kalimat – Ein Projekt an der FU Berlin

Key Words for the Study of the Arabic Literary and Manuscript Tradition

Logo created by Nadia El Obaidi, FUB-IT, 2025

kalimat in Arabic means ‚words‘; the Acronym stands for “Key Words for the Study of the Arabic Literary and Manuscript Tradition” (in Arabic: كلمات مفتاحية لدراسات المخطوطات والنصوص الأدبية في التراث العربي).

kalimat is the first online handbook of Arabic literature from the pre-modern and early modern periods. The new publication format promotes Arabic and English as the two languages of academic research and learning in the field.

Thus, all articles are to be published in both Arabic and English, just as the platform is bilingual in all its functionalities. Both the editorial workflows, the editing and incremental publication of the articles will be facilitated by the open source software Open Encyclopedia System (OES) engineered by the project partner FUB-IT at the Freie Universität Berlin directed by Brigitte Grote. The entire platform is published in open access. 

kalimat consists of short articles that translate Arabic literary concepts into modern usage, as well as analyze and contextualize them in specified corpora. The main goal of kalimat is to emphasize the complexity and multi-layered semantic nature of literature as a meta-concept. Another goal is to account for the polysemy and mutability of the rich repertoire of Arabic literary concepts. The terms and concepts to be included in our living handbook will bring together research in philology and literary and intellectual history as well as cultural studies and are drawn from the fields of literary genres and institutions, literary theory including poetics, rhetoric, and linguistics, literary ethics (adab), as well as textual practices.

The kalimat project and editorial team at Freie Universität Berlin under the academic lead of Johannes Stephan are hosting a pilot project in Arabic Digital Humanities to facilitate access to the latest academic research in the field, promote young academics and their contributions and to open the floor for new readings of literary concepts in the Arabic tradition.

Freie Universität Berlin,
Department of History and Cultural Studies, Arabic Studies, Fabeckstraße 23/25, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem