Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A unique and richly engaging approach to teaching Arabic at the high intermediate to advanced level
The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A Guided Reader is a unique Arabic literature and history textbook for students at the High Intermediate to Advanced level. Ibn Battuta was the greatest traveler of the medieval period, and his narrative provides an unmatched view of medieval civilization from Spain to China, and from Russia to Mali. Students will read the authentic descriptions of Ibn Battuta’s encounters with cannibals, desert bandits, Mongol chieftains, and his impressions of wonders from Timbuktu to Constantinople to Quanzhou. This book provides a guided and scaffolded survey of Ibn Battuta’s greatest travels through twenty lessons, each with extensive preparatory, explanatory, and application exercises, enabling students to read the actual words of the original text without undue difficulty.
While telling a fascinating narrative as a whole, each of the twenty lessons is designed to stand alone for classroom or individual study. Individual sections focus on classical grammar and stylistics, historical and cultural background and critical evaluation of the texts. The book also provides teachers with a wide range of comprehension, composition, interpretation, and research activities.
"DiMeo and Hassan take an exciting and effective approach to repositioning culture at the center of Arabic-language learning. Instructors will find this textbook a useful, enriching, and valuable asset for their students."—Mbaye Bashir Lo, Duke University
"This textbook is unique in its sound pedagogically approach, its rich historical background, its smooth transitioning within and across lessons, and its use of a wide variety of text-handling strategies that enhance students' reading and comprehension skills of authentic material." —Hanada Al-Masri, Denison University
"The authentic texts of one of the best known Arabic literary classics combined with a wealth of activities, including vocabulary and writing skill building, comprehension and discussion questions, grammar explanations and exercises, and culture and history notes prepared by two innovative and dedicated teachers make this textbook an indispensable contribution to the field of Arabic language instruction. I will definitely use it in my advanced Arabic classes at Cornell University and I highly recommend it to my colleagues in Arabic-as-a-foreign-language programs." —Munther Younes, Cornell University
David DiMeo is an associate professor and director of the Arabic program at Western Kentucky University and has taught Arabic for over twenty years. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and an MA from Princeton University. He is the author of Committed to Disillusion: Activist Writers in Egypt from the 1950s to the 1980s (AUC Press, 2016) and Taha Hussein's The Days: A Guided Study for Arabic Learners (AUC Press, 2022), and hosts the podcast The Golden Age of Islam.
Inas Hassan has a PhD and an MA in Arabic linguistics from Alexandria University in Egypt and is currently visiting assistant professor of Arabic at Loyola University Maryland.