Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia, Volume 2 Story of a Desert Knight: The Legend of Slēwīḥ Al-’Aṭāwi and Other

The Story of a Desert Knight is the second volume of a trilogy entitled Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia. It is devoted to the narratives told about and the poems composed by Slēwīḥ al-’Aṭāwi and his brother Bxīt, both famous desert knights in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century. The principal source of this book is Slēwīḥ’s great-grandson Xālid, a sheikh of the ’Utaybah tribe.
The introduction discusses inter alia the general characteristics of Bedouin oral culture, the linguistic, prosodic and stylistic features of the text, and Xālid’s use of his ancestors’ oral legacy in order to enhance his position in the tribal hierarchy of prestige. In addition to the translation of the oral text this volume offers a complete transcription, based on taped records and including variants found in published Saudi sources, and a substantial glossary.

P. Marcel Kurpershoek studied Arabic language and literature at the University of Leiden and has served in several Arab countries as a member of the Netherlands Foreign Service. He is the author of The Short Stories of Yūsūf Idrīs (Brill, 1981) and Volume One of this trilogy, The Poetry of ad-Dindān. A Bedouin Bard in Southern Najd, (Brill,1994).