The Road to Self-Revival

Assadi (English) and Na'amneh (Arabic, both College of Sakhnin for Teacher Education) explore the tendency of modern Arabic poetry to summon Sufi figures, their philosophy and terms, and their attitudes and practices. The modernist poets whose work they consider are Abdul Wahab al-Bayyati (1926-99), Ali Ahmad Said (Adonis) (1930-), Salah Abdu-s-Sabur (1931-81), and Mahmud Darwish (1941-2008). They examine poems from the perspective of the essence of the Sufi character depicted and the thoughts and vocabulary of Sufism, and trace the destination of the modern Arab poet through investing the Sufi world with its sacred characters. They have not indexed their study. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Jamal Assadi is the Chair of the Department of English at The College of Sakhnin for Teacher Education, Sakhnin and a lecturer at An-Najah National University, Nablus. He received his PhD in English literature from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, Dr. Assadi is the author of Acting, Rhetoric and Interpretation in Selected Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Saul Bellow (2006), A Distant Drummer: Foreign Perspectives on F. Scott Fitzgerald (2007), Mohammad Ali Taha’s ?A Rose To Hafeeza’s Eyes? and Other Stories (2008), Father and Son: Selected Short Fiction by Hanna Ibrahim Elias and Mohammad Ali Saeid (2009) and Mustafa Murrar: ?The Internal Pages? and Other Stories (2010).
Mahmud Na‘amneh is a lecturer of Arabic at the College of Sakhnin, Israel, a researcher at the Majm a‘ of Arabic in Haifa and a coordinator of symposiums for graduate students in the Department of Arabic at Tel Aviv University, where he did his PhD on ancient myths and their manifestation in modern Arabic poetry.