Arabic literature, the body of written works produced in the
Arabic language.
The tradition of Arabic
literature stretches back some 16 centuries to unrecorded
beginnings in the Arabian Peninsula. At certain points in the
development of European civilization, the literary culture of
Islam and its Arabic medium of expression came to be regarded
not only as models for emulation but also, through vital
conduits such as Moorish Spain and Norman Sicily, as direct
sources of inspiration for the intellectual communities of
Europe. The rapid spread of the Islamic faith brought the
original literary tradition of the Arabian Peninsula into
contact with many other cultural traditions—Byzantine, Persian,
Indian, Amazigh (Berber), and Andalusian, to name just a
few—transforming and being transformed by all of them. At the
turn of the 21st century, the powerful influence of the West
tended to give such contacts a more one-sided directionality,
but Arab litterateurs were constantly striving to find ways of
combining the generic models and critical approaches of the West
with more indigenous sources of inspiration drawn from their own
literary heritage.
General considerations
Definitions
Both terms in the title of this article are in need
of elaboration. The use of the term literature in English to
imply those writings that are susceptible to aesthetic analysis
(as opposed to everything that is written) is of relatively
recent vintage, and the development of a field of study devoted
to it is yet more recent (with the study in the West of
non-Western literary traditions being even more so). In Arabic
the term for “literature” in the narrow English sense is adab,
best translated by the French term belles-lettres (“beautiful
letters”), which conveys the combination of the aesthetic and
didactic elements found in adab more effectively than does the
English term literature. However, it is important to observe
that, as is the case with many literary traditions, the origins
of this Arabic term in the premodern period lie in the realms of
correct behaviour (“polite letters”).
The English language, unlike
many other European languages, uses several adjectives—Arab,
Arabic, and Arabian—to depict phenomena of the particular region
and people that are linked to the notion of “Arab,” a word that
has the original sense of “nomad.” For the purposes of this
article, the term Arabic will be used to refer only to the
Arabic language. The sections that follow will be concerned only
with literature that has been composed in Arabic; it thus
excludes works written by Arabs in other languages.
The Arabic language
The Arabic
language in its earliest phases was relatively well protected
from the forces of rapid change by the peninsular environment
within which it developed. It is the best-preserved model of the
Semitic languages. Its syntax and morphology—recorded and
systematized as part of the massive research endeavour that
followed the production of an authoritative version of the text
of the Qurʾān in the 7th century (although this date is a matter
of controversy)—provide evidence of early features of the
Semitic languages. These features have since disappeared from
sister languages, of which Hebrew is perhaps the most prominent.
As the history of the revelation, memorization, and eventual
recording in written form of the Qurʾān makes clear, the society
of Arabia was one that relied to a large extent on human memory
to preserve details of important events and principles and to
pass on such information and artifacts to succeeding
generations. That very reality makes it extremely difficult to
pinpoint precise details regarding the earliest development of
the Arabic language and its literary tradition. What has
survived as the earliest examples of Arabic literary
compositions consists of a highly elaborate system of poetic
composition and a series of oratorical and often homiletic
utterances, all couched in language of a variety and at a level
that was to be later reflected in the style of the Qurʾānic
revelations themselves. It is unclear, however, whether this
apparently elevated language (perhaps reserved for special
occasions, such as poetry competitions) was ever the means of
spoken communication for any particular group.
Whatever may have been the
linguistic environment of pre-Islamic Arabia, the rapid spread
of the faith across Africa and into Asia soon created a
situation in which written and spoken Arabic inhabited opposite
ends of a linguistic spectrum. At one end was the language of
written communication and Islamic scholarship, which regarded
the language of the Qurʾān as its inimitable yardstick; from
this belief developed the later critical doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān
(the “inimitability of the Qurʾān”), which resulted in a written
(literary) language that has undergone remarkably little change
over the centuries. At the other end was the spoken language of
Arabs, which from Spain (known as Al-Andalus during the Moorish
period) and Morocco in the west to the Arabian Gulf and Iraq in
the east displayed—and continues to display—enormous variety,
hardly a surprising linguistic phenomenon in view of the great
distances involved and the wide variety of cultures with which
Islam came into contact.
Context
The Arabic literary
tradition began within the context of a tribal, nomadic culture.
With the advent and spread of Islam, that tradition was carried
far and wide during the course of the 7th to the 10th century.
It initially sought to preserve the values of chivalry and
hospitality while expressing a love of animals and describing
the stark realities of nature, but it proceeded to absorb
cultural influences from every region brought within the fold of
“Dār al-Islām” (“Abode of Islam”). Early contacts with the
Sasanian empire of Persia (present-day Iran) led to a noisy but
fruitful exchange of cultural values. The foundation in 762 of
Baghdad, built expressly as a caliphal capital, brought about
further expansion to the east and contacts with the cultures of
India and beyond; one of the results of such contact was the
appearance in the Middle East of the world’s greatest collection
of narrative, Alf laylah wa laylah (The Thousand and One
Nights). In that same capital city was founded the great library
Bayt al-Ḥikmah (“House of Wisdom”), which, until the sack of the
city by the Mongols in 1258, served as a huge repository for the
series of works from the Hellenistic tradition that were
translated into Arabic. Al-Andalus became to the rest of Europe
a model of a society in which the religions and cultures of
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism could work together and create
a system of scholarship and teaching that could transmit the
heritage of older civilizations and the rich cultural admixture
of Andalusian society. Western science, mathematics, philosophy,
music, and literature were all beneficiaries of this fascinating
era, of whose final stages the fabulous Alhambra palace complex
in Granada, Spain, remains the most visible token.
By the 10th century, the
political fragmentation of the larger Islamic community was
evident in the existence of three separate caliphates: that of
the ʿAbbāsids in Baghdad, that of the Shīʿite Fāṭimids in Cairo,
and that of the Umayyads, in Spain at this time after having
been earlier removed from power in the eastern regions by the
advent of the ʿAbbāsids. Ironically, this fragmentation worked
to the advantage of literature and its practitioners; the
existence of a continuing series of petty dynasties provided
ample opportunity for patronage at court, which was the primary
means of support for poets and scholars. However, literary
production and creativity were inevitably marked by the ongoing
series of Crusades, carried out by Christians from western
Europe, the Mongol invasions and later those of the Turkic
conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), the fall of Constantinople to the
Ottomans in 1453, the fall of Granada in the Reconquista in
1492, and the fall of Cairo to the Ottomans in 1517. It has been
customary in surveys of the Arabic literary tradition to write
off the era between 1258 and 1800 by declaring it a “period of
decadence.” However, a more nuanced analysis of the situation
would acknowledge the political turmoil that characterized many
regions and periods and would also suggest that a degree of
caution is needed in applying Western criteria for literary
evaluation to a period in which the aesthetic yardsticks were
clearly different.
The nature of “the modern” in
the context of Arabic literary history involves twin processes:
first, renewed contacts with the Western world, something that
was considerably accelerated by European imperial incursions
during the 19th century, and, second, a renewed interest in the
classical heritage of the Arabic language and Islam.
Particularly in analyzing the earlier stages in the process
known as al-nahḍah (“renaissance”), Western historians have for
a long time placed much more emphasis on the first of these
factors. It is certainly true that the 19th century witnessed a
vigorous translation movement that introduced to the readership
of Arabic literature examples of genres such as the novel, the
short story, and the drama. All these genres were subsequently
produced within the literary milieu of Arabic, although the
chronology and pace of that process varied widely in different
regions. However, as Arab literary historians endeavoured to
trace the development of a modern literary tradition in
different regions and as creative writers themselves strove to
find indigenous sources of inspiration and modes of expression,
a perceived need to incorporate the second category mentioned
above—that of the linkage between the classical heritage of the
Arab past and the creativity of the present—became more pressing
and led in many regions to a reexamination of the balance
between these two forces.
At the turn of the 21st
century, the Arab creative writer operated at a local level
within a social environment that, more often than not,
constrained freedom of expression and indeed subjected
literature to strict forms of censorship. Many prominent Arab
authors spent large segments of their life in exile from their
homelands for political reasons. More broadly, the confrontation
between secularism and popular religious movements, which might
in the best of circumstances provide for a fruitful interaction
of opinions, instead—because of local, regional, and global
factors—created an atmosphere of tension and repression that was
often not conducive to creative thought. This confrontation also
prompted Arab litterateurs to view the global environment with
considerable circumspection.
Ahmad ibn-al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi
Abou-t-Tayyib Ahmad
ibn al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi (Arabic: أبو الطيب احمد
بن الحسين المتنبّي) (915 – 23 September 965) was
an Arab (Iraqi-born) poet. He is regarded as one of
the greatest poets in the Arabic language. Most of
his poetry revolves around praising the kings he
visited during his lifetime. Some consider his 326
poems to be a great representation of his life
story. He started versifying when he was nine years
old. He is well known for his sharp intelligence and
witness. Al-Mutanabbi had a great pride in himself
through his poetry. Among the topics he discussed
were courage, the philosophy of life, and the
description of battles. Many of his poems were and
still are widely spread in today's Arab world and
are considered to be proverbial.
His great talent
brought him very close to many leaders of that time.
He praised those leaders and kings in return for
money and gifts. His powerful and honest poetic
style earned great popularity in his time.
Al-Mutanabbi was
born in the town of Kufah in Iraq, he was a son of
water carrier. In his youth, Al-Mutanabbi was
educated in Syria Damascus. His nickname Al-Mutanabbi
means "The one who wants to become a Prophet", the
reason for this controversial nickname is not
entirely known, some say that he climed to be the
predecessor of prophet Saleh. Others claim it is his
political activities that won the young poet the
unusual nickname when he lead a revolutionary
movement in his home town in 932. The revolt was
suppressed and the young man was imprisoned. It is
during this period that he began to write his first
known poems. Al-Mutanabbi had great political
ambitions to be Wali, to fulfill his ambitions he
joined the courts of Sayf al-Daula and Abu al-Misk
Kafur but his ambitions failed.
Al-Mutanabbi lived at the time when the Abbasid
Caliphate started coming apart, many of the states
in the islamic world became politically and
militarily independent from the weak Abbasid
Caliphate. Chief among those states was the Emirate
of Aleppo. Ruling this greatly independent state at
the time of Al-Mutanabbi was Sayf al-Daula.
Al-Mutanabbi joined
the court of Sayf al-Daula in 948. Sayf al-Daula was
greatly concerned with fighting the Byzantine Empire
in Asia minor where Al-Mutanabbi fought along side
him. During his nine years stay at Sayf al-Daula's
court, Al-Mutanabbi versified his greatest and most
famous poems.
During his stay in
Aleppo, great rivalry occur between Al-Mutanabbi and
many scholars and poets in Sayf al-Daula's court,
one of those poets was Abu Firas al-Hamdani, Sayf
al-Daula's cousin. In addition, Al-Mutanabbi lost
Sayf al-Daula's favor because of his political
ambition to be Wali. Al-Mutanabbi had no other
choice but to leave Aleppo heading toward Egypt.
Al-Mutanabbi joined the court of Abu al-Misk Kafur,
but the latter did not bestow the visiting poet as
he expected. At that time Al-Mutanabbi realized that
his hopes of becoming Wali were not going to be
materialized so he left Egypt in 960. After leaving
Egypt he heavily criticized Abu al-Misk Kafur with
very satirical poems. As a result of those poems Abu
al-Misk Kafur will always be associated with those
satirical poems throughout history.
Al-Mutanabbi was killed because one of his poems
that contained great insult to a man called Dhaba
al-Alasdi (Arabic: ضبة الأسدي). Dhaba along with his
Uncle Fatik al-Alasdi (Arabic: فاتك الأسدي)
determined to kill Al-Mutanabbi because of that poem
with contained a great insult for his nephew, they
managed to intercept Al-Mutanabbi, his son Muhassad
Arabic: محسد), and his servant near Bagdad and
killed them all in 965.
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Abu Tammam
Abu Tammam was born in Jasim (Josem), Syria,
north-east of the Sea of Tiberias and near
Hierapolis Bambyce. He seems to have spent his youth
in Homs, though, according to one story, he was
employed during his boyhood selling water at a
mosque in Cairo. His first appearance as a poet was
in Egypt, but as he failed to make a living there he
went to Damascus, and then to Mosul. From there he
made a visit to the governor of Armenia which was at
the time a part of the Arab Islamic empire, where he
was well-supported. After 833 he lived mostly in
Baghdad, at the court of the caliph Mo'tasim. From
Baghdad he visited Khorasan, where he enjoyed the
favour of Abdallah ibn Tahir. In approximately 845
he was in Ma'arrat un-Nu'man, where he met the poet
al-Buhturi (c. 820–897). He died in Mosul in 845.
Abu Tammam is best
known in literature by his 9th century compilation
of early poems known as the Hamasah. The Hamasah
(Arabic, "exhortation") is one of the greatest
anthologies of Arabic literature ever written. Abu
Tammam gathered these works together when he was
snowbound in Hamadan, where he had access to an
excellent library belonging to Abu al-Wafa Ibn
Salama. There are ten books of poems in the Hamasah,
all classified by subject. Some of them are
selections from long poems. This is one of the
treasuries of early Arabic poetry, and the poems are
of exceptional beauty. A later anthology by the same
name was compiled by the poet al-Buhturi, and the
term has been used in modern times to mean "heroic
epic."
Two other
collections of a similar nature are ascribed to Abu
Tammam. His own poems have been somewhat neglected
owing to the success of his compilations, but they
enjoyed great repute in his lifetime. His poems
reflect a stylistic break from prevailing oral-based
concepts of Arab poetry, often describing historical
events and people. They were distinguished for the
purity of their style, the merit of the verse, and
the excellent manner of treating subjects, and have
been linked to the prevailing Mutazilite philosophy
of the Abbasid period. His poems were published in
Cairo in 1875.
According to the
poet Adunis, Abu Tammam "started out from a vision
of poetry as a sort of creation of the world through
language, comparing the relationship between the
poet and the word to the relationship between two
lovers, and the act of composing poetry to the
sexual act
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Abu Nuwas
Abu-Nuwas al-Hasan ben Hani Al-Hakami
(756–814),a known as Abū-Nuwās (Arabic: ابونواس;
Persian: ابونواس, Abu Novas), was one of the
greatest of classical Arabic poets, who also
composed in Persian on occasion. Born in the city of
Ahvaz in Persia, of an Arab father and a Persian
mother,[1] he became a master of all the
contemporary genres of Arabic poetry, although his
fame rests principally on his poems in praise of
pederasty. Abu Nuwas has entered the folkloric
tradition, and he appears several times in The Book
of One Thousand and One Nights.
Abu Nuwas was born
to an Arab father whom he never knew, Hani, who was
a soldier in the army of Marwan II. His Persian
mother, named Golban, worked as a weaver.
Biographies differ on the date of Abu Nuwas' birth,
ranging from 747 to 762. Some say he was born at
Basra others in Damascus, Busra, or at
Ahwaz.[citation needed] His given name was al-Hasan
ibn Hani al-Hakami, 'Abu Nuwas' being a nickname:
'Father of the Lock of Hair' referred to the two
long sidelocks which hung down to his shoulders.
When Abu Nuwas was
still a boy, his mother sold him to a grocer from
Basra, Sa’ad al-Yashira. Abu Nuwas migrated to
Baghdad, possibly in the company of Walibah ibn al-Hubab,
and soon became renowned for his witty and humorous
poetry, which dealt not with the traditional desert
themes, but with urban life and the joys of wine and
drinking (khamriyyat), and ribald humor (mujuniyyat).
His commissioned work includes poems on hunting, the
love of women and boys, and panegyrics to his
patrons. He was infamous for his mockery and satire,
two of his favorite themes being the sexual
passivity of men and the sexual intemperance of
women. Despite his celebration of boy love, he was
less than sympathetic towards lesbianism, and often
mocked what he perceived as its inanity. He liked to
shock society by openly writing about things which
Islam forbade. He may have been the first Arab poet
to write about masturbation.
Ismail bin Nubakht
said of Abu Nuwas: "I never saw a man of more
extensive learning than Abu Nuwas, nor one who, with
a memory so richly furnished, possessed so few
books. After his decease we searched his house, and
could only find one book-cover containing a quire of
paper, in which was a collection of rare expressions
and grammatical observations."
