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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Registers of Arabic Literary History

Nadia Al-Bagdadi I. Introduction: Borderlines of Literature
aithful to the idea that Literature in its broadest sense comprises all that mankind imprinted in verbal form to be transmitted to memory, Carl Brockelmanns monumental History of Arabic Literature sought to collect and catalog all of Arabic writing he considered to be of literary relevance.1 The German Orientalist, though, was conscious of the fact that a philosophical history of Arabic Schrifttum, the ultimate aim of his endeavor, was still out of reach and that his aspiration for a Literaturwissenschaft im hheren Sinne had to await further study at the beginning of the twentieth century (1:2). Exhaustive knowledge of the literary material and rened methodology were still in their infancy in comparison to the advance in the study of Islamic religion and tradition 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 with two different concepts of literature. One stems from Arabic tradition and usage, one from a modern, universal one: Thus the historian of Arabic literature needs to consider all these emergences and may only in the Modern period, which gradually aligns the world of Islam as well to European culture, restrict himself to art of literature (Wortkunst) proper (1:1f).2 But as demod as Brockelmanns denition of literature and his attempt to provide an all-embracing literary history may appear, they curiously come closer to our present understanding of literature. At the turn of the long nineteenth century, an epoch marked by the height of European colonialism in the Arab world and the triggering of an imperial global age with far-reaching consequences for Arab and other local cultures 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 relate to dening the nature of the material called literature, the denition of parameters of periodization, and the specication of geographic and linguistic boundaries over time. The imperative for literary studies in the
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Anglo-Saxon world today is to rethink under conditions of the global age (a) the parameters of literature in terms of its genres, (b) the spatial expansion of boundaries hitherto clearly dened as national boundaries, and (c) the new dimensions of intertextuality between hitherto independent 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 from other forms of utterance, text, and truth, and of what denes its forms and functions, already occupied the minds of Arab scholars, poets, and critics 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 Brockelmann again, reached from the shores of the Pontus to Zanzibar, von Fez and Timbuktu to Kasgar and the Sunda Islands.3 It is a truism that shifts of cultural centers, access of new social groups to the realm of literacy and culture, and other changes within literary traditions cannot be explained with reference to literary developments alone, but require external factors of explanation. The pervasive global transformations, occasioned by a hitherto unprecedented compression of time and space, reinforced in turn the necessity to rethink the very foundations of modes of thought and academic disciplines, of society and culture. Inquiries into social, economic, and cultural conditions and contingencies favored the reemergence of concepts such as civilization as more appropriate units to study large-scale historical masses in a comparative manner.4 The concept of globalization as it is most widely used, understood as a progressive move from the local to the world level, has become a concept fashionable not only in sociological, economic, or political studies, but of late in the humanities and literary studies. These inquiries have not left entirely untouched studies on culture and literature in the Arab world. In comparison, however, to what a sketchy survey of pre- and postmillennial special issues and symposia in the wider realm of (comparative) literary and cultural studies reveals, there clearly exists a 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 the same measure by quests for self-reection, repositioning of the eld, and redening of the methodological apparatus and parameters. This has to do, in my view, less with the nature of Arabic literature but with its embeddedness in the larger frame of Islamdom and Islamicate civilization, to use Marshall Hodgsons terms.5 Arab culture and civilization underwent various forms of globalization before the present global age. The concerns historians of Arabic

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literature still have with framing the past involve them in how to rethink literary studies in todays 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 trace how Arabic literary history emerges out of and breaks off from earlier traditions and shall direct attention to some aspects of Arabic literary history that seem to me instructive for the present project of rethinking the very parameters of literary history in the global age.

