 I'm Paul Webley. I'm the director of service. I'd like to welcome you all in the audience tonight, particularly those who've travelled a long way to be here and Professor Wenchings, friends and colleagues. We have guests from wide variety of places today. Some of people have come a long way and I noticed one of my predecessors. My predecessors predecessor is here. He says he likes to be here when there are norgles of people who he appointed all those years ago, so that's also very nice. We really appreciate you taking this trouble. It all adds to the sense of occasion that is a source inaugural. It's a ceremony, it's a reaped passage for the speaker, it's a celebration and it's an enjoyable intellectual event for the whole source community. Now just to make sure that it's an enjoyable event, some simple housekeeping first, my mobile phone just went off. So please turn off your mobile phones. Right. Every time. I think I'm doing it now. Good. Yours all turned off? Yes, okay. Wenchings does not want to hear a mobile phone. The other thing is, do note where the fire exits are and now I'm going to feel like an air hostess, but anyway. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture. It's the second of the set of eight fascinating inaugural lectures that will take place during the second year. Wenchings been at science since 1997. So yes, Tim, you did appoint her as a member of the Near and Middle East Department and in recent years has been head of department. Her research interests include critical theory and thought comparative literature and world literature. She's not only written some brilliant scholarly books, but just to do a bit of advertising. She's just recently produced a new edition of the Arabian Knights in the Everman Library. I strongly recommend it. I'm giving it as a Christmas present to lots of my friends. Wenchings just told me I actually could give me a 50% discount, but that's a bit of a waste now because I've already bought all the copies, but it was a nice thought. Wenchings will be introduced by Professor Abdul-Halim. Now, Mohamed Abdul-Halim, sometimes I say that these things need no introduction and I think Mohamed really does need no introduction. He's the elder in the department. He's been at Sirius longer than anyone can remember. Actually, he is a stalwart of the department and he was on the search committee that was responsible for hiring Wenchings at Sirius. We have a lot to thank him for, not just that. At the end, the voter thanks will be given by Professor Julia Bray. Julia Bray is the Lordian Professor of Arabic Oxford. She's the first woman to hold that post since the chair was founded in 1636. We're very proud of Arasintinry, but we've obviously got some way to go yet. Wenchins and Julia met when they participated in the project Bonjour, Ideologies and Narrative Transformation, which is part of the HRC Centre on Asian and African Literatures. She's gone on to edit the monograph series on Edinburgh series of classical Arabic literature. At the end, there'll be a reception in the Brunais Suite. We're very grateful to Professor Abdul-Halim, Professor Julia Bray for their part in this event and to kick off, to introduce Professor Wenchin Ywang. I'll pass over to Professor Abdul-Halim. Over to you Mohamed. Okay, director, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. I am grateful to Professor Wenchin Ooyang for asking me to introduce her for her inaugural lecture this evening. I have known her perhaps longer than many of you here since I was a member of the selection committee, selection panels, when she applied for a lectureship in Arabic at Sirius some years ago. I will start from there. I was so impressed by her application even before the interview that I thought I should definitely vote for this candidate for three reasons. As this happened many years ago, there is no harm in speaking about it now openly. Wenchin herself will hear about these reasons for the first time just as you will. My reasons were first that she was a woman, second that she was Chinese, and third that she had studied in an Arab country. Let me elaborate. First that she was a woman. I grew up in a village in Danell Delta and learned the Quran by heart as a child, taught by men all along. But then my father sent me to a blind woman Quran reciter, Sheikha Sharifa, to polish up my recitation. It was a short but unforgettable experience which I have always cherished. Then I moved to the city and there throughout my education in Al Azhar and even Cairo University there was not one single woman on the staff of this institution. When I came to Cambridge, I found that Feds William College was all men. Arabic academics at the Oriental Faculty were all men. In fact 30 or 40 years ago there was not one woman arabist on the academic staff of nearly 20 universities in this country that taught Arabic. It seemed to be taken as an unquestionable fact that Arabic academic teaching was the exclusive domain of men. Then I came to South. Soon after my arrival Professor Anne Lampton became head of department of the Middle East where I was a lecturer. She was a formidable scholar of professor of Persian and I was so impressed by her character and style of administration that I thought she was better than many men heads of departments both together. She knocked out of my head completely and finally the old notion that only men could lead and do big things. I am grateful to Lampton for this cultural encounter and re-education. When I was when the chance came and I was later and I was appointed as a member of the selection committee for Arabic for Arabic, I thought that all other things being equal. I must put my newly acquired education into practice when Shen provided me with such one opportunity for this. The second reason was that when Shen was Chinese born in Taiwan. As a Muslim child I learned that the Prophet Muhammad said seek knowledge even unto China and I thought that this China must have a very special type of knowledge to be sought. Never before when Shen had I seen a Chinese Arabist and I thought how very interesting and refreshing it would be to bring the skills, the attitudes and the culture of a Chinese scholar into Arabic studies. Just as I think that British scholar bring something fresh into the subject of Arabic, so do the French, so do the German, why not see what a Chinese Arabist could contribute. Indeed, more so the Chinese. After all, the Prophet did not say seek knowledge even unto London, Paris or Berlin, he said China. The third reason was that when Shen was schooled and went into university in an Arab country, not just any Arab country, but the great Arab, Libyan people, socialist Jamaheria. The title sounds more grand than Arabic. Al-Jamaheria, Al-Arabia, Libia, Al-Shaabiya, Al-Ishtirakiya, Al-Uzma. Maybe that is why when Shen and her family selected that country. She went to Libya at the age of four. You see, as a child under that Libyan system of education, you see, she went to Libya at the age of four. It is remarkable that her parents sent her to an Arabic school, not to