Encountering ‘Monsters’ in Medieval Arab Culture

Instead of Room 10, Faculty of AMES, the new venue is the Erasmus Room, Queens’ College.

Encountering the ‘monster’ in Medieval Arab Writings explores the notions of monstrosity and otherness in Arab culture. These monstrous creatures, some transmitted from Greek culture and some original to Arab culture, feature across a variety of disciplines and genres that range from geography, travel and zoology to exegetical writings. The talk sheds light on select monsters while focusing on the encounter that takes place between monster and man. Central to the talk is examining the terms medieval Arab writers employed for those creatures, the way they represented them textually and visually, and the extent to which the human/non-human boundary holds. To approach medieval Arab society through the encounter with wonders and monsters is to explore it from a different angle revealing of the cultural underpinnings of this society and the continuous shift between the real and the imaginary.

Sally Abed is a postdoctoral fellow on the ERC funded project Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah at Trinity College Dublin. She focuses on the literary and cultural aspects of Arabic poetry in the Cairo Genizah and is currently working on a series of articles out of her research. Before joining the project, she was on the Juynboll Fellowship at Leiden University and libraries to conduct her research on travel and monsters in medieval Arab writing that she is now turning into a monograph under contract with Brill. Her talk today is part of this project. Sally obtained her PhD in comparative literature with focus on medieval travel from the University of Utah in 2017. Her research interests include travel writing, monsters, east/west relations, and the Cairo Genizah. She has published several articles on travel writing and other medieval topics in different venues and she publishes in English on Egyptian culture and heritage in the Egyptian newspaper Ahram Weekly.