39.3.Al Bagdadi

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Registers of Arabic Literary History

Nadia Al-Bagdadi

New Literary History, Volume 39, Number 3, Summer 2008, pp. 437-461

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0046

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New Literary History, 2008, 39: 437–461

Registers of Arabic Literary History

Nadia Al-Bagdadi

I. Introduction: Borderlines of Literature

Faithful to the idea that “Literature in its broadest sense com-

prises all that mankind imprinted in verbal form to be transmittedto memory,” Carl Brockelmann’s monumental History of Arabic Lit-

erature sought to collect and catalog all of Arabic writing he considered tobe of literary relevance.1 The German Orientalist, though, was consciousof the fact that a philosophical history of Arabic Schrifttum , the ultimateaim of his endeavor, was still out of reach and that his aspiration for a“Literaturwissenschaft im höheren Sinne ” had to await further study at thebeginning of the twentieth century (1:2). Exhaustive knowledge of theliterary material and refined methodology were still in their infancy in

comparison to the advance in the study of Islamic religion and tradi-tion initiated by the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher. Brockelmann,

who was aware of the difference between what constitutes “literature”for the Arabs and the modern meaning of “literature,” operated withtwo different concepts of literature. One stems from Arabic traditionand usage, one from a modern, universal one: “Thus the historian of

Arabic literature needs to consider all these emergences and may onlyin the Modern period, which gradually aligns the world of Islam as wellto European culture, restrict himself to art of literature (Wortkunst )

proper” (1:1f).2 But as demodé as Brockelmann’s definition of literature and his attemptto provide an all-embracing literary history may appear, they curiouslycome closer to our present understanding of literature. At the turn ofthe long nineteenth century, an epoch marked by the height of Euro-pean colonialism in the Arab world and the triggering of an imperialglobal age with far-reaching consequences for Arab and other localcultures and traditions, the challenges Brockelmann faced one hundred

years ago are not unfamiliar to those obstacles historians and critics of

Arabic literature encounter today. In principle, these problems relateto defining the nature of the material called “literature,” the definitionof parameters of periodization, and the specification of geographic andlinguistic boundaries over time. The imperative for literary studies in the

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new literary history438

Anglo-Saxon world today is to rethink under conditions of the globalage (a) the parameters of literature in terms of its genres, (b) the spatialexpansion of boundaries hitherto clearly defined as national boundar-

ies, and (c) the new dimensions of intertextuality between hithertoindependent literary traditions. While this situation imposes on English,French, and comparative literature studies a fundamental self-inquiry,

Arabic literary studies were concerned with these problems much earlier.Questions of what constitutes the nature of literature as distinct fromother forms of utterance, text, and truth, and of what defines its formsand functions, already occupied the minds of Arab scholars, poets, andcritics of the early Islamic period. With the spread of Islamic civilization,there emerged the issue of geographic and cultural unity and diversity,

and their changes through history. Islamic civilization, to quote Brock-elmann again, reached “from the shores of the Pontus to Zanzibar, vonFez and Timbuktu to Kasgar and the Sunda Islands.”3

It is a truism that shifts of cultural centers, access of new social groupsto the realm of literacy and culture, and other changes within literarytraditions cannot be explained with reference to literary developmentsalone, but require external factors of explanation. The pervasive globaltransformations, occasioned by a hitherto unprecedented compressionof time and space, reinforced in turn the necessity to rethink the very

foundations of modes of thought and academic disciplines, of societyand culture. Inquiries into social, economic, and cultural conditions andcontingencies favored the reemergence of concepts such as civilizationas more appropriate units to study large-scale historical masses in a com-parative manner.4 The concept of globalization as it is most widely used,understood as a progressive move from the local to the world level, hasbecome a concept fashionable not only in sociological, economic, orpolitical studies, but of late in the humanities and literary studies. Theseinquiries have not left entirely untouched studies on culture and literaturein the Arab world. In comparison, however, to what a sketchy survey ofpre- and postmillennial special issues and symposia in the wider realmof (comparative) literary and cultural studies reveals, there clearly existsa lesser degree of concern about the global age. If long held certainties,categories, and boundaries have been tumbling in the former disciplines,for better or worse, Arabic literary studies have not been affected in thesame measure by quests for self-reflection, repositioning of the field,and redefining of the methodological apparatus and parameters. Thishas to do, in my view, less with the nature of Arabic literature but withits embeddedness in the larger frame of “Islamdom” and “Islamicatecivilization,” to use Marshall Hodgson’s terms.5

Arab culture and civilization underwent various forms of globaliza-tion before the present global age. The concerns historians of Arabic

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439registers of arabic literary history

literature still have with framing the past involve them in how to rethinkliterary studies in today’s global age. In what follows, I shall look at

Arabic literary studies before and after it sought to fashion itself upon

Western European models of writing and of interpretation. I shall tracehow Arabic literary history emerges out of and breaks off from earliertraditions and shall direct attention to some aspects of Arabic literaryhistory that seem to me instructive for the present project of rethinkingthe very parameters of literary history in the global age.

II. What Is Literature?

Crucial for any investigation into literary history is the question: whatis literature? From the crossing point of empires and civilizations, withoverlapping imperial histories, geographical locations, religious and cul-tural traditions, emerged a distinctive Arab cultural tradition from aboutthe fourth century CE. With the advent of Islam in the sixth century, theoverlapping imperial settings necessitated Arabic literature, as the mostprominent and developed of Arab forms of culture, and subsequently

Arab literary history, to cope with processes of expansion and integration,of translation and assimilation, and finally of unity and diversity. Arabic

literature as it developed over the ages provides in itself a rich reservoirof “text and context” reflecting and inflecting this dynamism. While in its modern use adab signifies exclusively literature as belles-

lettres, in its premodern meaning it was not coterminous with the mean-ing of “literature” alone but displayed a richness of meanings. TzvetanTodorov’s reminder to “create a first element of doubt as to the ‘natural’character of literature” and to any idea of finite type or types of litera-ture describes well the present case.6 Before the advent of modernity,

Arabic literature was not so much confined to specific genres of text,each with a fixed and stable nature, but referred to a variety of formsand functions of literary expressions, subsumed under the name adab .This term adab , as a multilayered term with unsolved etymological ori-gin, poses some problems for translation. It is rendered most closely as“educational literature,” “etiquette,” “Bildung ,” or “ paideia ”; others wouldgo for “humanitas.”7 The literary areas involved belong to the domainsof the secretaries (kuttab ), the poets, philologists, and the culama . Thecharacteristics of adab are associated with an urbane and mundane life-style, covering entertaining and spiritual as well as ethical and practicalcontent. Adab includes both poetry and prose (shi c r and nathr ), the basicdistinction of genres in Arabic literature, while poetry has been—and forsome it still is—the preferred form of literary expression. For a person“to have literature” is a clear indication of a certain level of education

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and literacy, including oral literacy. In society, adab marks the status of aperson, establishing a social barrier between the cultured elite and theuncultivated masses. This social differentiation based on levels of literacy

became a major theme of Arabic literature.Adab , including history and literature, and ‘ilm are the two majorcategories of enunciation. History (tar K kh ) in general was embedded inand classified as one of the genres of adab . Obviously, literary history inthe modern sense did not exist in this concept. But there did exist whatis best called an ars poetica with a highly sophisticated field of literarycriticism in the form of rhetoric (balagha ) and applied literary criticism(naqd al-shi c r ). In this sense the study of adab functions as an art ( fann or sina c ), or technê without, however, having its own object (mawd¯ u c ) and

problematic and thus being distinguished from a science (‘ilm ).The fact that until the present day no comprehensive history has been written on the concept of adab is an indication of its enormous flexibilityand complexity, which prevents it from being captured as one single,clearly identifiable subject in some kind of stable form.8

III. Canons as Histories

If one of the features of adab and of Arabic culture is its diversity,attempts at confining, directing, and unifying by Arab philologists arequick to follow. These attempts take the form of canons and literaryhistories of sorts.

