On Distinctiveness of the Arabic Poetic Canon of the 13th to 18th Centuries

The long period of the 13th to 18th centuries in Arab history has hardly received exhaustive treatment in international scholarship. To account for this deficiency, one might note that while in recent decades there has been much accomplished in the field of Oriental studies dealing with elucidating of Arabic poetry from antiquity to the 10th–12th centuries, Arabic literature of the 13th–18th centuries is still lacking attention prompted by advanced interpreting practices. The corresponding studies tend to overlook many achievements of international Medieval scholarship including those engaged with traditionalistic type of artistic mindset and with principles of canonfollowing creativeness. Also, late medieval Arabic works are often considered out of their proper context; namely, they are measured against theoretical and literary notions drawn from European literatures of Modern and Late Modern periods. In aiming to offer a corrective to previous interpretive models, this article reconsiders the intensive development of figurative speech techniques in classical Arabic poetry going back to the 2nd / 8th century. Special attention is paid to figurative techniques addressing visual perception and exhibiting the growing importance of the graphic side of writing. The article holds that late medieval Arabic literature is continuously aware of ancient heritage, given the importance of poetics of reminiscences, which back then used to inform such generic modes as takhmīs and tashṭīr. The article also regards works of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. c. 749/1348), who is among the most renowned and noted Arab authors of the 8th / 13th–14th centuries.