an English school as one would expect. Very daring and adventurous. As a child who went into that system of education, she would have had to learn in one go these five sophisticated Arabic adjectives of the name of the country. A splendid example for our first year students. Living and studying in Libya gave her special opportunity of immersion into the Arabic language and culture, which is not available to other Arabists who may have gone, may go to the country for a year abroad and maybe one year later and so on. This experience had far reaching implications for when Shen's future career as an Arabist. After Libya, when Shen went to America, where she did her MA, MFEL and then PhD at Columbia University on literary criticism of medieval Arabic and Islamic culture. So, when Shen had a fine blend of Chinese Arabic and Western education that would from now on mark and direct her career as an Arabist. So, I was delighted that when Shen was selected as a lecturer in 1997 and I have always observed her and to see how she settled in and how she climbed very quickly up the ladder lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and in 2013 professor. She has an impressive list of publications, three authored books, five edited volumes, 18 chapters in books, 13 articles in referee journals and others to follow. Her background, as I have described it, is well reflected in these publications. For example, Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel, Nation and State, Modernity and Tradition. Politics of Nostalgia in Arabic Novel, again Nation and State, Modernity and Tradition. Literary criticism in medieval Arabic and Islamic tradition, the making of a tradition. A thousand and one diet that inexhaustible source of learning, wisdom and entertainment is a theme which when Shen has returned to in many of her various applications. Her international and multicultural and gender oriented outlook is evident in such studies as Drama of Encounter, Ashidiaq on Arab, English and French Women, Utopian fantasy or dystopian nightmare, trajectories of desires in the Chinese and Arabic and classical Arabic and Chinese and then you have something like English translation in Arabic. These titles give a glimpse of her central interests. I will not list all the books or articles, you can refer to that on the website, but I must also mention how pleased I was that she contributed to the latest issue of our journal of Quranic studies, which was dedicated to the theme of the Quran and World Literature with an article entitled The Quran and the Identity in the Chinese Fiction. In addition to this remark, to this, to her being very productive in research when Shen has always carried a heavy load of teaching in Arabic language, Arabic literature, the culture of the Middle East. She has been remarkably active in administration under graduate and postgraduate tutor, convener of programs, head of Arabic, associate dean for research and in 2011 head of department of the Middle East. She is a member of many professional associations, she also has been very active in outreach, has organized many conferences, workshops and panels in the field, inside and outside source. One wonders, one wonders how she gets the time for all this. It is all thanks to her organizational skills, her self-discipline and commitment to her profession. I wish my teachers in Cambridge were here now to see what a woman arabist could do. I should say that as a head of department when Shen is effective, pleasant and generous. When she returns from trips abroad, you can see her walking in the corridor through the corridor with a lot of books of exotic sweets and souvenirs which we all came to look for and enjoy. She says it's every opportunity to get all the members together, members of the department together, for academic and social purposes. I must mention in particular the end of year lunch which she would never allow to go missed, to be missed. Her interest in the culture of the Middle East is not confined to the teaching of a course which she introduced on the subject, but she puts it all into practice in choosing the restaurant for the department at lunch. It is never held in an English restaurant, but one from the culture represented in the department. Most recently Iranian in Edgewood Road. The pleasant gathering goes on for hours. With Edgewood Road becoming a paradise enough as Fitzgerald the translator of Omar Khayam would have it. This is a very special chance for members to get together and chat about things that interest them. Winshyn eggs everybody on and stays until the last minute with the hardy few that come well equipped with bottles never worrying about driving afterwards. Unadventurous souls like myself would leave earlier, but thanks to Winshyn the whole experience is made thrice more colorful and welcome than the graduation ceremony in the Logan Hall. Lamton would have none of this, but history marches on. The comparative multicultural spirit of this lunch reflects the whole culture and education of Winshyn. I was really pleased to see that she was given the title of professor of Arabic and comparative literature. Now comparative literature is very appealing to people in Arab universities and comes at the top of the hierarchy of literary studies. After all it involves cultural encounter between a number of literatures, literary traditions. Winshyn was the first in any department of Arabic in this country to hold this title. Well done another first for Winshyn, well done source as well. Personally I think the school should highlight and publicize this theme of comparative literature. I have no doubt that much is being done on different departments in the school, even though it is not labeled or announced as comparative literature. The school is in a privileged position, more than any other institution of being equipped to develop comparative literary studies in the literatures of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and indeed Winshyn literature. Today's event now is but one fine example of what service can offer. Here we are gathered this evening to seek knowledge of comparative literature from Libya, Colombia, Bloomsbury and China. Director, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Winshyn Ooyan to deliver her inaugural lecture on the curious life of objects in the Arabian Nights. What can food, gems and clothes tell us about cultural encounter? Professor Abdelhalim, no words can express my gratitude to you. You have been my elder since I came to Sahas and you will always be like a father to me. So thank you very much for your introduction. Good evening, I'm sorry this robe is very heavy and this hat is too big so I'm going to remove the hat and see if I can last through the lecture with the robe on. And it's falling all over the places. All right, so can I see. So good evening ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming especially on a cold and dark night. It's indeed cold and dark outside and we are a little hungry. It's almost time for dinner but my inaugural lecture stands between you and