A universal feature of literary history and the literary canon seems toconsist in their dual attempt to maintain literature conservatively, as arepository and memory of literary traces, while assuring its mobility bybeing based upon the changing consensus of the interpreting communityof scholars and readers. Moreover, literary history resembles processesof canonization in that they are both driven by an “anxiety of influencethat forms and malforms each new writing that aspires to permanence.”9 Part of this attempt is to define what constitutes a literary trace, including

written as well as oral traces, the latter becoming fixed and normative with the transformation into written text. History provides ample evi-dence that periods of crisis are fruitful occasions for reflection on thenature of literature, leading professional interpreters to revise the waysin which they think of literature. For Arabic literature such momentsoccurred with the rise of Islam during the ninth and tenth centuries,

with the increasing impact of Persian culture on Arabic, with the end of Arab Muslim empires, and with the advent of modernity.

Institutions of Arabic canon maintenance, be they religious or literary-profane, are driven by fear of corruption. Canon-making assured first

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a safe path to revelation and then provided a reliable path back to the

beginnings of Arab genius. These procedures supported the ideas of the

superiority of racial Arabertum and of Arabic as the linguistic medium of

Islamic revelation and poetical genius. The similar function of the canon,as Frank Kermode points out, the relation between sacred and secular

interpretation and between sacred and profane institutional control of

interpretation, both follow the same pattern of increasingly complex

interpretation, an affinity characteristic of Arabic religious and profane

scholarship.10 During the first centuries of Islam, not only were religiousmaterials canonized, but so too were the seven canonical readings of

the Qur’an and the six canonical hadith collections.11 Compilations and

philological interpretations of Arabic poetry and sayings, mainly of the

pre-Islamic period, flourished as well. A climax of literary canon-making was reached in the ninth century in the Arab East, when Arab poets and

critics broke demonstratively with the “old style” of Arabic rhetoric and

poetry, and introduced a “modern” style. Arab philologists felt at once

threatened and inspired by the presence of Persian secretaries, scholars,

and writers (udaba’) at the Abbasid court, who introduced, in Arabic,

new ideas and themes to Arabic culture. The competitive polemics be-tween the Arabs and the Persians (cajams ) did not remain restricted to

literature, but expanded to genealogy (c ilm al-ansab ) and philology (c ilm

al-lugha ). Reviewing and taking stock of the literary tradition in their owntongue served to delineate a purely Arabic tradition and its superiority

over other languages, notably Greek and Persian. It resulted as well in

the archives of Arabic literature, the d¯ K wan collections. These d¯ K wan s,

collections of pre-Islamic poetry, provided the textual basis from which

philological and aesthetical studies were developed, thus enhancing an

Arabic science of literature proper.12

Apart then from their conservative character, canon and literaryhistory resemble each other in their imaginative potential. It is this

potential, which derives from the endeavor to reconstruct the past for

the needs of the present, a present that anxiously seeks to maintain the

canon, that allows us to study canon and literary history as historical

products in their own right.13 Not only can they capture the intellectual

spirit and cultural tastes of their time, they reveal an inherent logic of

text and interpretation. Literary histories are vivid testimonies of textual

communities of the learned, who as a group display “a type of rationality

inseparable from the text.”14 In this sense, literary history has to emerge

from criteria inherent to the specificities of a particular literature, and yet to integrate in the larger historical movements of time.

While according to the premodern use, literature and history belonged

epistemologically to the same domain, namely adab , part of the challenge

of the current global age derives from the nature of this modern couple,

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“literary history,” which united what has become, with modernity, twodistinct areas and disciplines, with their own fundamental transformationsin form and content, function and legitimacy. Under the new regime,

this modern understanding of literature and history reigns in European, Arabic, and other oriental literatures alike. If the task today is to rethinkthe implications of disciplinary frameworks, and their respective meth-odologies and paradigms, and of the changing nature of literature, thequestion is whether premodern examples can serve as models?

IV. Registers of Arabic Literary History— Arab Contributions

Until the present day, there exists not a single literary history, to thebest of my knowledge, that developed literary epochs and caesurasfrom categories specific to literature. This includes those poets of the

Abbasid period, who in distinction from earlier poets called themselves“modernist” (the muhdathun ) and applied literary categories such asstyle and themes. They were, however, unable to apply literary classifica-tions for earlier schools and periods and maintained the chronologicalconvention.

Nevertheless, the relationship between literature and history didconcern Arab scholars, if in different ways. In his comprehensive Historyof Arabic Literature (Tar K kh al-adab al-‘arab K in six volumes), the modernEgyptian critic Shawqi Dayf acknowledges the futility of defining theexact nature of literature. Adab , as poetry and prose (shi c ran wa-nathran ),changes in tandem with the changes of society. He defines adab as areflex of society. As such, he has to trace its different usages from thepre-Islamic era and from the ethics Bedouin society attributed to it, tousages in the mundane world of urban civilization in the capitals of the

Muslim empires and dynasties where adab acquired a normative functionas educational instrument and tool of refinement.15 But although Dayfsuggests that literary history (tar K kh al-adab ) ought to be less concerned

with chronological order than with issues of genres and thus genealogies,he adopted a conventional chronological order. Dayf’s literary historyavoided the development of a new periodization specific to literature.

More rigorous and systematic is an attempt to rethink the foundationsof the body politic, of social formation and organization, and of scienceand knowledge, sacred and profane, which was developed under theimpact of the end of the Arab Muslim empires and at the beginning ofthe emergence of new empires, the Ottoman and the Persian Indian. Inhis discussion of the sciences, the universal historian Ibn Khaldun adoptsa purely scientific perspective on what he calls “cilm al-adab ” (science of

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literature). What renders his understanding important are his views onaffinities and limitations of literature and history as science toward theend of the two-volume universal history al-Muqaddima , the Prolegomenea to

the Book of Example, Record of Beginnings and Events from the Days of the Arabs,Persians and Berbers and Their Powerful Contemporaries (known in Arabic asthe Kitab’ al-‘ibar ), modestly claimed to be not more than a local historyof the Berbers of North Africa. At the end of chapter 6, which deals

with “the various kinds of sciences,” he discusses “science of literature,”after having treated subjects such as medicine, natural sciences, alchemy,optics, dream, and the evil eye. “This science,” Ibn Khaldun asserts, “hasno object the accident of which may be studied and thus be affirmed ordenied.” To him, four books alone, all from the ninth and early tenth

century CE, constitute the pillars ofc

ilm al-adab: the professional, special-ized handbook Adab al-katib (literally “The Secretary’s Culture ,” or “Paideia ”)by the philologist and theologian Ibn Qutayba (d. 889); the Kitab al-kamil

f¯ K al-adab (The Perfect Book of Culture ), a study of lexicography, gram-mar, and pre- and early Islamic poetry by the grammarian and literaryscholar al-Mubarrad (d. 898); the Kitab al-bayan wa-al-taby¯ K n’ (The Book of

Eloquence ) by the polymath al-Jahiz (d. 868–9); and, the Kitab al-Nawadir (The Book of Rarities ) by the grammarian Abi c Al K al-Qal K al-Baghdad K (d.967).16 Based on these philological pillars, Ibn Khaldun ranks literature

(al-adab ) as the fourth element of what constitutes Arabic language, af-ter lexicography (al-lugha ), grammar and syntax (al-nahw ), and rhetoric(al-bayan ).17 This rather low position of literature among the linguisticsciences is reemphasized in his pragmatic view that “[b]oth poetry andprose work with words, and not with ideas. The ideas are secondary tothe words. The words are basic.”18 This view, which considers words andthus lexicography as being stable and unchangeable, treats literatureas a repository and as an assurance of historical continuity. Of course,such an opinion was far from being accepted by all, least by those for

whom the faculty of the “imagination” (tahky¯ K l or quwwa mutakhayyila )plays an essential aspect of poetic expression, scholars like the grammar-ian c Abd al-Qahir al-JurjanK (d. ca.1078–81) or the Andalusian literarytheorist Hazim al-Qartajann K (1211–85). For philosophers like Ibn S Kna(Avicenna) or Ibn Rushd (Averroes), literary expression is even a meansto produce poetic syllogism.19 If Ibn Khaldun’s view is not conducive to aliterary history, which presumes not a typological or ontological fixationof words but their potential to change, Arab literary critics and poets

will denounce it as sterile fixation on words.Ibn Khaldun goes so far as to reject the idea that literature makes

general statements; and therefore it does not partake of universality.20 Only the fact that people produce poetic works and ideas is universal;literature’s specificity is to be found in the local. “Scholars,” he states,

