Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Furani, Khaled, 1973–author.

Silencing the sea : secular rhythms in Palestinian poetry / Khaled Furani.

pages   cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7646-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-8260-9 (e-book)

1. Arabic poetry—Palestine—History and criticism. 2. Arabic poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Poetics. 4. Secularism in literature. I. Title.

PJ8190.2.F87 2012

892.7'100995694—dc23

2012007600

Designed by Bruce Lundquist

Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 10/14 Minion

Section opener design by Naif Shaqqur. Calligraphy by Ahmad Zoabi. Arabic text is an excerpt from an untitled poem by ʿAbd al-Jabbār ibn Hamdīs (d. circa AD 1132–33), a Sicilian and Andalusian Arab poet. A horrifying [sea] whose rider would be nothing but a transgressor / If it were not, in the Quran, a sign to wonder / Because of what they witnessed, my eye or my ear / Continue to warn my heart about a relentless fear. Translation by Khaled Furani.

SILENCING THE SEA

SECULAR RHYTHMS IN PALESTINIAN POETRY

KHALED FURANI

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

To the souls of my mother and grandmother, Jamila al-Badawi Furani and Khadija Yaaqub Abbas

And from water we created all that lives

Quran 21:30

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

A Note on Transliteration

Introduction

INITIATIONS

1 Secular Bewilderment

2 Rhythms and Rulers

3 The Land of the Poem

THE SONG

4 Memory for Beginnings

5 Metrical Discipline and Mastery

6 Poets for the People

THE PICTURE

7 Enough Screaming

8 Rhythmical Freedom

9 Modern Poets and Conservative People

THE DREAM

10 Redeeming Prose

11 When Meter Melts

12 The Laity Outside Poetry’s Temple

Conclusions: Secular Prayers

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE TRAIL OF RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK began over ten years ago. During this time, many more people have contributed to its making than my effort to acknowledge them can possibly include. My heartfelt thanks go to them all, primarily to the poets and their families for their hospitality toward this inquiry and the inquirer. As for several poets who have passed away in the interim, I am grateful if this book can pass along some of their stories, rhythms, and questions. From the quick of my heart I also convey gratitude to Talal Asad, who conveyed to me the value of investigating one’s own ignorance, and whose unassuming, probing questions kindled mine for this book and more.

This inquiry was also nourished by the care of scholars at numerous institutions: Barbara Aswad and Geurin Montilus at Wayne State University; Ammiel Alcalay, Michael Blim, Marc Edelman, Louise Lennihan, Leith Mullings, and Jane Schneider at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and Steve Caton at Harvard University. In the precariousness of ethnographic fieldwork riddled with closures and checkpoints of military occupation in the year 2001–2, Inam Dagher, Abd al-Karim Abu-Kashan, and Mahmoud al-Atshan at Birzeit University ensured that many literal and figurative paths remained open. Brinkley Messick at Columbia University extended material space and moral sustenance when those were acutely needed during the book’s infancy. Trevor Dawes, whether at Prince ton or Columbia libraries, extended indefatigable support in finding many otherwise intractable bibliographic sources.

In navigating the deep of Arabic language and literature, I remain indebted to the inspiring as well as instrumental guidance of the following individuals: Sayyid al-Bahrawi, Taufiq Ben-Amour, Mahmud Ghanayim, Ferial Ghazoul, Fathi Furani, Elias Khoury, Jeries Naim Khoury, Muhsin Jasim al-Musawi, and the late Magda al-Nowaihi. For profitable comments on this book at one or another stage of its unfolding, my gratitude goes to the anonymous reviewer at Stanford University Press and the following readers: Lori Allen, Steve Blum, Moustafa Bayoumi, Koray Çalişkan, Elliot Colla, T. K. Hunter, Janet Kaplan, Jonathan Shannon, Genese Sodikof, Ramzi Rouighi, and Andrea Queeley. I also extend my appreciation to my editor, Kate Wahl, and her fine crew for elegantly steering my book through production. To Benjamin Hollander, the sound-smith who listened with great care to the sounds and sentience in this book’s evolution, go my Haifian bundle of thanks.

For offering financial support during the research and writing of this book, I thank the Social Science Research Council, the Palestinian-American Research Center, the Jonathan Shapira Fund, and the Committee for Educational Guidance for Arab Students in Haifa.

