A Life in the Shadow of the Rubāʿiyyāt ʿUmar al-Khayyām

This talk, to be delivered by Russell Harris, speaks of a personal journey – how he discovered the voice and music of Umm Kulthūm in 1970s Liverpool and how she inspired him to learn Arabic in order to understand the texts she sang. The talk covers the inroads made by Persian culture in the 19th century into mainstream literary and musical culture worldwide with particular reference to Edward FitzGerald’s masterly and accidentally epoch-making English reworking of the by-then almost unknown quatrains of Umar Khayyam. The talk will show to some extent how seemingly different cultures are the subject of cultural cross-fertilization and the exchange of styles of poetry. As well as providing some biographic information on perhaps the Arab world’s most significant songstress, Umm Kulthūm, and her lyricist, the great Egyptian ‘poet of the people’, Aḥmad Rāmī, the talk will be enhanced with visual illustrations and short audio examples.

Russell Harris, has an MA in Oriental Studies from Balliol College, Oxford. His duties at the IIS include editing entries for the Encyclopaedia Islamica, writing and improving etymologies, picture research, proofing and consulting on translations of Arabic texts. He is a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography, The Routledge Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography and The Oxford Companion to Food. He has written many articles on Middle Eastern art for various international journals and magazines and has published books on portraits of India’s ruling princes from the archives of the V&A Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. He has also curated exhibitions of historic photographs in institutions throughout Europe and the Middle East as well as being a published literary translator.

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