the reception that is being prepared for you upstairs. You will have the drinks and nibbles promised you but only after you've heard me speak. So it looks like we're stuck here together for at least one more hour. Let me then invite you to join me on a tour of the imaginary world, the stories we tell conjure up and contemplate the ways we relate to and understand this imaginary world. I want to begin with reading to you from one of the Arabian nice stories The Hunchback Tales as translated by Richard Burton. It hath reached me, O auspicious king, that there dwelt during times of yure and years and ages long gone before in a certain city of China. A tailor who was an open-handed man that loved pleasuring and merry making and who was want he and his wife to solace themselves from time to time with public diversions and amusements. One day they went out with the first of the light and were returning in the evening when they fell in with the hunchback whose semblance would draw a laugh from care and dispel the horrors of despair. So they went up to enjoy looking at him and invite him to go home with them and converse and carouse with them that night. He consented and accompanied them afoot to their home where upon the tailor fell forth to the bazar night having just set in and bought a fried fish and bread and lemons and dry sweetmeats for dessert and set the victuals before the hunchback and they ate. If you were like me, always hungry for food especially when it is cold and perpetually confused by the three languages that inhabit me and the three cultures I've had to negotiate since I was in my teens, you would pause and begin to imagine the fried fish, bread, lemon and dry sweetmeats look alike, taste like and how they are prepared. From there you would then go on to wonder whether the events of the story actually take place in China, whether Burton's translation is accurate and whether translations can adequately convey the culture framing an inherent in any story we tell. So I'm going to take you through a number of slides here and show you images. If you read Burton in English, would you imagine that fried fish is fish and chips like this? Maybe. And what of bread? Like this or like this? But if you're thinking in Arabic, and this is from the 19th century Bulaq edition of the Arabian Nights, and he says, So what would fish look like? This? With lemon? This? And what would bread look like? Hops? Hops? Hops? Ruqaq? Hops? Or something like this? Right? And I pause here because this is something you can find in China, but we don't know whether this is in the Arabian Nights. But you start thinking in English and I have, in Chinese, and I have two translation, one from 2000, right? And it says fried food, fried fish, no, pan-fried fish, sorry, sorry, sorry. This is from the early translation by a Muslim who translated the Arabian Nights from Arabic in the 1950s and 60s, but it was not published until the 1980s. So he says, he translated this phrase into Jianyu, Mo Mo, Ning Meng, Han Pu Tao, Pu Tao's grape, so that doesn't work. So if it's pan-fried fish, does it look like this? Like this? Mo Mo, that's Mo Mo, this is Mo Mo, right? But if you go for the sort of 2000 translation by Li Weizhong, he says, Zha Yu, deep-fried fish, kao bing, right? Pancake, Ning Meng, lemon, and Tian Shi sweets, right? Deep-fried Chinese, maybe? This? Right? Pancakes, this, so on and so forth. Tonight, I'm interested in translation only in so far as it gives us a glimpse of interpretive process that takes place when we read stories or, for that matter, anything written in words. I want to take away from this foray into fish, bread, and lemon, and I will come to lemon in a couple of minutes three ideas. One, only three tonight. That would allow me to show you how I contemplate what I do as a scholar, engage in the study of literature within the three disciplines of Arabic studies, comparative literature, and word literature, and why I wish to tinker with these disciplines, but more importantly, how I will rethink them. First of all, I have situated understanding the story on the reader me. It is I who reads, understands, and interprets. This means two things. One, I bring to my interpretation of the story, my languages and my cultures as I have known them through my lived experiences. Two, I also bring to my interpretation an agenda, a perspective and a position. Let me explain. I am Chinese from Taiwan, but was raised in Tripoli and educated in both Libya and the United States. I lived in New York for nine years and have been living in London since 1997. I'm a wanderer and have traveled extensively and I really love food and would eat anything. I think I know something about the different cuisines around the globe. As I began to read the hunchback's tale, and may I remind you that the events are supposed to take place in China, in a city of China, I stopped at the two words, bread and lemon. Do the Chinese eat fish with bread and squeeze lemon juice on their deep fried or pan fried fish? Not that I know of. At least there are varieties of dough based cakes or pancakes that can impersonate bread. But lemon? Even in the rather westernized presentation lime, often lemon limes serves only as decoration. What the story says about Chinese food does not tally with what I know, but what I know is limited to my experience. I know this for sure, for even if we just limit our discussion to lemon, as I found out only last week that lemon originated in China, Assam, India and Burma, and lime in Babylon or Iraq today. A quick search of a 10th century Arabic cookbook confirms that lemon figures little in medieval Bardadi or cuisine, but why would I care? You would want to know whether the items of food mentioned in the story can be authenticated as belonging to the same culture sphere of the location of the story. Remember the story set in China. After all, we are reading an Arabic story, albeit in English translation, and food must be identical to the story. Does food in a story have an impact on its meaning? This brings me to two. I'm always on the lookout for traces of culture exchanges in what I read. When I read Arabic, I search for China, and when I read Chinese, I look for the Arab world and the Middle East. But when I read English, I don't bother. I have two very simple reasons. Personal and professional. Personal. When I started university and on the first day of our literature class on pre-Islamic poetry, our professor took one look at me and I stuck out like a sore thumb because I was always the only Chinese in class and asked, do you speak and write Chinese? And when I answered, yes, he said, you will be an ambassador and build culture bridges between our peoples. I was 18 and took his command to heart. I have been trying to find ways of doing this since then, but I wanted to be a literature scholar and care little for politics and diplomacy or business. And so I thought, well, I will find ways of bridging the two cultures and therefore two peoples through comparative literature. Comparative literature in the 1980s was still in the