Abu Nuwas was
forced to flee to Egypt for a time, after he wrote
an elegiac poem praising the elite Persian political
family of the Barmakis, the powerful family which
had been toppled and massacred by the caliph, Harun
al-Rashid. He returned to Baghdad in 809 upon the
death of Harun al-Rashid. The subsequent ascension
of Muhammad al-Amin, Harun al-Rashid's
twenty-two-year-old libertine son (and former
student of Abu Nuwas) was a mighty stroke of luck
for Abu Nuwas. In fact, most scholars believe that
Abu Nuwas wrote most of his poems during the reign
of Al-Amin. His most famous royal commission was a
poem (a 'Kasida') which he composed in praise of al-Amin.
"According to the
critics of his time, he was the greatest poet in
Islam." wrote F.F. Arbuthnot in Arabic Authors. His
contemporary Abu Hatim al Mekki often said that the
deepest meanings of thoughts were concealed
underground until Abu Nuwas dug them out.
Nevertheless, Abu
Nuwas was imprisoned when his drunken, libidinous
exploits tested even al-Amin's patience. Amin was
finally overthrown by his puritanical brother, Al-Ma'mun,
who had no tolerance for Abu Nuwas.
Some later accounts
claim that fear of prison made Abu Nuwas repent his
old ways and become deeply religious, while others
believe his later, penitent poems were simply
written in hopes of winning the caliph's pardon. It
was said that al-Ma'mun's secretary Zonbor tricked
Abu Nuwas into writing a satire against Ali, the
son-in-law of the Prophet, while Nuwas was drunk.
Zonbor then deliberately read the poem aloud in
public, and ensured Nuwas's continuing imprisonment.
Depending on which biography is consulted, Abu Nuwas
either died in prison or was poisoned by Ismail bin
Abu Sehl, or both.
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Al-Khansa
Tumāḍir bint ʿAmr
ibn al-Ḥarth ibn al-Sharīd al-Sulamīyah (Arabic:
تماضر بنت عمرو بن الحرث بن الشريد السُلمية ) ,
usually simply referred to as al-Khansā’ (Arabic:
الخنساء) (translated from Arabic as either
'gazelle' or 'short-nosed') was a 7th century Arabic
poet. She was born and raised in the Najd region
(the central region of modern-day Saudi Arabia). She
was a contemporary of Muhammad, and eventually
converted to Islam.
In her time, the
role of a female poet was to write elegies for the
dead and perform them for the tribe in public oral
competitions. Al-Khansa’ won respect and fame in
these competitions with her elegies for her
brothers, Ṣakhr and Muʿāwiyah, who had died in
battle. She is the best known female poet in Arabic
literature.
Al-Khansa’ was born into a rich family of Najd.
In 612 AD, her
brother Muʿawiyah was killed by members of another
tribe. Al-Khansa’ insisted that her brother, Sakhr,
avenge Muʿawiyah's death, which he did. Sakhr was
wounded in the process and died of his wounds a year
later. Al-Khansa’ mourned his death in poetry and
gained fame for her elegiac compositions.
She met the Prophet
Muhammad in 629 and converted to Islam. He is said
to have been very impressed by her poetry.
She had four sons:
Yazīd, Muʿāwiyah, ʿAmr, and ʿAmrah, all of whom
converted to Islam. She earned respect when she went
with her sons who fought in the Battle of Qadisiyah,
where all four were killed.
When she received
the news, she allegedly did not grieve, but said,
"Praise be to Allah who honored me with their
martyrdom. And I have hope from my Lord that he will
reunite me with them in the abode of his mercy."
(Arabic: الحمد لله الذي شرفني بقتلهم، وأرجو من ربي
أن يجمعني بهم في مستقر رحمته)
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Al-Farazdaq
Hammam ibn Ghalib Abu Firas, (Arabic: همام بن
غالب ، ابو فراس) commonly known as al-Farazdaq
(Arabic: الفرزدق) (Arabicized form of Persian
Parāzda پرازده: "lump of dough")
(ca. 641 - ca. 728-730) was an Arab poet.
He was born in Najd
and lived at Basra. He was a member of Darim, one of
the most respected divisions of the Bani Tamim, and
his mother was of the tribe of Dabba. His
grandfather Sa'sa' was a Bedouin of great repute,
his father Ghalib followed the same manner of life
until Basra was founded, and was famous for his
generosity and hospitality.
At the age of 15,
Farazdaq was known as a poet, and though checked for
a short time by the advice of the caliph Ali to
devote his attention to the study of the Qur'an, he
soon returned to making verse. In the true Bedouin
spirit he devoted his talent largely to satire and
attacked the Bani Nahshal and the Bani Fuqaim. When
Ziyad, a member of the latter tribe, became governor
of Basra in 669, the poet was compelled to flee,
first to Kufa, and then, as he was still too near
Ziyad, to Medina, where he was well received by the
city's emir, Said ibn al-As. Here he remained about
ten years, writing satires on Bedouin tribes, but
avoiding city politics.
But he lived a
prodigal life, and his amorous verses led to his
expulsion by the caliph Marwan I. Just at that time
he learned of the death of Ziyad and returned to
Basra, where he secured the favor of Ziyad's
successor Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad. Much of his poetry
was now devoted to his matrimonial affairs. He had
taken advantage of his position as guardian and
married his cousin Nawar against her will. She
sought help in vain from the court of Basra and from
various tribes. All feared the poet's satires. At
last she fled to Mecca and appealed to the political
contender to the Ummayids Abdallah ibn Zubayr, who,
however, succeeded in inducing her to consent to a
confirmation of the marriage.
Quarrels soon arose
again. Farazdaq took a second wife, and after her
death a third, to annoy Nawar. Finally he consented
to a divorce pronounced by Hasan al-Basri. Another
subject occasioned a long series of verses, namely
his feud with his rival Jarir and his tribe the Bani
Kulaib. These poems are published as the Nakaid of
Jarir and al-Farazdaq.
Al-Farazdaq became
official poet to the Umayyad caliph Al-Walid I
(reigned 705–715), to whom he dedicated a number of
panegyrics.
He is most famous
for the poem that he gave in Makkah when Ali bin
Hussain bin Ali bin Abu Talib (Zayn al-Abidin)
entered the Haram of the Kaba angering the emir. The
poem is extremely powerful. It is because of this
poem that he was imprisoned.
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Jarir ibn Atiyah
Jarir ibn `Atiyah
al-Khatfi Al-Tamimi Al-Najdi (Arabic: جرير بن عطية
الخطفي التميمي النجدي) (ca. 650 – ca. 728) was an
Arab poet and satirist. He was born in the reign of
the caliph Othman, and was a member of the tribe
Kulaib, a part of the Banu Tamim. He was a native of
al-Yamamah, but also spent time in Damascus at the
court of the Umayyad caliphs.
Little is known of
his early life, but he succeeded in winning the
favor of Al-Hajjaj bin Yousef, the governor of Iraq.
Already famous for his verse, he became more widely
known by his feud with rival poets Farazdaq and
Akhtal. Later he went to Damascus and visited the
court of the caliph Abd al-Malik and that of his
successor, Al-Walid I. From neither of these did he
receive a warm welcome. He was, however, more
successful with Umar II, and was the only poet
received by the pious caliph.
His verse, like
that of his contemporaries, is largely satire and
eulogy.
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Ibn Zaydun
Abu al-Waleed Ahmad
Ibn Zaydún al-Makhzumi (1003-1071) known as Ibn
Zaydún (Arabic full name,أبو الوليد أحمد بن زيدون
المخزومي) was a famous Arab poet of Cordoba and
Seville. His romantic and literary life was
dominated by his relations with the poetess Wallada
bint al-Mustakfi, the daughter of the Ummayad Caliph
Muhammad III of Cordoba. According to Jayyusi in her
book The Legacy of Muslim Spain, "Ibn Zaydun brought
into Andalusi poetry something of balance, the
rhetorical command, the passionate power and
grandeur of style that marked contemporary poetry in
the east...he rescued Andalusi poetry from the
self-indulgence of the poets of externalized
description."
Ibn Zaydun was born
in Cordoba to an aristocratic Arab family of the
tribe of Makhzum. He grew up during the decline of
the Umayyad caliphate and was involved in the
political life of his age. He joined the court of
the Jahwarid Abu al-Hazm of cordoba and was
imprisoned by him after he was accused of conspiring
against him and his patrons.
His relationship
with the Umayyad princess Wallada was quickly
terminated by Wallada herself. Some attributed this
change of heart to Ibn Zaydun's early anti-Umayyad
activities, while others mention his rivalry with
the rich minister Ibn Abdus, a former friend of Ibn
Zaydun, who supposedly gains Wallada's favor and
supported her. It is suggested that Ibn Abdus
himself was the one who instigated Abu al-Hazm ibn
Jahwar against Ibn Zaydun.
He sought refuge with Abbad II of Seville and his
son al-Mu'tamid. He was able to return home for a
period after the ruler of Seville conquered Cordoba.
Much of his life was spent in exile and the themes
of lost youth and nostalgia for his city are present
in many of his poems. In a poem about Cordoba he
remembers his city and his youth:
God has sent showers upon abandoned dwelling places
of those we loved. He has woven upon them a striped
many-coloured garmet of flowers, and raised among
them a flower like a star. How many girls like
images trailed their garmets among such flowers,
when life was fresh and time was at our
service...How happy were, those days that have
passed, days of pleasure, when we lived with those
who had back flowing hair and white shoulders
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The Qur'ān
The revelation of the Qurʾān to the Prophet Muhammad, beginning
at some point early in the 7th century ad, is the foundational
event in Islam. It separates the period before Islam (known as
the Jāhiliyyah [“period of ignorance”]) from the Islamic era and
provides the Muslim community with its most significant
monument, the word of God revealed to humanity. Its message is
conveyed in a language of great beauty, something that is
regarded as an inimitable miracle. Its contents are the primary
basis for the formulation of Islamic law and the designation of
conduct by Muslims, both as individuals and as a community.
However, beyond the Qurʾān’s central position within the Islamic
faith, the aftermath of its revelation led to a lengthy
scholarly process that traced its precedents and analyzed the
Arabic language system; as such, its revelation also needs to be
viewed as the event that marks the initial stages in the
recording and study of the Arabic literary tradition.
The word qurʾān means
“recitation,” illustrating a major difference between it and the
sacred scriptural sources of Judaism and Christianity: the
Qurʾān is primarily an oral phenomenon, something to be recited
and intoned (the latter involving a highly elaborated skill
known as tajwīd). The textual version of the Qurʾān was to
become the focus of a vast repertoire of scholarship—devoted to
the interpretation of the text and to the codification of the
dogmas, regulations, and ethical prescriptions that it contains
and the system of language that it represents—but from the
beginnings of Islam to the present day the sounds of the Qurʾān
have played a major part in the daily lives and practices of all
peoples living within the dominions of Islam.
Revelation, compilation, and
structure
Recite in the name of your lord who created— From an
embryo created the human.
This opening verse from the
96th sura (chapter) of the Qurʾān is believed to be the first
revelation to Muhammad (as translated by Michael Sells in
Approaching the Qurʾan). God in the first person addresses
Muhammad directly in the second person; those who listen to the
revelations delivered in Arabic from Muhammad’s mouth are
designated as “they.” During the course of Muhammad’s lifetime,
these revelations were memorized and recorded in written form.
This activity was carried out in Mecca until 622 ce
and—following the Hijrah (the migration of Muhammad and his
followers)—in the oasis town of Yathrib, later to be known as
Medina, where Muhammad remained from 622 until his death in 632.
But these revelations were not organized in any systematic
fashion. It was only after Muhammad’s death, when many of those
who had memorized the revelations were themselves dying, that
the Muslim community realized the urgent need to establish a
canonical version of the Qurʾān. That was achieved during the
reign of the third caliph to rule after Muhammad’s death,
ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān. Thereafter the text of the Qurʾān that had
been prepared under ʿUthmān was declared the only authoritative
version, and all variant versions were ordered destroyed.
Apart from the short opening
sura, Al-Fātiḥah (“The Opening”), which is regularly used by
Muslims as a prayer and at the conclusion of contracts
(including that of marriage), the suras of the Qurʾān are
arranged in order of length: the longest (Al-Baqarah [“The
Cow”], with 286 verses) is second while a selection of very
short suras comes at the end of the Qurʾān, with the six verses
of Al-Nās (“The People”) as the final—114th—sura. These short
suras belong to the Meccan period of revelation, while the
lengthier suras are made up of collections of revelations from
both the Meccan and Medinan periods.
Each sura begins with a listing
of its title, the number of verses it contains, the venue in
which its particular revelations were received, and its
placement in the order of suras. This method of compilation
allows for certain sections and narratives to be presented as
unified wholes; for that reason, Yūsuf (the 12th sura, the
Qurʾānic version of the Joseph narrative) has long been a
favourite object of study by Western scholars. However, in the
context of a history of Arabic literature, it is important to
recognize that the Qurʾān’s oral origins and its modes of
compilation led to the emergence of a text in which revelations
from different periods are interwoven. As a result, revelations
devoted to a single topic may be dispersed among several
different suras. Since the Qurʾān plays such an enormously
important role as a model for Arabic literary discourse, this
feature of the text is of central importance.
Message and impact
The primary
message of the Qurʾān is the absolute and indivisible oneness of
God, reflected in the first part of the shahādah (“statement of
faith”): there is no deity but God. His attributes are reflected
in the 99 “beautiful names,” adjectives used within the text:
merciful, powerful, forgiving, great, and so on. The message
imparted to humanity via his chosen prophet, Muhammad, is that
this world is but a preparation for the next and that believers
must live their lives with that fact in mind. God has provided
clear “signs” (āyāt) regarding the fates of peoples, such as ʿĀd
and Thamūd (sura 7, verses 65–79), who ignored this message.
Muslims are urged to live their lives in such a way that on the
Day of Judgment, when their deeds are weighed in the balance,
they will earn a place in paradise.
The message of the Qurʾān is
often illustrated with a variety of homiletic narratives. The
most famous is the story of Joseph, in the middle of which he,
while imprisoned, delivers a sermon on the oneness of God. Sura
18, Al-Kahf (“The Cave”), is also notable for its reference to
the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (verses 9–26), who
fall into a prolonged sleep and wake to find themselves in an
era of Christian belief, and to the story of Moses (verses
60–83), who is severely tested by the strange behaviour of the
mysterious, legendary figure al-Khiḍr (al-Khaḍir).
With the emigration of Muhammad
to Medina and the establishment of a Muslim community, the
revelations assume a somewhat different tone. The oral nature of
the communication between Prophet and community is reflected in
the many revelations on doctrinal and behavioral issues that
take the form of responses to questions. These revelations
incorporate the phrase “They will ask you about…” as part of the
text itself. Such pronouncements provide the source for Islamic
law regarding such matters as inheritance, usury, diet,
gambling, and marriage and divorce.
The Qurʾān is thus the primary
and central authority for the community of Muslim believers
throughout the world, and, as such, its sounds are heard and its
message is read by millions of people on a daily basis. Within
the realm of Arabic literature, the Qurʾān has played a
foundational role and continues to serve, much as the Bible does
in the history of Western literatures, as the major stylistic
yardstick for literary expression in the Arabic language and as
a major source of intertextual reference. Today the availability
of modern media has expanded still further the reach of the
Qurʾānic message, with the muezzin’s call to prayer amplified
across Islamic cities and with television and radio devoting
significant portions of their broadcasts to recitations of the
sacred text and commentaries on them.
Poetry
“The register of the Arabs” (dīwān al-ʿArab) is the age-old
phrase whereby Arabs have acknowledged the status and value that
poetry has always retained within their cultural heritage. From
the very earliest stages in the Arabic literary tradition,
poetry has reflected the deepest sense of Arab self-identity, of
communal history, and of aspirations for the future. Within this
tradition the role of the poet has been of major significance.
The linkage between public life and the composition of ringing
odes has remained a direct one from the pre-Islamic era—when the
poet was a major verbal weapon, someone whose verses could be
invoked to praise the heroes of his own tribe and to pour scorn
on those of their enemies—through the premodern period—when
poetic eulogies not only extolled the ruler who patronized the
poet but reflected a pride in the achievements and extent of the
Islamic dominions—to the modern period—in which the poet has
felt called upon to either reflect or oppose the prevailing
political mood. In times of crisis it has always been, and still
remains, the poet’s voice that is first raised to reflect the
tragedies, the anger, the fears, and the determination of the
Arab people.
