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ABDELFATTAH KILITO, The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture, trans. Michael Cooperson, Middle East Literature in Translation Series (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001). Pp. 153. $34.95 cloth, $17.95 paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2004

WILLIAM MAYNARD HUTCHINS
Affiliation:
Philosophy and Religion Department, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC.; e-mail: hutchwm@appstate.edu

Extract

Classical Arab authors' use of anthologies for self-expression and their tendency to recycle familiar material from earlier authors make their works a gold mine for studying the relationships that link a person to a text. It is this tangle that Abdelfattah Kilito unravels and illuminates, deftly and unobtrusively, in The Author and His Doubles, a set of essays on plagiarism and forgery in classical Arabic literature. The fourth chapter, “The Paths of the Prophetic Hadith,” for example, points out both that few other texts have inspired as much discussion of the relationship of a man to a text as hadith collections and that scholars' emphasis on its isnād did not mean that they neglected “the contents of the Hadith” (p. 42).

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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