This chapter reads Syrian writer Haydar Haydar’s Walīma li-aʿshāb al-bahr: nashīd al-mawt (Banquet for Seaweed: Ode to Death, 1983) with Lebanese poet Etel Adnan’s L’Apocalypse arabe (The Arab Apocalypse, 1980). Banquet is a transregional epic that treats events across Algeria and Iraq, from the Umayyad era to the early 1970s. I trace its epic form through its parody of pan-Arab dictators between the Epic of Gilgamesh and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and a virtuoso performance of multiple registers of fuṣḥā. For Haydar, a Mashreq transregionalist who develops the Algerian topos for the bleak 1980s, a 1965 coup in Algeria signified the end of Algeria’s revolution and of Arab, decolonial liberation. The novel depicts Arab politics through an Arab planet that rotates in transhistorical cycles of revolution and oppression. This conceit of an orbiting, closed cycle is key to Banquet’s historical and ontological account of Arab politics. The work of the novel is to reveal transregional history as repetition. In contrast, Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse is read as transregional Arabic literature in French. While her poem speaks for Arab experience through the topos of Palestine and massacres in the Lebanese Civil War, Adnan relationally remaps transregionalism into global sites of violence and injustice.

In this chapter, we will examine the Old Testament’s role in religious communities as an authoritative revelation from God – the concept of “scripture” common to the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These texts hardly began as the books that now comprise the Bible; rather, what we will discover is a lengthy, complex development of authoritative texts from oral to written to canon.

This chapter will take us inside the ancient world of the Old Testament’s formation. Words, considered powerful, were painstakingly preserved through centuries in the hands of anonymous authors and editors, scribes and scholars. Texts were collected into books and went through a process of use and standardization by the ancient Israelites, beginning as early as the tenth century bceand lasting through the Babylonian exile and beyond – emerging finally in the canonical form we know today as the Old Testament.

In this final chapter, we will summarize the Old Testament and explore its lasting contributions to world history, society in general, and the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Specifically, we will explore four particular aspects of the Old Testament and examine how each functions to create a cohesive and living whole.

This overview in turn will remind us that the Old Testament’s central message communicates, in a host of ways, what it perceives as Israel’s life in covenant relationship with God, obeying God’s Torah, and living morally and ethically in right relationship with other human beings. Within this overarching concern of the Old Testament, we have already observed the continual thread of a monotheistic worldview in process. The development toward the Old Testament’s conviction of the singularity of God is indeed among the most enduring contributions to human history.

Similarly, the Old Testament’s contribution to civil society cannot be underestimated. Thus, in conclusion, we will explore three core values in particular that are rooted, not in secularization as often is assumed, but in the rich and enduring legacy of the Old Testament.

The significance of the Old Testament for human history and culture is undeniable. Whatever our personal convictions regarding its content, the Old Testament contains the origins of nearly everything we think about God. Variously labeled as the Hebrew Bible, the Tanak, the First Testament, and the Old Testament, among others, this library of texts from ancient Israel has been preserved for more than two thousand years.

Emerging from the polytheistic context of the ancient world, the enduring significance of the Old Testament is to be found in the concept of monotheism. Indeed, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share in this unique religious legacy. We will discover in this chapter what lies behind the terminology we use when we speak of monotheism, and how the Old Testament perceives and develops the understanding of a singular God. Known to ancient Israel as Yahweh, Israel’s God came to be understood as Creator, source of all, and sovereign over all. Only in time would Israel come to believe that Yahweh was not only its God, and the God Israelites were called to worship, but the one and only God.

This chapter sets the scene in urban Penang at the time of research through a consideration of public discourses about marriage and gender relations. It examines newspaper accounts, public events, debates, exhibitions and theatrical productions in Penang’s capital, George Town. Alongside interviews with lawyers, these public discourses show how discussions about what are perceived by many as ‘dysfunctional relations’, including child marriage, polygamy, the conversion of minors to Islam, divorce and LGBTQ rights, have the capacity to expand and take on a life of their own at moments of national tension. The chapter illuminates the dense connections between kinship, gender, ethnicity, religion and law. Stories about child marriage at different political moments – to take one example – condense ethical and political concerns and contestations in times of radical change.

