For the convenience of the nonspecialist, I have omitted Arabic diacritic marks except for the hamza (’) and the ayn (`). These are indicated in the transliteration of less familiar words, but not in that of well-known terms such as Abbasid or Iraq, for instance. It is my hope that this simplified system of Arabic transliteration will ease the reading and facilitate border crossings between French and Arabic.
I have kept citations in the original Arabic script to the minimum (for editorial necessity) and limited them to those sections when the Arabic text is essential to the analysis. I hope that this inclusion of Arabic within this manuscript will contribute both hermeneutically and visually to the border crossings between French and Arabic that this book invites the reader to undertake.