groups of tracing influences of Western literature on Oriental literature. And I thought instead of doing East West, I would do East East and look for things Chinese in Arabic literature and things Arabs in Chinese literature. I went to Columbia University to pursue this dream. When I arrived, Edward Said, who was the chair of the comparative literature program at Columbia University at the time, was enthusiastic. So were my professors of Arabic, Pierre Kakiye and Chinese, Citi Shah, at least on the surface. When I finished my coursework and comprehensive exams and began looking for a topic for the doctoral thesis, we hit a brick wall. Why? I now come to the second idea I want to bring up from my earlier discussion of food in the hunchback's tail. I want to talk about two interrelated issues having to do with language and how our scholarly engagements with literature are structured. One, words live in a language world that is on the surface discrete and sovereign. Each language is contained within imagined linguistic borders. The Arabic language is like a nation state, so is Chinese in literary studies. Languages have borders and home security checkpoints. Two, the division of labour among disciplines of literary studies remains informed by the perceived sovereignty of language. In area studies, the focus is to study literature, the literature produced in one language, but quite often divided into classical and modern between the two there is little traffic. One studies a text, an author, a theme, a genre, or a literary phenomenon, all within the confines of one language, a language that is based in word. In comparative literature and word literature, one needs the permission of influence and translation to be allowed to traverse linguistic borders. Comparative literature has come a long way since the heydays of tracing Western influence on Eastern writing. It now encompasses a variety of practices. Today, even looking at two texts from two different linguistic literary culture traditions to illuminate each other is legitimate and even valued. Word literature moves away from the binary of East and West informed by the search for influence towards circulation and the systems that enable and govern the circulations and away from close reading towards distant reading. Such moves, however, have not eliminated Eurocentrism as well as other centrisms completely, so I have listed them on the slide here. Frank Moretti's mapping of the proliferation of European novel around the world in the modern period, Pascal Casanova's imagining of the world republic of letters as centred in Paris, where all national literature congregate to compete for place in the international canon today, and David Damarch's modes of circulation through the medium of translation from the national to the international, which is inevitably located in Europe and North Africa, bring us back-squary to Eurocentrism, presentism, modern, nationalism, nation-state, and the written text, the novel, as a book. It is true that we are free from the past forms of Eurocentrism from speaking of culture exchanges as Western influences on the West, for example, but we continue to face a variety of centrisms, particularly the monolingualism and therefore monoculturalism of any national literary field. Francesca Orsini has been arguing for more nuanced understanding of the national literary field. It is multilingual and circulation within this multilingual field must be taken into consideration in any theory of word literature. Others have suggested considering circulation through orality and oral texts and of other literary forms such as the sonnet. The Chinese as well as the Japanese and Koreans have suggested an alternative location for word literature to be situated in the pan East Asian empire and base in the sinophone. I have suggested expanding our horizon to look at the life of a literary work that has traveled across time and space as well as language and think in terms of networks of circulation. The Arabian Knights, a storybook without a definitive text and without an identifiable author but given shape by multiple editors, some known and some unknown, in a spontaneous global cross-cultural collaboration between their one hazard to say the 9th and 19th centuries is a work produced in a global network of circulation. That pushes us to think beyond the kind of centrisms pervading comparative literature and word literature. However, quite a few problems remain and more importantly, the word centered approach continues to fall short of what I seek. For one thing, it does not resolve completely the problem of Eurocentrism. If one looks at the diffusion of the Arabian Knights in China and Japan, the originator of this diffusion is inevitably traced back to Burton's 19th century English translation. Even though the 18th century French translation by Antoine Galan was the catalyst for the diffusion of the Oriental tale in Europe, the result is that East-East encounters are necessarily mediated by the West and take place only in the modern period. For another word is firmly located in a language world that even when it conjures up exotic imaginary world, this imaginary world nevertheless corresponds closely to the material world it inhabits and represents. Except for the Little Lemon, the Hunchback's Tale reads more like a story of the Muslim world in pre-modern times. Like the Arabian Knights at large, this story is a cycle of stories, the setting in a city of China and the story of the Hunchback, a clown like me tonight, who served the Chinese king as a royal entertainer, frame other stories of people and events located outside China. The Hunchback dies at the very beginning of the tale and remains dead until the very end. The role of the Chinese king is limited to that of threatening people with death until day, like Shahrazedd, can tell a story marvelous and fantastic enough to save their lives. This is how the story goes. The tailor and his wife invite the Hunchback to dinner. One of them stuffs a piece of fish down his throat and he dies. The tailor and his wife wrap him up and take him to the Jewish doctor's house and leave him on the latter's doorsteps. The Jewish doctor, with the help of his wife, throws the body over to their Muslim neighbor's house. The Muslim then dumps the body in the street. It bumps into a Christian broker who thinks he's being robbed and starts beating the Hunchback. When it falls to the ground, the Christian broker thinks he has killed him. Unfortunately for him, a police officer is patrolling the street at the time and he is caught. He's taken to the governor, tried and sentenced to hang. In the nick of time, all the culprits showed up to confess their crime. Everyone is waving and shouting, I did it, I did it, I killed the Hunchback, hang me, hang me, don't hang the wrong man. So the Halabalu disturbs the king and he comes to take charge of the situation. When he hears the story, he orders the story to be written down in gold ink too, saying, did you ever hear more wondrous tale than that of the Hunchback? This serves as