A Genealogy of Adab in the Comparative Middle East

This chapter sets the historical scene of the book by charting the emergence of the modern concept of “literature” in the Middle East. I start by surveying the range of terms for the literary that are currently in use across the Arab world, Turkey, and Iran (“adab”, “edebiyat”, and “adabiyāt”). I argue that in their contemporary deployment, each is premised on the reinscription of the classical Arabic-Islamic concept of “adab” that took place in tandem with the modernization process from the 19th to mid-20th centuries. Against the long-held view in Arabic literary studies that adab is equivalent to “belles-lettres”, I reinterpret it as an expression of the multiple modalities of political, social, and cultural experience of the classical Arabic-Islamic life-world. I then trace how adab was systematically reinscribed as “literature” in the modern, European sense in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. Comprising a wholesale re-envisioning of the Middle Eastern literary and cultural sphere, this act laid the groundwork for the novel and other modern literary forms across the region. I thus posit the Middle Eastern novel as founded on the occlusion and marginalization of literary and cultural tradition there, which thereby returns to haunt it according to the logic of spectrality.