{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01841712294673967, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.4423076923076925, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Milton and Islam: Bridging Cultures

John Milton’s works remain the central pillar of late-Renaissance English studies, and scholarship on Milton has importantly enriched our understanding of the political and religious currents of seventeenth-century Europe. Innovative recent scholarship, moreover, continues to expand the range of relevant contexts beyond Europe, unearthing the vitality and resonance of the Miltonic text in religious and political debates across borders, through time and in multiple languages. One of the global sites where this vitality and resonance is felt is the Arab world and the Muslim world more broadly. The recent publication of complete translations of Paradise Lost into the Arabic language invites fresh critical explorations of the global reception of Milton’s works and the cultural heritages they represent, uphold and contest. By exploring how Milton, Islam and the Middle East address and implicate one another, this collection aims to generate new questions of why, how and where Milton matters. We reflect on the critical future while holding in view how the forms of the past continue to inform the present. This effort attempts to grapple with the two key questions that Jonathan Burton foregrounds in surveying recent work in cultural studies on the early modernMediterranean: “how do literary scholars reconstruct and theorize exchange when our archives are onesided?” and “how can we avoid in our own histories reproducing the problems of emplotment that we find in early modern accounts of exchange?” There is now a burgeoning field of historical and literary scholarship that aspires to build more comprehensive and dialogic accounts of cultural diversity and the diverse forms of contact and exchange in the Mediterranean world than either orientalism or the anachronistic “application” of Edward Said’s Orientalism permitted. The kinds of answers to Burton’s questions advanced or practised in this volume, however, are, in general, radical ones; addressing