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“take care to deposit all their scientific thought in books by means of writing, so that all those who are absent and live at a later time may havethe benefit of them. People who do that are authors. Everywhere in the

world, written works are numerous. They are handed down among allraces and in all ages. They differ as the result of differences in religiouslaws and organizations and in the information available about nationsand dynasties. The philosophical sciences do not show such differences”(411–12). For Ibn Khaldun, then, this view culminates in the categoricaldivorce of literature from such modes of thought and knowledge thataspire to ultimate truth. It is this particularist aspect of literature thatprevents it from transcending its realm. Or, in the words of Ibn Khaldun,“[e]ach nation has its own particular form of writing, which is attributed

to it in particular” (412).But it is the homogeneity of science to which the study of literaturealso has to aspire. Ibn Khaldun details the purposes of valid discursivecomposition, of which there are seven, the first of which is “(1) Theinvention of a science with its subject, its division into chapters andsections, and the discussion of its problems” (413). With reference toliterary theory, he then discerns that “(6) The problems of a certainscience may only exist scattered among the proper chapters of othersciences. Some excellent scholar will then become aware of the subject

of that particular discipline. . . . He will do that, and a (new) discipline will make its appearance. He will give it its place among the sciencesthat mankind, with its ability to think, cultivates. This happened with thescience of rhetoric (bayân )” (414). From Ibn Khaldun’s account, writtenat a moment of great transition, let us jump some six hundred years toanother historian who also sought, without success, to embrace withequal breadth a history of Arab culture and civilization. Ibn Khaldun’shistorio-philosophical approach, which, as we saw, positioned literatureas firmly embedded in rhetoric and history as part of the science of adab ,

was abandoned during the nineteenth century, when the Arabic term“literary history” (tar K kh al-adab ) appeared for the first time.

With the advent of another global age, the age of imperialism andcolonialism, the problem of principle, scope, and object (mawd¯ u c ) ofliterary history was posed again as a question about “the meaning ofhistory today,”21 echoing concerns among Arab historians of the nine-teenth century,22 including other Arab intellectuals such as the Lebanese

writers Butrus al-BustanK and Faris al-Shidyaq or the Egyptian Farah Antun. The Lebanese historian and novelist Jurj K Zaydan (1861–1914), who held the first chair in Arabic Literary History,23 provides separatehistories of various aspects of Arabic Schrifttum , among them The Historyof Islamic Civilization (Tar K kh al-tamaddun al-islam K , 1901–6), a biographicaldictionary of Arab personalities, and his last work, the four-volume Arab

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Literary History (Tar K kh ‘adab al-lugha al- c arabiyya , 1910–13).24 In the latter,Zaydan draws explicitly a parallel to modern European literary history,claiming that his history will mark an epochal turning point. It is Zaydan

who credits himself with having coined in 189425

the notion and newconcept of literary history (tar K kh al-adab al-luga al-arabiyya )26 and whoaspired to write literary history as Geistes-und Kulturgeschichte of the Arabpeople, thus transcending political history.27 (Thus it is not surprisingthat his historical novels introduced a new popular genre.) History andliterature are complementary to each other, but under the signature ofthe rising Arab nation-states and ideas of nationalism, for which literature,and subsequently literary history, are congenial media. The idea of theumma reflects simultaneously the universal and the national, not unlike

Burckhardt’s idea: “Since general historiography writes the history of war,of conquest, shedding of blood, of overpowering and despotism, it is notconcerned with the history of literature (tar K kh ‘adab al-lugha ). But it canonly reach a true understanding of the nation ( fahm haq K qat al-umma ) orthe true essence of its culture or politics (kunh tamadduniha aw-siyasati- ha ) through a knowledge of the history of science and literature (tar K khal-‘ilm wa-l-adab ). Only these interpret history (sharih li-l-t ar K kh ), as theyrefer historical events to their real causes ( yu‘allil al-asbaba wa-l-hawadithabi-‘ilaliha l-haq K qiyya ).”28 In other words, literary history is able to reach

another understanding of history beyond events, since it is at once “thehistory of the mind (c uq¯ ul ), and what marked her spirit (nufusihim ) andmanners (akhlaqihim ).”29

What makes Zaydan’s history of additional interest is the fact that itadopts two different registers for premodern and modern literature.For the premodern period, Zaydan adopts a diachronic perspective,presenting the classical literary canon along six aspects: ranking of the

Arabs (bayan manz K la al- c Arab ), political history, scientific developments,biographies of learned men (tarajim rijal al- c ilm wa-l-adab ), summaryand categorization of books, and finally accessibility of manuscripts andbooks. Zaydan’s account adopts the conventional periodization, followingreligious and dynastic division. He begins with the pre-Islamic period,the Jahiliyya , though he divides it into two separate aspects: the first deals

with the specimens and traces of the Arabs and of Arabic materials; thesecond deals with poetry and science. Then follows early Islamic Schrift- tum , which culminates in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, with thelatter being divided into four sections. In these chapters, Zaydan opensthe perspective and offers overviews of Greek, Persian, and Indian lit-erature and culture and their impact on Arabic literature and science.For the remaining centuries, during which the Mongolian and later theOttoman Empire came to power in the Arab world, Zaydan adopts thenotion of the Age of Decline (‘asr al-inhitat ),30 a period during which all

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of Arabic literature and sciences are thought to have fallen into darknessand stagnation, from which it emerged only with the arrival of NapoleonBonaparte in Egypt in 1798. This event marks the advent of modernity,

or the New Age (al- c

asr al-jad K d ), as Zaydan, following the spirit of histime, labels it. Being neither dynastic nor religious but adopted frompolitical discourse, the term “the New Age” is equally bare of literaryqualification, although it does coincide with the emergence of new stylesand themes.

Remarkably, the three hundred years preceding the New Age, stretch-ing from the fall of Constantinople to the first arrival of the French inEgypt, are given seventy-five pages all together, while the short New Agefills three hundred pages. To present the nahda , the renaissance move-

ment of the New Age, and its far-reaching impact on the literary fieldas such, Zaydan introduces new categories and aspects that he did notapply to the previous periods. Mapping the new centers of literary produc-tion and institutions, the organizing principle follows now along proto-national divisions and new literary institutions, which include the listingof libraries, associations, literary schools, journals, and newspapers. Withthis systematic presentation of the changing landscape of Arab literaryproduction and Arabic literature, Zaydan reacts to the profound socialand cultural transformations under conditions of European colonialism.

“Westernization” is the term that has been most widely used in (liter-ary) history to describe the effects of cultural contact, adaptation, andinfluence, a term that over the last decades has been found increasingly

wanting. As a concept, Westernization implies at once a one-way impactand a superiority of Western values to which others adhere, leaving littlespace for modes of inventive incorporation and exchange of ideas.

Similarly, Zaydan’s attempt at writing a new kind of literary history wasbelittled by some scholars for not being as original as the author claimsit to be, and for having “borrowed” generously from contemporary Eu-ropean literary histories, namely Brockelmann’s monumental Geschichteder Arabischen Litteratur and Reynold Nicholson’s The Literary History of theArabs (1907).31 Zaydan made no secret of his sources of reference andinspiration, be they Arabic or European. He duly acknowledges thoseEuropean scholars who developed during their “recent renaissance”32 theconcept of literary history,33 which differs from earlier Arabic literary in-

ventories. Of the Arab precursors, Zaydan lists, among others, Ibn Nad Km’sKitab al-Fihrist and the Miftah al-sa c ada wa-misbah al-siyada by the Ottomantheologian and biographer cIsam al-D Kn Tashköprüzade (d. 1561).34 Bethis as it may, the accusation that Zaydan did not devise a history of hisown points to another issue that requires attention in the context underconsideration, namely the relationship between Arab and Europeanscholarship, and refers us to matters of transferability of concepts and

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to a divide between the scholarship on both sides of the Mediterranean, which has undergone substantial change in recent years.

