{"title":"The Polemics of Iltizām: Al-Ādāb’s Early Arguments for Commitment","authors":"Qussay Al-Attabi","doi":"10.1163/1570064X-12341422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064X-12341422","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The Lebanese monthly Al-Ādāb is accredited with the dissemination of iltizām, the Arabic rendition of Jean-Paul Sartre’s engagement (commitment). The concept assumed significance throughout the 1950s–1970s. In fact, it is often singled out as the most important literary term of the period. Surprisingly, however, a closer look at Al-Ādāb’s early issues reveals that, despite the forceful circulation of iltizām, indeterminacy and confusion continued to plague the term. Through archival research of Al-Ādāb’s early numbers, this article shows that this indeterminacy contributed to iltizām’s popularity and argues that the dissemination of the term was characterized by an intriguing paradox: while iltizām failed as a term of literary criticism (due in large part to the inconclusive nature of its meaning), it succeeded in fueling robust literary and critical output.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"124-146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44058348","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":"Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation, written by Fadi A. Bardawil","authors":"Yoav Di-Capua","doi":"10.1163/1570064X-12341429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064X-12341429","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"272-277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44741891","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":"Dār al-Ṭalīʿah and the Question of Arab Authenticity in the 1960s","authors":"Ahmad Agbaria","doi":"10.1163/1570064X-12341425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064X-12341425","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Cultural institutions and publishing houses have been essential to the making of Arab intellectual conversations in the post-colonial era. The publishing house of Dār al-Ṭalīʿah (est. 1959) played a central role in naturalizing social classifications, ideological views and cultural expectations that have influenced the then-new articulation of the notion of Arab authenticity. Yet, al-Ṭalīʿah was more than a publishing house: it was an intellectual hub that sustained intellectuals and unified them into a coherent group. Despite its centrality, however, the group of authors published by al-Ṭalīʿah has rarely drawn the attention of literary critics or intellectual historians. This article rethinks the connection between ideas and their institutional location, rejecting the conventional view that institutions are only secondary to, or even parasitic on, the supremacy of ideas. Looking at the idea of cultural authenticity (aṣālah) fiercely opposed by al-Ṭalīʿah authors, this article examines the ways the publishing house informed the meaning and deployment of aṣālah during the 1960s, even while rejecting it.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"228-253"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47362497","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":"Zaynab Fawwāz’s Feminist Locutions","authors":"M. Booth","doi":"10.1163/1570064X-12341419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064X-12341419","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Lebanese-Egyptian Zaynab Fawwāz (ca. 1850-1914) was an unusual presence in 1890s Egypt: an immigrant from Shīʿī south Lebanon, without major family support, she created an intellectual place for herself in the Cairo press, generating a forthright voice on women’s needs as distinct from “the nation’s.” Like most Arabophone writers on “the Woman Question,” Fawwāz addressed girls’ education, but she focused less on domestic training than on work and income, gender-defined dependency, and exploitation. She highlighted gender-prejudiced uses of religious knowledge to further masculine privilege. Framing her arguments within terms of engagement defined by Islamic sharīʿah, she appropriated and redefined keywords for an indigenous feminism. She repurposed the Islamic-Arabic genre of biographical writing for feminist-inflected history writing. I consider how Fawwāz deployed terminology and genre to contest patriarchal readings of Islamic practice sustained by assumptions of masculinist authority. Fawwāz’s writings remind us that secularism was never inherent in Arabophone feminist theorizing, nor were the earliest Arab feminisms Western derivatives. Historical assemblages shaped by Islamic (and Christian) worldviews yielded creative syntheses that were firmly indigenous.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"37-67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42566413","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":"Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, written by William Granara","authors":"M. Ballan","doi":"10.1163/1570064X-12341426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064X-12341426","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"255-260"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43386495","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":"Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should","authors":"Linda Istanbulli","doi":"10.1163/1570064X-12341424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064X-12341424","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"202-227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64702535","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":"Approaches to the Study of Pre-Modern Arabic Anthologies","authors":"G. V. van Gelder","doi":"10.1163/9789004459090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004459090","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47787733","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 (Inter-religious?) Rededication of an Arabic Panegyric by Judah al-Ḥarīzī","authors":"Jonathan P. Decter","doi":"10.1163/1570064x-12341412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064x-12341412","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article studies two versions of an Arabic panegyric by the Jewish poet Judah al-Ḥarīzī, one preserved in Hebrew (Judeo-Arabic) script and the other in Arabic script in a biographical dictionary by al-Mubārak ibn Aḥmad al-Mawṣilī (1197-1256). The Judeo-Arabic version was dedicated to a Jewish physician. While the version transmitted by al-Mawṣilī does not have a named addressee, it was likely dedicated to a Muslim. By reading the two versions as iterations of the same basic text accommodated to specific circumstances, this article demonstrates the ways in which the author modulated rhetoric to fit the social positions of the respective addressees. The article studies the dynamics of inter-religious praise and the Jewish internalization of Islamic concepts of political legitimacy.","PeriodicalId":43529,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"351-368"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/1570064x-12341412","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46284059","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":"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}