an invitation and suddenly everyone is competing to tell an even more wondrous tale. As the stories unfold, a narrow geographical landscape emerges and we find ourselves primarily in the 9th century Baghdad, the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid and Hisans, el-Amin el-Mu'mun el-Mu'tasim. Even the Coptic Christian, Christian broker, though of Kyrene origin, has come to a city of China from Baghdad. Word, as we understand it and our train to decode it is not at all helpful for me. Here I come to the third idea I want to take away from the Hunchback's tale. This is that language inhabits the material world and is saturated with its materiality. Here I want to posit that material objects, even or particularly as they are verbalized or encoded in language or converted into words, can help us to understand language differently. I will limit myself to three ideas. One, a material object in literature is a loaded cultural code. Two, it is a site of dense cultural memory and three, it opens up each language or any linguistic system based in word to multilingualism. In other words, it allows us to see language itself not as a monolingual but multilingual. It is through such reimagining of what language is and how it works. I will argue that I will be able to discover, uncover and recover the cultural bridges between the Arabophone and Sinophone worlds, past and present and without third party mediation. One, a material object in literature is a loaded cultural code. Let's now take a look at the morsel of fish in the Hunchback's tale more closely. The story really begins when he chokes to death on the morsel of fish the tailor's wife or the tailor in some versions shoves down his throat. His death engenders two cycles of stories, those told by the culprits and those inflamed by the story the tailor tells about a barber, who in turn tells six stories about his six brothers who are as it happens all barbers. These are all stories of people who got maimed, primarily cloth itinerant merchants who have lost bits and pieces of their bodies or have become deformed and this is to go with the physical deformity of the Hunchback. The main theme talis with that of the frame tale of the Arabian Knights. As Shahraza tells Shahraja stories to forestall death by execution, everyone in the Hunchback's tale tells a wondrous story to save lives. Most readers of the Arabian Knights think that postponing death and saving life are the same thing. However, if we follow the deadly morsel of the fish more closely, we will come to the realization that they're not, whereas definitely cannot save lives. Stories are able to postpone death temporarily, but they can also inflict a lot of damage. This becomes very clear in the second cycle of stories. We have here a prattling barber whose words actually get those around him maimed as everyone prattles on the Hunchback remains quite dead. It is only when the barber pulls out the morsel of fish from the Hunchback's throat that the Hunchback comes back to life. The juxtaposition between the barber's lame and maiming prattling and his effective life-saving action is that the heart of a parody that mocks the logic of the Shahrazaad and Shahraja story. And the culture of patronage hovering in the background of the Arabian Knights that is based in the exchange of word such as panagerics in poetry for food, and food here stands in for livelihood. Words are prattle, and food earned through prattle kills, and there goes your livelihood. So two, a material object is a site dense with cultural memory including that of intercultural exchange. On occasions this memory of intercultural exchange is rather explicit. Let me read to you an excerpt from the tale of the porter and three ladies of Baghdad, here in this case translated by Madras. There was once a young man in the city of Baghdad who was by faith a bachelor and by trade a porter. One day, as he was leaning idly against his basket in the marketplace, a woman wearing a full veil of Mosul silk, tassled with gold and turned with rare brocade, stopped before him and raised the veil a little from her face. Above it there showed dark eyes with long lashes of silk and list to set a man dreaming. Her body was light, her feet were small and clear perfection shown about her. She said, and oh, but her voice was sweet. Take up your basket, porter, and follow me, hardly believing that so exquisite words should have been said to him, the porter too, up his basket and follow the girl, who stopped eventually before the door of a house. She knocked at the door and immediately a Christian opened to her, who gave her in exchange for a dinar a great measure of olive clear wine, which she put into the basket saying, to the porter, lift and follow me, by Allah, this day of days, exclaim the porter as he lifted his basket and follow the girl. Arrived at the stall of the fruiterer, she bought Syrian apples, Damascus nerofars, cucumbers, wait a second, I missed something, brought Syrian apples, Osmani quincis, peaches from Oman, jasmine of Aleppo, Damascus nerofars, cucumbers from the north, dynial, limes from Egypt, sultani citron, murder berries, flowers of henna, blood red, anemones, violets, pomegranate bloom, and the narcissist. All these she put into the porter's basket and said, lift. The entire Middle East has congregated in this one sentence. I now return to that little lemon. I want to link it to silk and think more about these as cultural sites, dense with memories of China in the Arabic language. I now turn to the 15th century texts of the Arabian Nights edited by Mohsen Mehdi and find the word Qashqar following a city of China. So we are in fact talking about a very specific city, not just any city in China. Qashqar is the western most city in China today located near the border with Tajikistan and Gilgistan. Qashqar has a rich history of over 2,000 years and serve as a trading post and strategically important city on the Silk Road between China, the Middle East and Europe. Located historically at the convergence point of widely varying cultures and empires, Qashqar has been under the rule of Chinese, Turkic, Mongol, Persian and Tibetan empires. If Qashqar, home of the Uighurs is the city of China referred to, then it may very well be one of the Asian homelands of lemon. More important, it's all city which has been called the best preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in Central Asia may very well have the feel of Abbasid Baghdad. Now that I have arrived at Silk Road, I want to leave food aside and turn my attention to silk. Oh, I forgot to show you the map. This is Qashqar, right? It's located in China, right? Silk Road in ancient Persia from the ancient times. Silk Road within China and you can see Qashqar on your left and then the Silk Road as we know it today. Now silk. That silk is from China, which spread around the world along the Silk Road is a well-known fact. Silk is not the only commodity circulating among the Silk Road. Foods, cuisines, clothes and textile, wood, perfumes, incense, musical instruments, animals, plants, spices