II. What Is Literature?

Crucial for any investigation into literary history is the question: what is literature? From the crossing point of empires and civilizations, with overlapping imperial histories, geographical locations, religious and cultural traditions, emerged a distinctive Arab cultural tradition from about the fourth century CE. With the advent of Islam in the sixth century, the overlapping imperial settings necessitated Arabic literature, as the most prominent 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 nally of unity and diversity. Arabic literature as it developed over the ages provides in itself a rich reservoir of text and context reecting and inecting this dynamism. While in its modern use adab signies exclusively literature as belleslettres, in its premodern meaning it was not coterminous with the meaning of literature alone but displayed a richness of meanings. Tzvetan Todorovs reminder to create a rst element of doubt as to the natural character of literature and to any idea of nite type or types of literature describes well the present case.6 Before the advent of modernity, Arabic literature was not so much conned to specic genres of text, each with a xed and stable nature, but referred to a variety of forms and functions of literary expressions, subsumed under the name adab. This term adab, as a multilayered term with unsolved etymological origin, poses some problems for translation. It is rendered most closely as educational literature, etiquette, Bildung, or paideia; others would go for humanitas.7 The literary areas involved belong to the domains of the secretaries (kutt ab), the poets, philologists, and the culama. The characteristics of adab are associated with an urbane and mundane lifestyle, covering entertaining and spiritual as well as ethical and practical content. Adab includes both poetry and prose (shicr and nathr), the basic distinction of genres in Arabic literature, while poetry has beenand for some it still isthe 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 a person, establishing a social barrier between the cultured elite and the uncultivated 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 major categories of enunciation. History (t ar Kkh) in general was embedded in and classied as one of the genres of adab. Obviously, literary history in the modern sense did not exist in this concept. But there did exist what is best called an ars poetica with a highly sophisticated eld of literary criticism in the form of rhetoric (bal agha) and applied literary criticism (naqd al-shicr). In this sense the study of adab functions as an art (fann or sinac), or techn without, however, having its own object (mawd uc) 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 exibility and complexity, which prevents it from being captured as one single, clearly identiable 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 conning, directing, and unifying by Arab philologists are quick to follow. These attempts take the form of canons and literary histories of sorts. A universal feature of literary history and the literary canon seems to consist in their dual attempt to maintain literature conservatively, as a repository and memory of literary traces, while assuring its mobility by being based upon the changing consensus of the interpreting community of scholars and readers. Moreover, literary history resembles processes of canonization in that they are both driven by an anxiety of inuence that forms and malforms each new writing that aspires to permanence.9 Part of this attempt is to dene what constitutes a literary trace, including written as well as oral traces, the latter becoming xed and normative with the transformation into written text. History provides ample evidence that periods of crisis are fruitful occasions for reection on the nature of literature, leading professional interpreters to revise the ways in which they think of literature. For Arabic literature such moments occurred 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 literaryprofane, are driven by fear of corruption. Canon-making assured rst

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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 afnity characteristic of Arabic religious and profane scholarship.10 During the rst centuries of Islam, not only were religious materials canonized, but so too were the seven canonical readings of the Quran and the six canonical hadith collections.11 Compilations and philological interpretations of Arabic poetry and sayings, mainly of the pre-Islamic period, ourished 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 (udab a ) at the Abbasid court, who introduced, in Arabic, new ideas and themes to Arabic culture. The competitive polemics between the Arabs and the Persians (cajams) did not remain restricted to literature, but expanded to genealogy (cilm al-ans ab) and philology (cilm al-lugha). Reviewing and taking stock of the literary tradition in their own tongue 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 Kw an collections. These d Kw ans, 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 literary history 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 specicities 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, two distinct areas and disciplines, with their own fundamental transformations in 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 rethink the implications of disciplinary frameworks, and their respective methodologies and paradigms, and of the changing nature of literature, the question 