 2014. Linguistique arabe et pragmatique. Beyrouth, Damas: Presses de l’ifpo

(Ovidiu Pietrăreanu)………………………………………………………………………………

311

Aldo Nicosia. 2014. Il romanzo arabo al cinema. Microcosmi egiziani et palestinesi. Roma:

Editore Carroci (Colezione Lingue e Letterature Carroci). (Laura Sitaru)......................................

329

Paul din Alep, Jurnal de călătorie în Moldova și Valahia (Paul of Aleppo, Travel Notes from

Moldavia and Wallachia), edition and annotated translation by Ioana Feodorov, with a

Foreword by Răzvan Theodorescu, Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române; Brăila: Editura

Istros a Muzeului Brăilei.(George Grigore)……………………………………………………….

331

.

331

Paul din Alep, Jurnal de călătorie în Moldova și Valahia (Paul of Aleppo, Travel Notes

from Moldavia and Wallachia), edition and annotated translation by Ioana Feodorov,

with a Foreword by Răzvan Theodorescu, Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române;

Brăila: Editura Istros a Muzeului Brăilei, 2014, 619 pp.ISBN 978-973-27-2429-3; ISBN

978-606-654-097-1

Reviewed by George Grigore

This book prepared by Ioana Feodorov, part of her broader project Travels of Patriarch

Makarius III Ibn al-Za‘īm in the Romanian Principalities, Written by his Son, Archdeacon

Paul of Aleppo, comprises, among others, a vast Introductory Study (pp. 7-75) which in itself

is a proper investigation, carried out based on the highest academic standards. It concerns the

personality of Būlos al-Ḥalabiyy and his travels to the Romanian Principalities, in the 17th

century, followed by an Editor’s Note signed again by Ioana Feodorov (pp. 77-85), the

translation of approximately one third of Paul‟s Journal into Romanian (pp. 145-435), and the

Arabic text (pp. 437-593). Out of the 311 pages that the largest manuscript of Paul‟s Journal

encompasses, the editor/translator selected for publication in this first volume all those that

refer to the Romanians of the principalities of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania,

including passages written by the Syrian Archdeacon while in Ukraine or in Moscow that are

connected with the Romanians. The volume also encloses extensive lists of cited titles (pp.

112-143), and Indices of proper names and geographical terms (pp. 597-617).

The Arabic manuscript reflects the impressions of Paul of Aleppo, Archdeacon of the

Antiochian Church, which marked him all through his travels, while accompanying his father,

Makarius III Ibn al-Za„īm, the Patriarch of Antioch and the Entire East, through the Romanian

Principalities, Ukraine and Russia, in 1652-1658. The purpose for this lengthy voyage was for

them to obtain spiritual, financial, and political help from the Orthodox countries that the

Eastern clerics visited.

During his journey, Paul of Aleppo took down with diligence everything that he

considered relevant of the way of life of their hosts, while insisting the most on their behavior,

practices, idioms, art forms and architectural styles. Considering the scarcity of the data that

reached us about the Romanians‟ life in the 17th

century, this work is a priceless document,

which can help our deeper understanding of the intricate mosaic of their daily life, by

providing us with a detailed panorama of far gone times.

Feodorov deals with the text at several levels:

1. The researcher‟s perspective, reflected by the Introductory Study, as well as the

footnotes to the Romania translation, where she displays a deep, erudite understanding not

George Grigore .

332

only of the text, but also of the period when it was created, of the history of Christianity in the

Romanian lands and the Middle East, as well as a broad knowledge of comments by other

experts who studied this text over the years. Feodorov records and discusses, with outstanding

minuteness and care, on all the known scholars who edited or translated parts of Paul of

Aleppo‟s Journal, stressing the merits of the only complete translation ever: the Russian one

by G. A. Murkos, published in Moscow in the late 19th

– early 20th

century.Moreover, the vast

bibliography that Feodorov‟s work is based on, presented in two sections Abrevieri și sigle

(Abbreviations and Acronyms) and Alte surse (Other Sources), could become in itself an

independent work, extremely useful to all those who wish to research Paul of Aleppo‟s notes.

2. The perspective of the editor who, based on a comparison of several manuscripts of

the Arabic text, including the ones preserved in Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), the

Institute for Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Saint Petersburg), and

the British Library (London), succeeded for the first time in establishing (with help from

researchers in all the countries covered by Paul of Aleppo‟s journal) a text which will

definitely become the ideal source of translations into other languages.

3. The translator‟s perspective. Ioana Feodorov succeeds, with this book, in offering

the Romanian culture a version that is composed in a harmonious style that combines the

language of old chronicles, religious texts, and contemporary expressions, leading the reader

back to the old times without burdening him with outdated vocabulary. Note should be taken

that the translation closely follows the Arabic original, reflecting its contents with accuracy.

It is worth mentioning that Paul of Aleppo‟s notes are written in a special variety of

Arabic, the Middle Arabic widely used by Eastern Christians since the mediaeval times.

Beside the Islamic and the Judaic varieties, this level of Arabic features within the “Middle

Arabic” domain, which is characterized by both classic and colloquial particularities, in a

mixture that is produced by the writer as he composes his work. Deciphering texts written in

such a variety of Arabic is very difficult for the researcher, who needs to know Classical

Arabic as well as the colloquial variety. If for Classical Arabic a large number of sources are

available – grammars, dictionaries, etc. – for the colloquial Arabic of the Middle Ages sources

are scarce, to say the least. Therefore, the researcher is compelled, based on the information

taken over from present-day colloquial Arabic of the concerned area, to try to decode such

texts, from all points of view: phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and semantic. Often,

searching for the meaning of a word in colloquial speech, inserted in the text under scrutiny,

requires a pains taking labor and much checking in other languages of the area. The interest

for this variety of Arabic, in which a large number of works, especially chronicles, were

Paul din Alep, Jurnal de călătorie în Moldova și Valahia

333

composed, is increasing among Arabic specialists all over the world. In Romania, the only

expert in this variety of Arabic is Feodorov who, for years now, has studied the Arabic used in

the Eastern Christians‟ works, and is recognized in the academic community, at home and

abroad, as a specialist in this domain. Her expertise is revealed by her published works, her

invitation to prestigious international reunions, her courses at the University of Bucharest, for

the Master Degree program at the Department of Arabic, which have been followed with

much interest by the students, some attracted to follow their training in this field.

The Arabic text published in the book under discussion here, so difficult to transfer to

another language, will definitely draw the attention of experts in Middle Arabic, while the

book itself is a real treasure for specialized libraries. By editing this text, a richer dialogue

may be established with Centers for Arabic Studies around the world, which brings great

scientific benefits, an international dimension of this type of research conducted in Romania,

and value added to a rare and very particular specialization in the domain of Arabic language

and literature.