The tribes of the Arabian
Peninsula in the pre-Islamic period (pre-7th century ce)
provided the social venue for the earliest examples of Arabic
poetry. The poet’s performances of his odes were a powerful tool
at the tribe’s disposal, arousing its heroes to battle against
their enemies, extolling the chivalry and generosity of its men
and the beauty of its women, and pouring scorn on the foibles of
opposing tribes. Fallen heroes were commemorated in the
marthiyyah, or elegy, and it is in this role that the voice of
the female poet is prominently heard, as, for example, in the
verses of the 7th-century poets al-Khansāʾ and Laylā
al-Akhyāliyyah. Many of the earliest male poets became renowned
as warriors and lovers, and around their careers (or, perhaps,
their “personae”; the historical existence of several poets
remains unverified) elaborate traditions of narrative developed,
as, for example, with the pre-Islamic cavalier-poet ʿAntarah and
the hapless love poet Majnūn Laylā (literally, “He Who Was
Driven Crazy by Love for Laylā”). Such was the status of the
poet as spokesman for the virtues of the tribal community that a
kind of anticommunal persona was developed in reaction by the
so-called ṣuʿlūk (“brigand”) poets, who were depicted as living
a life of solitude and hardship in the desert accompanied only
by its fiercest denizens (the snake, the hyena, and the wolf).
Taʾabbaṭa Sharran (“He Who Has Put Evil in His Armpit”) and
al-Shanfarā are among the best known of the ṣuʿlūk poets.
This tradition of poetry,
composed by poets and passed on through the memories of bards
from one generation to the next, emerged in the 7th century as
the primary linguistic precedent to the Arabic of the newly
recorded text of the Qurʾān. As such, it became the focus of a
great deal of attention as scholars began the lengthy process of
compiling, anthologizing, and analyzing the corpus of an oral
tradition of poetry that stretched back several centuries to
distant, unknown beginnings.
During the Islamic centuries
(post-7th century), poetry came to occupy a central place within
the courts of the caliph and of the sultans, emirs, governors,
and other potentates who ruled over the various regions of the
Islamic world following its breakup into smaller, more local
dominions. Poetry by itself rarely, if ever, provided a
sufficient living for even the most gifted crafter of verses,
and that remains as much the case today as it did during the
premodern period. A large percentage of poetry (especially
panegyrics) was inspired and often commissioned by the ruling
authorities for public recitation on many sorts of “state
occasions,” and the poet would expect to be rewarded for such
celebrations of the glories of Islam and its rulers.
Furthermore, a number of prominent figures—caliphs (Al-Walīd ibn
Yazīd, for example, and Ibn al-Muʿtazz), ministers,
philosophers, and theologians—were prominent contributors to the
poetic tradition. However, the variety of other genres and
subthemes that have been preserved in collections of poetry make
it clear that there were other occasions that were less public
and more informal at which poetry of a less official stamp would
be recited.
Metre and rhyme
The recording
of the earliest-known Arabic poetry provided future generations
with examples of recitations by bards of 7th- or 8th-century
versions of poems whose original composition and performance
date back perhaps centuries. The collections reveal an already
elaborate prosodic system, the earliest phases in the
development of which remain substantially unknown.
The various types of poem are
marked by particular patterns of rhyme and syllabic pulse. Each
line is divided into two half-lines (called miṣrāʿ); the second
of the two ends with a rhyming syllable that is used throughout
the poem. In order that the listening audience may internalize
the rhyme that is to be used, the first line (which is often
repeated) uses the rhyme at the end of both halves of the line;
thereafter the rhyme occurs only at the end of the complete
line.
The great 8th-century
philologist al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad developed a system whereby the
differing stress patterns that he heard in poetic recitations
were subdivided into 15 separate metres (later expanded to 16).
While al-Khalīl (who also wrote treatises on music and compiled
an Arabic dictionary) clearly stated that his system merely set
down one method for the metrical analysis of Arabic poetry and
while later scholars have suggested different systems, it is
remarkable that al-Khalīl’s prosodic system remained the
standard—and, indeed, constituted one of the modes of defining
what was poetic and what was not—until well into the 20th
century.
Categories and forms
One of the
earliest methods by which poems were categorized was that of
rhyming syllable. Thus, the famous pre-Islamic ode of the
brigand poet al-Shanfarā was known as Lāmiyyat al-ʿArab
(literally, “The L-Poem of the Arabs”). Even when, beginning
about the 9th century, the works of poets were habitually
collected under different categories, it was still common to
refer to famous odes by their rhyming syllable; thus the
Nūniyyah (“N-Poem”) of the 11th-century Andalusian poet Ibn
Zaydūn and Al-Tā’iyyah al-kubrā (“The Great Ode on T”) by the
13th-century Egyptian Sufi poet Ibn al-Fāriḍ. However, the
pioneer compilers of the earliest poetry soon developed further
modes of categorization based on length and, from that, on
segmentation. Poetry in general was referred to as qarīḍ, but
within that framework poetry was subdivided into two types. The
first was the qiṭʿah (“segment”), consisting of a relatively
short poem devoted to a single theme or else composed and
performed for a particular occasion; the marthiyyah, mentioned
above, is an example of such a poem. While many qiṭʿahs suggest
that they are complete in and of themselves, the structure of
others (as well as what is now known about the nature of oral
performances and the processes of recording them) points to the
possibility of their being the favourite memorized examples of
typical segments from a lengthier poetic performance.
That lengthier type—the second
type of qarīḍ—is the qaṣīdah, a polythematic poem that might
extend to 100 lines or more and that constituted an elaborate
celebration of the tribe and its way of life. The critical
tradition—exemplified most famously by the 9th-century writer
Ibn Qutaybah—analyzed such long poems within a tripartite
structure. In an opening section, called the naṣīb, the poem’s
speaker comes across a deserted encampment and muses
nostalgically about times past and especially about his absent
beloved. Via a transition, a second section (the raḥīl) recounts
a desert journey, thus affording the opportunity for
descriptions of animals—especially the camel and horse as
primary riding beasts—that are among the most famous and beloved
within the entire tradition of Arabic poetry. A section in
praise of the tribe (the madīḥ) comes third, in which one of
several possible “purposes” is proclaimed: boasts concerning the
heroism and endurance of the tribe’s fighters, the generosity
and hospitality of its people, the beauty of its women, or the
feats of its animals. Descriptions of wine drinking, gambling,
jousts, and horse races all contribute to the overall picture
through which the performance of the qaṣīdah presents a
ritualized liturgy in praise of community.
Initially 7, and later 10, of
the longer examples of the qaṣīdah were early recognized as
outstanding representatives of the large corpus of longer poems
that had been recorded in written form. They were collected as
Al-Muʿallaqāt (also known variously as the 7 (or 10) “long
poems” and the Seven Long Odes). The opening of the muʿallaqah
of 6th-century poet Imruʾ al-Qays is probably the most famous
line of poetry in Arabic:
Halt, you two companions, and
let us weep for the memory of a beloved and an abode mid the
sand-dunes between Al-Dakhūl and Ḥawmal.
While certain segments of each
muʿallaqah are especially famous—Ṭarafah’s elaborate description
of the camel, for example, and Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā’s depictions
of tribal wars— each of the poems invokes the imagery of the
desert and its way of life to re-create a mythical past. To this
day this collection is prized as a supreme poetic representation
of the essence of Arab culture and its values, with chivalry,
generosity, endurance, and hospitality as major components. (As
a counter to the length of these classics of early Arabic
poetry, the 9th-century philologist al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī
compiled a collection of shorter ancient poems, initially for
pedagogical purposes, that came to be known as
Al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt.)
These two subcategories of
qarīḍ were the predominant forms of expression in the history of
Arabic poetry up to the conclusion of World War II, but they
were not the only ones. As part of the unrecorded earliest
periods in the development of Arabic poetry, the metre and genre
of rajaz provided another form of the poetic (possibly emerging
out of the earlier category of sajʿ, or rhyming prose). This
form of poem served several functions, as is evident in, for
example, camel drivers’ songs, known as al-ḥidāʾ. The urjūzah (a
poem composed in rajaz) was also utilized for verbal display and
other types of didactic and even obscene poetry.
Later critics subsumed the
overall category of qarīḍ within a listing of what they termed
“the seven types” (al-funūn al-sabʿah) of poem. To the two major
forms discussed thus far, qarīḍ and rajaz, were added several
that utilized the colloquial form of the Arabic language (the
qūmā, for example, and the kān wa kān). But the two additional
forms that have occasioned the most interest among scholars
originated in the Iberian Peninsula: the zajal and the
muwashshaḥ. There is a great deal of controversy regarding
almost every aspect of these two forms—their early history,
their performance practices, their metrics, and their linkage to
the early history of Western lyric poetry. What is clear,
however, is not only that they provide a wonderfully accurate
picture of the rich multicultural environment found in
Al-Andalus during the Islamic period (8th–15th centuries), but
also that, following their migration across North Africa to the
Mashriq (as the eastern regions of the Islamic world were
termed), they contributed significantly to both the elite and
popular traditions of Arabic poetry.
A major change in the form of
the Arabic poem occurred in the late 1940s, when two Iraqi
poets, Nāzik al-Malāʾikah and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, almost
simultaneously decided to abandon the system of prosody that the
critical establishment had for centuries imposed as a principal
method of identifying the poetic, choosing to adopt in its place
a system that used variable line length and patterns of
assonance and repetition in place of end rhyme. While it should
be noted that there had been previous attempts to break out of
the rigid strictures of traditional metrics (especially in
colloquial poetic genres that were for the most part ignored by
critics), it was this gesture in the 1940s that ushered in a new
era for Arabic poetry, one that moved beyond the notion of
variable metre and line length to the prose poem and other
experiments in form and poetic discourse. With all that,
however, the traditional form of the qaṣīdah continued at the
hands of certain poets to hold an important place in the hearts
of those many Arabs who still enjoyed listening to the form. In
the latter half of the 20th century, Al-Akhṭal al-Ṣaghīr (pen
name of Bishārā al-Khūrī), Badawī al-Jabal (pen name of Muḥammad
al-Aḥmad), and Muḥammad al-Jawāhirī were notable qaṣīdah poets.
Genres and themes
Alongside
these methods of categorizing poetry and poets, some classical
critics identified three principal “purposes” (aghrāḍ) for the
public performance of poetry: first, panegyric (madḥ), the
praise of the tribe and its elders, a genre of poetry that was
to become the primary mode of poetic expression during the
Islamic period; second, praise’s opposite—lampoon
(hijāʾ)—whereby the poet would be expected to take verbal aim at
the community’s enemies and impugn their honour (most often at
the expense of women); and third, praise of the dead, or elegy
(rithāʾ).
Panegyric
Panegyric’s function as a means of extolling the virtues of the
tribe and its leaders was easily transferred, albeit within a
very different political and social context, from the
pre-Islamic period to the Islamic. Hyperbolic expressions of
satisfaction and delight with the ruler were intended to bolster
the ruler’s sense of self-esteem; this goal, the poet hoped,
would not only illustrate the prestige of the Muslim community
as a whole but also, on a more practical level, encourage the
presentation of largesse to the poet. The great master of the
genre, and arguably Arabic’s most illustrious poet, al-Mutanabbī
(“He Who Claimed to Be a Prophet”), is quite unsubtle in making
this point in a famous ode in praise of the great 10th-century
ruler of Aleppo, Sayf al-Dawlah:
To you belongs the praise
regarding the pearls that I pronounce;
You are the giver, but I am the arranger.
The very continuity of the
repertoire of imagery in this genre can be gauged by comparing
two lines written more than three centuries apart. The first is
by the pre-Islamic poet al-Nābighah addressing his ruler:
You are the sun itself, other
monarchs are stars.
When your light shines bright, the other stars vanish.
The second is another of
al-Mutanabbī’s lines, written after Sayf al-Dawlah was restored
to health after illness:
Light is now returned to the
sun; previously it was extinguished,
As though the lack of it in a body were a kind of disease.
Panegyric was adopted
immediately in the cause of Islam. The 6th- and 7th-century poet
Ḥassān ibn Thābit, often referred to as “the Prophet’s poet,”
composed panegyrics in praise of Muhammad, recording his
victories in strident tones and initiating a tradition of poems
in praise of the Prophet of Islam that continued throughout the
ensuing centuries. With the first dynasty of caliphs, the
Umayyads, panegyric became a major propaganda device. The
Christian poet al-Akhṭal, for instance, extolled figures who
were now not merely spiritual but also temporal rulers:
When nobility and number are
taken into account, you hail from a house that has no peer.
This widespread use of
panegyric to glorify Islam and its successes through public
performances of poems that record the policies and victories of
rulers continued into the ʿAbbāsid period. Indeed, with the
gradual fragmentation of central authority beginning in the 9th
century, the process was enhanced: rival caliphates and
dynasties flourished in widely scattered parts of the Islamic
world, and around them courts provided venues for the stentorian
boasts of poets. The Andalusian poet Ibn Hāniʾ undoubtedly
enraged the ʿAbbāsid caliph in Baghdad when he referred to the
capture of Cairo by the Fāṭimid dynasty:
“Has Egypt been captured?” the
sons of Al-ʿAbbas will ask. Inform them
that indeed the entire matter has been concluded.
As an important source of
patronage, the panegyric—now assuming a more bipartite
structure, extolling both the state of the people ruled and the
glory of the ruler’s own personage—became the major mode of
expression in qaṣīdah form until the 20th century. The volumes
of collected poetry (divans) of all the greatest poets contain
sections devoted to madḥ; beyond those poets mentioned above, a
short list of other great classical figures would have to
include Bashshār ibn Burd, Abū Tammām, al-Buḥturī, and Abū
Firās. With Abū Tammām in particular the panegyric genre became
the supreme (or, some critics claimed, the extreme)
manifestation of a trend in poetic creativity toward elaboration
in imagery and diction that was subsumed under the heading of
badīʿ (innovative use of figurative language), a development
that rapidly became a primary focus of critical debate.
During the ensuing centuries
poets carried on this tradition, and it was not until the second
decade of the 20th century that a severe critical analysis by
the Egyptian critic ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād of an ode by Egypt’s
most illustrious modern poet, Aḥmad Shawqī, suggested that the
forms, functions, and imagery of the occasional poem, not to
mention the role of the poet, were themselves in a process of
change.
Lampoon
Critical analyses of the Arabic poetic tradition point out that
the vigorous practice of lampooning is the obverse of panegyric:
by verbally flattening one’s foes, the ground is open for the
glorification of one’s own tribe or community. The themes of
hijāʾ (“lampooning”) and fakhr (“boasting”) thus often occur
together, and poets noted above for their contributions to the
panegyric were equally at home with the lampoon. Al-Mutanabbī,
in particular, is also famous for his withering attacks on Abū
al-Misk Kāfūr, the Ethiopian slave who was regent in Egypt in
the 10th century. Having quit the court of Sayf al-Dawlah, the
poet arrives full of hope and hyperbolic praise:
O father of musk, the visage
for which I have been yearning,
The precious moment that is my dearest wish.
But, when those hopes are
dashed, the poet leaves behind him a set of lampoons that are
bywords for the lampoon genre:
Never did I expect to witness a
time
When a dog could do me ill and be praised for it all the while.
The ability of words to hurt
and to shame is present in the Arabic poetic tradition from the
outset. The pre-Islamic poet ʿAmr ibn Qamīʾah is specific on the
point:
Many’s the tribal bard loaded
with hatred whom I have tamed,
So his folk have felt belittled and ashamed.
While defeat in battle is, of
course, a primary focus of derision in this type of poetry, the
honour of the community and the family has resided to a major
extent in the protection of its women. Al-Ḥārith ibn Ḥillizah’s
contribution to the tribal and poetic joust between himself and
ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm, recorded in Al-Muʿallaqāt, demonstrates one
form of insult within such a context:
We turned our attention to the
Banū Tamīm tribe. As we marked the truce month,
Their daughters were our maidservants.
During the Umayyad caliphate, a
number of poets indulged in a series of poetic jousts in
Al-Mirbad, the central square of the city Al-Baṣrah (Basra).
