Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T09:37:12.051Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Foreword by Professor Clive Holes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2015

Pierre Cachia
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Clive Holes
Affiliation:
Magdalen College, Oxford
Get access

Summary

It is a signal honour to have been invited to write the Foreword to this collection of papers by the doyen of Arabic folk literature, Professor Pierre Cachia, the ‘honorary Sa‘īdī’. Although now well into his eighties, Professor Cachia still continues to produce perceptive editions, translations, commentaries and analyses of folk literature as practiced in his beloved Egypt. All who toil in this and related fields sincerely hope that, despite the infirmities of age, he will continue to do so for many years to come.

The present collection gathers together some of Professor Cachia's most important journal-length contributions to Arabic folk literature and allied subjects, published over roughly the last forty years. Although only two of the twenty articles have not been previously published, collecting them together in a single volume is a great service to other researchers, many of whom may not have access to all of the journals in which they originally came out. While Professor Cachia's interest in folk literature is long-standing, he has never been a one-club golfer, and he has made significant contributions to Classical Arabic Literature and Arabic linguistics over his long career. In fact, it is his vast hinterland of Arabic linguistic and literary knowledge that is one of the main reasons why his contributions in the field of popular culture are so authoritative: the breadth and depth of his scholarship enables him to bring a sense of context and proportion, and a cultural understanding of both high culture and the grass roots which nowadays is rare in Arabic studies, in which the trend, as in other disciplines, is to specialise in an ever narrower field and say more and more about less and less.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×