On Fiction And Adab In Medieval Arabic Literature

Proceedings from a workshop in medieval Arabic literature, April 21-22, 2000.

An examination of the impulses that went into the making of literary criticism in medieval Arab-Islamic culture.

Short fiction was an immensely innovative art in the medieval Arab world and speaks to the urbanization of the Arab domain after Islam. It reflects the bustling life of Muslim Arabs and Islamized Persians and the sure stamp of an urbanity that had settled very staunchly after big conquests. Reading these texts today illuminates the wide spectrum of early Arab life and the influences and innovations that flourished so vibrantly in medieval Arab society. Classical Arabic Stories selects from an impressive corpus, including excerpts from seven seminal works: Ibn Tufail's novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan; Kalila wa Dimna by Ibn al-Muqaffa; The Misers by al-Jahiz; The Brethren of Purity's The Protest of Animals Against Man; Al-Maqamat (The Assemblies) by al-Hamadhani and al-Hariri; Epistle of Forgiveness by al-Ma'arri; and the epic romance, Sayf Bin Dhi Yazan. Organized thematically, the volume begins with pre-Islamic tales, stories of rulers and other notables, and thrilling narratives of danger and warfare. It follows with tales of love, religion, comedy, and the strange and the supernatural.

This book fills a long-standing gap in Arabic-Islamic studies. Following the informative and entertaining style of adab literature and based on a large number of relevant sources from a wide range of genres, Hasan Shuraydi presents a panoramic view of relevant themes that concern youth and old age in Medieval Arabic literature intended for both specialists and non-specialists. A pattern of binary oppositions runs through such themes, e.g., black/white, male/female, husband/wife, sacred/profane, paradise/this world, ignorance/wisdom, past/present, young/old, new/old, health/disease, sappy/dry, permitted/forbidden, lust/chastity, obedience/disobedience, experience/inexperience, folly/reason, sobriety/intoxication, parent/child, celibacy/marriage, present life/hereafter. Themes discussed include: aging, ambition, aphrodisiacs, beauty, education, feminist trends, hair dyeing, homosexuality, honoring age, jihad, life stages, longevity, love, marriage, sex.

The study of Arabic literature is blossoming. This book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to help research this highly prolific and diverse production of contemporary literary texts. Based on the achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian formalism and its theoretical legacy, this framework offers flexible, transparent, and unbiased tools to understand the relevant contexts within the literary system. The aim is to enhance our understanding of Arabic literature, throw light on areas of literary production that traditionally have been neglected, and stimulate others to take up the fascinating challenge of mapping out and exploring them.

This path-breaking book offers a re-examination of the east-west (Egyptian-French) cultural encounter during the early period of the renaissance or nahda in 19th-century Egypt, through looking closely at the particular contact zone of literary translations, specifically some of the earliest translations of prestigious French literature into Arabic. In this unprecedented study, in contrast with views that presume a passive top-down model of cultural influence, Carol Bardenstein formulates a more complex and ambivalent model - a transculturating one. She shows how - within the translations themselves - an indigenous sensibility is asserted and elaborated, running against the grain of the apparently deferring gesture of borrowing from the French literary tradition, which was viewed by many in the Egyptian intellectual vanguard as having the prestige and cultural capital to civilize an Egypt and an Arabic literary tradition that was perceived as being belated in its development. In translations of works by La Fontaine, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Moliere and Racine, Muhammad Uthman Jalal indigenized the texts in various ways, Arabizing, Islamicizing, and Egyptianizing the textual field. Not only did this translational approach create a corpus of indigenized literary texts, but it also implicitly engaged in the process of experimenting with different possible delineations of the contours of the collective or community that was to produce what was to become modern Arabic literature. In so doing, it anticipated many later explicit ideological formulations about the nature of possible or desired configurations of collective affiliation and identification, as Arab, pan-Arab, regional Egyptian along nationalist lines, pan-Islamic etc., with the passing of Ottomanism.

At the heart of this book is a spectral theory of world literature that draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida and world-systems theory to assess how the field produces local literature as an "e;other"e; that haunts its universalising, assimilative imperative with the force of the uncanny. It takes the Middle Eastern novel as both metonym and metaphor of a spectral world literature. It explores the worlding of novels from the Middle East in recent years, and, focusing on the pivotal sites of Middle Eastern modernity (Egypt, Turkey, Iran), argues that lost to their global production, circulation and reception is their constitution in the logic of spectrality. With the intention of redressing this imbalance, it critically restores their engagements with the others of Middle Eastern modernity and shows, through a new reading of the Middle Eastern novel, that world literature is always-already haunted by its others, the ghosts of modernity.

The aim of this volume is to raise and discuss questions about the different approaches to the study of pre-modern Arabic anthologies from the perspectives of philology, religion, history, geography, and literature.