To the descendents of Hajja Khadija and al-Badawi in the Abbas tribe go my thanks for nourishing this book, even by distraction, as we continue to live out the wider book of our common daily lives. Though we are separated by oceans, I thank my in-laws, Joan and Hugh Alpert, for their robust support, for availing space to write during visits to the United States, and for vital and discerning edits by Joan. Particular lines and thoughts in this book ineluctably grew out of conversations I have had with my siblings, Khulud, Fawzi, and Salah, who co-shouldered its brunt. Until my final breath I will remain indebted to my parents, Jamal and Jamila, for cultivating in me a palate for the secret sweetness of suffering. This book owes its beginnings and its compass to my mother, whose absence continued to nourish it, just as her presence had steadily done. To the awesome beginners, my children, Mysoon, Sukayna, and Jamal, I owe both the light that traversed through them when darkness shrouded my path and the serenity they brought when life’s hubbub prevailed. My soul mate, Helene, knows this book is but one emanation from the well of our bond. For all the lessons learned and yet to be learned from this inquiry, my gratitude ultimately returns to God—Maker of All-Forms, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Light, and the Just, who extends the path of submission.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

A VAST MAJORITY OF THE WORDS I transliterate in this study were spoken in classical literary Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic) during interviews with poets and the public of various regional dialects. Generally, I adhere to the transliteration system followed by the International Journal of Middle East Studies, except for words commonly recognized by English readers. However, I double Latin letters to indicate the gemination of Arabic consonants in lieu of the diacritic shadda.

When transliterating words from demotic Arabic, I comply with the pronunciation of the given speaker(s). This occasionally includes assimilation of the definite article (al-) with the initial consonant of the nouns it modifies, as is the case with solar letters (al-ḥuruf ash-shamsiyyah).

In transliterating names and texts, I use diacritics for premodern sources, except for the Prophet Muhammad. For modern authors and texts, I use commonly recognized spellings and approximate others according to current conventions.

INTRODUCTION

I GIVE MY STEPS their form and tell the sea to follow me, wrote the Syrian-born poet known as Adonis.¹ Through these words, he sought four decades ago, as he still does today, to stir the still waters of poetic and political life throughout the Arab world. His words belong to a wave of remarkable endeavors by Arab poets to secure moorings for their tradition in the modern world. In culling the word sea (baḥr), Adonis indicates his own powerful location at the crest of that wave, whose tidemarks have reached many shores of Arabic poetry, including Palestinian, the focus of this book. Beyond naming a natural formation, in Arabic the sea also refers to poetic meter. Unlike his predecessors who composed Arabic poetry in traditional meters passed down over generations and centuries, Adonis creates his own poetic form and tells meter to follow him.

In the quest to modernize poetic forms, whereby Palestinian poets, and Arab poets generally, have radically transformed the sound structures of their poems, poets have adopted free verse and prose poems, forms in which poets, not the sea, stand sovereign over rhythms. This substitution of sovereignties has emerged from a protean process in which modernizing poets have essentially rejected poetic meter and refused to measure sound in their compositions. Over the past seven decades, their rhythms have become ever more irregular and their poems ever more silent, more likely to be read quietly and privately than recited publicly, beckoning the eyes more than the ears. As an ethnography of literary transformation, this book investigates forms of ethics, politics, epistemologies, and imaginaries, which have led to this prevailing silence in the contemporary poetry of Arab societies. It tunes in to the secular reverberations of these acoustic mutations, particularly within the Palestinian scene, which still struggles for sovereignty in the secular complex of nation-states as it does for a place in world literature.

A primary goal of this book is to demonstrate ways in which poets’ emerging silence bespeaks contradictions and ambiguities of secular formations in modernity as movements in the sounds of rhythms, but also beyond them. I advance three main arguments. First, I argue that poetic forms and forms of life are inseparable. Thus different sonic edifices are enactments or embodiments of forms of life and self, freedom and truth, knowledge and tradition that poets aspire to cultivate, expunge, or simply explore. Poets’ sound techniques (e.g., rhyme, rhythm, and meter) invariably intermingle with sounds of living and knowing in their societies.