Collected as Al-Naqāʾiḍ (“Flytings”), these contests—involving
principally Jarīr and al-Farazdaq but also al-Akhṭal and
al-Ṭirimmāh—took the level of invective to new heights (or
depths):
Al-Farazdaq’s mother gave birth
to a fornicator; what she produced
Was a pygmy with stubby legs.
As with panegyric, the instinct
for lampoon found no shortage of targets in the ensuing
centuries. The great poet Abū Nuwās seems to be aware of the
risk he can take when he even teases the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd
over a scandal concerning the caliph’s sister:
If you get some pleasure from
the removal of some rascal’s head,
Do not kill him by sword; marry him to ʿAbbāsah!
While such poetic barbs may
have been part of the cut and thrust of political life in the
premodern period, the realities of life in the Arabic-speaking
world during the 20th century rendered most attempts at lampoon
a life-threatening exercise. This, however, did not prevent a
courageous figure such as the Iraqi poet Muẓaffar al-Nawwāb from
taking potshots at the rulers of Saudi Arabia:
The son of Kaʿbah is having
sex.
The world’s prices are on hold…
Elegy
The celebration of the life and courage of a tribal comrade
fallen in battle is the occasion for the earliest elegies in
Arabic. After an account of the death itself, these elegies
include an appreciation of the hero’s virtues, thus providing
yet another occasion for the community to express its unifying
principles. In her contributions to the genre, al-Khansāʾ mourns
the loss of two of her brothers, one named Ṣakhr:
On that day when I was forever
parted from Ṣakhr, Ḥassān’s father,
I bade farewell to all pleasure and converse.
Ah, my grief for him, and my mother’s grief!
Is he really consigned to the tomb morning and night?
This combination of personal
grief and communal mourning, with its underlying currents of
pride and aspiration, survived in the early schisms within the
Muslim community during the Islamic period, which came to
replicate the conflicts of earlier times. In the elegies of
those poets who adhered to groups such as the Shīʿites or the
Khārijites can be found much the same spirit. A 7th-century
Khārijite poet, for instance, laments Zayd, one of the group’s
fallen heroes:
To God I protest that, from
every tribe, battle has destroyed the cream of men.
So long as the sun shines to the East, may God quench Zayd’s
thirst,
And grant him a haven in the gardens of Paradise.
Like panegyrics and lampoons,
the elegy was adaptable to the expectations of the
ever-expanding Muslim community and itself became a further
means of public affirmation—mourning the dead, to be sure, but
also finding solace in the strength of Islam and its rulers.
Poetic divans of all eras are filled with elegies of rulers and
important figures. A particular topic of communal mourning is
the fall of an entire city to enemy forces. The renowned elegy
of the 9th-century poet Ibn al-Rūmī on the fall of Al-Baṣrah to
an army of slave labourers is a case in point:
My heart is seared with grief
for you, dome of Islam, a grief that extends my agony,
My heart is seared with grief for you, haven from distant lands,
one that will linger
For years to come.
The great philosopher-poet Abū
al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarrī combines his grief over the loss of a
relative with observations on the ephemerality of this life:
Soften your tread. Methinks the
earth’s surface is but bodies of the dead,
Walk slowly in the air, so you do not trample on the remains of
God’s servants.
As human conflicts continued
unabated through the 20th century and into the 21st, so the
elegy continued to fulfill its generic purposes as an expression
of personal sorrow and broader communal grief and steadfastness.
“Wa-ʿāda…fī kafan” (1964; “And He Came Home…in a Shroud”), by
the Palestinian poet Maḥmūd Darwīsh, is a modern example:
In our land they relate,
In grief they relate,
How my friend who departed
Came home in a shroud.
His name was…
No, don’t mention his name.
Leave it in our hearts,
Don’t allow the word
To be swept away by the wind…like ashes.
Description
To these three poetic genres—panegyric, lampoon, and elegy—was
added at an early stage another category that was quite
different in focus and yet reflected a very vigorous aspect of
the Arabic poetic tradition from the outset: description (waṣf).
Analysts of the earliest poetry chose to devote particular
attention to the ways in which poets depicted animals and other
aspects of nature and often indulged in complex patterns of
imagery that likened attributes of one animal to those of
another. The images of camels and horses—the two mainstays of
the tribe’s mobility—of the pre-Islamic poets are justifiably
well known. Imruʾ al-Qays describes his horse:
He has the loins of a gazelle,
the thighs of an ostrich; he gallops like a wolf
and canters like a young fox.
Ṭarafah’s camel is
Sure of foot and firm, as thin
as the planks of a bier; I quicken her
Pace over paths long-trodden, as varied as a striped shirt,
Able to outpace the swiftest camels, even of noblest stock,
With her hindlegs speeding behind her forelegs along the beaten
path.
The scenes and images that are
so characteristic of the earliest poems—animals, storm clouds,
evenings of revelry, places of recollection of the
beloved—linger within the Arabic poetic tradition as a whole, to
be invoked by Arab poets in quest of links to a nostalgic,
idealized view of the past. In 11th-century Spain, for example,
Ibn Khafājah could still return to the images of the Arabian
Peninsula for inspiration:
O oryx of Najd, through
destiny’s decrees many are the hardships,
but few indeed are the loyal.
Spain provides the poet with a
very different environment from that of Arabia, of course, and
the same Ibn Khafājah could also depict the kind of gardens for
which Andalusian palaces (including the Alhambra) are still
renowned:
In a garden where the shade was
as dark as ruby lips
and blossoms grew, as white as pearly teeth.
The strong link in Islam
between the garden and paradise ensured that elaborate
descriptions of attempts by temporal rulers to replicate within
their own palaces the pleasures of the life to come would remain
a prominent theme of Arabic poetry. The theme and the imagery
were later adopted by the romantic poets of the 20th century, as
in ʿAlī Maḥmūd Ṭāhā’s poem “Ughniyah rīfiyyah” (“Rustic Song”):
As water plays with the shade
of the trees
And clouds flirt with the moonlight…
There in the darkness stands a willow
As though unnoticed in the dusk.
Later genres
As the ceremonial qaṣīdah during the Islamic centuries became
more and more the realm of panegyric, other themes within the
pre-Islamic tradition—wine, hunting, love, and maxims—emerged as
separate genres in their own right. At least by the time of Abū
Nuwās, who wrote during the 8th and 9th centuries, the collected
works of a poet would contain sections that included, among
other categories, khamriyyāt (wine poems), ṭardiyyāt (hunt
poems), zuhdiyyāt (ascetic poems), and ghazal (love poems).
Wine poetry
The earliest poetry in Arabic contains much description of wine
and revelry. The opening lines of the muʿallaqah of ʿAmr ibn
Kulthūm are a famous instance:
Up there, maiden, and bring us
a morning draught in a goblet;
Do not hold back on the prize vintages of ʿAndarīn!
The pre-Islamic poet al-Aʿshā
was especially recognized for his wine poetry. As such he became
a focus of special attention in a famous work composed by
al-Maʿarrī in the 11th century, Risālat al-ghufrān (“The Epistle
of Forgiveness”; Eng. trans. Risalat ul Ghufran: A Divine
Comedy), in which a sheikh travels to paradise to ascertain the
treatment of prominent pre-Islamic figures in the light of
Islamic codes of behaviour, and Al-Aʿshā and other pre-Islamic
poets are made to justify their graphic depictions of
pre-Islamic revelry and wine drinking. The Qurʾān’s injunctions
against wine drinking—e.g., sura 5, Al-Māʾidah (“The Table”),
verse 90—provide the context of such discussions. These firm
injunctions are an expression of Islamic orthodoxy, but the very
number of poetic divans that contain sections devoted to wine
poetry illustrates the extent to which poetry could be used to
confront such religious attitudes. One of the Umayyad caliphs,
al-Walīd ibn Yazīd, was a notable wine poet, and the spirit of
challenge to orthodoxy reached its height with Abū Nuwās, who,
far from concealing his bibulousness, was determined to flaunt
it:
Ho, pour me a glass of wine,
and confirm that it’s wine!
Do not do it in secret, when it can be done in the open.
With Abū Nuwās, the wine poem
(khamriyyah) acquires a set of actors—the publican, the
companions, the wine pourer (sāqī), the curvaceous wine
bottle—all of whom tilt against the fates. The poetry of Abū
Nuwās and his successors is a clear challenge to Islamic
orthopraxy (correctness of practice), and at the same time it
offers a revealing glimpse of the private proclivities of the
ruling elite.
This same set of images within
the wine poem provides the framework for poetry of an entirely
different purpose: that of the Sufi (mystical) poets. While the
Persian tradition, with world-renowned figures such as Jalāl
al-Dīn al-Rūmī and Ḥāfeẓ, provides peerless examples of the
genre, the Egyptian poet and Sufi master Ibn al-Fāriḍ also
utilizes the imagery of the genre to great effect. The opening
line of his mystical khamriyyah mentions not only wine (now
acting as a symbol for the achievement of a transcendent state)
but also the ancient theme of the absent beloved. However, the
vintage of this particular wine precedes human awareness:
In remembrance of the beloved
we drank a wine,
Through which we were drunk before the vine was ever created.
Hunt poetry
The many hunt scenes to be found in the earliest Arabic
poetry—one of the most notable is in Imruʾ al-Qays’s
muʿallaqah—illustrate the love of this sport among the Arabs of
the desert, one that continues to the present day. As the
pre-Islamic qaṣīdah continued to furnish poets during the
Islamic period with themes for separate categories of poem, it
is to be expected that a separate type of hunt poem (ṭardiyyah)
would emerge. Indeed, such were the leisure interests of many of
the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid caliphs that the new genre thrived.
In these poems the scene of the
morning departure is still present, having been carried over
from the opening section (naṣīb) of the qaṣīdah, and the
speaker’s companions are the saker falcon (ṣaqr) and the hunting
dog. Both are often portrayed in luxuriant detail and often
become the poem’s heroes. Abū Nuwās’s divan contains many
examples of this category:
When a fox emerges at the foot
of the mountain,
“Up!” I yell to my hound, and he rushes away like a hero.
Brave-hearted he is, a splendid worker, well trained,
And perfect in every way.
The caliph, poet, and critic
Ibn al-Muʿtazz clearly reflects his personal interests and
experience in his own contributions to the hunt poem:
The trainer brought out a lithe
saluki-hound
that he had often used…,
She snatches her prey without hesitation,
Just as a mother hugs her children.
Ascetic poetry
The pre-Islamic muʿallaqah poet Zuhayr finishes his long poem
recounting tribal warfare and attempts at reconciliation with a
series of reflections and maxims:
Life’s experience has taught me
the happenings of yesterday and today;
As for the morrow, I admit to being totally blind.
The proclivity, often indulged
in by the Arab poet, for homiletic advice and contemplation
found a fruitful source in not only the Qurʾān’s pointed
comments on the ephemerality of this life in comparison with the
next (as in, for example, sura 11, Hūd, verses 15–16) but also
the Islamic community’s quest for a more individual mode of
access to the transcendent. As is the case with other religions,
the latter is closely linked to the advocacy of an ascetic life,
a call in which the Qurʾānic message is proclaimed by the life
and sayings of a figure such as al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī. While many
poets contributed to the repertoire of the ascetic poem
(zuhdiyyah), it is Abū al-ʿAtāhiyah whose name is most closely
associated with the genre. In poem after poem he concentrates on
the mortality of humanity; as part of that theme there is
frequent allusion to the ubi sunt (Latin: “where are”) motif,
asking what has happened to the great historical figures of
yesteryear and pointing to their common abode in the grave:
Note well! All of us are dust.
Who among humanity is immortal?
With the poetry of al-Maʿarrī,
the homiletic aspect is blended with philosophical contemplation
and pessimism. For him life is not merely a brief period of
preparation for what is to come but an experience of sheer
misery. In one of his most famous lines he states:
Would that a babe could die at
the hour of its birth
And never suckle from its mother in her confinement.
Before it can even utter a word, it says to her: All you will
Glean from me is grief and trouble.
With al-Maʿarrī these
expressions of asceticism and rejection of this world and its
values were coupled with a vigorously iconoclastic attitude
toward Islamic orthodoxy of his time and toward those who
advocated its tenets.
Like the hunt poem discussed
above, the ascetic poem as a distinct genre seems to have been
the product of a particular era in the development of Islamic
thought and its expression in literary form. That is not to say,
of course, that its motif—an exhortation to abandon the
ephemeralities of this world—has not retained its homiletic
function in Arabic poetry to the present day, but rather that
the theme of humankind’s mortality is now subsumed within poems
with a variety of purposes. The modern Egyptian poet Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd
al-Ṣabūr, for instance, depicts a rural preacher in his “Al-Nās
fī bilādī” (1957; “The People in My Country”):
So-and-so constructed palaces
for himself and raised them up…
But one weak-echoed evening arrived the Angel of Death…
And down into Hell rolled the soul of So-and-so.
Love poetry
The theme of love has been present in the Arabic poetic
tradition since the earliest poems committed to written form.
The bulk of the love poetry that has been preserved was composed
by male poets and expresses love and admiration for women.
(Whatever early tradition there may have been of women’s poetry
has not survived, although women have always played a major role
in funeral rituals, including the composing and reciting of
elegies, for which al-Khansāʾ and Laylā al-Akhyāliyyah are best
known.) The examples of a homoerotic tradition of love poetry
that have been preserved belong in the main to the later
centuries of the classical period, beginning in the 9th century.
The earliest Arabic poems
reveal distinctly different attitudes to the theme of love. The
desert environment, the nomadic lifestyle, and the need for
constant travel all contribute to a poetic vision that focuses
on absence, departure, lack, and nostalgia. In the majority of
poems the beloved is absent; memories of her belong to the past,
and future encounters are dependent on the dictates of fate.
During the Islamic period, this desert-inspired approach to love
was adapted and transformed into a strand of love poetry called
ʿUdhrī, named for the tribe to which the poet Jamīl, one of its
best-known practitioners, belonged. In these poems the lover
spends a lifetime of absence and longing, pining for the beloved
who is tyrannical and cruel (aiming arrows at the heart and eye)
and yet remains the object of worship and adoration. ʿUdhrī
poetry belongs to a courtly love tradition, and indeed many
scholars have suggested it as a precedent to the development of
a similar strand in Western literatures during the Middle Ages.
The early centuries of recorded Arabic poetry are replete with
collections of poetry written by ʿUdhrī poets, all of whom are
known by a name that incorporates their beloved’s: Jamīl
Buthaynah, Majnūn Laylā, Kuthayyir ʿAzzah; the story of Majnūn
in particular became the subject of folkloric narratives and
other artistic media, such as miniature painting, drama, and
song.
Alongside this attitude to love
in early poetry, however, there is in the muʿallaqah of Imruʾ
al-Qays a much different one, in which the poet’s persona is
engaged in encounters with the fair sex that are considerably
different:
One day I entered ʿUnayzah’s
camel-litter:
“Damn you!” she protested, “you’ll force me to dismount.”
The litter kept swaying all the while. “You have hobbled my
camel,
Imruʾ al-Qays,” she said, “so dismount now!”
Imruʾ al-Qays poem is a clear
precedent to another strand of love poetry that emerged in
Arabia’s urban centres (including the city of Mecca) early in
the Islamic era. It is termed ʿUmarī, named for the poet ʿUmar
ibn Abī Rabīʿah, whose poems reveal much closer contact with the
beloved and reflect a strongly narcissistic attitude on the part
of the poem’s speaker.
With the passage of time,
elements from these two strands were blended into a unified
tradition of the Arabic love poem (ghazal); images from the
ʿUdhrī repertoire were particularly favoured by the Sufi poets
in their mystical verses. Al-Bashshār ibn Burd’s divan contains
love poems of both types, but it is once again Abū Nuwās who
makes major innovative contributions. His love poetry affords
insight into the tolerant approach of ʿAbbāsid society to
varying sexualities, as he composes verses involving homosexual
and bisexual relationships:
“Hello,” said the Devil
swooping down. “Greetings to one
whose penitence is sheer delusion!…
What about a sensuous virgin-girl with wonderful breasts?”….
“No!” I replied. “Then what about a beardless youth, one
whose plump buttocks are all aquiver?”….
“No!” I replied again….
The genres of zajal and
muwashshaḥ that originated in Muslim Spain had love as their
primary theme. Often blending both ʿUmarī and ʿUdhrī themes with
songs and popular poems in Romance dialects, they present a
blend of images and motifs that is representative of the
cultural environment in which they were created.