V. Registers of Arabic Literary History—European Contributions

European histories of Arabic literature appear for the first timeduring the second half of the nineteenth century. After Joseph Ham-mer-Purgstall’s pioneering, though unsuccessful, attempt to present to

Western readers a comprehensive Literaturgeschichte der Araber , other worksexplored the field.35 In principle, they applied methodologies and pa-

rameters of German and French literary studies to Arabic poetry, beingdriven by “the romantic universalism of the age,” as Gustave Edmund von Grunebaum rightly pointed out.36 W. Ahlwardt’s treatise, Über Poesieund Poetik der Araber (Gotha, 1856), was followed by Theodor Nöldeke’sBeiträge zur Kenntnis der Poesie der Alten Araber (Hannover, 1864), IgnácGoldziher’s Az arab irodalom rövid története (1908),37 Otto Rescher’s Abrißder arabischen Literaturgeschichte (Constantinople Pera, 1925), and C. A.Nallino’s La Littérature arabe des origins à l’époque de la dynastie umayyade (in the French translation of the Italian version by Maria Nallino, 1935).

Reynold A. Nicholson’s A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge, 1930)resembles only rudimentarily a history of literature but is, mainly, a po-litical history with some references to literature, since Nicholson aimedat drawing a history of ideas but leaving the study of literature ratheron the margins of this history, not unlike Adam Mez’s Renaissance desIslams (Heidelberg, 1922).

Brockelmann’s gigantic bio-bibliographic Geschichte der arabischen Lit- teratur , to which I referred in the beginning, was later supplemented byG. Graf’s equally impressive Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur

(Vatican City, 1944–53). Both of them mark the watershed of literarystudies, to be challenged sixty years later by Fuat Sezgin’s Geschichte desArabischen Schrifttums (1967–79, 7 volumes, incomplete; vol. 2 treats poetryuntil 1039), which provides more data, classification, and indexing ofall of Arabic Schrifttum rather than an intellectual or aesthetic history ofliterature. In the second half of the twentieth century, Gustave E. vonGrunebaum’s Kritik und Dichtkunst: Studien zur Arabischen Literaturgeschichte (Wiesbaden, 1955) and Gibb’s Arabic Literature: An Introduction (1963)tried to fill this gap. For a long period, no attempts were made to writesinglehandedly a history of Arabic literature, from its beginning to thepresent. Mostly, scholars single out genres (the novel, poetry, shortstory), individual poets and writers, or rarely periods (modern period,classical period).38 Otherwise, literary history has become multiauthored

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projects, ever more often today as joint projects between Arab and Eu-ropean scholars.39

Edward Said’s Orientalism and the debate about Orientalism have left

traces in the field of Arabic literary studies, and maybe not unlike thefield of Islamic studies, there remains an uneven balance in both theproduction and the reception of scholarship. Major literary studies,encyclopedias, complete histories, scientific periodicals, and systematicoverviews and introductions are still mainly written, organized, and pub-lished in Europe, but with ever growing participation of Arab scholars,

who are either based in or associated with Western institutions. Arabscholarship that does not participate in the larger international networksoften still remains unquoted.

VI. Forms of Globalization and the Literary Field

In Arabic literary history, as in other cognate fields, the problem ofdefining the subject of study is first of all a problem of unity and ofboundaries, be they geographic, linguistic, social, or cultural.

The qualitative markers used, such as Oriental, Arab and Arabic, NearEast and Middle East, function as an artificial bracket and confine, a priori,

material and period. Nowadays the much-discredited term “Orientalliterature” includes a larger number of lingual media, Turkish, Persian, Aramaic, Armenian, Hebrew, as well as other religious traditions, such as Jewish and Christian literatures. The term Arabic literature is, in principle,open to these latter traditions, but excludes other literatures that areethnically marked, such as Kurdish or Berber literature. Equally, otherconstructs such as “literature of the Muslim world,” or “Near Eastern”or “Middle Eastern” literature or “Mediterranean Literature,” also havetheir shortcomings.40 The relatively short-lived and equally unsatisfactoryterm “Third World Literature” has been replaced by some mainly An-glo-Saxon scholars with the otherwise inflationary terms “colonial” and“postcolonial.”41 Despite their chronometric limitation, their assumptionof a common universal time in which the literatures of the world arehistorically interdependent points at what marks “global literature.”

Much of this terminological imprecision, or confusion, derives fromthe fact that, by virtue of its geographic location, the Arab world hasalways been part of world-historical movements of integration, expan-sion, and dispersion, or, in Hodgson’s term, of the oikoumene .42 For thepresent context, it is useful to discern three distinct phases and types ofglobalization. The first comprises oikumenical globalization of late antiquityto the end of the Abbasid period; the second, expanding globalization ofthe Imperialist age of the late eighteenth to the twentieth century; and,

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finally, dispersal globalization of the current age. It is needless to add thatconfining literary movements to these three forms of globalization is asimplified scheme of more complex historical developments. The heuris-

tic advantage, however, opens up historical and theoretical perspectives onliteracy, literature, and interpretation at the interface of crossing culturesand civilizations. It will suffice here to sketch out the three phases withregard to the question under consideration.

Oikumenical globalization demarcates a period stretching from lateantiquity to the twelfth century, during which Arabic emerged as thelingua franca for administrative, religious, and intellectual purposesalike. This remarkable expansion of a hitherto tribal language from the

Arabian peninsula to a universal medium of communication took place

under conditions that were not a priori conducive to this development.The new empire was faced with imperial settings at its frontiers—theByzantine and Persian Empires with high cultures of their own and richliteratures (Coptic, Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, Hebrew) with strong religious,literary, and scientific traditions.43 The newcomer to the region, thespreading Islamic empire of the Arabs from the peninsula, did not havemuch to offer initially. What was available in the language of the Islamicempire, Arabic, was the Qur’an and pre-Islamic poetry. The emergenceof a distinct, urban adab , including literature and Arab-Muslim paideia,44

reinforced the position of Arabic as a global language. In contrast tothe body of pre-Islamic poetry,45 this Arabic literature was never “genu-inely” Arabian, but it reflected the vivid urban intellectual milieus and

was inspired by emerging Muslim religious sciences (had K th , s K ra, and

tafs K r ) and Arab philology, an auxiliary discipline in close proximity toreligious sciences, and by translations from Byzantine and Persian tradi-tions.46 Baghdad in the ninth century became a center of tremendousintellectual activity, which saw not only the translation of large amountsof Greek materials into Arabic (previously, Greek had been translatedinto Syriac), but also saw the development of an understanding of sciencecolored and shaped by its historical locality.47 With the Abbasid period(750 CE–1258 CE) and the move toward the Arab east, with the newimperial capital Baghdad, built by the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur,the weaknesses of the oikumenic character became more pertinent. Theethnic, social, and cultural diversity of the Muslim empire hitherto wasruled by a homogenous Arab elite; the Abbasid empire was thoroughlyshaped, politically and culturally, by Sassanian bureaucrats and scholars.Critical tones, especially in literature, were adopted by the new influen-tial and affluent urban class of secretaries (kuttab ), who were of mixedethnic backgrounds, though predominately of Persian origin. The peri-odic dominance of Persian over Arab culture, including administrative,scientific, and literary realms, led to reactions of rejection, known as the

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Shu c ubiyya controversy, which lasted from the ninth to the eleventh centuryand stretched over the entire empire.48 The Shu c ubiyya (adherents of thenon-Arab people) movement questioned the identity of Islam with Arab-

ness, which in turn let non-Arab theologians question the superiority of Arabic, as “proven” in and through the Qur’an. Arguably the Shu c ubiyya controversy supported the tendency to overdetermine Arabic language,text, and civilization, a tendency that shapes certain sections of ArabicSchrifttum and scholarship in this period and is the result of “an unvary-ing and conscious manner” that “postulates . . . a unification of objectand subject in a meta-object that is the text.”49

The Abbasid capital produced a truly cosmopolitan literature, shapedby competition as well as by joint scholarly projects, from translations of

Greek and Indian works to research of religiously and ethnically mixedscholars, in a cultural milieu that inspired Arab and Persian court poetsalike, fusing some literary genres but keeping others distinct, such as theghazal (love poetry). Other such centers of cultural and intellectual fusionare the cities of the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, al-Andalus.

