{"title":"Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts, written by Samuel England","authors":"Jocelyn Sharlet","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341415","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341415","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43778024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Beyond a Snow Pile”: Najīb Surūr’s Challenging Reading of the Egyptian Literary Canon in Riḥlah Fī Thulāthiyyat Najīb Maḥfūẓ","authors":"Chiara Fontana","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341410","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This study of the Egyptian intellectual Najīb Surūr’s critical essay, Riḥlah fī Thulāthiyyat Najīb Maḥfūẓ (c. 1978; A Journey into Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Trilogy) argues that this underexplored work of Surūr is a brave assessment of the Egyptian literary canon of the 1950s. The argument finds justification in the author’s unique mastery of irony, and his vigorous textual engagement with Maḥfūẓ’s widely acclaimed masterpiece. Throughout his essay, liberated from a “snow pile” of sensational success, Surūr dives into Maḥfūẓ’s novel Bayna al-Qaṣrayn, in order to bolster his conviction that all authors and genres deserve in-depth analyses. Arguing the viability of applying the Constance School’s Reception Theory in evaluating Surūr’s revolutionary reading, this paper seeks to resituate new aesthetical and ideological paradigms in criticism within the broader context of extra literary/intraliterary dynamics that give birth to competing works of fiction. Surūr’s effort also highlights a compelling mismatch between young authors’ de jure inventive ambitions and their de facto conciliation with previous models.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"189-214"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341410","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44177420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Clarion of Syria: A Patriot’s Call Against the Civil War of 1860, written by Butrus al-Bustani","authors":"A. Firat","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341416","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"377-380"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341416","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45655692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations Around The Ottoman Mediterranean, edited by Marilyn Booth","authors":"Peiyu Yang","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341417","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"369-376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341417","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45995657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Labīd, ʿAbīd, and Lubad: Lexical Excavation and the Reclamation of the Poetic Past in al-Maʿarrī’s Luzūmiyyāt","authors":"Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341408","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The blind Syrian poet, man of letters and scholar, Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (363 H/973 CE-449 H/1057 CE) is the author of two celebrated diwans. The second of these, his controversial double-rhymed and alphabetized, Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam (Requiring What is Not Obligatory), known simply as Al-Luzūmiyyāt (The Compulsories), features his uninhibited, often highly ironic and usually pessimistic, religious, and ‘philosophical’ ideas along with mordant criticism of politics, religion, and humanity in general. In his introduction, he abjures the corrupt and worldly qaṣīdah poetry of his otherwise celebrated early diwan, Saqṭ al-Zand (Sparks of the Fire-Drill), to turn in al-Luzūmiyyāt to a poetry that is “free from lies.”\u0000In the present study I take a ‘biopsy’ from Al-Luzūmiyyāt of the eight poems with the double rhyme b-d to explore al-Maʿarrī’s excavation and reclamation of meaning from the Ancient Arabian past through the intertwined legacies of philology and poetic lore. The constraint (luzūm) of the double b-d rhyme in these poems leads inexorably to two proper names, the legends and poetry associated with them, and the etymological-semantic complex that yokes them together and generates related names and themes. The first name is that of the renowned poet of the Muʿallaqāt, Labīd ibn Rabīʿah; the second is that of Lubad, the last of the seven vultures whose life-spans measured out the days of the legendary pre-Islamic sage, Luqmān. Not surprisingly, the ancient Jāhilī poet-knight ʿAbīd ibn al-Abraṣ, likewise, cannot escape the pull of the b-d rhyme. The study demonstrates the mythophoric power of proper names from the Arabic poetic and folkloric past, once lexically and morphologically generated by the double consonants of the rhyme pattern, to evoke poems and legends of the past but also, by the force of al-Maʿarrī’s moral as well as prosodic constraints, to be reconstructed in accordance with the prosodic and moral constraints of Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam, into a new poetic form, the luzūmiyyah. Quite at odds with the moral, thematic, and structural trajectory of the qaṣīdah form, the luzūmiyyah is by contrast static, directionless, and oftentimes a dead end.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"238-272"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341408","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47676577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Question of Tradition between Eliot and Adūnīs","authors":"Imed Nsiri","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341411","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Arguing that the poetic quest is an instance of the modernist movement at crossroads, this article compares poetic quests as represented in the works of T. S. Eliot and ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd, pen-named Adūnīs (Adonis). The article (re-)examines Eliot’s most famous poem The Waste Land and some of Adūnīs’s short poems alongside their respective prose works on literary criticism. I demonstrate how Eliot’s and Adūnīs’s poetic quests are an instance not only of the modernist movement at crossroads, but also of liminality where the modernist poet presents fluctuating images of himself: the poet as a knight that can change the world and, at the same time, as the little man who is blown in the wind. Hence Eliot’s and Adūnīs’s poetic texts are full of paradoxes and are peopled by those that bear within themselves opposites and are capable of everything and nothing. The modernist poet is Eliot’s Tiresias and Adunis’s al-Buhlūl. I illustrate how this instance of liminality is represented in their treatment of the theme of tradition.