Unlike some of the other genres
already mentioned, the ghazal has remained popular into the
modern period. While the romantic movement in the early 20th
century provided an impetus for many poets, the quest for new
identities in postindependence societies and, in particular, the
increasing prominence of works by women produced significant
change in Arabic love poetry. The Syrian diplomat and poet Nizār
Qabbānī managed in a single career to become the Arab world’s
primary love poet and a commentator on political controversies:
Ah, my love!
What is this nation of ours that can treat love like a
policeman?
The Kuwaiti poet Suʿād al-Ṣabāḥ
expresses her frustration with the continued echoes of the
earlier tradition:
I’m bored by ghazal of the
dead…
Sitting down for dinner each night…
With Jamīl Buthaynah…
Please try to deviate from the text just a little
And invent me.
Modern Arabic poetry
The
penetration of poetry into the fabric of Arab-Islamic society in
the premodern era was a major factor in the continuing vigour
that the neoclassical school was to display well into the 20th
century. Al-ʿAqqād’s criticism of an ode by Aḥmad Shawqī (see
above Genres and themes: Panegyric) and the popularity of the
odes of Badawī al-Jabal and Muḥammad al-Jawāhirī reflect a trend
that retained its position alongside the new initiatives in
imagery and mood fostered by romantic poets such as Khalīl
Jubrān (more commonly known in the West as Khalil Gibran),
Īliyyā Abū Māḍī, Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābbī, and ʿAlī Maḥmūd Ṭāhā.
The major break with tradition
and, many critics would maintain, the onset of a genuine sense
of modernity came in the aftermath of World War II. The quest
for independence and the creation of the State of Israel were
two political factors that, along with many others, stimulated a
cry for a more “committed” approach to literature, with poetry
fulfilling a central social function in such a context. The
metrical experiments undertaken by the Iraqi poets Nāzik
al-Malāʾikah and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb in the 1940s, combined
with the translation into Arabic of the Middle Eastern segments
of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative
Religion and
T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, were more
aesthetically based stimuli to the development of an entirely
new outlook on the form and content of the poem and the role of
the poet.
The Palestinian people were a
continuing source of inspiration for politically committed poets
across the Arab world during the second half of the 20th
century, especially for Palestinian poets. Tawfīq Zayyād, Fadwā
Ṭūqān, Samīḥ al-Qāsim, and Rāshid Ḥusayn all addressed
themselves to the injustices they saw in Palestinian daily life.
But Maḥmūd Darwīsh’s poetry, penned during a lengthy career that
continued into the 21st century, best encapsulates the fate of
his fellow Palestinians through vivid depictions of their
losses, their defiance, and their aspirations. Other poets, such
as the Iraqi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī, expressed their
commitment to the cause of revolutionary change on a broader
canvas, a posture that led al-Bayātī (like so many other modern
Arab poets) to a life of exile far from his homeland.
The 1950s in the cosmopolitan
city of Beirut witnessed the creation of the poetry group Shiʿr
(“Poetry”), whose magazine of the same name was an influential
organ of change. At the core of this group were Yūsuf al-Khāl
and Adonis (the pen name of ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd), arguably the most
influential figure in modern Arabic poetry. In its radical
approach to poetic form (including the prose poem) and its
experiments with language and imagery, this group was emblematic
of the many new directions that Arabic poetry was to follow in
the latter half of the 20th century. Poets such as the Lebanese
Khalīl Ḥawī and the Egyptian Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-Ṣabūr, both as well
acquainted with the classical canon of Arabic poetry as they
were with recent trends in the West, left behind them divans
that, like that of al-Sayyāb, are already acknowledged as
20th-century classics of Arabic poetry.
While Adonis continued with his
experiments in every aspect of his art, an entire generation of
poets across the Arabic-speaking world at the turn of the 21st
century were taking poetry in a variety of new directions. Among
the notable poets were the Syrian Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ, the
Moroccan Muḥammad Bannīs, the Iraqi Saʿdī Yūsuf, and the
Egyptians Muḥammad ʿAfīfī Maṭar and Amal Dunqul. In the
21st-century world of global communication and of television,
video, and the Internet, Arabic poetry struggled to find a place
within the public domain, but, when political crises loomed, it
was the voice of the poet that continued to express the
conscience, the agony, and the aspirations of the Arab people.
Belles lettres and narrative prose
As has been the case with many world cultures, the emergence of
a tradition of belles lettres in Arabic is closely linked to the
bureaucratic class and its quest for professional identity. In
the case of Arabic literature, that process finds its beginnings
in the Umayyad caliphal court during the 8th century. Earlier
“nonpoetic” texts do, of course, exist, but for a number of
reasons they are best considered as precedents to the tradition
that was to develop.
The revelation of the Qurʾān
not only involved a process of recording, compilation, and
verification but also established a clear textual boundary; it
was neither poetry nor prose but the inimitable Qurʾān. The fact
that the Qurʾān showed most of the features of a characteristic
form of pre-Islamic discourse known as sajʿ (usually translated
as “rhyming prose” but almost certainly a very early form of
poetic expression) complicated matters considerably, in that
some of the earliest extant Arabic materials consist of the
utterances of soothsayers (kuhhān) couched in precisely the same
form of discourse. The similarities between the suras,
particularly the earlier ones, of the Qurʾān and these other
types of homiletic texts were tactfully ignored for several
centuries, leaving the phenomenon of sajʿ in a kind of critical
limbo—heavily utilized but historically unanalyzed.
Alongside these earliest
examples of “prose,” a number of official documents have also
survived in the form of treaties and the like. Also recorded
were accounts of the pre-Islamic peninsular tribes and
especially of their great battles. These latter accounts, the
so-called Ayyām al-ʿArab (“Battle Days of the Arabs”; the term
is also applied to the battles themselves), were couched in a
particular format that was an indigenous characteristic of the
anecdote, the generic title of which is khabar (“report”). The
first segment in this format consisted of the isnād (“chain of
authority”), which used a variety of verbs to register the type
of narrative involved and, most significantly, established the
level of the report’s veracity by listing the names of
transmitters back to the source. This initial segment was then
followed by the matn (“backbone,” or the content of the report).
As the community of Muslims set itself to record not only the
Qurʾān itself but the deeds and sayings of Muhammad, reports of
this kind were collected, categorized, and sifted, thus
initiating a vast exercise in history, genealogy, critical
analysis, and anthologizing.
The most authentic reports were
gathered into collections of Ḥadīth, accounts of the Prophet’s
sayings and actions. The best-authenticated reports became part
of two collections, both called the Ṣaḥīḥ, compiled by
al-Bukhārī and Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, which together are the
second most important source of Islamic law and practice after
the Qurʾān itself. These reports also became part of the
collections of maghāzī (accounts of the Prophet’s raids during
his lifetime) and sīrah (biographies of the Prophet). Beyond
these specific genres, however, the logical structure of the
khabar was replicated in a wide variety of other generic
contexts. It is even possible to see the maqāmah genre (see
below The concept of adab: Narratives of the imagination) as a
pastiche of the khabar’s narrative principles.
The concept of adab
A major
feature of premodern prose literature in Arabic was adab, a term
that in modern usage is translated as “literature” but that in
origin is closely connected with the English concept of “polite
letters” and the French term belles-lettres, both of which imply
a close linkage between the act of writing and the manners and
norms of a community. In the case of Arabic, that community
consisted of a number of functionaries of the Islamic court and,
especially, bureaucrats and chancery officials. With the
elaboration of caliphal and other varieties of court life, the
adīb (“litterateur”), the practitioner of adab, joined forces
with the nadīm (“boon companion”) and the ẓarīf (“arbiter of
taste and fashion”) in providing both enlightenment and
entertainment for the ruler. In the particular case of adab, the
initial priorities involved the preparation of codes of conduct
and practice for the increasingly large secretariat, which was
growing in conjunction with the administrative needs of the
ever-expanding Islamic dominions, and of useful (and often
diverting) materials with which they could fulfill the demands
of their profession. A major part of the resulting repertoire of
works is a tradition of practical manuals, monographs, and
compilations of information of every conceivable type. All these
genres combined into the development of a field of study that
was to become extremely influential in the educational life of
the Muslim community.
Alongside these trends there
was also an ongoing process whereby speakers and writers of
other languages who became Muslims and worked in the various
offices of the court translated works into Arabic. A major early
contributor to this process was an 8th-century Persian scholar,
Rūzbih, who adopted the Arabic name Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ. He
translated from the Persian a collection of animal fables about
kingship, the Panchatantra (a work of Indian origin), which he
titled in Arabic Kalīlah wa Dimnah (“Kalīlah and Dimnah”); its
narrative method and its particular style were among its
contributions to the development of a new secretarial mode of
composition. He also composed a manual for secretaries, Kitāb
ādāb al-kabīr (“The Major Work on Secretarial Etiquette”). At a
later date, another translation movement, much encouraged by the
ʿAbbasīd caliph al-Maʾmūn, rendered much of the Hellenistic
heritage from Greek, often via Syriac, into Arabic, the products
of which were stored in the great Baghdad library Bayt al-Ḥikmah
(“House of Wisdom”). The beginnings of a tradition of epistle
composition are associated with ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, known as al-Kātib
(“The Secretary”), who in the 8th century composed a work for
the son of one of the Umayyad caliphs on the proper conduct of
rulers.
The intellectual issues
reflected in the varied compositions of the secretarial class,
all of which were vigorously debated within the new
multicultural environment of the caliphal court, were to be
brought to new levels of sophistication in the 9th century by
one of Arabic literature’s greatest figures, ʿAmr ibn Baḥr,
whose physical ugliness led him to be forever known by the
nickname al-Jāḥiẓ (“The Man with Boggling Eyes”).
Al-Jāḥiẓ and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī
Al-Jāḥiẓ earned a reputation in his own lifetime as a prodigious
polymath, and the breadth of his learning is reflected in the
listing of his works. He compiled anthologies of poetry and
anecdote about animals (Kitāb al-ḥayawān) and misers (Kitāb
al-bukhalāʾ), and he wrote essays (rasā’il) on every conceivable
topic (on theological controversies, on race and colour, on
envy, on food, on speech, and so on). He also wrote a highly
influential work of early criticism, Kitāb al-bayān wa al-tabyīn
(“Book of Clarity and Clarification”). Apart from sheer
erudition and a delight in controversy, what sets al-Jāḥiẓ’s
works apart is, first, his total mastery of a clear and concise
Arabic style that reflected the new influences on the Muslim
community and, second, a great predilection for digression—a
reflection, no doubt, of the apparently limitless nature of his
curiosity and memory. The following brief extract illustrates
some of these aspects of his craft:
Discourse, just like people,
can be subcategorized. It may be serious or trivial, elegant and
fine, or else crude and nasty, either amusing or the opposite.
It is all Arabic…. As far as I am concerned, no speech on earth
is as enjoyable and useful, as elegant and sweet to the ear, as
closely linked to sound intellect, as liberating for the tongue,
and as beneficial for the improvement of diction as a lengthy
process of listening to the way that eloquent, learned, and
intelligent Bedouin talk.
Even during al-Jāḥiẓ’s lifetime
the extent of his erudition and genius was widely recognized,
and his achievements were deemed virtually unattainable. In
later generations one prominent figure, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī,
whose turbulent life is an apt reflection of the vicissitudes of
court patronage during the 10th and 11th centuries, provides
another example of virtuosic prose and breadth of interest. His
extreme self-criticism led him to destroy some of his writings,
but his renowned anthology of anecdotes, Kitāb al-imtāʾ wa
al-muʾānasah (“Book of Enjoyment and Bonhomie”), and his often
scurrilous commentary on cultural and political infighting,
Kitāb mathālib al-wazīrayn (“Book on the Foibles of the Two
Ministers”), provide ample justification for his reputation as
one of Arabic’s greatest stylists.
Varieties of adab: compilations, anthologies, and manuals
While al-Jāḥiẓ and al-Tawḥīdī represent the higher achievements
of those who practiced the arts and subgenres of adab, many
other court officials, bureaucrats, and arbiters of public
discourse contributed to a continuing process whereby
information, opinion, and entertainment were placed at the
disposal of the educated elite of the courts within the Islamic
dominions. Ibn Qutaybah followed the early example of ʿAbd
al-Ḥamīd and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in preparing manuals on scribal
practice and etiquette, but he also played a major role in
laying the groundwork for further research in a number of
fields, including the meaning of the Qurʾān, orthodoxy, and the
principles of historical writing. In the context of compilation,
his most notable achievement is the multivolume work Kitāb ʿuyūn
al-akhbār (“Book of Springs of Information,” or “Book of Choice
Narratives”), which, as its title implies, intended to make
available to its readers information and anecdote on a wide
variety of topics (eloquence, for example, as well as
friendship, asceticism, and a final section on women). This
large anthology is one of the earliest examples of compilations
of the curious yet engaging variety of materials that was
characteristic of the literary salons (majālis) gracing the life
of the court. It is an apt reflection of the enormous demand for
enlightening and entertaining information that was a feature of
the lifestyle of the educated elite within the urban communities
of the Muslim world. Through the ensuing centuries, such works
continued to constitute a primary activity for the community of
litterateurs. Among the major contributors to the genre were
al-Thaʿālibī, al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, and Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmud ibn
ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī. Another major contributor, al-Tanūkhī,
also compiled a collection that is an example of the al-faraj
baʿd al-shiddah (“escape from hardship”) genre, which involves
sequences of anecdotes in which people find release from
difficult situations, often at the very last minute and as a
result of the generosity of others. A still later work by
al-Qalqashandī, the 15th-century Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā (“The Dawn of the
Blind”), approaches Ibn Qutaybah’s in its compendiousness, but
its practical bent makes it a kind of comprehensive summary of
the secretarial manual genre.
The same instinct for
compilation can be seen in a number of famous collections that
focus in particular on the “literary” genres of poetry and
anecdotal narrative. An early example is the Andalusian Ibn ʿAbd
Rabbih’s Al-ʿIqd al-Farīd (“The Unique Necklace”), in which each
section is named after a precious jewel, and, most celebrated of
all, the Kitāb al-aghānī (“Books of Songs”) of Abū al-Faraj
al-Iṣbahānī (al-Iṣfahānī), a major source on Arabic poetry and
poets as well as performance practice.
There were also rasāʾil
(essays) devoted to particular topics. In addition to his works
on animals and misers, for example, al-Jāḥiẓ also took singing
girls as his topic in Risālat al-qiyān (The Epistle on
Singing-Girls of Jāḥiẓ). Other topics ranged from complex
discussions of theology and philosophy to the ethics of begging
and gate-crashing social events. The theme of love was
especially popular, and a wide variety of intellectuals focused
their attention on it. The Andalusian jurist and poet Ibn Ḥazm,
for example, wrote his Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah (“Dove’s Neckring”), a
charmingly intimate portrait of social intercourse within the
Islamic community of the 11th century, while Ibn al-Jawzī
contributed his Dhamm al-hawā (“Condemnation of Passion”), a
preacher’s warning concerning the perils of passion. Sheikh
al-Nafzāwī’s Al-Rawḍ al-ʿāṭir fī nuzhat al-khāṭir (“The Perfumed
Garden Concerning the Heart’s Delights”) is, thanks to the
interest of Sir Richard Burton (who translated it under the
title The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui), widely known
in the English-speaking world as a classic among sex manuals.
As is the case within the
Western literary traditions, the category of “literature” in the
premodern period of the Arabic heritage was not restricted to
belles lettres alone; it also included such genres as biography
and history. Indeed, the presence of such “nonliterary” genres
is a distinct characteristic of the phenomenon of adab. At the
turn of the 21st century, research into the textual functions of
narratives increasingly subjected these genres to types of
analysis that had traditionally been reserved for literary
works. Some categories of historical and geographical writing
(particularly annalistic versions of the former, for example,
and urban topographies within the latter) remained beyond the
attention of narratologists, but they too are works that clearly
fall within the boundaries of adab. Especially notable among
historical writing is al-Masʿūdī’s Murūj al-dhahab wa maʿādin
al-jawāhir (“The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems”), in which
he traces the history of the world up to his own time and shows
remarkable knowledge of myth, geography, and history. The
tradition of writing histories of enormous scope continued
throughout the ensuing centuries, with famous contributions by
Ibn Miskawayh, Ibn al-Athīr, Ibn Kathīr, and the world-renowned
Ibn Khaldūn, whose introduction to his history Al-Muqaddimah is
generally acknowledged as a major milestone in the theorization
of historical studies. His geographical works range from the
listing of postal routes to detailed descriptions of countries
and, at a later stage, cities.