This chapter returns to the import of marriage as an institution at the interface between intimate, personal lives and wider political transformation. It highlights the experiences of those who have remained unmarried beyond the usual marrying age and draws on discussions of ethical imagination from earlier in the book to explore some submerged connections between non-marriage and social activism. The multiple temporalities in which reflecting on marriage occurs (here by those who remain unmarried) reveal how such judgements constitute imaginative and political work. Involvement in gender-related activism is a possible trajectory for those concerned about women’s or LGBTQ rights. The potential fractures between conservative Islam and the more liberal attitudes of urban, middle-class, youthful Malaysians constitute a zone of contention – but also, for some, a suggestive field for imaginative reflection about their own situation, about the marriage of their parents or those of siblings or friends. In these fissures, transformative standpoints and visions may carry the seeds of wider political change.

This chapter takes forward the exploration of marriage as difference through an examination of what are locally perceived as ‘mixed’ marriages in Penang. Difference can be calibrated in many registers – including age, wealth, class, familial background, religion, language, ‘race’ and ethnicity. The cultural and ethnic diversity of Penang offers unusual scope for marrying outside familiar boundaries. But which sorts of difference are most salient, and which boundaries are more permeable and more easy to bridge? ‘Malayness’ and Islam have a historically privileged legal status in Malaysia, and marrying a Muslim legally requires a non-Muslim spouse to convert. The bodily, culinary, religious and legal concomitants of this conversion are likely to impact close family members of a non-Muslim partner. At the extreme end of a range of possibilities, ‘mixed’ couples encountering or expecting opposition from their families sometimes elope to marry. But, after marriage, a long process of accommodation and absorption is likely to occur. Experiences of ‘mixed’ marriage and the negotiation of difference, which is part of marriage everywhere, offer a perspective on other changes in Malaysia over several decades. But more broadly, it provides a way to understand how intimate worlds may generate wider social transformation.

This chapter describes ongoing corpus-based research on representations of Islam in the British press. The study involved building large corpora of newspaper articles about Islam and/or Muslims and using techniques like collocation and keywords to identify patterns of representation as well as differences between newspapers and change over time. The chapter outlines some of the key findings of the research as well as describing the various impact activities that were carried, and the challenges these presented. This includes working with a number of groups (ENGAGE, MEND, the Centre for Media Monitoring), presenting our work at the Labour Party Conference and in Parliament, as well as giving talks in mosques. We also detail how our project resulted in the creation of additional collections of newer corpora, enabling further examination of how representations have changed over time.

This chapter considers the fraught and complex history of religion and poetry in Australia, given the context of settler – colonialism, Aboriginal understandings of Country, and Australia’s growing cultural diversity. Discerning that anti-religious sentiment has emerged through a perception of Christianity as too close to settler – colonialism, it argues for a broad understanding of religion to include major world faiths and Aboriginal spirituality. It considers how nineteenth-century poets responded to the crises of faith brought about by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and then how poets grappled with meaning-making and value-making following the two world wars. At the same time, it recognises that many poets; including Francis Webb, James McAuley, Vincent Buckley; and Les Murray; still shared an institutional understanding of religion. The chapter considers how recent poets have meditated on the relationship between the secular and the sacred. It analyses the mosaic quality of Fay Zwicky’s reflections on her Jewish ancestry, as well as the navigation of Buddhism in poets like Harold Stewart, Robert Gray; and Judith Beveridge; Christianity in the work of Kevin Hart and Lachlan Brown; and Islam in the work of Omar Sakr.

The introduction grounds African literary studies in practical and material considerations, and shows how print is a site of innovation and transformation. The print archive is shown to be full of texts which are now overlooked, but which enable us to understand much more about the literary productivity of the period, including what printed texts meant, socially and culturally, to their readers. An overview of the three sections of the volume is given, from Part I, which asks when independent African-owned printing presses emerged on the continent, what they published and where their readers were located, to Part II, which asks about the audiences for print culture and how they were convened, and Part III, which asks about the international networks of producers, distributors and readers behind the flows of texts on the continent. Emphasising specificities of language, religion and education, as well as the tangible social and political networks behind the circulation of texts, the introduction suggests that a locally sensitive approach to the study of print networks is essential to our understanding of global movements such as Black internationalism and Islam.