At its westernmost borders emerged a rich and distinct literature in the Arabic tongue, distinctively characterized by its locality. The allocationof the Andalusian literary heritage into its “proper” history has beensubject to critical investigation. This problematization not only tackles

the question of whether it belonged and thus informed and influencedliterary traditions of Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, and Latin-European orMediterranean cultures, but also whether it is possible at all to write oneliterary history of al-Andalus, say Arabic, that excludes all others.50 Thebest known example is, of course, the troubadour genre and certain lovemotifs. European literary history has had problems with absorbing theliterature and culture of that period in Spain into its literary canons andhistories. On the other hand, due to its dominant linguistic medium,the literature of al-Andalus genuinely forms part of Arabic tradition andacknowledges the local character and intellectual influence in works suchas Ibn Tufayl’s (c. 1110–85) Hayy ibn Yaqzan , Ibn Hazm’s (994–1064) Tawq

al-hamama , or indeed Ibn al-c ArabK’s (1165–1240) mystical writings, all of which uniquely meld religio-philosophical and fictional elements in their works. Another example of the cosmopolitan character of Andalusianliterature and the spirit of a cultural milieu can be traced in the ninthcentury with the emergence of unique poetical forms, the Arabic (andlater also Hebrew) muwashshaha , a poem of five strophes with musicalaccompaniment, and its popular sister-version, the zajal , a strophic po-etic form in the local vernacular dialect, which uses rhyme and meterunknown in the eastern parts of the Muslim empire, but which can betraced back to folk songs in Romance language.51

The literatures of al-Andalus and of Abbasid Baghdad demonstrate thatas long as we do not recognize the fundamental unity and kinship of the

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literatures of various Oriental and Western origins, it will not be possibleto place literature in a civilizational or global frame. An understandingthat places literature at once as part of local or otherwise specific tradi-

tions and as part of larger civilizational contexts and genealogies avoidsthe narrow perspective that assumes “complete” literatures from whichothers borrow and translate alone, a view that was held already by VonGrunebaum.52 If this is a useful description for oikumenical globaliza-tion, it is ever more so today. Approaches that focus mainly on tracingorigins and on textual evidence as proof of influence turn a blind eye tothose literary processes and social conditions that generate a commonliterature. Hayden White’s insistence about reading literature strictlyhistorically points in this direction and shows how futile ontological

claims can be.53

To turn to the second phase, expansionist globalization, one of themost striking features lies in the fact that the rules have changed fun-damentally insofar as questions of influence, adaptation, and syncretismare concerned. The imperialist age of the eighteenth to the twentiethcenturies, and the advent of modernities on a global scale, determine aclear-cut split between the East and the West, between Western modernscience, ideas, and literature and Oriental wisdom, tales, and poetry. Therise of national literatures in Arabic, as Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, or Lebanese

literatures, together with literary imitation, adaptation, and translationof European genres and works coincide with a shifting understandingof adab , which became coterminous with belles-lettres and fiction. Thecatch-word is so-called “Westernization,” a term that denounces genuinepartaking in the advances of Western modernity and that declares aclear hierarchy of relationships. Arabic loses its primacy as a languageof education and culture and thus diminishes its universal claims. Undercolonial supremacy of Western European culture, Arabic sinks to the rankof backwardness—a trend against which, of course, reaction is prompt tofollow. The encounter between different literary traditions does not takeplace in a common shared space, in learned circles or schools, whichunite scholars and poets of different backgrounds, but is marked firstby “textual encounter” in the form of translation. Travels to the capitalsof Europe, turned into literary writing, are thus becoming the means toovercome spatial distance and social boundaries. New ideals of literarymodels develop in imitation, but also in rejection of European literaryforms, and except for the short-lived neoclassical movement during thesecond half of the nineteenth century, Arabic literary heritage, restrictedto the classical Abbasid period, loses its normative role and function as aunique reservoir, while at the same time the newly introduced publishinghouses make the literary heritage readily available.

The third phase of globalization is marked by dispersion and is fullyintegrated in what has been called postmodern cosmopolitanism. In

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comparison to expansionist globalization, the major characteristic is thatLondon and Paris are no longer places to travel to. If travel literature

was one of the signatures of the second globalization, then the present

age differs precisely in that London and Paris have been “taken over”and are places constitutive to Arabic literature as today Arab authors write in many tongues in the capitals of the Western world. Debates,for instance, about the “authenticity” of “la littérature maghrebine enlangue francaise” vanished in recent years as French literature writtenby Arabs and North Africans has been well established within French,North African, and Arabic literary canons.

The tumbling down of national literatures affects Arabic literary his-tory to a lesser degree than it affects others, most notably English liter-

ary history. The universalizing effects of expansionist globalization andcolonialism, and with it the advent of modernity, also occasioned theemergence of Arab national literatures of the newly founded nation-states.But, in contrast to national ideologies that reside in great measure inthe identity of a people and its language transcended through nationalliterature, in the Arab case there is one lingua franca, Arabic, with dialec-tical nuances and colorit . It is not only the ideal of pan-Arabism, as oftencalled dead as it reappears, that incorporates Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian,and other national literatures into one and thus makes it difficult to

draw clear boundaries between these national literatures. Apart fromindividual mobility and exile, inner Arab migration often took place inemigration waves—of Syro-Lebanese writers, under increasing Ottomancensorship and sectarian pressure since the 1860s, to Egypt, but soonafter also to Latin and North America; the great exodus of Palestinian

writers after 1948 to neighboring countries; and of Iraqi Jewish writers toIsrael in 1948. Emblematic of this situation is the aesthetic and personalexperiment of the metafictional novel Alam bi-la khar¯ Kta (World Withouta Map), which was written jointly by the Palestinian writer Jabra IbrahKm

Jabra and c Abdalrahman MunKf, born in Jordan to a Saudi father andIraqi mother, and which explores this existential experience in themundane world of Baghdadi society in the 1970s, where both authorslived for some time.54

Arabic literary history comes closer to this reality if it adopts the locusgenius as historical and categorical framework, rather than national lit-erature. That this is not a statement about the historical viability of Arabnation-states goes without saying. For whereas Arabic popular literatureoften lives from its local colorit , specific national characteristics on thelevel of genre, style, and motif are rather difficult to discern in Arabicliterature, apart, of course, from specifically national themes.