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 the best of my knowledge, that developed literary epochs and caesuras from categories specic to literature. This includes those poets of the Abbasid period, who in distinction from earlier poets called themselves modernist (the muhdath un) and applied literary categories such as style and themes. They were, however, unable to apply literary classications for earlier schools and periods and maintained the chronological convention. Nevertheless, the relationship between literature and history did concern Arab scholars, if in different ways. In his comprehensive History of Arabic Literature (T ar Kkh al-adab al-arab K in six volumes), the modern Egyptian critic Shawqi Dayf acknowledges the futility of dening the exact nature of literature. Adab, as poetry and prose (shicran wa-nathran), changes in tandem with the changes of society. He denes adab as a reex of society. As such, he has to trace its different usages from the pre-Islamic era and from the ethics Bedouin society attributed to it, to usages in the mundane world of urban civilization in the capitals of the Muslim empires and dynasties where adab acquired a normative function as educational instrument and tool of renement.15 But although Dayf suggests that literary history (t ar Kkh al-adab) ought to be less concerned with chronological order than with issues of genres and thus genealogies, he adopted a conventional chronological order. Dayfs literary history avoided the development of a new periodization specic to literature. More rigorous and systematic is an attempt to rethink the foundations of the body politic, of social formation and organization, and of science and knowledge, sacred and profane, which was developed under the impact of the end of the Arab Muslim empires and at the beginning of the emergence of new empires, the Ottoman and the Persian Indian. In his discussion of the sciences, the universal historian Ibn Khald un adopts a purely scientic perspective on what he calls cilm al-adab (science of

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literature). What renders his understanding important are his views on afnities and limitations of literature and history as science toward the end 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 as the Kit ab al-ibar), modestly claimed to be not more than a local history of 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 Khald un asserts, has no object the accident of which may be studied and thus be afrmed or denied. To him, four books alone, all from the ninth and early tenth century CE, constitute the pillars of cilm al-adab : the professional, specialized handbook Adab al-k atib (literally The Secretarys Culture, or Paideia) by the philologist and theologian Ibn Qutayba (d. 889); the Kit ab al-k amil f K al-adab (The Perfect Book of Culture), a study of lexicography, grammar, and pre- and early Islamic poetry by the grammarian and literary scholar al-Mubarrad (d. 898); the Kit ab al-bay an wa-al-taby Kn (The Book of Eloquence) by the polymath al-J ahiz (d. 8689); and, the Kit ab al-Naw adir (The Book of Rarities) by the grammarian Abi cAl K al-Q al K al-Baghdad K (d. 967).16 Based on these philological pillars, Ibn Khald un ranks literature (al-adab) as the fourth element of what constitutes Arabic language, after lexicography (al-lugha), grammar and syntax (al-nahw), and rhetoric (al-bay an).17 This rather low position of literature among the linguistic sciences is reemphasized in his pragmatic view that [b]oth poetry and prose work with words, and not with ideas. The ideas are secondary to the words. The words are basic.18 This view, which considers words and thus lexicography as being stable and unchangeable, treats literature as 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 Kl or quwwa mutakhayyila) plays an essential aspect of poetic expression, scholars like the grammarian cAbd al-Q ahir al-Jurj an K (d. ca.107881) or the Andalusian literary theorist H azim al-Qartajann K (121185). For philosophers like Ibn S Kn a (Avicenna) or Ibn Rushd (Averroes), literary expression is even a means to produce poetic syllogism.19 If Ibn Khald uns view is not conducive to a literary history, which presumes not a typological or ontological xation of words but their potential to change, Arab literary critics and poets will denounce it as sterile xation on words. Ibn Khald un 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; literatures specicity is to be found in the local. Scholars, he states,

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take care to deposit all their scientic thought in books by means of writing, so that all those who are absent and live at a later time may have the benet of them. People who do that are authors. Everywhere in the world, written works are numerous. They are handed down among all races and in all ages. They differ as the result of differences in religious laws and organizations and in the information available about nations and dynasties. The philosophical sciences do not show such differences (41112). For Ibn Khald un, then, this view culminates in the categorical divorce of literature from such modes of thought and knowledge that aspire to ultimate truth. It is this particularist aspect of literature that prevents it from transcending its realm. Or, in the words of Ibn Khald un, [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 literature also has to aspire. Ibn Khald un details the purposes of valid discursive composition, of which there are seven, the rst of which is (1) the invention of a science with its subject, its division into chapters and sections, and the discussion of its problems (413). With reference to literary theory, he then discerns that (6) The problems of a certain science may only exist scattered among the proper chapters of other sciences. 