The institution of the journey
is, thanks to the institution of the pilgrimage (hajj) that is
enjoined upon all healthy Muslims at least once in their
lifetime, the inspiration for a school of travel narrative, a
genre for which the Arabs are well known (and of which the
series of tales recounted by Sindbad the Sailor, a late addition
to The Thousand and One Nights, is an apt reflection). In 921
Ibn Faḍlān was dispatched by the caliph in Baghdad to visit the
peoples of the Volga River region, but the records of two
travelers from the Maghrib best reveal the hardships of such
lengthy travels. Ibn Jubayr traveled from Granada to Mecca to
perform the pilgrimage; his Riḥlah (“Travels”; Eng. trans. The
Travels of Ibn Jubayr) is a somewhat hyperbolic account of the
curiosities he encountered. Ibn Baṭṭūṭah initially traveled from
Tangier to Mecca for the same purposes but, after spending a
period in Mecca, decided to continue on. He traveled all the way
to China before making his way back to his native city. His
Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharāʾib al-amṣār wa ʿajāʾib al-asfār
(“Beholder’s Delight Concerning Strange Cities and Incredible
Travels”), commonly known by the title Riḥlah, is thus not
merely a treasure trove of information and insight but a
thoroughly engaging narrative.
Narratives of the imagination
A number of prominent Arab litterateurs composed narratives
involving travel into the worlds of the imagination. The
11th-century Andalusian poet Ibn Shuhayd, for example, utilized
his Risālat al-tawābiʿ wa al-zawābiʿ (“Epistle on Familiar
Spirits and Demons”) to converse with the spirits of his poetic
forebears, and his contemporary al-Maʿarrī adopted the same
narrative strategy in the Risālat al-ghufrān. On a more
philosophical and mystical plane, another Andalusian writer, Ibn
Ṭufayl, followed the lead of his illustrious predecessor Ibn
Sīnā (known in the West as Avicenna) by writing the allegory of
Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive, Son of Wakeful”; Eng. trans. Ḥayy ibn
Yaqẓan by Ibn Ṭufayl), concerning a man who is born on an island
by spontaneous generation, learns to appreciate the natural
world he lives in, and, having traveled to another island where
he encounters other humans and their various systems of living
and believing, decides to return to a life of contemplation on
his own island.
One narrative genre that is
specific to the Arabic literary tradition is the maqāmah, a form
of narrative that emerged out of several already existing
trends. Following the works of al-Jāḥiẓ, one strand in Arabic
prose style, influenced by the same aesthetic principles as had
driven the badīʿ trend in poetry, relished elaboration and its
concomitant patterns of repetition and assonance. During the
10th century, at the court of Rayy, in Iran, the celebrated
minister and arbiter of taste al-Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād gathered
around him a remarkable cluster of great writers in numerous
fields; the prolific and versatile al-Tawḥīdī could manage only
the lowly rank of scribe in such a coterie. A notable
practitioner of this new trend was Abū al-Faḍl ibn al-ʿAmīd, but
it was another visitor to this court, al-Hamadhānī, who managed
to combine the new aesthetics of style—especially the adoption
of sajʿ, the ancient form of rhyming prose—with attractive
vignettes of social and intellectual life into a totally new
genre, the maqāmah, earning for himself the title of “Badīʿ
al-Zamān” (“Wonder of the Age”). Developed by his great
successor al-Ḥarīrī into a vehicle for tremendous feats of
stylistic virtuosity, the maqāmah genre was a much-favoured mode
of prose expression for the intellectual elite of the
Arabic-speaking world until the latter half of the 20th century.
Popular narratives
To a Western
world for which The Thousand and One Nights has long since
become a classic of world narrative, it is something of a
surprise to learn that attitudes within Arab societies toward
appropriateness of language use and performance mode have
excluded that collection and a host of other huge compilations
of narrative from the Arabic literary canon. Intense Western
interest in the collection followed its translation into French
by Antoine Galland (published between 1704 and 1717) and
resulted in the addition of numerous tales to the original
collection, which includes fewer than 170, and in the subsequent
publication of “complete” versions. But it was only in the late
20th century that the advent of social-scientific modes of
research moved beyond questions of “sources” and engaged in
serious investigation of the narrative features of these
collections.
Until the advent of broadcast
media, the ḥakawātī (storyteller) remained a major fixture of
Arabic-speaking countries, choosing a select spot either in the
open air of evening or in a café from which to recite episodes
from some of the great sagas of Arab lore (in Arabic, siyar
shaʿbiyyah). These include the exploits of the legendary
poet-cavalier ʿAntar (see Romance of ʿAntar), the much-traveled
tribal confederacy of the Banū Hilāl, the warrior-princess Dhāt
al-Himmah, and the wily ʿAlī Zaybaq. In the context of such a
public tradition of multi-episodic storytelling, the status of
The Thousand and One Nights within Arabic literature is
difficult to assess, since it seems to have started as a much
shorter contribution to the “mirror for princes”
genre—collections of exemplary fables intended to illustrate the
principles of proper kingship—before Western interest led to its
rapid expansion into its current form.
Whatever attitudes may prevail
regarding the canonical status of these enormous collections of
narrative, they have served as inspiration and as models not
only for writers of modern fiction but also for numerous
experiments in drama. While the public function of the
storytellers may have disappeared from most countries of the
Arabic-speaking world, the collections of tales that they
performed remain as a remarkable treasure trove of world
narrative.
"The Arabian Nights"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV,
PART V
Illustrations by V. Sterrett
Illustrations by E. Dulac
Modern fiction
The development
of modern Arabic fiction took place within a cultural context in
which two major forces were in play and sometimes in
confrontation. The first of them is what has been termed “the
rediscovery of the West”—more particularly, an interest in the
products and critical methods of Western literary traditions.
The second is a search for inspiration in the Arabic literary
heritage. At different phases of the long process generally
referred to as al-nahḍah (“the renaissance”; see Arabic literary
renaissance), which began at different times within the large
area that is the Arab world, the relative importance of these
two forces shifted, but both were (and remain) constants.
During the earliest phases, the
influence of Europe and its literary heritage was very strong,
with Arab writers impelled by the need to address the realities
of European colonization in large portions of the Middle East.
Inhabitants of the region initiated or renewed contacts with the
countries to the north and west: Italy first and then France.
Missions of students sent to study language and technology
returned and commenced the process of translating texts into
Arabic. At first those texts were mostly of a practical nature
(such as military and engineering manuals), but the proclivities
of many of the translators insured that works of literature were
soon added to the repertoire of available texts. The process of
introducing these new genres to an Arab world readership from
the outset relied to a substantial extent on publication
opportunities afforded by the press: daily newspapers
(especially the Friday edition) and specialized weekly and
monthly journals.
The short story
While the short story was not the first fictional genre to make
its appearance during the course of the 19th century, it
certainly was the first to adapt itself to a new cultural
environment, as writers set about using it as a means of
illustrating social problems. The pages of the press permitted
early Egyptian pioneers in short narrative such as ʿAbd Allāh
Nadīm and Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī to publish vignettes in
which they cast a critical eye on the habits and foibles of
their fellow countrymen, while in Lebanon Khalīl Jubrān (Khalil
Gibran) and later Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿaymah analyzed the problems of
family life and broader societal issues—the role of the clergy,
problems of emigration, the crushing effects of city life, and
so on.
A major advance in short-story
writing occurred in the early and mid-20th century with a group
of Egyptian writers who became known as Jamāʿat al-Madrasah
Ḥadīthah (“New School Group”). The pioneer figure of the school,
Muḥammad Taymūr, died at an early age, but the other members of
the group elaborated on his efforts and brought the genre to a
level of real maturity: if Muḥammad’s brother Maḥmūd Taymūr was
certainly the most prolific, both Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī and Maḥmūd Ṭāhir
Lāshīn were the most accomplished craftsmen.
While Egyptian writers
continued to advance the generic prominence of the short story,
writers in other regions—albeit with differing
chronologies—developed their own local traditions; these include
the Palestinian Khalīl Baydas, the Tunisian ʿAlī al-Duʿājī, the
Iraqi Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb, and the Lebanese Tawfīq Yūsuf ʿAwwād.
With the increasing emergence of women into the public domain
(once again a variable phenomenon across countries), women
writers began to contribute short stories that provided new
insights into issues of family and society; among such pioneers
are Suhayr al-Qalamāwī of Egypt, Ulfat Idilbī of Syria, and
Samīrah ʿAzzām of Palestine.
Two writers, by their
concentration on the art of the short story, have come to be
widely acknowledged as genuine masters of their craft: Yūsuf
Idrīs of Egypt and Zakariyyā Tāmir of Syria. Beginning a writing
career in the 1950s with an outpouring of story collections,
Idrīs—who wrote plays and novels, as well as publishing many
more story collections in the last half of the 20th
century—managed to recount in his vignettes the realities of the
life of the poor, primarily in the Egyptian countryside but also
in the ancient quarters of Cairo. As political oppression began
to impinge upon the daily life of Egyptians, Idrīs added to his
authentic visions a series of new and symbolic portrayals of
oppression and alienation that encapsulated an entire era in
contemporary Arab societies. Zakariyyā Tāmir’s contributions to
the genre tend to be concerned with a highly terse and symbolic
representation of the callous indifference of authority and
bureaucracy, often expressed through nightmarish visions of
violence, both verbal and physical.
At the beginning of the 21st
century, the short story was by far the most popular literary
genre in the Arab world; for nonprofessional writers it was a
relatively short-term project with the prospect of many
publication outlets, and for readers it provided an opportunity
to interpret a brief expression of contemporary concerns, both
social and political. The short story was also on frequent
occasions readily adaptable to the more lucrative and
increasingly available alternatives of film and television. A
very short list of distinguished contributors to the genre would
include Aḥmad Būzufūr (Būzfūr) of Morocco, Ḥasan Naṣr of
Tunisia, Ḥaydar Ḥaydar of Syria, Fuʾād al-Tikirlī and Muḥammad
Khuḍayyir of Iraq, Laylā al-ʿUthmān of Kuwait, and Yaḥyā
al-Ṭāhir ʿAbdallāh, Muḥammad al-Bisāṭī, Salwā Bakr, and Ibrāhīm
Aṣlān of Egypt.
The novel
Through the popularity of early translations into Arabic of
works of European fiction (Jules Verne and
Alexandre Dumas, père
being especially popular) and imitations of them by Arab
writers, the novel rapidly established a place for itself within
the currents of intellectual change during the 19th century.
Among the earliest examples of the novel in Arabic were Ghābat
al-ḥaqq (1865; “Forest of Truth”), an idealistic allegory about
freedom that was published in Syria by Fransīs Marrāsh, and
Al-Huyām fī jinān al-shām (1870; “Passion in Syrian Gardens”), a
work set during the 7th-century Islamic conquest of Syria, by
Salīm al-Bustānī. The latter work appeared in serial form in the
Bustānī family’s journal, Al-Jinān, and this publication mode
established a pattern that was to be followed by writers of
Arabic fiction for many subsequent decades. Premodern history
also came to be frequently invoked in the Arabic novel. This
trend found a notable exponent in Jurjī Zaydān, who used the
pages of his own journal, Al-Hilāl, to publish a series of
novels that educated and entertained generations of readers by
setting key events in Islamic history against local backgrounds.
Alongside these early efforts
in novel writing, a neoclassical strand of narrative became
evident, one that focused in particular on the classical genre
of the maqāmah. Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī’s Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn (1856; “The
Meeting Place of the Two Seas”) is a conscious revival of the
style and generic purpose of earlier examples, but Aḥmad Fāris
al-Shidyāq’s Al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāryāq (1855;
title translatable as “One Leg over Another [or The Pigeon on
the Tree Branch], Concerning al-Fāryāq [Fāris al-Shidyāq]”),
which contains a set of maqāmāt, looks to the future in its use
of the autobiographical travel narrative (and its incorporation
of a female voice) as a means to compare and criticize
contemporary societies. Those critical features are even more
marked in another neoclassical and transitional narrative,
Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām (1907; “Īsā ibn
Hishām’s Tale”), a highly sarcastic account of
turn-of-the-century Egypt under British occupation.
As is to be expected, the
importation and adaptation of the novel genre in the
Arabic-speaking world involved a longer process than that of the
short story. While the developmental sequence was relatively
similar within each subregion, the chronology was not. Thus, an
important moment in the Egyptian tradition was the initially
anonymous publication in 1913 of a novel, Zaynab (Eng. trans.
Mohammed Hussein Haikal’s Zainab), by “a peasant Egyptian.” It
presents the reader with a thoroughly nostalgic picture of the
Egyptian countryside, which serves as the backdrop for the
fervent advocacy of the need for women’s education. The author,
Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, had written the work while studying in
France, and the influence of a variety of European Romantic
narrative traditions is very clear. Elsewhere within the region,
novel writing was initiated at a later date: in Iraq by Maḥmūd
Aḥmad al-Sayyid with Fī sabīl al-zawāj (1921; “On the Marriage
Path”); in Algeria by Aḥmad Riḍā Hūhū with Ghādat umm al-qurā
(1947; “Maid of the City”); and in Morocco by ʿAbd al-Majīd ibn
Jallūn with Fī al-ṭufūlah (1957; “In Childhood”).
The confluence of a series of
political, social, and critical trends in the Arab world—the
development of nationalist ideas, which gave rise to a quest for
independence from colonial occupation and a new sense of
identity, coupled with developments in education and a
concomitant interest in other literary traditions—resulted in a
concentration of creative energy on the novel during the 1930s.
The process may be seen as beginning with the appearance of Tāhā
Husayn’s fictionalized autobiography, Al-Ayyām (3 parts,
1929–67; The Days), and the republication of Haykal’s Zaynab in
1929. The following decade saw the appearance of works by Tawfīq
al-Ḥakīm (notably ʿAwdat al-rūḥ [1933; Return of the Spirit] and
Yawmiyyāt nāʾib fī al-aryāf [1937; “Diary of a Country
Prosecutor”; Eng. trans. The Maze of Justice]), Ibrāhīm
al-Māzinī, ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād, Maḥmūd Taymūr, and Maḥmūd
Ṭāhir Lāshīn. Much influenced by these important literary
figures, a young philosophy graduate from Cairo University began
to explore the novel genre, and in 1939 the first novel of
Naguib Mahfouz (Najīb Maḥfūẓ) appeared, a historical novel set
in ancient Egypt entitled ʿAbath al-aqdār (“Fates’ Mockery”).
Mahfouz, who in 1988 became the
first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is
acknowledged as the writer who brought the Arabic novel to a
stage of complete maturity and acceptance within the
Arabic-speaking world. Over his lengthy career he experimented
with technique in a variety of ways. He started with the social
realism of his “quarters” novels, each one set in a different
section (quarter) of the old city of Cairo, which culminated in
the justly famous Cairo Trilogy (1956–57). He then turned to a
more symbolic mode in his novels of the 1960s (with examples
such as Al-Liṣṣ wa al-kilāb [1961; The Thief and The Dogs] and
Thartharah fawq al-Nīl [1966; “Chatter on the Nile”]).
Thereafter he participated with the members of a younger
novelistic generation in a variety of explorations of newer
modes and styles while still casting a critical eye on
developments in his own homeland and reflecting on the major
issues confronting the citizens of the Third World.
Like the short story, the novel
genre now flourishes throughout the Arab world; the demands of
time and expense in both creation and publication may make the
novel somewhat less plentiful than the short story, but to the
Egyptian critic Jābir ʿUṣfur, the beginning of the 21st century
marked “the era of the novel,” to cite the title of his book
Zamān al-riwāyah (1999). (For a list of notable novels that have
been published in English, see Sidebar: Arabic Novels in English
Translation.)
Tāhā Husayn
Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, also
spelled Taha Hussein or Taha Husain (b. Nov. 14,
1889, Maghāghah, Egypt—d. Oct. 28, 1973, Cairo),
outstanding figure of the modernist movement in
Egyptian literature whose writings, in Arabic,
include novels, stories, criticism, and social and
political essays. Outside Egypt he is best known
through his autobiography, Al-Ayyām (3 vol.,
1929–67; The Days), the first modern Arab literary
work to be acclaimed in the West.