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VII. The Problems of Periodization

If these three forms of globalization offer a useful framework for the

study and history of synchronic aspects of literature, diachronic aspectsof history still require special consideration.Organizing principles of literary history are not self-evident but result

from a specific understanding of literature, be it as a realm of its ownor be it subsequent to other, prior forms of organization. As mentionedabove, and in accordance with the Aristotelian view that history andliterature are complementary, and in contrast to modern ideas thatthese belong to two distinct disciplines, traditionally history is but asubcategory of adab .55 Organizing principles, however, chronology and

geography or elements of profane dynastic and sacred history, are adaptedfrom historiography into literary history. Parameters for histories of Arabic literature follow the two registers used in Arab historiography, atechnically oriented one using repertoire and narrative structures anda typological one organizing its material according to categories.56 Byand large, periodizations of Arabic literary history conventionally followthat of Arab dynastic-Islamic history: the pre-Islamic period (commonlyreferred to as Jahiliyya ), early Islam, then the classical age of the Muslimempires, the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods, followed by the lacuna

of the period of the last Muslim Empire, the Ottoman period, and then, with the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt, the beginning of the Arab renaissance and colonization, followed by the wars and strugglefor independence of the new nation-states, and the postcolonial period,marked further by the year 1967, the year of the catastrophic Arab defeat(nakba ) brought about by Israel (and the West). The present historicalsituation, globalization referred to in political terms with the neologismal-‘aulama , sees the Arab world as divided into the oil and gas rich statesof the Gulf and the former core-lands of Arabic culture and literature,

torn by wars.Departing from these religio-political chronologies, there emergedperiodizations applying seemingly neutral or metaphorical terms. These,however, do not offer much more than abstract notions to the givenand unquestioned periodization. Modernist Arab poets and scholarsof the ninth and tenth century, the muhdathun , do not escape religiousterminology when they continue classifying authors as jahiliyun (poetsof the era of Ignorance), mukhadramun (the generation between pagansand Islamic poets), islamiyun (Islamic poets), and finally the muhdathun

(modernists), who stand in opposition to all earlier poets.57

Upholdingthe foundational division of the time before and after the rise of Islam,other periodizations employ neutral, centennial divisions (first, second,third . . . century) or rhetorical patterns of rise and fall, such as the Clas-

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sical Age or Golden Age followed by the Silver Age and then the Age ofDarkness, the so-called Age of Decline, Westernization and nahda , and

with some delay, postmodernity. Again, these categories and periods are

entirely defined by factors external to literature, including terms such as“Classical” or “Golden Age” since they tend to parallel political strength with artistic quality and quantity.

Nowhere is the problem of periodization more evident than in whatremains one of the major chronological lacunae not only for literaryhistory but Arab history in general, namely the long period from thefifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century in the Arab world. Describ-ing or defining this period in literary terms is not only a terminologicalproblem, but touches upon matters of genres, high and low culture, and

inclusion of social and cultural groups. An illustration of the infancyof Arabic periodization was provided recently with the publication ofthe sixth volume of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (CHAL ).Following conventional periodization, the CHAL jumped some 400centuries, to be precise the period between 1258 and 1798, dates thatmark the Mongol invasion in Baghdad and the French arrival in Egypt,publishing the volume on Modern Arabic Literature directly after that ofthe Abbasid period and an extra volume on Andalusian literature. Inthe introduction to the sixth volume, Arabic Literature in the Post-Clas-

sical Period , its editor, Roger Allen, insists that the so-called “period ofdecadence” (casr al-inhitat ) is far from being void of significant literaryproduction.58 Since these centuries, from the so-called “Golden Age”of Islam and Arab civilization until the advent of modernity, have beenleft unstudied, it is still impossible to attempt to define these centuriesin literary terms, thus the somewhat charged notion of the “postclassi-cal period.” Another way of looking at this period, which suffers fromterminological and categorical problems as all middle periods do, is toopen it up to the perspective proposed here.59 With the rise of the Otto-man Empire (1300–1922) and the Safavid empire (1502–1722), followedby the Zand and Qajar dynasties and the rise of Persian and Ottomanas imperial languages, Arabic literature maintains a privileged status incertain areas of religious sciences and in high culture. But it becameassociated with a literature of the past, whereas Ottoman and Turkishliteratures developed as rivals.

Addressing this period from the perspective of globalization offeredhere would provide, I believe, a greater readiness to perceive the varyingrhythms and shifts of center and influence within the region of concernhere. Similarily, the widespread perception that modern Arabic literatureis predominantly an offspring of imitated Western literature adds to the

view that cuts off continuity with earlier traditions and renders any aes-thetical and historical evaluation of that premodern period even more

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difficult. In the same vain, attempts to retrace indigenous literary gene-alogies, such as the maqamat form of an Bad K

c al-Zaman al-HamadhanK (968–1008) or al-HarKrK (1054–1122) of the classical period as precursor

to the short story, stop short at retracing those lines through the longpostclassical period.

VIII. Sources of Inspiration—Of Jinnis and the Genius

I referred earlier to the genius loci in its spatial aspect and as a socialand material condition for mutual literary inspiration of different literarytraditions, merging into distinct features of a place or region. At the end

of my contribution, however, I seek to invoke, if briefly, another qualityof inspiration and to turn to the spirit of literary history.During the last decade or so, under the pressure of globalization and

the crisis of secularism, the intensified search for meaning and certaintiesdid not restrict itself to the revival of religion as faith and object of study,but stimulated debates about the edifying nature of literature. After thesetbacks and insights of postcolonial and postmodern criticism, a criti-cal revision of parameters and methodologies is required that advancesthe possibilities of universal ideas without giving in to all too handy

and reassuring certainties.

Matters that have been dismissed as purelydriven by ideology, such as questions of virtue, truth, and objectivity,60 but also of canonicity, beauty, and universalism,61 may find in literarystudies new ground, if they are posed from radical historical perspectives.Literature, which at all times had a role to play in the quest for truth,provides insights into its deeper aspects. After all, the Arabic classicaltradition always trusted more in the medium of adab and its potentialfor truth and value than it trusted in philosophy ( falsafa ). Returning tothese questions seems to be an adequate way for discerning criteria ofliterary history in the global.

One of the lessons we learned from modern literary history, whichinstitutionalized the idea that literature and its history captures thespirit of a people, is that a literary history without inspiration remains acatalog, a repertoire at best. Stripped of its national frame of reference,however, this idea reaches far back to earlier registers of literary historyand signals ways to go in the future. The association of literature andspirits is probably as old as literature.62 The spirit not only visits the genial

writer, but also resides in particular kinds of writing. In Arabic tradition,the association of spirit and poetry goes back to the foundational textof Islam, and, moreover, goes back to the occasion of revelation itself.Central to the motive of the Prophet’s honesty and authenticity are therepeated Qur’anic rejections asserting that Muhammad is not a sooth-

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sayer (kahin ) but a prophet (rasul ) and that his message is not poetry(shi c r ) but divine message (risala ).63 These repetitions occurring in theQur’an, had Kth literature, and Islamic exegetical works are a clear token

of belief in the presence and power of supernatural beings. After thefirst revelation Muhammed received through the archangel J Kbr Kl (Ga-briel), he initially feared being possessed by jinn , examples of which weremany at his time.64 The belief in these beings predates Islam and pointsback to heathen Arabia. Corresponding to ideas of the Greek daemon,there existed the widespread view that humans are or can be possessedor charmed by jinn . The presence of the jinn, a collective noun of thesingular jinn K , refers to a specific class of beings made of white fire (ghul ,ifr Kt , ruh , shaytan , and so on). They can be companions and a source of

inspiration, but they are not necessarily benevolent.65

The Qur’an left scholars and poets in a vexed situation. The Qur’anicdisclaimer that, despite a certain resemblance, the Qur’an is not poetryand that its source of inspiration is of a different, divine nature, however,had consequences for poetry. If with the advent of Islam, poetry comesinto question, the situation is far from being univocal, with one hadithor sura being cited to prove the opposite view of another. Poetry gets castas falsehood and magic, being associated with soothsaying and myth, yetit remains the sole linguistic and historical source for that language in

which the Qur’an was revealed, Arabic. The theological doctrine of theinimitability of the Qur’an (i c jaz al-qur’an ) declares the divine text as amatchless miracle of aesthetic expression. Early on, though, the theologi-cal dogma provoked satirical responses by poets who contested, throughproof of their poetry, the dogma and, consequently, that revealed truthis the only form of truth.