For example, one poet’s defense of meter may elicit a critique of globalization, just as another poet’s attack on meter’s authority may inspire a critique of authority writ large in Arab or Muslim societies. Perhaps to Arab poets themselves and their public, this indivisibility between the aesthetic and the political is assumed because the oneness of the human word (and effort) has not experienced the steadily splintering sovereignties of human practice into recognizable, and respected, specializations and expertise as extensively as in the modern, secular West.

This dissociability between techniques of poetry and craftings of the self foreshadows my second argument: that the secular has been vital for poets in composing modern rhythms of life. In the seemingly inert and innocuous details of poetic form that carry the fullness and finitude of human practices and the unfolding of collective and personal histories, the secular lives various and distinct facets of its embattled presence. Being far greater than statements poets make about the place of Islam (or religion generally) as consigned to a private place within society and outside politics, the secular affects ways poets conceive their tradition; sustain, relinquish, or renovate its practices; and infuse their articulations of a relation with a public, revealing attendant notions about language, creativity, truth, tradition, freedom, submission, living, and dying in the era of modern specializations.

This second argument takes me to the third and final one: in its claims to self-sufficiency, the secular, in complex and contradictory ways, both denies and depends on an other it anoints as the religious. Poets of secular modernity vindicate in poetry what they repudiate in religion. With secular sensibilities they simultaneously rupture and erect ramparts with which they endeavor to found an autonomous field of poetry. They march toward life, freed from the miracles of a religiously persuaded world, only to reembrace them as aesthetic epiphanies, as in Adonis’s thaumaturgic command of the sea.

To fashion an argument about secular poetic forms, I must first make a number of assumptions about poetry, poets, and poetic form. I draw upon two premodern conceptions of poetry as a body of knowledge (ʿilm) and as a historical repository (diwān).² With these conceptions as a basis for viewing modern poetry, I have been able to see the poetic tradition as caught in the formation and contestation of truth and subject formations in a particular society, rather than as an insular unraveling of beauty and imagination. By extension, I approach poets as intellectuals whose work expresses, inquires, embodies, abdicates, and contests certain traditions of truth-subject formations in their society. Therefore poets are not merely expressive artists belonging to the secular cult of Beauty, as Walter Benjamin (1968, p. 224) would say, and as some poets in this study might say about themselves.

When I began my ethnographic fieldwork, I did not plan to study poetic form. However, when speaking to poets I quickly learned that the topic that most concerned them was the state of verse; it interested and stirred them passionately in all sorts of directions. The question that initially brought me to the field related to a pervasive notion in Palestinian parlance after the collapse of Palestinian society in 1948: summoud, meaning persistence. I wanted to understand why poets employed it so commonly, using it to evoke fortitude in the occupied and frailty in the occupier. I was attracted by what appeared both tragic and tragically distant about this sensibility that claims an ethical form of power (and freedom) through powerlessness, once at home in a Sophoclean life, yet largely foreign to a modern life that equates the sovereignty of the self with its power (arche).³ Yet talking about summoud met only with poets’ disinterest. They informed me repeatedly that the best they had to say about it they had already said in their poems. And so poets took me to my new topic, insistently their topic: poetic form.

The current Palestinian poetic scene is dominated by three forms: a traditional ode in use for over fifteen centuries, and two modern arrivals, both less than a century old: free verse and prose poetry. The scene is characterized by a plethora of exceedingly intricate power struggles among these forms, their adherents, and the different worlds they advocate. Henceforth I also refer to them by their common names in this scene: al-ʿāmūdī for the traditional, classical pre-Islamic ode; tafʿīla for the modern form of free verse; and qaṣīdat al-nathr for the widely debated form of the prose poem. I must stress that I have not attempted a history of these literary forms, nor do I imply a linear historical narration positing their sequential existence. All three forms coexist today, sometimes even among the works of a single poet, yet they do so in unequal conditions of power and prominence with particular consequences to their visibility.

