Daniel Lawrence Newman (born 1963) is a British writer, scholar and translator of Arabic literature.^[1][2] He serves as a special advisor to the Islamic Criminal Justice Project at the Centre for Criminal Law & Justice, Durham Law School, and served as a member of council at the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies from 2008 to 2012.^[3]

Academic career

Newman received his doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.^[4]

Newman's research in Arabic studies centres on linguistics (phonetics and dialectology) and literature. He is a specialist on the 19th-century Nahda (Arab Renaissance) movement in Egypt and Tunisia and has published extensively on this topic. He is also involved in a long-term project on mediaeval Arabic erotic literature which will result in the edition and translation of original manuscripts.^[5]

Newman has translated several works of Arabic literature, both from the pre-modern and modern era. These include Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz by Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (under the title An Imam in Paris) and Modern Arabic Short Stories. In 2008, he was the co-recipient of the Republic of Tunisia International Prize for Islamic Studies for the book Muslim Women in Law and Society.^[6]

Since 2011, Newman has been cited as an expert on the Middle East for Al Jazeera and the Voice of America, among others.^[1][2]

Books

Author

• The Exile’s Cookbook: Medieval Gastronomic Treasures from al-Andalus & North Africa, London, Saqi Books, 2023.
• The Sultan’s Feast: A Fifteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook, London, Saqi Books, 2020.
• The Sultan’s Sex Potions: Arab Aphrodisiacs in the Middle Ages, Saqi Books, 2014.
• A to Z of Arabic-English-Arabic Translation, London, Saqi Books, 2013 (co-authored with R. Husni).
• Modern Arabic Short Stories: A Bilingual Reader - Twelve Stories by Contemporary Masters from Morocco to Iraq, London, Saqi Books, 2008 (co-authored with R. Husni).
• Arabic-English Thematic Lexicon, Routledge, 2007.
• Muslim Women in Law and Society: Annotated translation of al-Tahir al-Haddad’s Imra ‘tuna fi ‘l-sharia wa ‘l-mujtama, with an introduction, Routledge, 2007 (co-authored with R. Husni).
• An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi's Visit to France (1826-1831), London, Saqi Books, 2004 (2nd revised edition 2011).
• Elsevier’s Dictionary of Ports and Shipping (English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, German), Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1993 (co-authored with J. Van der Tuin).

Editor

• Proceedings of the 1st Annual International Conference on Language, Literature & Linguistics (L3 2012), Singapore, 2012.
• Maritime Terminology: Issues in Communication and Translation. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Maritime Terminology, Brussels, 1999 (with M. Van Campenhoudt).