Critical Bibliography of Spoken Arabic Proverb Literature

Abstract

HIS ARTICLE' presents a classified list of 128 titles of studies of spoken Arabic proverbs together with a brief description and evaluation of each study examined by the authors. The list has been compiled primarily to serve as a tool for folkloristic studies (descriptive, distributional, or otherwise) of Arabic culture. European and American folklorists in citing Arabic proverbs tend to limit themselves to relatively few sources, and these chiefly Classical Arabic. This is probably due in part to the general inaccessibility of the numerous studies of the proverb literature of the modem dialects. The present list attempts to make these studies known to folklorists who may be interested in the field. The field covered includes all dialects and all types of proverb studies which have appeared in the languages of western Europe;2 only studies dealing primarily with Classical Arabic sources and those that appeared prior to 1825 have been systematically excluded. Most of the entries are either independent collections of proverbs or lists of proverbs included in grammars and texts, but even studies of a single proverb or very general treatments of the proverb genre in Arabic folk literature have been included. No attempt, however, has been made to include casual quotations of proverbs in dictionaries, literary works and the like or brief mention of proverbs in popular magazines. An effort has been made to have the list as complete as possible for the purposes of scholarly and scientific study, but no claim to exhaustiveness is made. Several items in the bibliography were not available for examination; these are preceded by an asterisk in the list. Where several editions or translations of the same work are known to exist, only those actually examined have been entered in the bibliography. Among the bibliographical sources consulted in the preparation of the list were articles of a general nature concerning proverb literature by Archer Taylor3 and Richard Jente.4 Both contained several relatively important and