and above all people travel along the Silk Road bringing with them their knowledge and culture. Qashqar is but one city where people's cultures and languages meet. The Silk Road in a variety of academic, political and cultural programs around the world is today a metaphor for a form of globalization that predated the 20th century for the strategic importance of Central Asia today and for a non-eurocentric framework in the study of cross-cultural interactions and developments. It frames word history surveys in high school and university curricula in the US, informed the research agenda of US and North European think tanks in the wake of the discovery of natural resources in the post-Soviet era Central Asia countries and provides a locus for cross-disciplinary museum and public library projects such as the British Libraries International Dunhuang project. The move away from presentism, Eurocentrism and monolingualism has not necessarily been accompanied by a parallel shift towards multiple temporalities, spatialities or language systems in the study and representation of the world. In other words, they remain equally imprisoned in the kind of conceptual categories I spoke of in relation to literary studies. The Silk Road studies today, including the British Libraries International Dunhuang project, see the circulation of people, languages, religions, knowledge and material objects in a monodirectional way, primarily from the Middle East and Central Asia. China is in the sense the locus of cultural exchange and the sole beneficiary of intercultural development. It is Sino-centric. So, if you look at any book on silk industry, you'll find identification of China as the originator of silk. The ongoing exhibit at the British Museum on Ming, the 50 years that China, for example, takes great care to point out, in pointing out the multiculturalism of Ming China, the other part of the story, the proliferation of Chinese culture, ideas and material objects in the world is tackled elsewhere but only in European Orientalism of the 18th and 20th century. I want to show you some slides about this. This is from the Ming exhibition. It takes great care in pointing out that this silk brocade from Ming China is of Islamic influence in that of the geometrical forms of the brocade. It takes great care in showing you the artifacts from Muslim countries. This is an Iranian astrolab that was probably circulating in Central Asia in the 14th century. It was part of the Ming collection. It shows you Ming silk robe. It looks like this. I added one to show you an Ottoman silk robe. They are very close. I just want to use these images so that we can think more about these images or the silk later. Ming dragon robe, just think about it in a while, and then Ottoman tulip robe. I chose this one out of hundreds of images because tulip is from China, from Western China that spread throughout the world later and it became Ottoman's sort of favorite flower. There is one important exception and here I refer to Neil McGregor's work, particularly a history of the word in 100 objects in 2010. He gives a sense of what intercultural baggage these material objects acquire as they travel around the world. Let me give you an example. Ulug Beg's Jade Cup provides the opportunity to talk about Timurid Empire, which encompassed today's Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan with its capital in Samarkand, and its role as a cultural bridge between East China and West the Middle East. This is what McGregor says. Ulug Beg's cup is very beautiful, but Jade was valued in Central Asia not just for its beauty but also for its powers of protection. Jade would keep you safe against lightning and earthquakes and especially important in a cup against poison. Poison placed in a Jade cup, so it was said, would result in the vessel splitting. The owner of this cup could drink without fear. The cup's handle is a splendid Chinese dragon and you can see it there to your left. But the inscription, Ulug Beg Cragan, you can see it in the middle there, carved into a cup is an Arabic script. So the cup was probably made in Samarkand with a handle showing connections east to China and an inscription looking west to the Islamic world. However, McGregor does not look at how literature remembers this dense interculture exchange that is now culture heritage or how literature speaks to us of this thick culture memory through material objects. I now turn to two contemporary novels, one from Lebanon and the other from China to show how material objects are sites of cultural memory. I would not linger on close readings. Close readings can be tedious, pretty taxing on the concentrations and very boring to hear. So I start with Huda Barakat and end with Hoda. Huda Barakat's 1998 novel, Harith and Mia, or The Tiller of Waters, tells the story of an unfortunate cloth merchant, and remember the unfortunate cloth merchants in the Arabian Nights, who lost his parents as well as his home during the Lebanese Civil War between 1975 and 1990. He moves into shop, his father bequeathed to him. The shop is an abandoned neighborhood in the war-torn Beirut, surrounded by ruins, snipers and hungry wild dogs. He settles in, finds a cellar where his father hid his most treasured cloths, and he moves the vault to the main floor. As he unfolds them one by one, he remembers his love affair with his mother's Kurdish maid. This love story is integrated into the histories of linen, velvet, lace and silk in Beirut. He teaches Shamsa in Arabic, her name Shamsa in Arabic, and she has a name in Kurdish Hatawi, and, or biblical name, Suresh, the Jinn, from the King Solomon's in, let's say, pre-language. The interlacing of the love story and the histories of the cloths gives Beirut's cosmopolitanism a densely textures into cultural fabric of multiple temporality, spatialities and cultures. The circulation of Egyptian linen of Europeanized velvet and lace and of Chinese silk perils the movement of people of all races and religions in and out of Lebanon from all over the world, past and present. One can easily use the map of silk road to imagine the trajectories of the migration of people, goods and ideas in and out of Lebanon. The Lebanese identity, the short and long of it, cannot be reduced to one authentic thing. So there is no such thing as I am the authentic Lebanese and Lebanon belongs to me and only me. Huwada writes a similarly complex history of the Hui in China in a Muslim funeral. She tells the story of the Hui Muslims in China through a story of the vicissitudes of the family of a jade craftsman beginning at the first world war and ending after the Chinese cultural revolution, so between 1919 and 1979. Two overlapping narratives of two generations of the Liang Han family intersect with the history of jade in China. Liang, a Hui jade craftsman takes on Han as his apprentice when the latter arrives in Beijing with an itinerant ahun or sheikh. The first strand of the narrative, Han learns the craft and in turn becomes a collector of jade artifacts. He marries Liang's elder daughter