One essential difference among these forms involves distinct ways in how poets employ them to handle that raw material from time immemorial: human sound. Rhyme, meter, and rhythm are essential components of poetic forms. At least in the Arab poetic tradition, shiʿr (poetry) has been defined canonically as measured and rhyming utterance pointing to a meaning (qaulun mawzūnun muqaffā yadullu ʿalā maʿnā).⁴ I found a relationship between a growing desire in and among poets for the modern and an abating desire for adhering to the tradition. Sonic measuring has become irrelevant (even an impediment) to poets aspiring to modernity.⁵

Since I make an argument about poetic form, it is essential to identify the form of a given poem or that employed by a given poet at a given time. There are many ways to discern a poem’s form. In this study two take precedence. First and primarily, I identify poetic form through poets’ narratives, arguably embedded philosophies revealed in fieldwork interviews. Second, I identify form as it is visually manifest in two distinct but related registers: the typographic and the prosodic. The typographic register attends to the visual distribution of a poem’s words on the printed page, that is, its format, whereas the prosodic register captures the measurement of sound in a poem. Prosodic measuring can be expressed in a scansion, a visual analytic rendition of the aural characteristics of composition. Thus the complex of the form’s materiality (its immanence) is drawn from poets’ descriptions and from a poem’s visual and sonic layers as manifest on the page.

I conducted my fieldwork from July 2001 to June 2002, focusing on the Palestinian poetic scene in Palestine/Israel primarily in Nazareth, Haifa, al-Taybeh, and Ramallah. But I also ventured to neighboring capitals, namely, Amman and Cairo. I spent nearly a month in Cairo during the thirty-fourth International Book Fair held there. I went to other parts of the Arab world partly because the Arabic language does not and cannot abide by colonially inscribed borders of modern nation-states of the Middle East, and partly because Palestinian poets encouraged me not to segregate my study from the wider poetic scene of the Arab world, as their own lives have been under Israeli sovereignty. In Cairo I was able to observe and interview poets from Libya, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Lebanon, and even sealed-away Gaza. This range of interviews and observations made clear to me the extent to which the local pursuit of modernity through the literary comprises local expression of an otherwise broadly Arab and even global condition.

In pursuit of poets working in the three forms of literary Arabic poetry today, I conducted fifty-eight interviews with forty-seven poets, six of whom were women. Their ages ranged from eighteen to eighty-four. I also interviewed seven nonpoets: literary critics and poetry recipients. I attended twenty-four poetry events in the local Palestinian scene, mainly in Nazareth and in Tamra in the Galilee and in al-Taybeh in the center of the country. In the first two locales, I attended the second Palestinian Poetry Festival (Mihrajan al-Shiʿr al-Filastīni); in the latter, I attended regular meetings of the Cultural Association (al-Muntadā al-Thaqāfi). I also attended poetry events held during the thirty-fourth Cairo International Book Fair and a poetry evening in Amman.

My investigation additionally included examinations of daily press and archival accounts of activities in the poetic field. Whereas in the daily press I reviewed reports on poetic activities in the local Palestinian and wider Arab scene, my archival work attended to poetic content and context: published verse and political-literary criticism and coverage. The contemporary and historic press offered a map of the local literary terrain and its actors, present and past. One of my chief resources was al-Jadid (The New, 1951–91), a literary-political Arabic journal published by the Israeli Communist Party in Haifa. In the Public Library of Ramallah, I reviewed its holdings of al-Karmel (named after the Carmel mountain range). Published by Khalil Al-Sakakini Institute, this periodical was edited by the late Mahmoud Darwish from 1981 until his death in 2008, when it ceased publication. At the Palestinian House of Poetry in al-Bireh, West Bank, I reviewed two periodicals it has published, al-Shuʿaraʾ (The Poets, 1998–present) and Aqwas (Bows, 2001). I also reviewed newspapers of various political affiliations: al-Ittihad (The Union), the only Arabic daily within Israel, published by the Israeli Communist Party; al-Ayyam (The Days), a daily newspaper affiliated with the Palestinian National Authority on the West Bank; Fasl al-Maqal (The Discerning Speech) of the Nationalist Assembly Party; and Sawt al-Haq wal-Hurriya (Voice of Justice and Freedom) of the Islamic Movement. The latter two are Arabic weekly newspapers published in Israel. I also followed the online literary section of the London-based al-Quds al-ʿArabi. Finally, I made it a habit to read works by the poets whom I met, whether appearing in collections or in the press.

Only at the risk of inviting misunderstanding could an introduction omit caveats, and I present quite a few. First, I explain why I focus primarily on poets and only marginally on their poetic works and clarify that this approach implies no statement on my part about the ontological primacy of the author. My study neither ascribes sovereignty to the author nor annuls poets’ authorial agency promoted by notions about the death of the author.⁶ I believe this view can be profitably captured with the ambiguity deposited in the very term subject. Approached as subjects of the secular, poets in this study constitute the secular as it constitutes them.

