Shawkat Toorawa
· Brand Blanshard Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Professor of Comparative LiteratureYale University · Comparative Literature
Active 1988–2025
About
Shawkat Toorawa is the Brand Blanshard Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has previously taught Arabic at Duke University, medieval French literature and Indian Ocean studies at the University of Mauritius, and Arabic and comparative literature at Cornell University. Since joining Yale in 2016, his courses have included topics on medieval Baghdad, Arabic and Islamic Classics, medieval and early modern travel accounts, and graduate seminars on Arabic literature. His research interests encompass classical and medieval Arabic literature, the literary and writerly culture of Abbasid Baghdad, the literary dimensions of the Qur’an, and the cultural and historical significance of the Waqwaq Tree and islands. He has authored and edited several books, including 'Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition', 'Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: A ninth-century bookman in Baghdad', and a critical edition of Ibn al-Sa‘i’s 'Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad'. He is a director of the School of Abbasid Studies, series editor of Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Lockwood Press, and of Cultural Legacies at Pink Pigeon Press/Solitaire. Additionally, he serves on the editorial or advisory boards of multiple journals such as the Journal of Abbasid Studies, the Journal of Arabic Literature, the Journal of Qur’anic Studies, and Middle Eastern Literatures. Since 2010, Toorawa has been an executive editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, an initiative dedicated to editing and translating key works from premodern Arabic literary heritage. His work also explores modern poetry, science fiction film and literature, and translation. His publications include articles on topics ranging from Waqwaq to Qur’anic stories, and he has contributed to the understanding of Arabic literature and culture through various essays and translations.
Research topics
- Chemistry
- Computer Science
- Art
- Biochemistry
- Literature
- Philosophy
- Linguistics
- Psychology
- Geology
- Aesthetics
- Archaeology
- Geography
Selected publications
2025-10-29
book-chapterSenior author2025-03-01
book-chapterSenior authorʿArīb Puts al-Wāṯiq in His Place: Visualizing Unspoken Love (and Unbridled Emotion)
Quaderni di Studi Arabi · 2024-12-27
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In this essay, I analyse an anecdote in the Nisāʾ al-ḫulafāʾ of Ibn al-Sāʿī (d. 674/1276) in which ʿArīb (d. 277/890–1) describes an exchange between al-Wāṯiq (d. 232/847), his slave Farīda (fl. 3rd/9th c.), and one of Farīda’s unnamed female servants (fl. 3rd/9th c.). I show how the anecdote’s visuality and spatiality, and the ensuing visualisation in which readers engage, enable ʿArīb, herself once a slave, to contrast the caliph’s power with the slave women’s power over him, as well as to contrast the women’s restraint with the man’s loss of control. In the space of only a few lines, the power of love and lust are demonstrated in a neat exchange of words unspoken.
Yale University Press eBooks · 2024-05-08
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingINDEX OF TRANSLATED SURAHS , PASSAGES , AND VERSES
Yale University Press eBooks · 2024-05-08
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingNew York University Press eBooks · 2023-03-16
book-chapterOpen accessWhat and Where on Earth Is Waqwaq?
Journal of Abbasid Studies · 2023-12-21
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract For well over a century, Indian Ocean Arabists, using primarily linguistic (and biological) arguments, have posited that Waqwaq is one place or another, one life-form or another. It is now Madagascar, now Sumatra; now a milkweed, now a pandanus; now a bird, now a woman-fruit. It is now a tree, now an island … I myself have not been immune to this need to identify, categorize, classify, locate, and domesticate Waqwaq. The impulse is a dangerous one: it arises out of a notion implicit in the colonial and philological enterprise that to be able to name something, to know how it got its name, and to put it on one’s map, is the better to be able to control it. Recent scholarship has been less constrained by potential philological and interpretive tyrannies and Waqwaq has accordingly benefited from re-sitings and re-readings. In this paper, I ask: What are the roots of Waqwaq and what routes has it taken as it traveled from the Abbasid court to China, from Japan to the Mascarenes, from India to the Philippines, from Istanbul to the New World, and even to Hell (and back).
The Qur’anic Story of Joseph in Five Acts: A Playscript Translation of <i>Sūrat Yūsuf</i> (Q. 12)
Journal of Qur anic Studies · 2023-10-01
article1st authorCorresponding2023-08-01
book-chapterSenior author2023-11-15
bookSenior author
Frequent coauthors
- 3947 shared
Joseph Lowry
- 3931 shared
Julia Bray
University of Cambridge
- 3930 shared
James E. Montgomery
Covenant Medical Center
- 3536 shared
Philip Kennedy
Neural Signals (United States)
- 3470 shared
Devin J. Stewart
Emory University
- 3166 shared
Tahera Qutbuddin
Carleton University
- 2952 shared
Sean W. Anthony
Yale University
- 2835 shared
Stuart Brown
University of Chicago
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