and has a son with her. When he tries to smuggle his collection to London in the company of Liang's younger sister during the Second World War, younger daughter, sorry, he and his sister-in-law get stuck for years during this period they fall in love and have a daughter. They will return after the war but his sister-in-law and now his lover moves to London and leaves her little daughter behind. In the second strand of narrative which is set in Beijing during the cultural revolution, the children grow up. The son begins work and falls in love with a Han woman. The daughter begins university and falls in love with her Han, tutor Han standing for Chinese. Their mother does everything to prevent any interracial marriage. The son ends up marrying a Hui girl and the daughter dies. The novel moves back and forth between two narrative strands between past and present and across two locations, Beijing and London. This domestic melodrama also overlaps with the history of the Hui role in the Chinese jade craft. At the heart of the novel is the jade panel Liang is commissioned to produce in celebration of Zhenghe's seafaring to be modeled on a famous painting. And Zhenghe is a famous Muslim neighbor general who led possibly the largest fleet in the world and traveled around the world during Ming dynasty. When Liang dies prematurely, Han, this is a Han, not Han, completes the panel. As this story unfolds, the jade craft Liang inherits from his forefathers is traced to the famous Chinese jade master. If you follow the route of circulation of jade, you will find that they overlap somewhat with the silk road. So ostensibly, Huo writes a history of Hui to mainstream Chinese history into, mainstream Chinese history through intersecting them into history of Chinese jade. Jade, according to John Goethe in Jade Lore, which was written in 1936, is truly the stone of immortality. Through its mystic powers, the Chinese have sought the key to life everlasting, while holding from mortals its secret jade has perpetuated itself down the uncounted centuries. Subversively, Huo Da, like Huda Barakat, unravels any notion of pure blood or authentic identity. On his deathbed, Han leaves a note for his wife, confessing that he's not Huo, but Han, and thus making a mockery of her lifelong efforts to maintain the purity of the family's bloodline. Now, when I read this novel, I thought, wow, the author is very clever. She knows exactly how to integrate the history of Hui into Chinese history by focusing on jade. As a Chinese who grew up in a Chinese family, jade is big for us. My mother likes jade, my grandmother has jade, my aunts all wear jade. But growing up in Libya, nobody cared about jade, right? But one day, when I had nothing better to do at Taipei Airport waiting for a plane to take me back to London, I found this book called Islamic Jades, Exquisite Beauties. And that was when I said, aha, there's something there to be looked at. So let me return to our material objects. I hope I have been able to show you that Huda Barakat's silk and Huot as jade are sites of thick memory of the dense intercultural exchanges that have been occurring for centuries across expansive geographies. And as such, it leads to my argument three that the material object opens up language to multilingualism. These two novels makes us contemplate two forms of multilingualism. The first form is more obvious, just as Huda Barakat's Arabic sits interspersed with Kurdish and French terms, Huot as his peppers would Hui Hui speak or Arabic and Persian terms. These words and terms bring with them a multitude of word views and cultures, right? And you can see, you can also see this in material objects. You have seen some images of silk robes already. Let me now show you some images of Chinese and Islamic jades and you, right? And as you come to the last image, I will read to you something. So let's just look at some images of jades and I won't talk about them at length, right? This is Chinese, no ornament, no, it's just carving Chinese figures. Chinese carvings. Chinese. Islamic jade. This is Mughal and you can find carvings in Arabic. Persian. This is Ottoman. Mughal. Indian. Ornamentation. Mughal. Ottoman. Mughal. Indian. Mughal. Indian. Mughal. Indian. And this is my favorite because the James stones, the favorite James stones in the Arabian nights are emerald, rubies, diamonds, pearls and coral and gold, of course. Now as you look at this, I'm going to read you something from the tale of Zumurud and Ali Shah and Zumurud is emerald. Zumurud handed him Ali Shah, a further 1000 dinars in a second purse saying, Run to the market and buy the finest furniture and carpets, the most delicate food and drink, and also bring me back a large square of Damascus silk of the rare list quality, garnet in tint with reels of gold thread, silver thread and silks of seven different colors. Also don't forget large needles and a gold thimble for my middle finger. When full morning had come, the diligence Zumurud lost no time in setting to work. She took the garnet of Damascus skill silk and in few days had made a curtain of it on which were presented with infinite art, the forms of birds and beasts. There was no animal in the world, great or small, which she had not drawn with stunning silk upon the curtain. So lifelike was the embroidery that the footed beasts seemed to move and the birds to sing. In the middle of the curtain were great trees loaded with their fruits and the shadows of them were so faithfully shown that the eye of the beholder rested suddenly on a delightful freshness. If you imagine silk as Chinese and jade as Kashkari Turkic or Uighur by the time they arrived from their homeland in their host culture, they already have a story to tell. Then you can see that carving ornamentation and brodery as different languages, Arabic, Chinese or Islamic, Mughal or Ottoman silk. Even our little lemon are multilingual and multicultural for Chinese, Islamic, Middle Eastern and Central Asian jade. There is another and more complex form of multilingualism in language, I hope. I hope I have been able to show you through the visualizing capacity of work that it produces images that these images come from. The material conditions of when and where the language lives and that language is dense with memory of interculture exchange. Language as our means of communication is not merely world as we think of it today, but the sign that combines at least three semiological or sign systems. We must think of image and sound and I have not had time to talk about sound tonight. As part and parcel of language, they complement words in giving us meaning. Ahmed Mustafa and Stefan Schbell show us how important image is in our understanding of words in Arabic in their path-breaking book, The Cosmic Script. This must be complemented by the role of sound such as tajweed and the production of meaning. We need the image and sound to understand language better and to be able to avoid a variety of centrisms in our study of interculture exchanges, including comparative literature and word literature. For