Second, on the selection of poets in this study a word is necessary. I was interested in poets as agents capable of articulating the practice of speaking and writing in society, irrespective of their standing in the literary establishment. Although all poets in the community in which I worked were invariably published in one or another literary outlet (and the younger ones increasingly posted on the Web), a majority of my informants were unadorned by the literary establishment and unheard of beyond it, living in obscurity and marginality.

This point may be trivial to an anthropologist whose discipline does not require studying primarily (if at all) the fortified and famous in their field. Yet the established poets and literary critics I encountered expected literary judgment in my work and assessed its merits accordingly. As with some I encountered in the field, certain readers of this book may be dismayed by my including nonacclaimed poets. Rather than sustaining some literary criterion, this work should be understood as an attempt by ethnographic means to dissociate from assumptions about the literary as a self-evident concept or self-sufficient realm. I set out in part to explore the different sensibilities, practices, conceptions, and traditions involved in legitimizing literary merit, not to demand them. An objective of this work is to demonstrate the extraliterary salience permeating this putative literary merit while refusing to sequester analysis to specialized prosodic, linguistic, and literary forms of expertise.

My third caveat relates to my giving preeminence to the materiality of form and therefore sound in poetry to the apparent exclusion of other poetic constituents, which may appear arbitrary at first. Only the conclusion of this book actually analyzes the semantic and figurative content of poetic writing. Why should my investigation exclude other significant aspects of poetry, such as grammar, syntax, and style?

The contingencies of disciplinary training are again part of the answer. My goal as an anthropologist has been to learn from poets themselves aspects of their work that are unavailable in their written compositions alone. Another part of the answer has to do with the historically eminent position of sound (and sound measurement, to be precise) in making poetry and denoting its form, whether in Arabic or in any other poetic tradition. In other words, poems are classified as traditional, free verse, or prose based on their sonic architecture rather than tropes, although, of course, these two are always related in complex ways, a relation discussed directly in the book’s conclusion.

My final caveat addresses my focus on three literary forms, which do not completely exhaust the field of contemporary Arabic poetry. I focus on them to the exclusion of other emergent and even still unidentifiable forms of poetic work. This work also excludes the immensely rich tradition of oral poetry while acknowledging that a total severance between oral and literary Arabic is unattainable. Also unattainable is a binary and irreversible distinction between audial and visual forms.⁷

The modern shifts at the center of this study and the debates among poets over the modernity of their tradition are quintessentially situated within the literary immanence of Arab poetic production. This means that the modern forms of free verse and prose poetry on which I focus are relevant to poets who compose in fuṣḥā (literary Arabic) and practically irrelevant to poets working in ʿāmiyya (demotic Arabic). It is this and only this kind of irrelevance of particular modern shifts to the world of colloquial Arabic poetry that accounts for my excluding it in this study. No normative reasoning about the legitimacy of one kind of poetry over the other should be ascribed to my attention to literary as opposed to colloquial poetry.⁸

And now some notes on the parts and chapters of this book. My story opens with three Initiations. They aim to acquaint the reader with terms of reference necessary for comprehending the argument and the story through which it unfolds. The first, Secular Bewilderment, develops the argument about secularizing poetic forms. It presents my sense of the relevance of secularism and secularization to this study, the notion of the secular I employ, and how I concretely register the secular in the world of modernizing poets.

The second and third initiations place the story I want to tell in axes of time and place, respectively. Rhythms and Rulers acquaints the nonspecialist reader with knowledge of pivotal terms, techniques, and personae in the history of the Arabic poetic tradition, who are also evoked by poets in their narratives. To help graft this technical knowledge onto the fabric of life forms to which Arabic poetry belongs, I follow one prominent line of drama in the history of Arabic poetry: the encounter between the poet and political authority. I trace this drama through the work of three paradigmatic figures: the pre-Islamic al-Shanfarā, the twelfth-century al-Mutannabi, and the modern-era Syrian-born Adonis.

The Land of the Poem presents a particular poetic field and its political prominence: the scene of Palestinian poetry festivals under the first Israeli military regime (1948–66). This history provides an important setting for positioning the ethnographic narratives that follow. In this section, I observe the last days of a historically dominant, but now largely defunct, form of al-ʿāmūdī (the pillared) in the modernity of Arabic poetry. I also show the earliest cracks out of which free verse erupted onto and arose from this particular scene.