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 sciences that mankind, with its ability to think, cultivates. This happened with the science of rhetoric (bayn) (414). From Ibn Khald uns account, written at a moment of great transition, let us jump some six hundred years to another historian who also sought, without success, to embrace with equal breadth a history of Arab culture and civilization. Ibn Khald uns historio-philosophical approach, which, as we saw, positioned literature as rmly embedded in rhetoric and history as part of the science of adab, was abandoned during the nineteenth century, when the Arabic term literary history (t ar Kkh al-adab) appeared for the rst time. With the advent of another global age, the age of imperialism and colonialism, the problem of principle, scope, and object (mawd uc) of literary history was posed again as a question about the meaning of history today,21 echoing concerns among Arab historians of the nineteenth century,22 including other Arab intellectuals such as the Lebanese writers Butrus al-Bust an K and F aris al-Shidy aq or the Egyptian Farah Ant un. The Lebanese historian and novelist Jurj K Zayd an (18611914), who held the rst chair in Arabic Literary History,23 provides separate histories of various aspects of Arabic Schrifttum, among them The History Kkh al-tamaddun al-islam K, 19016), a biographical of Islamic Civilization (T ar dictionary of Arab personalities, and his last work, the four-volume Arab

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Literary History (T ar Kkh ad ab al-lugha al-carabiyya, 191013).24 In the latter, Zayd an draws explicitly a parallel to modern European literary history, claiming that his history will mark an epochal turning point. It is Zayd an who credits himself with having coined in 189425 the notion and new concept of literary history (t ar Kkh al- ad ab al-luga al-arabiyya)26 and who aspired to write literary history as Geistes-und Kulturgeschichte of the Arab people, thus transcending political history.27 (Thus it is not surprising that his historical novels introduced a new popular genre.) History and literature are complementary to each other, but under the signature of the rising Arab nation-states and ideas of nationalism, for which literature, and subsequently literary history, are congenial media. The idea of the umma reects simultaneously the universal and the national, not unlike Burckhardts idea: Since general historiography writes the history of war, of conquest, shedding of blood, of overpowering and despotism, it is not concerned with the history of literature (t ar Kkh ad ab al-lugha). But it can only reach a true understanding of the nation (fahm haq Kqat al-umma) or the true essence of its culture or politics (kunh ta maddunih a aw-siy asatih a) through a knowledge of the history of science and literature (t ar Kkh al-ilm wa-l-adab). Only these interpret history (sh arih li-l-t ar Kkh), as they refer historical events to their real causes (yuallil al-asb aba wa-l-haw aditha bi-il alih a l-haq Kqiyya).28 In other words, literary history is able to reach another understanding of history beyond events, since it is at once the history of the mind (cuq ul), and what marked her spirit (nuf usihim) and manners (akhl aqihim).29 What makes Zayd ans history of additional interest is the fact that it adopts two different registers for premodern and modern literature. For the premodern period, Zayd an adopts a diachronic perspective, presenting the classical literary canon along six aspects: ranking of the Arabs (bay an manz Kla al-cArab), political history, scientic developments, biographies of learned men (tar ajim rij al al-cilm wa-l-adab), summary and categorization of books, and nally accessibility of manuscripts and books. Zayd ans account adopts the conventional periodization, following religious and dynastic division. He begins with the pre-Islamic period, the J ahiliyya, though he divides it into two separate aspects: the rst deals with the specimens and traces of the Arabs and of Arabic materials; the second deals with poetry and science. Then follows early Islamic Schrifttum, which culminates in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, with the latter being divided into four sections. In these chapters, Zayd an opens the perspective and offers overviews of Greek, Persian, and Indian literature and culture and their impact on Arabic literature and science. For the remaining centuries, during which the Mongolian and later the Ottoman Empire came to power in the Arab world, Zayd an adopts the notion of the Age of Decline (asr al-inhit at),30 a period during which all