Paradoxically, the sura that addresses directly the issue of poetry, the“Sura on the Poets” (sura 26, especially the verses 224–27), still posesthe ground for controversial interpretation as to whether and to whatextent the Qur’an condemns literature as such. The linguistic ambiguityof verses 224–27 has opened a wide field for speculation.66 What is ofrelevance, however, to the present argument is the fact that poetry didnot vanish after the Qur’an. On the contrary, as has been discussed above,poetry became the major form of artistic and edifying expression. Thecompetition of spirits, those benign ones that inspire prophets and soMuhammad—“but down on Muhammad came the spirit of faithfulness”(nazala bi-hi al-r uhu al-am¯ K nu ), “in the clear language of Arabic” (bi-lisanc arab¯ K mub¯ K n ) (sura 26, 193 and 195)—and those that inspire poets andsoothsayers seemingly demarcate a clear line of division between thesacred and the profane. That this division is not so easily upheld hasbeen tested time and again by Arab poets who negate the separationand the two kinds of inspiration, one occasioned by the spirit (ruh ) to

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descend on prophets and one by jinn , demons, or shayat¯ K n (devils) tocome down on poets. These ideas long troubled the minds of scholars,and throughout the centuries, literary sources testify to the inspiring, if

frightful, aspect of the jinn¯ K , or the poetic genius.

While for earlier agesthe animated world of the jinn was more actual, authors of the modernage, such as the modern Egyptian poet Shukr K al-‘Aqqad (1889–1964),professed to prophet-like qualities and to receiving inspiration (wahy ),a term with clear religious connotation.

In its references to the jinn¯ K , Arabic literature is far from homogenous.In one of the popular stories, “The Fisherman” from Stories from the

Thousand and One Nights , the fisherman reseals the mocking jinn K in itsbottle. Against the magic power of the jinn¯ K , he uses his sound reason to

“now plot his destruction with my art and reason, like as he hath plot-ted with his cunning and perfidy.”67 A positive attitude toward the jinn as a source of inspiration is found in the work of the Andalusian poetIbn Shuhayd al-Andalus K (992–1035), Epistle of Familiar Jinn and Whirling

Demons (Risalat al-tawabi’ wa-al- zawab¯ K ’ ). Ibn Shuhayd wrote the epistleas an ironic and self-confident rejection of the accusation of plagiarismput forward by the scholar and vizier, Abu Bakr Yahya Ibn Hazm.68 Thisrejection develops, as James T. Monroe demonstrates, into a Neoplatonictreatise about the sources of poetical inspiration and the essential beauty

of poetry. In the scene that depicts the first encounter of the narrator,or the poetic genius, with his familiar jinn , named Zuhayr Ibn Numayrfrom the tribe of the Banu Ashjac of the jinn , the jinn¯ K advises the nar-rator to call him whenever he is in need of inspiration and to recite thefollowing lines:

Come Zuhair of love; O mighty one such that when memoriesremember him he comes to them.Should mouths ever express their remembrance I imagine that I amkissing her mouth.

For I conceal the abodes of those who remember, even though sanddunes are far from my abode, with a love for their love.69

In Arabic, the three hemistiches are an artful play with the multiplemeanings of the verb dhakara (to mention, to remember, to name)used as verb and substantives, conjuring the presence of the jinn¯ K asthe beloved.70 Rejecting an aestheticism that is founded entirely onrhetoric, Ibn Shuhayd alludes to the jinn¯ K as joining the poet’s intellectand imagination with the realm of the divine, that is the realm of God,

the Qur’an, and eloquence. The depiction of the poet’s journey, dur-ing which he visits, with the help of his jinn K, the jinn of the great Arabpoets and writers of the past, evokes a powerful image and sense of thetimeless presence of the poetic genius. The epistle, then, apart from its

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defense of the active poetical imagination, reveals another elementaryaspect of literature, its sources of inspiration, and poetic genius. For itis an attribute and a peculiarity of literature, as of art, that its presence

does not depend on (institutionalized) mediation alone. The transhis-torical presence of literature is channeled through cultural mechanismsof memorizing, canonizing, and interpreting, but also through the actof visiting, consulting, and reading.

Yet literary history does bestow broader meaning upon a work, exploringthe possibilities of literature and situating it in its civilizational context.

Arabic literary tradition, as we have seen, invested much energy in defin-ing the possibilities and the limits of literature. After the paradigmaticchanges in the field of historiography, after postcolonial and postmodern

criticism, totalizing theories have rightly lost their attractiveness. Theplenum of documents and narratives, as Hayden White calls it, whichestablishes historically possible narratives, finds itself inseparably tiedto the question of the aesthetic realm, not only in the (post) modern

world.

IX. In Lieu of a Conclusion

There is a vast space for alternative approaches to literary historybetween Goethe’s futuristic idea of a Weltliteratur as a vision of the har-monious melding of the world’s best literatures into a great synthesis,and the hegemonic incorporation of The Epic of Gilgamesh , the greatMesopotamian epic of the third millennium BCE, as a source of Westerntradition.71 Literary histories that trace historical transfigurations andpossibilities of literature will write the chapters on “The Global Age”

with a certain sense of a revenant.

Central European University

NOTES

1 Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur , rev. ed. (Leiden, Neth.: E. J. Brill,1943), 1:1 (hereafter cited in text; my translations).2 “Daher muss der Historiker der arabischen Literatur alle diese Erscheinungen in seinenBereich ziehn und darf sich erst in der Neuzeit, die auch die Islamwelt der europäischenKultur immer mehr angleicht, auf die Wortkunst im engeren Sinne beschränken.”3 “ . . . von den Ufern des Pontus bis nach Zanzibar, von Fez und Timbuktu bis nachKasgar und den Sundainseln.”

4 For a summary and insightful discussion on the possibilities and limits of the conceptfrom a global perspective, see Jóhann P. Árnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Ques- tions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2003), and “Rethinking Civilizational

Analysis,” ed. Said Arjomand, special issue, International Sociology 16, no. 3 (2001).

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5 For a precise and thoughtful reflection on the usage of terms in the field of Islamiccivilization, see Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civi- lization , vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), 3–70.6 Tzvetan Todorov, “The Notion of Literature,” New Literary History 38, no. 1 (2007):

1.7 Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI2), ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1986), vol.1, s.v. “adab”; George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the West: WithSpecial Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1990).8 For a summary discussion on the development of adab , see Pellat Charles, “Variationssur le Thème de l’adab ,” Correspondance d’Orient, Études 5–6 (1964): 19–37; Fähndrich Hart-mut, “Der Begriff adab und sein literarischer Niederschlag,” in Orientalisches Mittelalter , ed.

Wolfhart Heinrichs and J. Christoph Bürgel (Wiesbaden: AULA-Verlag, 1990), 326–45; S. A. Bonebakker, “Adab and the Concepts of Belles-Lettres ,” in Abbasid Belles-Lettres , ed. Julia Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1990), 31–48. For a discussion of adab from the perspective of education in the classical period, see George Makdisi, The Rise

of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press,1990), 97–120.9 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead,1995), 12.10 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA:Harvard Univ. Press, 1979).11 On canonization processes in Islam, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, “The Muslim Canon from Late

Antiquity to the Age of Modernism: Typology, Utility, and History,” in Canon and Canon- ization , ed. A. van der Kooij and K. van den Toorn (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1998), 191–228;reprinted in The Times of Histor y: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography , ed. Aziz Al-Azmeh(Budapest: Central European Univ. Press, 2007).

12 See Ihsan Abbas, Tar K kh al-naqd al-adabi ‘inda al-Arab (Beirut: Dar al-Amanah, 1971).See also Gibb, Arabic Literature: An Introduction (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1926; rev.ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) and Wolfhart Heinrichs, Arabische Dichtung und griechischePoetik: Hazim al-Qartagannis Grundlegung der Poetik mit Hilfearistotelischer Begriffe (Wiesbaden:F. Steiner, 1969).13 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967).14 Brian Stock, though, coined the term to analyze literacy and textuality for a differentkind of textuality in the eleventh and twelfth century. See Brian Stock, Implications of Literacy:Written Lanuage and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton,NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 11.15 Shawq K Dayf, Tar K kh al-adab al- c arab K (Cairo: Dâr al-Ma‘ârif, 1960), 1:7–10.16 Ibn Khaldun, Tar K kh al- c allama Ibn Khaldun—Kitab al- c ibar [Book of Advice ] (Beirut: D arKit ab al-lubn aniyya, 1960), 2:1070.17 Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al- c ibar , 2:1055.18 Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al- c ibar , 2:1056.19 See, for instance, Kamal Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjani’s Theory of Poetic Imagery (Warminster,UK: Aris and Philips, 1979) or Wolfhart Heinrichs, “‘Takhyil’ and its Traditions,” in Gott istSchön und er liebt die Schönheit , ed. Alma Giese and J. C. Bürgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994),227–47.20 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History , ed. N. J. Dawood, trans. FranzRosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), 411 (hereafter cited in text).21 Jurji Zaydan, Tar K kh adab al-lugha al-arabiyy (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1957), 1:8.22 See Jack A. Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cairo: AmericanUniv. in Cairo Press, 1984).23 Inaugurated at the young Cairo University founded in 1905.