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"215-237"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341411","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45798485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Arabic takhalluṣ, Persian Style in Muḥammad al-Ṣūfī’s Poems to Muḥammad the Prophet","authors":"T. Homerin","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341409","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Though a signature verse (takhalluṣ) is often found in medieval Persian and Ottoman Turkish poetry, this is less frequently the case in Arabic poetry at this time. However, Muḥammad Ibn al-Shihābī al-Ṣūfī included such a signature verse in 38 Arabic poems, many inspired by recitations of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry. This article offers a critical Arabic edition and English translation of two of these poems, followed by an extensive discussion of linguistic and stylistic aspects of Ibn al-Shihābī’s Arabic and poetic style. Both poems also highlight trends in Arabic poetry at the end of the 9th/15th century, including the incorporation of elements from regional varieties of Arabic, and Ibn al-Shihābī’s innovative use of the signature verse, which may reflect the influence of Sufi chanting practices.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"325-350"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341409","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45128859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ʿAyniyyah of Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī: The Achievement of a Classical Arabic Allegorical Form","authors":"J. Stetkevych","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341413","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper aims to examine the renowned Early Islamic elegy, the ʿAyniyyah of the Mukhaḍram poet Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī in two respects. First, it examines the poem as an entirely unconventional example of a Classical Arabic elegiac poem (rithāʾ) in terms of its thematic structure of introductory lament to the poet’s dead sons followed by three panels: the onager, the oryx and knightly combat. It concludes that the tragic endings of all three panels constitute a dramatic inversion of the triumphal outcomes of such thematic panels in the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah in a manner that reflects al-Jāḥiẓ’s structural insights into the semantic functions of the animal panels in both elegy and qaṣīdah. Second, the paper explores the allegorical aspect of the thematic sections of the poem, the elegiac lament and the three tragic panels, in order to argue that they are a key to understanding the allegorical dimensions of such panels in the Early Arabic qaṣīdah tradition. The paper next explores Arabic critical terminology for the Western term “allegory,” such as tamthīl, umthūlah and majāz, only to conclude that none of them are adequate. Building especially on ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s proper understanding of majāz, the paper finally proposes a new etymologically and semantically sound neologism as an Arabic critical term for allegory: umjūzah.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"273-324"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341413","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42199663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience, and the Syrian Revolution, written by miriam cooke","authors":"M. Weiss","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341414","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"387-391"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341414","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41768208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Canons, Thefts, and Palimpsests in the Arabic Literary Tradition","authors":"M. Al-Musawi","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341407","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The purpose of this essay is to explain and also problematize the reasons behind my use of intertextual interaction as an inclusive term that cuts across time and space. With regard to Arabic literary production, ancient and modern, this inclusive term recalls a similar classical and pre-modern understanding of textual engagements as manifestations of textual subordination, anxiety, empowerment, competitiveness, and supremacy. Therefore, the present essay associates this understanding with Arab philologists’ theories of plagiarism. What came once under the rubric of plagiarism has a shared register, parlance, and postulates with current intertextual practices. Both address textual tapestries and matrices whereby threads are woven in an intricate manner. Over time, words, meanings, motifs, and thence theorizations form a constellation. The essay explores a number of Arabic novels of the third millennium as examples of this textual engagement not only with Arabic literary tradition, but also with texts from the global south. Such a substantial and visible textual appropriation invites this critical intervention which, in turn, is bound in dialogue with contemporary literary forays that reflect on texts as tissues of quotations.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"165-188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341407","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41609328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}