After Initiations, the core ethnographic narration is organized into three parts, according to the three poetic forms inhabiting the literary scene. The first part is The Song, dedicated to the traditional form of al-qaṣīda, more commonly known as al-ʿāmūdī, with its regularity of a single rhyme, rhythm, and meter throughout a given poem. The Picture is dedicated to free verse, commonly called tafʿīla. In free verse, the practice of measuring sound loses its preeminence as poets slacken meter’s grip, but without entirely discarding it. The Dream is dedicated to the prose poem, qaṣīdat al-nathr, in which poets completely repudiate the traditional practice of sound measuring, thus silencing the sea. In naming these parts, I point to the paradigmatic practice, the grammar, as it were, in the sonic edifice of each form. While The Song, The Picture, and The Dream aim to delineate the retreat of sound and the ascendancy of visualization (and obscure visualization at that), in no way should the practices they represent be taken as mutually exclusive.

Within this tripartite discussion lives another one. Each ethnographic part consists of three chapters whose narratives each focus on one of three relations, which figured prominently in my conversations with poets: their relation to poetic tradition, to rhythm, and to a reading or listening public. These chapters are sequenced to express an escalating intensity in secularizing forms whereby poets view the measuring of sounds as increasingly obsolete and simultaneously express a greater mistrust of the audience.

This secularizing intensity culminates in the book’s conclusion, Secular Prayers. While the ethnographic narratives explore form, largely through what poets say about it and principally about its sound properties, the conclusion shifts to an analysis of content. It also deviates from ethnographic interviews and observations to pursue a close and critical reading of poetic selections. This analysis of actual poetic writing aims to show the reader what poets always insist upon: a change in sound structures ineluctably involves a change in the poem’s structures of meanings. To effectively demonstrate this inseparability between form and content, I have chosen to focus on certain highly influential writings by Adonis (in free verse primarily and to a lesser extent in prose forms), who championed the cause of Arab modern secularity. Although Adonis is not Palestinian, his work has had a significant influence on the Palestinian and wider Arabic poetic scene.⁹ But more relevant to my argument, analyzing Adonis’s work enables me to probe a quandary that riddles the secular, demonstrating the ambiguities and contradictions in its modern workings through the ways it arranges its relation with the religious, in this case within a literary field.

INITIATIONS

1

SECULAR BEWILDERMENT

ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK among poets shaped my interest in secularism. Poets themselves, to be sure, did not repeatedly invoke it, yet secularism was profoundly assumed in the ways they sought to modernize their tradition and make it relevant to their world. The modernizing poets’ narratives—their embedded philosophies—collected through ethnographic field interviews most immediately resonate with secularism as a political doctrine of separation when the poets express its typical demand for expunging religion from politics. However, the secular as a dominant presence, as a hegemonic mode of knowing and living the real of the modern world, also reverberates in what poets say they wanted to do in their poems. It lives among modernizing poets in what Taylor (2007, p. 4) calls the whole background understanding and feel of the world.¹ Poets assume the secular, a power for distancing themselves from a world they call religious, when they speak of what is natural, obvious, necessary, and even inevitable for modernizing their techniques and conceptions of poetic work. I, in turn, approach the secular as a force that goes far beyond the nonreligious and constitutes particular formations of being and knowing in the modern world. Through poets’ narratives, I show how the secular has been vital as well as complex in its working within a modern poetic transformation.

It is exactly in poets assuming the secular that I realized its power during my fieldwork. I have come to consider its silence as a paradoxical sign of its dominant presence in the modern world. Its power does not simply lie in its ability to be evoked by poets, to appear as vestments they wear or in pronouncements they make about a literary agency opposing religious authority or tradition in the public realm, although it is there as well. Most profoundly, the secular’s ability to operate viscerally and silently as axiomatic and natural, even with regard to sounds poets may or may not versify, attests to the magnitude of its power. It was natural and self-evident for certain poets in this study to posit poetry as distinct from religion, writing as more powerful than reciting, and historical time as sovereign over all others (e.g., a time of eternity). Their narratives make manifest the secularity of such separations and their implications for the secular’s claims of self-sufficiency.