Ṭāhā Ḥusayn was
born in modest circumstances and was blinded by an
illness at age two. In 1902 he was sent to al-Azhar
seminary in Cairo, the leading Sunni centre of
higher Islamic education, but he was soon at odds
with its predominantly conservative authorities. In
1908 he entered the newly opened secular University
of Cairo, and in 1914 he was the first to obtain a
doctorate there. Further study at the Sorbonne
familiarized him with the culture of the West.
Ṭāhā Ḥusayn
returned to Egypt from France to become a professor
of Arabic literature at the University of Cairo; his
career there was frequently stormy, for his bold
views enraged religious conservatives. His
application of modern critical methods in Fi al-shiʾr
al-jāhilī (1926; “On Pre-Islamic Poetry”) embroiled
him in fierce polemics. In this book he contended
that a great deal of the poetry reputed to be
pre-Islamic had been forged by Muslims of a later
date for various reasons, one being to give credence
to Qurʾānic myths. For this he was tried for
apostasy, but he was not convicted. In another book,
Mustaqbal al-thaqāfah fī Miṣr (1938; The Future of
Culture in Egypt), he expounds his belief that Egypt
belongs by heritage to the same wider Mediterranean
civilization that embraces Greece, Italy, and
France; it advocates the assimilation of modern
European culture.
Serving as minister
of education (1950–52) in the last government formed
by the Wafd party before the overthrow of the
monarchy, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn vastly extended state
education and abolished school fees. In his later
literary work he showed increasing concern for the
plight of the poor and interest in energetic
governmental reforms; he also strongly defended the
use of literary over colloquial Arabic.
The first part of
Al-Ayyām appeared in 1929 (Eng. trans. An Egyptian
Childhood) and the second in 1932 (Eng. trans. The
Stream of Days). At age 78 he published a book of
memoirs, Mudhakkirāt (1967; Eng. trans. A Passage to
France), considered a third volume of Al-Ayyām. In
1997 all three parts were published together in
English translation as The Days.
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Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz,
also spelled Najīb Maḥfūẓ (b. Dec. 11, 1911, Cairo,
Egypt—d. Aug. 30, 2006, Cairo), Egyptian novelist
and screenplay writer, who was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1988, the first Arabic
writer to be so honoured.
Mahfouz was the son
of a civil servant and grew up in Cairo’s Al-Jamāliyyah
district. He attended Fuʾād I University (now Cairo
University), where in 1934 he received a degree in
philosophy. He worked in the Egyptian civil service
in a variety of positions from 1934 until his
retirement in 1971.
Mahfouz’s earliest
published works were short stories. His early
novels, such as Rādūbīs (1943; “Radobis”), were set
in ancient Egypt, but he had turned to describing
modern Egyptian society by the time he began his
major work, Al-Thulāthiyyah (1956–57), known as The
Cairo Trilogy. Its three novels—Bayn al-qaṣrayn
(1956; Palace Walk), Qaṣr al-shawq (1957; Palace of
Desire), and Al-Sukkariyyah (1957; Sugar
Street)—depict the lives of three generations of
different families in Cairo from World War I until
after the 1952 military coup that overthrew King
Farouk. The trilogy provides a penetrating overview
of 20th-century Egyptian thought, attitudes, and
social change.
In subsequent works
Mahfouz offered critical views of the old Egyptian
monarchy, British colonialism, and contemporary
Egypt. Several of his more notable novels deal with
social issues involving women and political
prisoners. His novel Awlād ḥāratinā (1959; Children
of the Alley) was banned in Egypt for a time because
of its controversial treatment of religion and its
use of characters based on Muhammad, Moses, and
other figures. Islamic militants, partly because of
their outrage over the work, later called for his
death, and in 1994 Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck.
Mahfouz’s other
novels include Al-Liṣṣ wa-al-kilāb (1961; The Thief
and the Dogs), Al-Shaḥḥādh (1965; The Beggar), and
Mīrāmār (1967; Miramar), all of which consider
Egyptian society under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime;
Afrāḥ al-qubba (1981; Wedding Song), set among
several characters associated with a Cairo theatre
company; and the structurally experimental Ḥadīth
al-ṣabāḥ wa-al-masāʾ (1987; Morning and Evening
Talk), which strings together in alphabetical order
dozens of character sketches. Together, his novels,
which were among the first to gain widespread
acceptance in the Arabic-speaking world, brought the
genre to maturity within Arabic literature.
Mahfouz’s
achievements as a short-story writer are
demonstrated in such collections as Dunyā Allāh
(1963; God’s World). The Time and the Place, and
Other Stories (1991) and The Seventh Heaven (2005)
are collections of his stories in English
translation. Mahfouz wrote more than 45 novels and
short-story collections, as well as some 30
screenplays and several plays. Aṣdāʾ al-sīrah al-dhātiyyah
(1996; Echoes of an Autobiography) is a collection
of parables and his sayings. In 1996 the Naguib
Mahfouz Medal for Literature was established to
honour Arabic writers.
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Drama
As the most public of genres, drama always presents the literary
historian with a rich blend of exemplars and issues. When the
textual forms, language levels, and publics are as varied as
those of the Arabic-speaking world, the topic becomes
particularly complex. One might begin by pointing out that, in
the first decade of the 21st century, theatre was not present in
some Arab-world countries governed by conservative regimes, such
as Saudi Arabia, and was a new phenomenon in others, such as the
countries of the Persian Gulf. In many other countries where
drama was permitted, every aspect of production was subject to
the closest scrutiny by censorship authorities (known as lajnat
al-qirāʾah). These practical issues aside, modern Arabic drama
continued to exist in a cultural milieu in which there was
ongoing tension between the perceived tastes (and concomitant
financial support) of elite and popular audiences and between
the differing aesthetic criteria applied to productions in the
standard written (literary) language and the colloquial
dialects. Drama and its practitioners also found themselves
confronted with the popularity and global reach of rival
media—film, television, and video, all of which tended to have
recourse to the same set of performers. If drama in the West
found itself similarly challenged, this was much more the case
in a number of Arabic-speaking regions where a tradition of
literary drama was barely a century old.
Beginnings
It has become
customary to trace the beginnings of modern Arabic drama
entirely to Western influence, as part of the process of
al-nahḍah (“the renaissance”) noted above. Any search for a
library of textual precedents in Arabic drama that would be
analogous to the Western canon—from Greek tragedy, via
William
Shakespeare and the French tragedians
Pierre Corneille and
Jean
Racine, to such 20th-century playwrights as
Luigi Pirandello and
Bertolt Brecht—would be in vain, as would any attempt to
identify a tradition of theatre buildings and companies that
would parallel that of the West. However, in the history of
Western culture, drama’s performance boundaries also extend
beyond such a canon, which is limited to those texts performed
within a theatre and reliant on the expectations and conventions
of such a space; one need think only of the cycles of religious
plays associated with many European cities (such as the Chester
plays and York plays of England).
Within this more comprehensive
view of the history of drama, the premodern era offers many
examples of similar public performance genres in Arabic. The
storyteller (ḥakawātī) regularly performed extracts from a whole
series of popular narrative sagas on the street, often
accompanied by musical instruments; his tales related, for
example, the chivalry of ʿAntar or the migration of the Banū
Hilāl tribe and its hero, Abū Zayd, or the victories of the
sultan Baybars against the Crusaders. During the Shīʿite holy
month of Muharram, Muslims processed through the streets,
reenacting the events of the Battle of Karbalāʾ (680 ce), during
which the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī was
killed. Cafés and other public places also provided venues for
shadow plays (khayāl al-ẓill), which regularly poked fun at the
foibles of politicians and bureaucrats. Especially during the
period of Ottoman control over large portions of the
Arabic-speaking world, the Karagöz puppet show was a prevalent
popular source of public entertainment, much like its Western
analogue, the Punch-and-Judy play. All these different types of
public dramatic events retained their popularity throughout the
premodern era and remained a source of inspiration for
playwrights into the modern period, particularly for those who
endeavoured to combine some of the effects of Brechtian dramatic
theory with a search into the heritage of the Arab past for
inspiration.
In addition to all the above
manifestations of the dramatic in the premodern era, the written
texts for a series of 13th-century plays by the Egyptian oculist
Ibn Dāniyāl have survived. Because the author’s preface notes
that these “new” plays were intended to replace a series of
other scripts that had become hackneyed, it seems likely that
the performance tradition into which they were intended to fit
had been in existence for some time. Ibn Dāniyāl’s examples
probably reflect the general spirit of the genre in that they
are bawdy farces, full of slapstick incident and scatological
reference; the chief character in one of the plays, Ṭayf
al-Khayāl, is al-Amīr Wiṣāl, translatable as Prince Intercourse.
Literary drama
In 1847 Mārūn
al-Naqqāsh, who had recently returned from a stay in Italy,
obtained permission from the Ottoman authorities in Syria to
produce in his house Al-Bakhīl, a play inspired by Molière’s
drama L’Avare. Most of the actors involved either were members
of his family or were friends. While there are reports of
earlier performances by visiting European theatre troupes, this
performance is generally regarded as the beginning of the modern
Arabic tradition of staged performance of text-based drama.
These early beginnings in Syria were among the many social and
cultural phenomena in that region that were disrupted by the
civil war that erupted in the 1860s. The Naqqāsh family troupe
and others moved to Egypt, where the cultural and political
atmosphere was more conducive to theatre; prominent among the
other troupes was that of Abū Khalīl al-Qabbānī, whose
performances in Damascus had been censored and even canceled
after complaints from the conservative Islamic establishment.
The theatrical scene that these Syrian émigrés encountered in
Egypt was both lively and varied. To perform his dramas in the
colloquial dialect, the Egyptian Jewish playwright Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʿ
had assembled a troupe that attracted the attention of the
khedive of Egypt, Ismāʿil, who encouraged Ṣannūʿ to produce
more—until, that is, he discovered that he himself was the butt
of some of the humour. Alongside such popular fare, the
translator Muḥammad ʿUthmān Jalāl “Egyptianized” several plays
by Molière, including, most famously, a version of Tartuffe,
Al-Shaykh Matlūf. The Egyptian public thus found an evening’s
entertainment might consist of a serious text-based drama based
on the fabled Arabian past, a popular farce with strong
political overtones, or even the performance of an opera by
Giuseppe Verdi at the newly constructed opera house.
In fostering this performance
tradition, Egypt served a pioneer role in the Arabic-speaking
world after the earlier but aborted initiatives in the Syrian
region. Drama spread to other regions through the visits of
troupes from both Western countries and Egypt itself. This was
particularly true for the countries of northwest Africa (the
Maghrib), where such visits to Tunisia in 1908 and Morocco in
1923 led to the appearance of local troupes, while the famous
actor Jūrj Abyaḍ—a Christian from Syria—took his renowned troupe
from Egypt to Iraq in 1926.
Because of the popularity of
slapstick forms and the increasingly prevalent role of singing
and dancing in performances, Arab audiences maintained an
ambiguous understanding of the essence of drama—whether, in
short, it was “literature” or entertainment. In response there
arose a perceived need for plays that would underline the
literary and textual aspect of drama. The fulfillment of that
project was the enormous achievement of the Egyptian writer
Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, who, because of the theatre’s reputation, felt
constrained to publish his earliest plays under the pseudonym
Ḥusayn Tawfīq.
Tawfīq al-Hakīm
Beginning in
the 1930s, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm composed a series of lengthy plays
based on themes culled from Greek legend, the Qurʾān, and Middle
Eastern history in order to create a dramatic literature that
was acceptable to the critical establishment in Egypt and
beyond, particularly with regard to its merit as “literature.”
The first of the plays was Ahl al-kahf (Eng. trans. Tawfīq
al-Ḥakīm’s The People of the Cave), based on the legend of the
Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who emerge from a prolonged period of
sleep to find themselves living in the Christian era. Ahl
al-kahf is probably based on the interpretation of this story in
sura 18 of the Qurʾān. Attempts to perform this play onstage in
the 1930s revealed at once a tension between, on the one hand, a
quest for a “literary” tradition of Arabic drama based on the
form of the language that is standard throughout the Arab world
and, on the other, the natural desire to employ colloquial
dialects and other local cultural phenomena to portray the
immediate and pressing social and political issues of the day—a
tension that has continued to dog Arabic drama ever since
(although, it must be said, with a host of intermediate
positions between these two poles). Other plays by al-Ḥakīm,
such as Shahrazād (1934; “Scheherazade”), Pijmalīyūn (1942;
“Pygmalion”), and Al-Malik Ūdīb (1939; “King Oedipus”; Eng.
trans. in The Arab Oedipus), all involve a minimum of action
onstage and dialogues between characters in which philosophical
positions are argued at length. Initially, al-Ḥakīm responded to
criticisms regarding the actability of these plays by resorting
to the notion of a “theatre of ideas” and the argument that
these were plays intended for reading only. However, as
al-Ḥakīm’s career proceeded, he undertook a number of
experiments in an attempt to reconcile the tensions that his
pioneering works had provoked and illustrated. In the 1940s he
penned a number of one-act plays, initially for newspaper
consumption, many of which succeeded through a necessarily more
concentrated medium in lending greater movement to the dramatic
action; Ughniyat al-mawt (1950; “The Song of Death”; Eng. trans.
in Fate of a Cockroach, and Other Plays) is particularly
noteworthy in this regard.
Later full-length plays, such
as Al-Sulṭān al-ḥāʾir (1960; “The Sultan’s Dilemma”; Eng. trans.
in Fate of a Cockroach, and Other Plays), suggest that al-Ḥakīm
was more aware of the need for action and event, and several of
his later plays were acted onstage with notable success.
However, the other area in which his ongoing experiments were
most noteworthy, if not always successful, was that of dramatic
language. Ironically, one of his most successful plays (and
productions) was an Absurdist drama, Yā ṭāliʿ al-shajarah (1962;
The Tree Climber), where the usage of the standard literary
language in dialogue helped contribute to the “unreal” nature of
the play’s dramatic logic. Al-Ḥakīm also wrote a few plays in
the colloquial dialect of Egypt, but his most memorable
experiment was his attempt to forge what he termed a “third
language,” which achieved a cleverly crafted level between the
literary and the colloquial through the use of syntactic and
lexical elements common to both. The result allowed a play to be
read on the page as a literary text and to be acted onstage as a
somewhat lofty version of the colloquial.
Modern Arabic drama
Al-Ḥakīm was
one of the favourite authors of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel
Nasser, who had come to power during the revolution of 1952, and
he was perhaps the major Egyptian cultural figure in the
following decades. The enormous process of social and political
change in Egypt provided a rich backdrop for the development of
a new tradition of theatre, and the cultural apparatus of the
government provided abundant funding for that process. Theatre
was apparently regarded as one of the few allowable outlets for
the expression of public concerns and doubts that were
rigorously controlled elsewhere. In retrospect, the two decades
after 1952 have come to be regarded as a kind of “golden era”
for not merely Egyptian drama but Arabic drama as a whole.
Virtually every aspect of the theatrical community—the cultural
apparatus of the state, a relatively large cluster of
playwrights, a cadre of producers and directors (many of them
trained in Europe and, most notably, the Soviet Union), and a
group of well-qualified and involved critics—seemed to be
working toward common goals. Beginning in the 1950s and ’60s
with Nuʿmān ʿĀshūr, who used a series of plays to present the
Egyptian public with insightful analyses of its own class
structure and values, a series of dramatists, among them Saʿd
al-Dīn Wahbah, Maḥmūd Diyāb, and ʿAlī Sālim, penned in the
colloquial dialect of Cairo dramatic texts that were highly
successful on stage. Another contributor to this rich period in
Egyptian theatrical life was Yūsuf Idrīs, whose celebrated play
Al-Farāfīr (1964; The Farfoors, or The Flipflap) combined
elements of traditional comic forms of dramatic presentation
with such Brechtian effects as the presence of an “author” as a
stage character and the use of theatre-in-the-round staging.
Alfred Faraj took a somewhat different course, invoking tales
and incidents from history and folklore (and especially from The
Thousand and One Nights) in order to illustrate contemporary
political and social realities. Faraj chose to follow al-Ḥakīm
in selecting as his language medium a more literary level of
Arabic than that adopted by his fellow dramatists and yet one
that was readily adaptable to acting onstage. This gave him the
additional advantage of affording his plays a broader audience
throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Even within the
less-fertile environment of the 1980s and ’90s, a younger
generation of Egyptian dramatists made notable contributions to
the genre. Of these, Muḥammad Salmāwī and Lenīn al-Ramlī were
the playwrights whose works were most often performed.
