This chapter introduces the historical (Persian period), literary (narrative anthology), and canonical dimensions of Numbers, and how these elucidates the theology of the book.

The present chapter provides a brief history of Byzantine hymnography, especially its Palestinian and Constantinopolitan origins, as well as insights into the ways different hymn genres work in presenting theological thought to the hosts of faithful in the church space. This is exemplified through an examination of hymns dedicated to the raising of Lazarus. Finally, there is a brief excursus to the apocryphal influence in Byzantine hymnography and, more broadly, liturgical arts and literature.

Opening with Salih’s Season of Migration, the chapter uses an imaginary library devoid of Arabic books to question Arabic’s place in world literature. It rejects two temptations – adding Arabic as a simple supplement or isolating it as exceptional – and proposes modern Arabic literature as a field that reshapes questions of time, language, geography, and media. Surveying scholarship and canon formation, the editors trace and critique Nahda-origin periodizations, fuṣḥā/ʿāmmiyya binaries, nationalist gatekeeping, and regional frames such as Mashriq, Maghrib, Gulf, and exile. The volume’s four sections examine shifting temporalities, contested linguistic registers and translation, transnational geographies, and media histories from print to poetry and the novel. A final provocation reads Ahmed Naji’s prison library to ask why Arabic literature matters now, foregrounding contemporary reading, translation, and experimentation against state-sanctioned canons. Across case studies, the Companion offers methods and close readings that unsettle inherited categories while opening future paths for studying modern Arabic literature.

Connecting the issue of purity and holiness to research on emotions, this chapter demonstrates how Numbers, and especially its different laws and rituals, to a large extent revolves around the motifs of purity and holiness. This is particularly so with the middle section of the book, which is set around Kadesh (“holy”).

This chapter interrogates the marginalization and recent resurgence of Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and Tamazight as legitimate literary languages in Morocco. Historically sidelined by Arabization policies and the dominance of the Franco–Arabic literary binary, these Indigenous languages have been mostly excluded from national literary historiography. This chapter traces how postindependence nationalist ideologies suppressed Morocco’s multilingual, literary heritage, privileging fuṣḥā and French while dismissing Darija and Tamazight as purely oral languages. Combining close readings of novels with institutional developments, the chapter highlights the emergence of a new literary consciousness that reclaims linguistic plurality as a pillar of Moroccan literature. It argues that despite institutional resistance, the rise of fiction written in Darija and Tamazight signals a transformative shift in Moroccan literature, challenging hegemonic narratives and redefining the language of the novelistic genre. It ultimately advocates for a reconfiguration of scholarly frameworks to reflect the multilingual realities of Moroccan cultural production.

This chapter follows up on the preceding one, making a character analysis in view of the generational change that happens in Numbers, and how the different leading characters embodies this change.

In this chapter, an overview of the various genres of hagiographic literature is given: The focus gradually shifts from the martyrs in the age of persecution to holy bishops, monks and monastery founders. Collections of edifying stories and miracles become popular, holy fools and fictional saints appear on the scene as the heroes of novel-like texts. Hagiographic literature reflects the ecclesiastical and social developments in the lives of real and imaginary martyrs of Iconoclasm, of saints who resisted the unpopular church union in the late 13th century or who supported the Hesychast movement in the 14th century. Hagiographic literature was written at both a simple and a sophisticated stylistic and linguistic level, and many lives of saints were rewritten in later times in a more refined language. For liturgical purposes, lives of saints were also brought together in collections, reduced to short entries and used as the base of hymns.

This chapter attempts to chart the radical transformation of the Orthodox world across history, namely from the universal religion of Christianity to the numerous ‘national’ Orthodox churches of today. Historically speaking, this universality became mostly evident in the ecumenical ideology of the multi-ethnic Byzantine empire. Yet, at the same time, there have been continuous strong entanglements of Orthodox Christianity with various ethnic peoples that led to the formation of specific ethno-religious identities, especially through their Christianisation in the wake of Byzantine missions. Not least, this had an impact on the articulation of the Orthodox church structures in the late Middle Ages. These were later profoundly shaped anew within the modern national framework following the encounter of Orthodox Christian cultures with Western nationalism. The sweeping national and even nationalistic transformation of the Orthodox world exhibits numerous features that seemingly contradict its long ecumenical past, yet they may be explained in the context of the specific Orthodox confessionalisation and concomitant mutations during the modern era.

This chapter takes Mahmoud Darwish’s 1992 poem “The Penultimate Speech of the ‘Red Indian’ to the White Man” as a starting point to reflect on three canonical texts in modern Arabic poetics: the Egyptian critic Louis ʿAwad’s introduction to his 1947 volume Blutuland (Plutoland); the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika’s introduction to her 1949 volume Shazaya wa-Ramad (Shrapnel and Ashes); and the Syrian-Lebanese poet and critic Adonis’s 1971 volume Muqaddima li-l-Shiʿr al-ʿArabi (Introduction to Arabic Poetry). Reading these three texts alongside one another, this chapter argues that in them a privilege of a listening subject, defined by interiorizing self-reflection, historical self-understanding, and aesthetic subjectivity, is generalized in language. The global terms for linguistic life are transmuted through these critical writings, while in Darwish a wholly other sense of language is given, without a desire for the terms privileged in the three texts in Arabic poetics this chapter also outlines.

What is the evolving role of exile in modern Arabic literature? Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading and the shifting figure of the exilic intellectual, the chapter traces the transformation of exile from a symbol of intellectual estrangement and creative agency to a dynamic site of engagement with displacement, fragmentation, and identity, and points to the ways in which exile literature intersects with, yet remains distinct from, refugee and forced migration narratives. Focusing on Palestinian literature, particularly Rabai al-Madhoun’s Masaʾir, it analyzes how exile and return are reimagined in the post-Oslo era through fragmented narrative structures and intergenerational perspectives. The chapter argues that exile literature continues to offer critical insight into the lived experience of displacement, while also challenging rigid legal and national categories. Through its aesthetic innovations and political resonances, exile literature remains a vital mode of witnessing, resistance, and reimagining belonging in the contemporary Arab world.

What did it mean to be human in the Byzantine church? How was humanity conceived theologically? What were the attributes that comprised the human person? This chapter offers an introduction to anthropological understandings of Byzantine theology. Drawing on major points of consensus across various theologians, genres and liturgical contexts, I show that humanity was understood primarily in light of its divinised potential. Although terminology and understandings of the human body and faculties might differ across various theologians, early and medieval Orthodox thinkers agreed upon the divine origin and end of humanity. From humanity’s creation in the divine image to its potential transcendence in divine communion, humanity in all its diverse expressions was understood as having its fullest expression in God.