A Reader of Classical Arabic Literature

A Reader of Classical Arabic Literature is one of a very small group of resources in English for the teaching of intermediate and advanced level classical Arabic. Based on his lecture notes, the late Seeger Bonebakker designed a superb teaching text, which he then asked his UCLA colleague, Michael Fishbein, to help him annotate and augment. The result is a truly valuable reader, one used widely in the United States and Europe, featuring judicious and instructive selections from such works as Ibn al-Qifti's Inbah al-ruwat, al-Tanukhi's al-Faraj ba'd al-shidda, and al-Dhahabi's Siyar a'lam al-nubala', among others.

Professor Seeger A. Bonebakker (1923-1995), a native of the Netherlands, began teaching at UCLA in 1969 and retired as Professor of Arabic in 1991. Bonebakker was a superlative Arabist, with interests inter alia in adab, poetics, rhetoric, and literary theory; he was also an avid cellist. Dr. Michael Fishbein, a student of Professor Bonebakker's, received his Ph.D. in Arabic from UCLA in 1988 and taught Arabic language and literature there from 1988 until his retirement in 2009. He lives in Los Angeles.