The Jewelers of the Ummah

The Jewelers of the Ummah
Author: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1804293121

Algeria's Arab Jews were renowned for their metal-working and jewellery-making skills, and these jewellers of the ummah-the Arabic community-are, for Azoulay, the symbol of a world that can still be reclaimed and repaired. In a series of letters written to her father, her great-grandmother, and her children-and to the thinkers and artists she claims as intellectual kin, such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt-Azoulaytraces the history of Arab Jewish life in Algeria, and how it was disrupted by French colonialism. She begins by asking how her family became assimilated into the identities of "Israeli," "Jewish," or "French." As she does, she finds a whole lost world open up to her - the world of her family, the Arab Jews of Algeria. She traces how Arab Jews were severed from other Arabs, and how Arab Jews were severed from their Arabness by the Israeli vision of a Jewish diaspora, and sets out to repair those breaks and revive their world. But it is in the return to the carefully crafted jewels, whose beautifully crafted objects act as messages to the future, reminds us of the conviviality of a world that existed long before colonial disruption, and whose memory challenges the imperial ways of thinking we have all inherited.

Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art & Architecture: Three-Volume Set

Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art & Architecture: Three-Volume Set
Author: Jonathan Bloom
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1697
Release: 2009-05-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 019530991X

The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture is the most comprehensive reference work in this complex and diverse area of art history. Built on the acclaimed scholarship of the Grove Dictionary of Art, this work offers over 1,600 up-to-date entries on Islamic art and architecture ranging from the Middle East to Central and South Asia, Africa, and Europe and spans over a thousand years of history. Recent changes in Islamic art in areas such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq are elucidated here by distinguished scholars. Entries provide in-depth art historical and cultural information about dynasties, art forms, artists, architecture, rulers, monuments, archaeological sites and stylistic developments. In addition, over 500 illustrations of sculpture, mosaic, painting, ceramics, architecture, metalwork and calligraphy illuminate the rich artistic tradition of the Islamic world. With the fundamental understanding that Islamic art is not limited to a particular region, or to a defined period of time, The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture offers pathways into Islamic culture through its art.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica: Payn-Polka

The Encyclopaedia Britannica: Payn-Polka
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1062
Release: 1911
Genre: Encyclopedias and dictionaries
ISBN:

"The last great work of the age of reason, the final instance when all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view ... Unabashed optimism, and unabashed racism, pervades many entries in the 11th, and provide its defining characteristics ... Despite its occasional ugliness, the reputation of the 11th persists today because of the staggering depth of knowledge contained with its volumes. It is especially strong in its biographical entries. These delve deeply into the history of men and women prominent in their eras who have since been largely forgotten - except by the historians, scholars"-- The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/apr/10/encyclopedia-britannica-11th-edition.