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of Arabic literature and sciences are thought to have fallen into darkness and stagnation, from which it emerged only with the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt in 1798. This event marks the advent of modernity, or the New Age (al-casr al-jad Kd), as Zayd an, following the spirit of his time, labels it. Being neither dynastic nor religious but adopted from political discourse, the term the New Age is equally bare of literary qualication, although it does coincide with the emergence of new styles and themes. Remarkably, the three hundred years preceding the New Age, stretching from the fall of Constantinople to the rst arrival of the French in Egypt, are given seventy-ve pages all together, while the short New Age lls three hundred pages. To present the nahda, the renaissance movement of the New Age, and its far-reaching impact on the literary eld as such, Zayd an introduces new categories and aspects that he did not apply to the previous periods. Mapping the new centers of literary production and institutions, the organizing principle follows now along proto national divisions and new literary institutions, which include the listing of libraries, associations, literary schools, journals, and newspapers. With this systematic presentation of the changing landscape of Arab literary production and Arabic literature, Zayd an reacts to the profound social and cultural transformations under conditions of European colonialism. Westernization is the term that has been most widely used in (literary) history to describe the effects of cultural contact, adaptation, and inuence, a term that over the last decades has been found increasingly wanting. As a concept, Westernization implies at once a one-way impact and a superiority of Western values to which others adhere, leaving little space for modes of inventive incorporation and exchange of ideas. Similarly, Zayd ans attempt at writing a new kind of literary history was belittled by some scholars for not being as original as the author claims it to be, and for having borrowed generously from contemporary European literary histories, namely Brockelmanns monumental Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur and Reynold Nicholsons The Literary History of the Arabs (1907).31 Zayd an made no secret of his sources of reference and inspiration, be they Arabic or European. He duly acknowledges those European scholars who developed during their recent renaissance32 the concept of literary history,33 which differs from earlier Arabic literary inventories. Of the Arab precursors, Zayd an lists, among others, Ibn Nad Kms Kit ab al-Fihrist and the Mift ah al-sac ada wa-misb ah al-siy ada by the Ottoman theologian and biographer cIs am al-D Kn Tashkprz ade (d. 1561).34 Be this as it may, the accusation that Zayd an did not devise a history of his own points to another issue that requires attention in the context under consideration, namely the relationship between Arab and European scholarship, 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 rst time during the second half of the nineteenth century. After Joseph Hammer-Purgstalls pioneering, though unsuccessful, attempt to present to Western readers a comprehensive Literaturgeschichte der Araber, other works explored the eld.35 In principle, they applied methodologies and parameters of German and French literary studies to Arabic poetry, being driven by the romantic universalism of the age, as Gustave Edmund von Grunebaum rightly pointed out.36 W. Ahlwardts treatise, ber Poesie und Poetik der Araber (Gotha, 1856), was followed by Theodor Nldekes Beitrge zur Kenntnis der Poesie der Alten Araber (Hannover, 1864), Ignc Goldzihers Az arab irodalom rvid trtnete (1908),37 Otto Reschers Abri der arabischen Literaturgeschichte (Constantinople Pera, 1925), and C. A. Nallinos La Littrature arabe des origins lpoque de la dynastie umayyade (in the French translation of the Italian version by Maria Nallino, 1935). Reynold A. Nicholsons A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge, 1930) resembles only rudimentarily a history of literature but is, mainly, a political history with some references to literature, since Nicholson aimed at drawing a history of ideas but leaving the study of literature rather on the margins of this history, not unlike Adam Mezs Renaissance des Islams (Heidelberg, 1922). Brockelmanns gigantic bio-bibliographic Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, to which I referred in the beginning, was later supplemented by G. Grafs equally impressive Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur (Vatican City, 194453). Both of them mark the watershed of literary studies, to be challenged sixty years later by Fuat Sezgins Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums (196779, 7 volumes, incomplete; vol. 2 treats poetry until 1039), which provides more data, classication, and indexing of all of Arabic Schrifttum rather than an intellectual or aesthetic history of literature. In the second half of the twentieth century, Gustave E. von Grunebaums Kritik und Dichtkunst: Studien zur Arabischen Literaturgeschichte (Wiesbaden, 1955) and Gibbs Arabic Literature: An Introduction (1963) tried to ll this gap. For a long period, no attempts were made to write singlehandedly a history of Arabic literature, from its beginning to the present. Mostly, scholars single out genres (the novel, poetry, short story), 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 European scholars.39 Edward Saids Orientalism and the debate about Orientalism have left traces in the eld of Arabic literary studies, and maybe not unlike the eld of Islamic studies, there remains an uneven balance in both the production and the reception of scholarship. Major literary studies, encyclopedias, complete histories, scientic periodicals, and systematic overviews and introductions are still mainly written, organized, and published in Europe, but with ever growing participation of Arab scholars, who are either based in or associated with Western institutions. Arab scholarship that does not participate in the larger international networks often still remains unquoted.

