Prof. Kamal Interviewed by ‘The National’

The American University of Ras Al Khaimah’s Prof. Kamal Abdel-Malek, professor of English, Arabic and translation within the Languages and Literature Department, was this week interviewed by ‘The National’, an English-language newspaper based in Abu Dhabi.

Prof. Abdel-Malek, who also established the AURAK Reading Club which hosts monthly events, spoke of the beauty and cultural importance of poetry in pre-Islamic Arabia, even drawing comparisons between that poetry and social media use in the 21st century.

“If you were to imagine Arabic literature as a house, the Muaallaqat would be the first room you would enter,” says Kamal Abdel-Malek, professor of Arabic and translation at the American University of Ras Al Khaimah. “It would strike you with its extraordinary features: an interior customized with seductive metaphors, a finishing with elegant diction, a tiling with splendid ceramic-like similes, a wallpaper full of images of sand dunes, deserted camps of lost loves, rising camels, rampaging steeds, and antelopes gazing at you with charming, kohl-colored eyes.”

Prof. Abdel-Malek, author of 2011’s From Muaallaqat to the Facebook, compares these “hung” odes to modern-day social-media messages, tweets and blogs. He says the topics discussed then and now are similar.

“In both the ancient and the modern cases there lies the human need to communicate, to broadcast, to express ideas and thoughts.”

The full interview can be read here.