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24 Parts of the book were published already in 1894 in the journal Zaydan edited, theCairo-based al-Hilal .25 According to his own account in al-Hilal 9 (1894).26 Zayd an, Tar K kh adab , 1:8.

27 Zayd an, Tar K kh adab , 1:14.28 Zayd an, Tar K kh adab , 1:14.29 Zayd an, Tar K kh adab , 1:15.30 See Zayd an, Tar K kh adab , 3:283.31 Zayd an, though, provides a list of books in Arabic, English, German, and French,

which he consulted for his history. Tar K kh adab , 1:12–13.32 This is the intermediary period before the age of the footnote and after the age ofmanuscript culture with its margins and glossaries.33 Using the Arabic term nahda for “modernity,” Zayd an aligns the nineteenth-century

Arab renaissance movement to a worldwide development.34 This work has been translated into German by Oskar Rescher (Stuttgart, 1934).

35 Freiherr von Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, Literaturgeschichte der Araber , 7 vols. (Vienna:Kaiserliche und Köngliche Hof-und Staatsdruckerei, 1850–56).36 On the beginnings of the study of Arabic literature, see Gustave Edmund von Grune-baum, “Zum Studium der Arabischen Literatur im Westen,” in Kritik und Dichtkunst: Studien

zur arabishen Literaturgeschichte (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1955), 7–16.37 Translated from the Hungarian original of Ignác Goldhizer as A Short History of Arabic

Literature , ed. and trans. József Somogyi (Hyderabad, Ind.: Islamic Culture Board, 1958).38 An exception is Roger Allen’s The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Developments of Its Genres

and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), which, as the title poignantlyindicates, avoids the concept of a “history.”39 Boutros Hallaq and Heidi Toëlle, eds., Histoire de la littérature arabe moderne , vol. 1,

1800–1945 (Arles, Fr.: Sindbad, 2007).40 See in this regard the introduction to Heinrichs and Bürgel, Orientalisches Mittelalter .41 On the career of this concept, see Aijaz Ahmad, “Literary Theory and ‘Third WorldLiterature,’” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992).42 Hodgson, Venture of Islam , 1: 45, 48–50, 109.43 For the various aspects (Greek, Persian, Jewish, Christian, and Aramaic), see the fourarticles by Carsten Colpe in Orientalisches Mittelalter , ed. Heinrichs and Bürgel, 31–141.44 Tarif Khalidi, Classical Arab Islam: The Culture and Heritage of the Golden Age (Princeton,NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 51.45 For now, the heretical question, famously raised by the Egyptian writer Taha Husaynin the early twentieth century, as to whether pre-Islamic poetry is at all authentic shall not

interest us here. Taha Husayn, Fi al-shi c r al-jahili (Cairo: Dar-Kuttub al-masriyya, 1926).46 For comprehensive overviews of various aspects of this history, consult Heinrichs,1994.47 A. I. Sabra, “Situating Arabic Science: Locality versus Essence,” Isis 87, no. 4 (1996):655, 657. Sabra notes “the advantages of a strict adherence to the axiom of locality insituating the tradition of Arabic science with reference both to the place that this tradi-tion occupies in the general history of science and to its place in the civilization where itemerged and developed” (655).48 Encyclopaedia of Islam , new ed., ed. Peri J. Bearman et al. (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1960–2005), 12 vols., s.v. “Shuc¯ ubiyya,” and H. T. Norris, “Shuc¯ ubiyyah in Arabic Literature,” inAbbasid Belles-Lettres , ed. Ashtiany, 31–48.49 Abdullah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? trans.Diarmid Cammell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 5.50 See Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in the Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten

Heritage (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

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51 James T. Monroe, “Zajal and Muwashshaha,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain , ed. S. K. Jayyusi (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1992), 398–419.52 Von Grunebaum, “Avicenna’s Risâla fi ‘l-išhq and Courtly Love,” Journal of Near EasternStudies 11, no. 4 (1952): 238.

53 See Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and HistoricalReality,” Rethinking History 9, nos. 2–3 (2005): 147–57, esp. 152, 156.54 Jabra Ibr ah Km Jabra and Abdalrahm¯ an Mun Kf, Alam bi-la khar Kta (Beirut: al-Muassasahal-`Arabiyah lil-Dirasat wa-al-Nashr, 1982).55 White, “Introduction,” 147.56 Aziz Al-Azmeh, The Times of Histor y: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography (Budapest:Central European Press, 2007), 27.57 Heinrichs, Arabische Dichtung , 24.58 See the introduction by Roger Allen, editor of the sixth volume to the series TheCambridge History of Arabic Literature (1989–2007). Each volume is edited by another team.Roger Allen, “The Post-Classical Period: Parameters and Preliminaries,” in Arabic Literature

in the Post-Classical Period , ed. Allen and D. S. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,2006), 1–23.59 On this topic, see Randolph Starn, “Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Decline,” Historyand Theory 14, no. 1 (1975): 1–31.60 For instance, Terry Eagleton insists that in the face of the economic forces of theglobal age “cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously once again.” Terry Eagleton,After Theory (London: Verso, 2003), 73.61 On this quest of the aesthetical autonomy of literature programmatically, see EdwardSaid, “Globalizing Literary Study,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 64–68.62 Some years ago Stephen Greenblatt made the same allusion. Stephen Greenblatt,“What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 461–80.

63 See, for example, “They say: Thou art only one of those bewitched (min al-musahar- riyuna ) and think you are a liar” (Qur’an 26:185–86).64 On this complex, see Michel Zwettler, “A Mantic Manifesto: The Sura of the Poets andthe Qu’ranic Foundations of Prophetic Authority,” in Poetry and Prophecy , ed. J. L. Kugel(Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), 86.65 For brief overviews, see the articles on “djinn ” in the EI2 and on “jinn” in Encyclopaediaof the Qur’an , and Ignaz Goldziher, Abhandlungen zur Arabischen Philologie (Leiden, Neth.:Brill, 1896), 1:107–17.66 The sentence in question (al-shu c ara’u yatabi c uhumu al-ghâw’ûn ) translates, dependingon the contextual interpretation, as either “the poets are followed by demons” or “thepoets are followed by those who have gone astray,” obviously leaving several options forinterpretation.67 “The Story of the Fisherman,” in Stories from the Thousand and One Nights , trans. Edward

William Lane, rev. Stanley Lane-Poole (New York: P. F. Collier, 1909), 32.68 See James T. Monroe’s introduction to Risalat at-tawabi’ wa z-zawabi’, The Treatise of

Familiar Spirits and Demons by Abu ‘ Amir ibn Shuhaid al-Ashja c î, al-Andalus K, trans. Monroe(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1971), esp. 38–40.69 Monroe, Risalat , 52.70 A variant and suggestive translation is given by Suzanne Pinckney Stetchkevych, “PoeticGenius and Poetic Jinni: The Case of Ibn Shuhayd,” International Journal of Middle EastStudies 39 (2007): 333.71 As happened in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces . See Waïl S. Hassan, “WorldLiterature in the Age of Globalization: Reflections on an Anthology,” College English 63,no. 1 (2000): 41.

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39.3.Al Bagdadi