These patterns of development
in Egypt were echoed elsewhere in the Arab world, albeit within
differing time frames. Following the early stages that have been
sketched above, further developments were, more often than not,
tied to the processes of nation building that followed the
achievement of independence during the 1950s and ’60s. In Syria
Saʿdallāh Wannūs made use of his strong interest in the theory
of drama, and particularly in the relationship of stage to
audience, to compose a series of works that made important
contributions to the development of experimental theatre in the
Arab world. Staged in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day
War of June 1967, Ḥaflat samar min ajl al-khāmis min Ḥuzayrān
(1968; “Soirée for the 5th of June”) was a devastating
commentary on the Arab defeat and on the Arab leaders who for
several days had used the media to claim that victory was at
hand (leading, almost automatically, to the play’s being
banned). Mughāmarat raʾs al-mamlūk Jābir (1971; “The Adventure
of Mamlūk Jābir’s Head”) and Al-Malik huwa al-malik (1977; “The
King’s the King”) continued his ongoing experiments with theatre
dynamics through what he termed masraḥ al-tasyīs (“theatre of
politicization”). Because Wannūs was such a crucially important
figure, other Syrian and Lebanese dramatists of the latter half
of the 20th century operated somewhat in his shadow, but
Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ, ʿIṣām Maḥfūẓ, and Mamdūḥ ʿAdwān wrote
significant plays that were successfully performed at theatre
festivals.
The lot of the Palestinian
literary community, which reflected the turmoil that affected
the larger community throughout the second half of the 20th
century, was such that the promotion of a dramatic tradition
proved extremely difficult and often impossible. However, there
were plays that reflected the trials and conflicts that were
part of daily life, such as Muʿīn Basīsū’s Thawrat al-Zanj
(1970; “The Zanj Revolt”) and the poet Samīḥ al-Qāsim’s Qaraqāsh
(1970). The tightly controlled circumstances in which the
Palestinians lived their lives also led to the appearance of one
of the most interesting and creative theatre troupes in the
Middle East, the Ḥakawātī troupe (named for the ḥakawātī, or
traditional storyteller), which emerged from an earlier group
known as Al-Balālīn (“Balloons”). An itinerant troupe
established in 1977, Ḥakawātī toured villages and performed its
own plays in a variety of public spaces through the turn of the
21st century.
Tunisia and Morocco provide
some of the best examples of a thriving theatre tradition. The
Tunisian writer ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Madanī, one of the most fruitful
contributors to the history of modern Arabic drama during the
20th century, composed a series of plays that were both
experimental and popular; they included Thawrat ṣāḥib al-ḥimār
(1971; “The Donkey Owner’s Revolt”) and Dīwān al-Zanj (1973;
“The Zanj Collection”). Moroccan theatre was represented at the
turn of the 21st century primarily by the multitalented
al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī, who adapted textual materials culled from
the heritage of the past, as in Dīwān Sīdī ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
al-Majdhūb (1966; “The Collection of Sīdī ʿAbd al-Raḥman
al-Majdhūb”), and produced them with his own troupe, often
casting himself in a role in which he would exhibit a unique
comic flair.
The theatre movement in Iraq
was also constricted by political circumstances, but the
dramatic tradition continued even so through the 1990s; an Iraqi
play won first prize at the prestigious Tunisian Carthage
Festival in 1999, for instance. Most prominent among
20th-century Iraqi playwrights was Yūsuf al-ʿĀnī, whose Anā
ummak yā Shākir (1955; “Shākir, I’m Your Mother”) graphically
portrays the misery of the Iraqi people in the period before the
downfall of the monarchy in the revolution of 1958. Elsewhere in
the Arabian Gulf, theatre remained, where it existed at all, a
very young cultural phenomenon, and efforts in the early 21st
century to foster a dramatic tradition vied with the popularity
of forms of entertainment readily available via television, CDs,
DVDs, and the Internet.
Arabic drama seemed likely to
remain a problematic genre in the 21st century, but one
fulfilling an important cultural function. By daring to raise
issues of political and social importance in a public forum and
by testing the limits of the local and the pan-Arabic worlds
through experiments with language, it showed signs of
illustrating many of the larger areas of concern within the
Arabic-speaking countries. While the status of drama and its
practitioners varied widely across the region, it remained an
invaluable outlet for popular sentiment and creative energy.
Literary criticism
As part of annual tribal festivals during the pre-Islamic
period, poets would compete against each other in jousts, and a
master poet would be asked to judge who was the winner. In other
words, criticism in Arabic literature is as old as the literary
tradition itself, and a remarkable feature of many Arab
societies today is the extent to which public performances by
poets can still be subject to the instantaneous assessment of
their audience; upon request, particular lines that appeal to
the mind and ear are repeated.
Beginnings
The process of
recording the text of the Qurʾān in written form, of sifting the
different versions of the revelations into a single canonical
version, of continuing the quest for linguistic precedents in
the oral tradition of pre-Islamic poetry, and of authenticating
transmitters involved the making of critical judgments and the
establishment of principles of value. The earliest texts of
literary criticism in Arabic thus involve the process of
“ranking” poets, that being part of a larger process of
establishing ṭabaqāt (“classes,” or “levels”). Two such early
works belong to al-Aṣmaʿī and his student Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī;
the latter’s Ṭabaqāt fuḥūl al-shuʿarāʾ (“Classes of Champion
Poets”) categorizes poets by both period and theme without
providing any principles for his judgments. It fell to their
successors to provide such criteria and the theoretical
justification for them. Ibn Qutaybah, for example, wrote a
famous introduction to his own 9th-century compilation of poets,
Kitāb al-shiʿr wa al-shuʿarāʾ (“Book of Poetry and Poets”), in
which he suggested that ancient poetry could not be deemed
superior merely because it was old. The 9th-century grammarian
Thaʿlab of al-Kūfah organized his Qawāʿid al-shiʿr (“The Rules
of Poetry”) along syntactic principles, thus illustrating the
continuing linkage between the philological demands of textual
research and the study of the corpus of early Arabic poetry.
Emerging poetics
The emergence
of a system of Islamic education and increasing contacts with
other cultures led to an increasing concern with the modes of
textual analysis. Poetry proved a rich field of exploration in
this endeavour, and two scholars made important contributions to
the analysis of poetry; their works were to have a major impact
on the Arabic poetic tradition for centuries. Late in the 9th
century, Ibn al-Muʿtazz, who was both poet and critic (and who,
as a member of the caliphal family of the ʿAbbasids, died after
only one day as caliph), emulated his predecessors by assembling
his own Ṭabaqāt al-shuʿarāʾ (“Classes of Poets”). But by then
Ibn Qutaybah’s suggestion that older poems were not necessarily
better than newer ones seems to have taken hold, insomuch as Ibn
al-Muʿtazz concentrated his work on his own contemporaries.
However, he is most famous for his Kitāb al-badīʿ (The Book of
Tropes), in which he provides a list of five major poetic
devices (including metaphor and simile) and then lists a further
group of “discourse embellishments.” While his goal was to
demonstrate that these devices were present in Arabic writing
from the outset and that their utilization by poets was
primarily a matter of good (or bad) taste, his listing became a
kind of challenge to future writers on poetics, who managed to
compile ever longer lists. The second of these scholars was
Qudāmah ibn Jaʿfar, whose Naqd al-shiʿr (“Evaluation of Poetry”)
provides specific criteria for assessing the quality of poetry;
he defines it as “discourse with rhyme, metre, and intention.”
What is perhaps most remarkable is that this specific definition
of poetry based on both rhyme and metre was to remain the
predominant criterion in any definition of the poetic in Arabic
until the mid-20th century.
The positioning of criticism
within the context of an ever-expanding system of Islamic
education and research was, not unnaturally, the trigger for a
series of debates. A large number of studies were devoted to
discussions of the merits and faults of two poets in particular,
Abū Tammām and al-Mutanabbī; efforts to place both these
preeminent figures of the 9th and 10th centuries into a balance
raised questions of principle and application that were widely
debated. On a more general plane, the central position of the
Qurʾān within the Islamic community as a whole and the
“challenge” (taḥaddin) that it posed to would-be imitators led
to the development of another critical approach whereby the
achievements of poets were measured against the Qurʾān’s
miraculous qualities (Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, or the “inimitability of
the Qurʾān”). At the hands of al-Bāqillānī, the odes of Imruʾ
al-Qays and al-Buḥturī were examined for their moral and
stylistic qualities and found wanting. However, with ʿAbd
al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, a paramount figure of the 11th century in
Arabic and world criticism, the comparison of the tropes of the
Qurʾānic text with other types of text became a highly
sophisticated exploration of the nature of meaning. His Dalāʾil
al-Iʿjāz (“Proofs of Iʿjāz”) and Asrār al-balāghah (“Secrets of
Eloquence”) are major monuments of classical Arabic critical
thought.
Compilations and manuals
In
addition to these particular features of the critical tradition
in Arabic, the premodern period was also characterized by the
same trend toward the categorization of textual materials and
their organization into anthologies, specialized manuals, and
other types of compilation that was occurring in the Islamic
courts (see above Belles lettres and narrative prose: The
concept of adab). One of the earliest such works was Abū Hilāl
al-ʿAskarī’s 10th-century Kitāb al-ṣināʿatayn, al-kitābah wa
al-shiʿr (“The Book of the Two Skills, Scribal Arts and
Poetry”), the title of which notes what was for al-ʿAskarī the
relatively recent placement of textual analysis devoted to
artistic prose alongside the traditionally prestigious genre of
poetry. While al-ʿAskarī joined his predecessors in collecting,
indeed increasing, the list of poetic devices, his primary aim
was to compile a manual that would explain the basic elements of
balāghah (“correct style”), including such topics as grammatical
accuracy and plagiarism. Al-ʿAskarī’s work was carried on and
expanded in another important piece of synthesis, Ibn Rashīq’s
Al-ʿUmdah fī maḥāsin al-shiʿr wa adabihi wa naqdihi (“The
Mainstay Concerning Poetry’s Embellishments, Correct Usage, and
Criticism”). The comprehensive coverage that this work provided
of previous writings on the various subfields of poetics—prosody
and poetic genres and devices, for example—and the critical
insights that Ibn Rashīq himself inserted into his discussion of
the critical controversies of his time made it a primary
reference work to which scholars referred for many centuries.
The increasingly prominent role
that belles lettres came to occupy in the life of the court and
its patronage system was reflected in a later work of
compilation, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn ibn al-Athīr’s Al-Mathal al-sāʾir fī
adab al-kātib wa al-shāʿir (“The Current Model for the Literary
Discipline of the Scribe and Poet”), where the sequence of
functions found in the title very much reflects the author’s own
career as an accomplished writer of belles lettres. Ibn Rashīq’s
Al-ʿUmdah also provided the evaluative basis for Al-Muzhir fī
ʿulūm al-lughah wa anwāʿihā (“The Luminous Work Concerning the
Sciences of Language and Its Subfields”), a huge work of
compilation by the 15th-century Egyptian polymath Jalāl al-Dīn
al-Suyūṭī, in which he examined every conceivable aspect of the
compositional process, starting at the level of the syllable,
and in the process expanded the listing of poetic devices to
some 236.
The tenacious longevity of this
manual tradition is well illustrated by the late 19th-century
work Al-Wasīlah al-adabiyyah ilā al-ʿulūm al-ʿArabiyyah (“The
Literary Method for the Arabic Sciences”), in which the Egyptian
scholar Ḥusayn al-Marṣafī returned to the classical heritage
(and particularly to al-ʿAskarī’s Kitāb al-ṣināʿatayn) in order
to provide a study of prosody, the syntactic function of words,
and the varieties of poetic devices. The result was a genuine
exercise in neoclassicism, whereby the contents of manuals
compiled by his forebears over many centuries were revived for a
later era.
The 20th century and beyond
At
the beginning of the 20th century, literary criticism remained
very much in the tradition of the premodern period, with
emphasis still firmly placed on the analysis of texts and their
functions, linguistic and aesthetic. As was the case with the
literary genres themselves, this critical heritage now came into
contact with the traditions of European literature. Students
from the Arab world were sent to Europe to study, and they
returned to their homelands bringing with them impressions of an
entirely different cultural environment, new literary genres
(novel, short story, and literary drama, for example), and
different approaches to the evaluation of literary creativity.
The Europe that these Arab visitors encountered was one that was
very much influenced by Romanticism and the schools of thought
that followed it, and the enhanced role that such an aesthetic
provided for the expression of the individual voice gave Arab
poets a golden opportunity to break from the straitjacket of
panegyric poetry, with its penchant for hyperbole and its
accompanying system of patronage. The social role of the poet
underwent a gradual process of change, and the increasing
expression of nationalist sentiment, whether pan-Arab or local,
within the political life of the region gave further stimulus to
these trends.
Such tendencies were at their
most vigorous among the writers of the mahjar (the name given to
émigré writers in the Americas), but similar movements emerged
in the Arabic-speaking world itself, albeit at a slower pace.
The period between the two world wars (1920–39) saw the heyday
of romantic poetry in Arabic. While critics such as ʿAbbās
Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn began their careers as diehard
opponents of the principles of premodern criticism, they both
maintained a careful watch on experimentation in literature and
were swift to condemn younger writers who adopted too radical a
stance toward tradition. It was surely a sign of the pace of
change in the 20th century that later in their careers both
these eminent modern Egyptian critics become reactionary
figures, tilting against the results of processes of change
following World War II and the culmination of prolonged
struggles against colonialism that took the form of independence
for many Arab nations during the 1950s.
These processes of profound
political transformation were accompanied by equally significant
changes in criticism. After World War II numerous critics urged
a totally different approach to literature; the fact that French
philosopher and novelist
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la
littérature? (1947; What Is Literature?)—with its call for
literature at the service of the people—was translated into
Arabic during this period is very significant. Among the more
prominent voices in urging a move away from an isolated “ivory
tower” attitude toward literature (of which romantic and
symbolist writers were accused) were Luwīs ʿAwaḍ, Maḥmūd Amīn
al-ʿĀlim, Ḥusayn Muruwwah, and ʿUmar al-Fākhūrī. This push
toward a literature of “commitment” (iltizām) became a constant
of Arabic literary criticism; Al-Ādāb, one of the most prominent
literary journals founded in the Arabic-speaking region in the
latter half of the 20th century, was established by the Lebanese
writer Suhayl Idrīs specifically to forward such an approach.
Beginning in the 1950s, a great deal of committed literature was
penned by Arab writers; topics such as the Palestinian people
provided a natural focus for such writing, but the goals of the
Arab peoples and their individual nation-states—establishing a
sense of identity, for instance, and developing balanced
relationships with Western countries—involved, more often than
not, the active involvement of creative writers and critics
within the cultural apparatus of the different regimes. The
linkage between politics, literature, and literary criticism
remained a direct one.
Two particular concerns seemed
to characterize much literary criticism in the Arabic-speaking
world during the late 20th century: the definition of modernity
and the issue of “particularity.” The Syrian-born Lebanese poet
Adonis (ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd) devoted much attention to the question
of “the modern” in Arabic literature and society. His most
comprehensive exploration of the topic took the form of the
four-volume study Al-Thābit wa al-mutaḥawwil (1974–78; “The
Static and the Dynamic”), in which he surveys the entire Arabic
literary tradition and concludes that, like the literary works
themselves, attitudes to and analyses of them must be subject to
a continuing process of reevaluation. Yet what he actually sees
occurring within the critical domain is mostly static and
unmoving. The second concern, that of particularity
(khuṣūṣiyyah), is a telling reflection of the realization among
writers and critics throughout the Arabic-speaking world that
the region they inhabited was both vast and variegated (with
Europe to the north and west as a living example). Debate over
this issue, while acknowledging notions of some sense of Arab
unity, revealed the need for each nation and region to
investigate the cultural demands of the present in more local
and particular terms. A deeper knowledge of the relationship
between the local present and its own unique version of the past
promises to furnish a sense of identity and particularity that,
when combined with similar entities from other Arabic-speaking
regions, will illustrate the immensely rich and diverse
tradition of which 21st-century litterateurs are the heirs.
Roger M.A. Allen