me personally, as a literary scholar, I need them to find the bridges between Arabic and Chinese cultures. They allow me, one, to uncover cultural memories of interculture exchanges buried in language. Two, discover the key sides of these memories and three, to recover the material condition of these interculture exchanges. And their significance. In addition, I will need the silk road as a framework for my inquiry. I will explain. The Arabic and Chinese languages have been the vehicle through which the civilizations of two empires complexes are expressed, preserved and disseminated. Although one Arabic is located in the Near Middle East and the other Chinese in the Far East, the two empire complexes are interlaced and have been engaged in exchanges for various kinds for thousands of years. Language is not the only semiological system or communication system based in science through which the dense cultural traffic between the two empire complexes is manifest. There are two equally important semiological systems, one based in image and the other based in sound, that have served as the highways and byways of culture exchange evidenced by cultural products such as art, craft, music and their attendant material culture. Most visible of these trilateral cultural exchanges may be found today in Dongkwang, where the remains of the material culture from a word defined by commerce showcase the coming together of different languages, ethnicities and religions to produce a multilingual, multiracial, multi-faith cultural complexes. The exuberant material culture of the past such as that of Dongkwang points to an urgent need to understand culture exchange outside the word of word. The stories of travels of a language from one culture sphere to another and the story told in words are necessarily incomplete. They make innocuous many ways in which people from different cultures thought of, dealt with, communicated with and came to terms with each other. In research on culture exchange driven by tracing the travels of words or surveying the multilingual makeup of a culture cluster, the stranger is necessarily the speaker of another unfamiliar language. Such focus on linguistic difference or multilingualism in isolation of other languages of communication has resulted in drawing up relatively inflexible cultural boundaries and imprisoning academic discourses in rather rigidly fabricated conceptual categories such as self and other or same and difference, which will immediately obscure the dense, complex, wily, untidy patterns of culture exchange. Paying equal attention to the multiple cosmopolitan loci of the Silk Road, each created in and serving as a centre of overlapping networks of the circulation of people, objects, ideas and faiths, for example, can open up a spatial or temporal centrism to a more complex approach to the world, especially globalisation and emphasis on the multidirectional trajectories of circulation, especially among eastern nodes, allows for a broader view of the overlapping patterns of interaction among different cultures. Thank you very much. Wenshin, Professor Abdel Halim, ladies and gentlemen, it's a very great honour to have been invited by Wenshin and by the school to give the thanks after Wenshin's inaugural. My first contact with Wenshin was through her first monograph, Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic Islamic Culture, The Making of a Tradition. This was the first attempt in English to map the intellectual conferences of an entire epoch. Intellectual, in the most profound and rigorous sense, was the word that sprang to mind when I tried to imagine the author. Some years later, Wenshin took up a post at Soas and I met her. In person, she certainly was intellectual, but I was rather thrown by her passionate interest in food. I'd never before met an intellectual who noticed what they ate. With Wenshin, I've since discovered a world of previously unimagined edibles. My only contribution to Wenshin's education has been to show her how to drink. Academics dealing with the word on the page are in a sense ascetics. To get on top of everything we ought to read to spend as much time thinking as we should tends to make us for long periods renunciants. Here lies a great problem, because words are not just what we think with. They're also what we feel with and how we define things, objects, experiences, and learn to make our way around the physical world and the world of hopes and memories. How to encompass these various functions of the word in acceptable academic formats is one problem. How to remember as academics and as intellectuals that we must also ourselves experience the word in these ways in order to be fully observant and honest scholars is another. Very often we allow this function of experiencing the word in all its aspects to wither or we repress it as being immature, undisciplined and out of place in academic work. The result is scholarship that can only tell part of the story and at worst fails to mention the parts that it thinks it can't talk about. Wenshin is a comparatist and comparative literature, even in those early dry forms that she's described to us, brings us bang up against the fact of the incommensurability of cultures. My own experience of this was of growing up speaking French at school and English at home. This double experience reinforced, gave credibility to the childish idea of languages as worlds that each contain everything in themselves. But each language world is different from other language worlds and magical, able to conjure up by sound and shape alone things that exist fully and truly only through invocation by words. In this innocent state all words and things are true and absolute. The world of things insofar as we can perceive them separately has equal authority and in many ways is equally mapped out and culturally demarcated in spite of the childish conviction which many of us don't bother to correct in adulthood that most things, commonplace everyday things, are simply things. Where and how do all these worlds intersect if indeed they do? Can any word or object carry its own essence with it into a contiguous but foreign world? Cultural anthropologists can tell us how things journey from hand to hand, place to place and mind to mind. But we word scholars need a different discourse to describe this. One of the places to begin is our own subjectivity. Instead of repressing or denying it we need to confront even foreground it. We are one of the experimental grounds in which the processes we want to describe are happening. The only one perhaps that we can observe in depth. It makes sense to start with the subject. This is a start, a genuinely new beginning in our field and it has been pioneered with exemplary intellectual rigor by Wen Chin in her own work. I should also like concluding to mention again what Professor Abdelhalim so eloquently outlined. How much other scholars and students and colleagues owe to Wen Chin. A dedicated, admired and influential teacher, journal editor, monograph series editor, a model citizen and public servant.