VI. Forms of Globalization and the Literary Field

In Arabic literary history, as in other cognate elds, the problem of dening the subject of study is rst of all a problem of unity and of boundaries, be they geographic, linguistic, social, or cultural. The qualitative markers used, such as Oriental, Arab and Arabic, Near East and Middle East, function as an articial bracket and conne, a priori, material and period. Nowadays the much-discredited term Oriental literature 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 are ethnically marked, such as Kurdish or Berber literature. Equally, other constructs such as literature of the Muslim world, or Near Eastern or Middle Eastern literature or Mediterranean Literature, also have their shortcomings.40 The relatively short-lived and equally unsatisfactory term Third World Literature has been replaced by some mainly Anglo-Saxon scholars with the otherwise inationary terms colonial and postcolonial.41 Despite their chronometric limitation, their assumption of a common universal time in which the literatures of the world are historically interdependent points at what marks global literature. Much of this terminological imprecision, or confusion, derives from the fact that, by virtue of its geographic location, the Arab world has always been part of world-historical movements of integration, expansion, and dispersion, or, in Hodgsons term, of the oikoumene.42 For the present context, it is useful to discern three distinct phases and types of globalization. The rst comprises oikumenical globalization of late antiquity to the end of the Abbasid period; the second, expanding globalization of the Imperialist age of the late eighteenth to the twentieth century; and,

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nally, dispersal globalization of the current age. It is needless to add that conning literary movements to these three forms of globalization is a simplied scheme of more complex historical developments. The heuristic advantage, however, opens up historical and theoretical perspectives on literacy, literature, and interpretation at the interface of crossing cultures and civilizations. It will sufce here to sketch out the three phases with regard to the question under consideration. Oikumenical globalization demarcates a period stretching from late antiquity to the twelfth century, during which Arabic emerged as the lingua franca for administrative, religious, and intellectual purposes alike. 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 frontiersthe Byzantine and Persian Empires with high cultures of their own and rich literatures (Coptic, Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, Hebrew) with strong religious, literary, and scientic traditions.43 The newcomer to the region, the spreading Islamic empire of the Arabs from the peninsula, did not have much to offer initially. What was available in the language of the Islamic empire, Arabic, was the Quran and pre-Islamic poetry. The emergence of a distinct, urban adab, including literature and Arab-Muslim paideia,44 reinforced the position of Arabic as a global language. In contrast to the body of pre-Islamic poetry,45 this Arabic literature was never genuinely Arabian, but it reected the vivid urban intellectual milieus and was inspired by emerging Muslim religious sciences (had Kth, s Kra, and tafs Kr) and Arab philology, an auxiliary discipline in close proximity to religious sciences, and by translations from Byzantine and Persian traditions.46 Baghdad in the ninth century became a center of tremendous intellectual activity, which saw not only the translation of large amounts of Greek materials into Arabic (previously, Greek had been translated into Syriac), but also saw the development of an understanding of science colored and shaped by its historical locality.47 With the Abbasid period (750 CE1258 CE) and the move toward the Arab east, with the new imperial capital Baghdad, built by the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, the weaknesses of the oikumenic character became more pertinent. The ethnic, social, and cultural diversity of the Muslim empire hitherto was ruled by a homogenous Arab elite; the Abbasid empire was thoroughly shaped, politically and culturally, by Sassanian bureaucrats and scholars. Critical tones, especially in literature, were adopted by the new inuential and afuent urban class of secretaries (kutt ab), who were of mixed ethnic backgrounds, though predominately of Persian origin. The periodic dominance of Persian over Arab culture, including administrative, scientic, and literary realms, led to reactions of rejection, known as the

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Shucubiyya controversy, which lasted from the ninth to the eleventh century and stretched over the entire empire.48 The Shucubiyya (adherents of the non-Arab people) movement questioned the identity of Islam with Arabness, which in turn let non-Arab theologians question the superiority of Arabic, as proven in and through the Quran. Arguably the Shucubiyya controversy supported the tendency to overdetermine Arabic language, text, and civilization, a tendency that shapes certain sections of Arabic Schrifttum and scholarship in this period and is the result of an unvarying and conscious manner that postulates . . . a unication of object and subject in a meta-object that is the text.49 The Abbasid capital produced a truly cosmopolitan literature, shaped by competition as well as by joint scholarly projects, from