The moments when the secular commits itself to silence are no less significant than the moments during which it surfaces in speech. Such moments of silence occur frequently when secular poets write mythically. In fact, poets resort to religious scriptures and ancient myths of the Middle East in distinct ways that are not even possible for traditional poets.² In his famous collection of poems, Songs of Mehyar the Damascene, discussed in the conclusion to this book, Adonis (1971, p. 98) confesses, O Phoenix I prayed . . . so madness would lead us. I found it bewildering that poets want to claim for history as opposed to, say, myth, or rationality as opposed to irrationality, an authoritative role in public life. But they prolifically use mythical signs, religious references, and seemingly illogical and nonrealistic constructions in their poetic compositions.

The turn from versified to prose rhythms of poetry; the attendant changes in conceptions of poetic tradition, public, and agency; and a distinct resort to religious signs in poetry constitute a complex of secular shifts, effects, and consequences. They are not secular because poets declare them as such nor only because poets embed them in declarations for a separation between poetry and religion, or politics and religion, or for keeping Islam (and religious authority generally) within a private sphere of personal belief about the supernatural. The secularity of these shifts resides in what poets do with words (and in what they want their words to do), which profoundly resonates with the modern and contingent career of the secular as an ontology and epistemology of distancing from what or whom it anoints as the religious.

One of the curious things secular poets do with words is evoke the mythical. In transforming poetic concepts and practices, the secular in modern Arabic poetry has not simply banished the religious; it has also come to depend on it. Poets evoke and mostly presume the secular as they conceive boundaries of their tradition and yet resort to its other, the religious, in their rhythmical and figurative practices. Furthermore, while poets advocate a non-sacred language—and accordingly aspire to have ordinary, prosaic roles in society—they charge their acts of writing with extraordinarily redemptive capabilities. The act of writing redeems (liberates) them from the prose and perishability of life. In and of itself, writing becomes an act of salvation to which secular poets aspire in the face of oblivion.

Such aspects of this apparent secular quandary may not be peculiar only to modern poets. Reasons exist to believe it is a quandary of the secular itself.³ It remains the task of elaboration beyond the scope of this book to show exactly when and where this secular quandary manifests itself in other scientific, intellectual, economic, or political pursuits that owe their legitimacy to the secular. My account modestly aims to point to the possibility that something like this quandary could exist elsewhere and to advocate for the pursuit of other studies on this question.⁴ If modernizing poets’ quandary is in essence secular, it follows that one would expect other versions of it to appear in other places where the secular, morphed into a modern power, inscribes itself. Here my argument in the form of a narrative points only to the need for a sequel on its quandaries.

My understanding of the secular that enables this argument is different from the all too common view that secularism is that which is outside religion, or even inimical to it. It is also common to think of secularization as a sacredness-stripping force. I part from these understandings and instead largely work with Talal Asad’s (2003) concept of the secular as a modern form of power. According to this concept, the secular is not to be reduced either to a political doctrine that requires the separation of religion and politics (secularism) or to a sociological thesis and a particular historical process (secularization), which has been crucial for creating the self-image of the modern era (rational, intellectual, worldly, disenchanted, and scientific; Casanova, 1994). Rather, the secular lives in the grammar of our modern being and forms, not only beliefs (theistic or otherwise), but also in conditions in which—and this is a crucial point for my argument—experiences of the oneness of human action splinters into autonomous realms.⁵

This useful distinction marks the secular as constituting the real and is therefore irreducible to a thesis, theory, doctrine, or perspective. It departs from a partisan preoccupation, however variegated, of secularization and secularism with religion in modern society and permits an investigation of poets’ modern secularity as something beyond accommodating religiosity to modern forms of life. As an epistemic-ontological category, the secular opens inquiry into how secular poets articulate as natural their particular need for founding the realm of poetry as an autonomous archipelago.

Drawing upon Asad’s notion, one can examine the secular as a formative power that generates distinct ways of living and thinking in the modern world, without normatively investing this power with the enduring salvational purposes of Christianity (as in Taylor, 2007).⁶ Insofar as it inhabits the senses, concepts, and practices that make up the real in the modern condition, the secular constitutes a presence that requires creation of an absence it names the religious. In other words, I take as a distinct power of the secular its ability to operate as external to what it defines and even redefines as the religious.