Julia Bray

University of Oxford, Oriental Studies, Faculty Member

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emerita ASAlBabtain-Laudian Professor of Arabic
Emerita Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford
Address: Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

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Papers by Julia Bray

Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam - By Kecia Ali

Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2014

Review of Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Harvard University Press, 2010)

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Feelings matter! Emotions in Medieval Arabic

Journal of Abbasid Studies

The history of emotions is an established field in European studies. It covers all periods and ma... more The history of emotions is an established field in European studies. It covers all periods and many disciplines. Its premise is that emotions are shaped by culture, and that their expression and effects should be contextualised in time and place. More than this, the history of emotions asserts that emotion and intellect are interconnected, and that understanding emotion is central to understanding historical motivations and actions. This talk argues that we need an Arabic history of emotions, for which the written materials are both abundant and challenging. Identifying and interpreting emotions in medieval Arabic writing — those that it depicts, and those that it arouses in the reader — makes us ask where the task leads us. I have used an example that throws light on how adab functions as an overarching mode of thinking, and in reading it have tried to address the fundamental problem in text-based emotions history, which is distinguishing between literary (imagined) and lived emoti...

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J. Bray (2020) Picture-poems for Saladin

Syria in Crusader Times, Conflict and Coexistence, 2020

Al-Jilyānī (d.603/1206) wrote picture-poems, mudabbajāt, for Saladin. What can a fresh look at th... more

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From Spain to Syria: what did al-Jilyānī bring with him?

Islam and Mediterranean: Identity, Alterity and Interactions Proceedings of the 28th Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants Palermo 2016, 2019

This is a preliminary survey of the scholarship on al-Jilyānī's picture-poetry, and of related ge... more This is a preliminary survey of the scholarship on al-Jilyānī's picture-poetry, and of related genres up to the early twentieth century. al-Jilyānī’s mudabbajāt are claimed by their author and by their modern editor as unique and unprecedented. At the time this paper was published, no fully-fledged precursors had been uncovered in either Andalusian or Syro-Egyptian sources.The same claim of uniqueness has been made, both in their own time and in modern scholarship, for the fifteenth-century AD Yemeni al-Muqrī’s ʽUnwān a-lsharaf, for the Andalusian Ibn ʽĀṣim’s qaṣīda, which al-Maqqarī speculates may have been inspired by ʽUnwān but which seems to have been composed fractionally earlier, and for the eighteenth and late-nineteenth-century poems of the Syrian Ibn al-Faranjiyya, the Kurdish al-Baytūshī, and the works of the Kurdish Aḥmad Fā’iz al-Barzanjī. The geographical and chronological distribution of these examples seems to argue as much against as for each being an entirely independent invention. There is a possibility that mudabbajāt found their way
from Egypt to Spain in al-Jilyānī’s lifetime, and a picture is beginning to emerge of the extent to which Dīwān al-Tadbīj or separate mudabbajāt continued to be copied and read during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a possibility of local continuity and influence in Syria.

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The illustrations of Ṭabbāra and Manfalūṭī's edition of Kalīla wa Dimna and of the Maktabat Ṣubayḥ edition of Alf Layla wa Layla

Whose Mediterranean? Some French perspectives

Place and self-image: the Buhlūlids and Tanūhids and their family traditions

Place and its associations with members of his family circle play a major part in the works of al... more Place and its associations with members of his family circle play a major part in the works of al-Muhassin al-Tanukhi (d. 384/994). This paper identifies and sets against their local background the documented members of his family on his father’s and his mother’s sides, the Ibn Abi 'Allans of Khuzistan, who figure in his own works, and the Buhlulids of al- Anbar and Baghdad, who figure both in his own works and in the 'Buhlulid family history’ which his son, 'Ali ibn Abi 'Ali, passed on to al-Khatib al-Baghdadi for inclusion in Tarikh Baghdad. His father’s marriage to a Buhlulid woman, hypothesised by D.S. Margoliouth and Louis Massignon, is clarified, and the symbolic significance of al-Anbar in the 'family history’, and the emotional and moral significance of the places of his youth in al-Tanukhi’s writings, are briefly discussed.

Things made of words

Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam

Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam, 2006

Beginning the journey. Under whose empire? The great tradition and little traditions in Ottoman Syria, 16th and 19th-early 20th centuries

Global perspectives on medieval Arabic literature

Ibn al-Sa'i's Nisa' al-khulafa

Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World.) Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 598; many color and 17 black-and-white figures, and 4 maps. $45. ISBN: 978-0-6911-5647-7

Speculum, Jul 1, 2021

A Competitive Fantasy Figure and his Female Conquests. ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabiʿa

Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, 2021

Ibn al-Mu'tazz's fuṣūl qiṣār and Mohsen Zakeri's Persian Wisdom in Arabic Garb

La passion de Saint Denis: les versions arabes

G. Endress, Organizing Knowledge: Encyclopaedic Activities in the Pre-eighteenth Century Islamic World

From Spain to Syria

Re-defining a Space of Encounter. Islam and Mediterranean, 2019

Arabic Literature and the Human Personality

A Lebanese chapbook of ca.1900: romance, folklore and modernity

The chapter surveys a bundle of Lebanese chapbooks containing postclassical material, situates th... more The chapter surveys a bundle of Lebanese chapbooks containing postclassical material, situates them in relation to the region's publishing output and to the activities of contemporary folklorists, compares the story of Jarīḥ al-Hawā and Zahr al-Wurūd, contained in one of the chapbooks, with the Arabian Nights tale of Masrūr al-Zayn al-Mawāṣif, and asks if this seemingly timeless story may not be seen as "modern" in the light of the social questions of its day.

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