translations of Greek and Indian works to research of religiously and ethnically mixed scholars, in a cultural milieu that inspired Arab and Persian court poets alike, fusing some literary genres but keeping others distinct, such as the ghazal (love poetry). Other such centers of cultural and intellectual fusion are 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 allocation of the Andalusian literary heritage into its proper history has been subject to critical investigation. This problematization not only tackles the question of whether it belonged and thus informed and inuenced literary traditions of Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, and Latin-European or Mediterranean cultures, but also whether it is possible at all to write one literary history of al-Andalus, say Arabic, that excludes all others.50 The best known example is, of course, the troubadour genre and certain love motifs. European literary history has had problems with absorbing the literature and culture of that period in Spain into its literary canons and histories. On the other hand, due to its dominant linguistic medium, the literature of al-Andalus genuinely forms part of Arabic tradition and acknowledges the local character and intellectual inuence in works such as Ibn Tufayls (c. 111085) Hayy ibn Yaqz an, Ibn Hazms (9941064) Tawq al-ham ama, or indeed Ibn al-cArab Ks (11651240) mystical writings, all of which uniquely meld religio-philosophical and ctional elements in their works. Another example of the cosmopolitan character of Andalusian literature and the spirit of a cultural milieu can be traced in the ninth century with the emergence of unique poetical forms, the Arabic (and later also Hebrew) muwashshaha, a poem of ve strophes with musical accompaniment, and its popular sister-version, the zajal, a strophic poetic form in the local vernacular dialect, which uses rhyme and meter unknown in the eastern parts of the Muslim empire, but which can be traced back to folk songs in Romance language.51 The literatures of al-Andalus and of Abbasid Baghdad demonstrate that as 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 possible to place literature in a civilizational or global frame. An understanding that places literature at once as part of local or otherwise specic traditions and as part of larger civilizational contexts and genealogies avoids the narrow perspective that assumes complete literatures from which others borrow and translate alone, a view that was held already by Von Grunebaum.52 If this is a useful description for oikumenical globalization, it is ever more so today. Approaches that focus mainly on tracing origins and on textual evidence as proof of inuence turn a blind eye to those literary processes and social conditions that generate a common literature. Hayden Whites insistence about reading literature strictly historically points in this direction and shows how futile ontological claims can be.53 To turn to the second phase, expansionist globalization, one of the most striking features lies in the fact that the rules have changed fundamentally insofar as questions of inuence, adaptation, and syncretism are concerned. The imperialist age of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the advent of modernities on a global scale, determine a clear-cut split between the East and the West, between Western modern science, ideas, and literature and Oriental wisdom, tales, and poetry. The rise of national literatures in Arabic, as Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, or Lebanese literatures, together with literary imitation, adaptation, and translation of European genres and works coincide with a shifting understanding of adab, which became coterminous with belles-lettres and ction. The catch-word is so-called Westernization, a term that denounces genuine partaking in the advances of Western modernity and that declares a clear hierarchy of relationships. Arabic loses its primacy as a language of education and culture and thus diminishes its universal claims. Under colonial supremacy of Western European culture, Arabic sinks to the rank of backwardnessa trend against which, of course, reaction is prompt to follow. The encounter between different literary traditions does not take place in a common shared space, in learned circles or schools, which unite scholars and poets of different backgrounds, but is marked rst by textual encounter in the form of translation. Travels to the capitals of Europe, turned into literary writing, are thus becoming the means to overcome spatial distance and social boundaries. New ideals of literary models develop in imitation, but also in rejection of European literary forms, and except for the short-lived neoclassical movement during the second half of the nineteenth century, Arabic literary heritage, restricted to the classical Abbasid period, loses its normative role and function as a unique reservoir, while at the same time the newly introduced publishing houses make the literary heritage readily available. The third phase of globalization is marked by dispersion and is fully integrated in what has been called postmodern cosmopolitanism. In

