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International literature #4: Arabic
This time I'm looking forward to some recommendations of books written in Arabic. It's a huge language, so I'm expecting some great suggestions!
Sidenote: I can highly recommend checking out #3 Portuguese. It wasn't the most commented post, but it had some good recommendations.
Religious or secular, or anything in between, the most definitive, most fundamental work of literature in Arabic is the Qur'an. It is the prototype for Modern Standard Arabic, the literary version of Arabic, the prestige lingua franca of the Arab world (where the situation is quite similar to the European Middle Ages where vernacular Latin vulgars were becoming separate languages, but Latin was the lingua franca of the prestigious institutions and academia. Qur'an's literary style and narrative content is of great influence to the Arabic (and in general Muslim) literature as well.
One major work of Arabic origin I've read was a Turkish translation of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (a.k.a. Philosophus Autodidactus) by Ibn Tufail. It is a philosophical essay-narrative where a baby grows up alone in an island, and we see whether he arrives at the same conclusions Islamic tradition suggests. One of the major works of Islamic Golden Age philosophy.
One major author I have in my reading list is Khalil Gibran. He was born in Ottoman Lebanon. I don't recall much from my research about him and his work---it's been a few years---but this sentence from Wikipedia is interesting: "Gibran is the third-best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi."
Edit: Meta note: I think it is kinda expected that these threads will be low-volume given we don't have many non-anglophone users, and we're looking for a subset of them that is into literature, or a subset of the anglophone users that are both into literature and read non-English works. But IMHO these threads are still worth it, I like reading them and participating in them personally.