Dr Matthew L Keegan

Exclusive: AI Error Likely Led to Iran Girl's School Bombing Pentagon investigators believe a bombing of a girls' school in Iran on Saturday likely resulted from inaccurate information provided by AI.

Or maybe it’s the general intuition that this kind of thing is going to happen more and more. thisweekinworcester.com/exclusive-ai...

I wonder how much of the anti-AI backlash stems from the fact that for decades we supposedly didn’t have money for human needs and infrastructure and now that there’s a tech that could eliminate the need for many human labors, there is suddenly endless money available to make that tech. Huh.

Bread and roses.

This could have some very interesting implications for the United States!

Uh oh…

I recognized James Bond (but didn’t know the actor’s name bc I never do) and then had to look up Weisz’s name even though I recognized her. I am terrible with knowing celebrities.

Was doing homework at a coffee shop in nyc when a couple asked if they could use the other end of the table (I said yes). I wasn’t wearing glasses. The woman turned to the man and exclaimed “darling, you’re gorgeous.” I put on my glasses.

It was James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Rachel Weisz.

The Sovereignty of the Scholar-Sultan: An ʾAyyūbid Prince's Defence of Abū Ḥanīfa The ʾAyyūbid Prince al-Malik al-Muʿaẓẓam ʿĪsā (d. 624/1227) expressed his scholarly idiom of sovereignty through Islamic scholarship. Other ʾAyyūbids were Shāfiʿīs who occasionally wrote poetry and...

My new article has just posted. It’s on an Ayyubid prince (nephew of Saladin) who wrote a spirited defense of Abu Hanifa to rebut the polemical reports found in al-Khatib al-Baghdadi’s history. Free eprint here. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SQATY...

Before World Literature – Penn Press An account of Arabic literary history through the lens of the reception of the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, a twelfth-century collection of fifty trickster st...

Looking for a Christmas gift that won’t arrive until March? As you do… well, my book is available for pre-order and there’s a 40% discount until the end of the month! (Discount code PENN-HOLIDAY25). www.pennpress.org/978151282887...

Before World Literature – Penn Press An account of Arabic literary history through the lens of the reception of the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, a twelfth-century collection of fifty trickster st...

Looking for a Christmas gift that won’t arrive until March? As you do… well, my book is available for pre-order and there’s a 40% discount until the end of the month! (Discount code PENN-HOLIDAY25). www.pennpress.org/978151282887...

* weak.

Asked if he’d tried it, he said: “I also wrote about suicide and never thought about trying that.” The isnad is wear tho.

He was, so the lore goes, asked about whether he had done any hands on research for this book.

"Harvard can't use race as a factor in admissions, but ICE can use race as a factor in detentions" is a retrenchment essentially to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution. It's vanishingly few steps removed from "Latinos have no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

Cover image of the book "Before World Literature" by Matthew L. Keegan.

My first monograph "Before World Literature" will be released by the University of Pennsylvania Press in March 2026. I hope it will be of interest to folks in comparative literature, Islamic studies, and classical Arabic literature.
www.pennpress.org/978151282887...

The poet had a large library, much of it he had copied himself. In the floods in Baghdad in 1172, his books were damaged by the water and the detritus of the nearby tannery — and he became blind in his chemical attempts to repair them and stop them from smelling horribly.

Some advice from the 12th century for authors...

لا تحسبنْ أنّ بالكتـــــــــــــــــــــــــب مثلنا ستصير
فللدجاجة ريشٌ ولكنها لا تطير

Don't ever think that
the likes of us will live on
through books.

The chicken has feathers,
But it cannot fly.

- Ibn al-Dahhān (d. 1174 CE)

Foreword to Sulaiman A. Alagunfon's "The Classical Arabic Maqāma in Yorubaland, Nigerias " A foreword to Sulaiman Adewale Alagunfon's book on the Maqāma in Yorubaland, Nigeria. I sought to highlight some of Dr. Alagunfon's unique contributions while emphasizing how this study might ...

For those interested in Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies in West Africa, I recommend Sulaiman A. Alagunfon's study of the Arabic Maqāma. It shatters a lot of myths about Arabic literature and Islamic education. My foreword to the book can be found here: www.academia.edu/129479952/Fo...

A Window into Early Twentieth-Century Arabic Manuscripts Transactions On Tuesday, September 17, 2024, a team of librarians from the American University in Cairo (AUC) arrived at the al-Khanji Bookstore in downtown Cairo to oversee the transfer of a rare archive document...

Muhammad Amin al-Khanji, who died in 1939, was a prolific publisher of classical Arabic texts. He also became a manuscript trader who shaped the major collections of Egypt, Europe, and America. My colleagues at the IAS have been working on this amazing project -- described in the linked article.

It's part of a pair of articles that were originally one too-long article. The other was originally the final section of "Rethinking Poetry" and puts the argument more succinctly: "Adab without the Crusades." It's about how solidarity was imagined. t.co/IXZ4COs28a

It is my attempt to rethink both the content of Zengid-Ayyubid poetry and how it circulated. It takes examples of poetry from the massive adab anthology of Saladin's secretary ʿImād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī. And it's not all about asceticism and jihad. t.co/28i0h05tqn

Archiving posts from the hellsite: An article of mine was selected in 2023 as the article of the month over at The Mediterranean Seminar. The article is "Rethinking Poetry as (Anti-Crusader) Propaganda." www.mediterraneanseminar.org/2023-june-ar...

I'll be posting some material from the old hellsite because I was trying to post pre-publication material and to summarize already-published stuff that people might not available. I'll start with Leo Africanus’s Cosmography. The recent translation had some glancing citations of my scholarship.

I'm working on a 13th-century manuscript of Maṣāriʿ al-ʿUshshāq — transmitted from the author al-Sarrāj to the most famous female scholar of the age Fakhr al-Nisāʾ to the copyist Ibn al-Khayyir. Extensive reading & audition notes throughout the MS. I'll be posting provisional transcriptions for fun!

And yes, there are both reading and audition notes in the MS - so samāʿāt is a bit misleading. :)

وصحح ذلك ….؟ بمسجده المعروف بدار الليف؟؟ بشارع نهر الزندبرد؟ بشرق باب الازج في مدينة السلام
كتبه عبد اللطيف علي بن النفيس بن بوزندان {بوزنداز} السلامي الحنبلي عفى الله عنه والحمد لله رب العالمين

قرات جميعه على الشيخ الإمام العالم ركن الدين ابي اسحاق ابراهيم بن محمود بن سالم بن مهدي عُرف بابن الخيّر
المقرئ بسماعه في الأصل من شهدة عن المصنف ومنه كانت القراءة وعورض بهذه النسخة فسمعه
ولده الشيخ العالم سديد الدين ابو محمد اسماعيل وصحح ذلك يوم الأحد سادس جمادى الآخرة من سنة سبع عشرة وستمائة

Transcription challenge (and a distraction from it all). I've been working on transcribing some samāʿāt but still lots of uncertainties. More on this manuscript to come IA. It is a copy of Maṣāriʿ al-ʿUshshāq with a riwāya that goes through Fakhr al-Nisāʾ. Suggestions welcome #arabic #مخطوطات

Please join me and Matt Keegan @drkeegan.bsky.social for a discussion of the book Black Knights by Rachel Schine @rachelschine.bsky.social with discussant Kristina Richardson

columbiauniversity.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Happy to have helped in a tiny way with this translation of Leo Africanus’s Cosmography, in which there is a glancing reference to a commentary on Al-Hariri’s Maqamat… that thing I wrote my dissertation about.