Milton in the Arab-Muslim World

Islam Issa is a rising star amongst scholars of the cultural interaction between the West and the Islamic world. This elegantly written book graciously eclipses previous studies of the topic. The subject is complex and in some respects volatile, but Issa grasps the tiller with a steady hand: his methodology is exemplary, and the inferences drawn from the data are characterised by common sense and intellectual honesty. Writing by literary specialists on such topics all too often describes imagined worlds, but Issa deals with the literary and religious cultures of a real world observed from the platform of his own experience and wide reading in both Arabic and English. The book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Milton, Early Modern literature, translation studies, cultural studies and reception studies, and for anyone curious about the cultural aspect of relations between the West and the Middle East.

-- Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester, UK

Islam Issa’s study of Milton and the Arab-Muslim world revisits with much greater range and detail a subject first broached in 1987 by Eid Dahiyat, whose short monograph remains unfamiliar to most Milton scholars. In line with scholarly efforts to understand the distinctive nature of relations between the West and the Middle East, Issa’s Milton in the Arab-Muslim World breaks important ground on two fronts. It is both a timely reception history and an invaluable illustration of how twenty-first-century scholars can engage with canonical authors. By focusing on global and peripheral readerships, translation theories and practices, and especially in this instance, the cross-cultural synergy that ensues when writings informed by Hebraic and Christian traditions are assessed by a culture that seems in many ways opposed to them, Issa has produced a book that will become a must-read for years to come.

-- Edward Jones, Editor, Milton Quarterly

This is genuinely important work, which makes a truly original contribution to knowledge. Most of it, indeed, is completely new. Islam Issa demonstrates how, in certain instances, Milton’s meaning and poetic affect is actually thickened and intensified by his Muslim reception. At these points in its argument, the book makes good on its engagingly provocative suggestion that a Qur’anic Milton might well mean more to modern Muslims than Paradise Lost does to its secularized modern Christian readership. Groundbreaking stuff.

-- Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Institute

In the context of current interest in Milton’s global impact, Islam Issa’s detailed study of his reception, appropriation and translation in the Arab-Muslim world is particularly timely and welcome.

-- Thomas N. Corns, Bangor University, UK

One feels throughout this book that one is in knowledgeable and sensitive hands.

-- Neil Forsyth, TLS

While scholars have spent decades studying the West's interpretaions of Arab-Muslim art and literature, the most famous of which is Edward Said's Orientalism (published by the same publisher, incidentally), very few scholars have focused on Arab-Muslim interpretations of West art and literature. Dr. Issa set out to fill this gap in literary academia, and has succeeded spectacularly.

-- Heather Hartlaub, Muftah Magazine

Issa has produced a dense and learnered book, well written, thorough, and stimulating

-- Nabil Matar, Milton Quarterly

Issa effectively situates Milton as terrain in which to appreciate the cross-pollination of reception studies, translation studies, and comparative studies, with an attentive eye to the informing circumstances of sociopolitical contexts and religio-cultural habits of thought.

-- Lowell Gallagher, SEL Studies in English Literature

Issa’s Milton in the Arab-Muslim World brings to first visibility Milton’s historical and contemporary Arab-Muslim readership with a methodological imaginativeness encompassing comparative theology, the sociology of reading, gender studies, intersectional theory, translation studies and visual culture. The subject and approach are of groundbreaking originality: from few books will mainstream Milton studies have more to learn, while the study also provides fresh paradigms for analysing cultural contact and exchange beyond familiar models informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism.

-- David Currell, English Studies

The singular achievement of this study is an important one, which is to generate terms in which Muslim readers--notably students in universities where Milton is being taught--can be encouraged to read, debate, and understand Paradise Lost.

-- Gerald MacLean, Renaissance Quarterly.