The Sword and the Pen in the Pre-Modern Arabic Heritage: A Literary Representation of an Important Historical Relationship

Abstract

The so-called "literary debate" in Greek, Latin and many Near Eastern languages is a well-developed genre. In his 1987 article, Geert Jan van Gelder surveyed its background more than adequately, 1 and very few details of that paper need to be repeated here. He assessed thoroughly the historical contribution of numerous poets to the relationship between "the sword and the pen," and also analyzed various aspects of this relationship in a few prose texts.