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comparison to expansionist globalization, the major characteristic is that London 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 littrature maghrebine en langue francaise vanished in recent years as French literature written by 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 history to a lesser degree than it affects others, most notably English literary history. The universalizing effects of expansionist globalization and colonialism, and with it the advent of modernity, also occasioned the emergence of Arab national literatures of the newly founded nation-states. But, in contrast to national ideologies that reside in great measure in the identity of a people and its language transcended through national literature, in the Arab case there is one lingua franca, Arabic, with dialectical nuances and colorit. It is not only the ideal of pan-Arabism, as often called dead as it reappears, that incorporates Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, and other national literatures into one and thus makes it difcult to draw clear boundaries between these national literatures. Apart from individual mobility and exile, inner Arab migration often took place in emigration wavesof Syro-Lebanese writers, under increasing Ottoman censorship and sectarian pressure since the 1860s, to Egypt, but soon after also to Latin and North America; the great exodus of Palestinian writers after 1948 to neighboring countries; and of Iraqi Jewish writers to Israel in 1948. Emblematic of this situation is the aesthetic and personal experiment of the metactional novel Alam bi-l a khar Kta (World Without a Map), which was written jointly by the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibr ah Km Jabra and cAbdalrahm an Mun Kf, born in Jordan to a Saudi father and Iraqi mother, and which explores this existential experience in the mundane world of Baghdadi society in the 1970s, where both authors lived for some time.54 Arabic literary history comes closer to this reality if it adopts the locus genius as historical and categorical framework, rather than national literature. That this is not a statement about the historical viability of Arab nation-states goes without saying. For whereas Arabic popular literature often lives from its local colorit, specic national characteristics on the level of genre, style, and motif are rather difcult to discern in Arabic literature, apart, of course, from specically 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 aspects of history still require special consideration. Organizing principles of literary history are not self-evident but result from a specic understanding of literature, be it as a realm of its own or be it subsequent to other, prior forms of organization. As mentioned above, and in accordance with the Aristotelian view that history and literature are complementary, and in contrast to modern ideas that these belong to two distinct disciplines, traditionally history is but a subcategory of adab.55 Organizing principles, however, chronology and geography or elements of profane dynastic and sacred history, are adapted from historiography into literary history. Parameters for histories of Arabic literature follow the two registers used in Arab historiography, a technically oriented one using repertoire and narrative structures and a typological one organizing its material according to categories.56 By and large, periodizations of Arabic literary history conventionally follow that of Arab dynastic-Islamic history: the pre-Islamic period (commonly referred to as J ahiliyya), early Islam, then the classical age of the Muslim empires, 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 struggle for 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 historical situation, globalization referred to in political terms with the neologism al-aul ama, sees the Arab world as divided into the oil and gas rich states of the Gulf and the former core-lands of Arabic culture and literature, torn by wars. Departing from these religio-political chronologies, there emerged periodizations applying seemingly neutral or metaphorical terms. These, however, do not offer much more than abstract notions to the given and unquestioned periodization. Modernist Arab poets and scholars of the ninth and tenth century, the muhdath un, do not escape religious terminology when they continue classifying authors as j ahiliy un (poets of the era of Ignorance), mukhadram un (the generation between pagans and Islamic poets), isl amiy un (Islamic poets), and nally the muhdath un (modernists), who stand in opposition to all earlier poets.57 Upholding the foundational division of the time before and after the rise of Islam, other periodizations employ neutral, centennial divisions (rst, 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 of Darkness, the so-called Age of Decline, Westernization and nahda, and with some delay, postmodernity. Again, these categories and periods are entirely dened 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 what remains one of the major chronological lacunae not only for literary history but Arab history in general, namely the long period from the fteenth to the end of the eighteenth century in the Arab world. Describing or dening this period in literary terms is not only a terminological problem, but touches upon matters of genres, high and low culture, and inclusion of social and cultural groups. An illustration of the infancy of Arabic periodization was provided recently with the publication of the sixth volume of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (CHAL). Following conventional periodization, the CHAL jumped some 400 centuries, to be precise the period between 1258 and 1798, dates that mark the Mongol invasion in Baghdad and the French arrival in Egypt, publishing the volume on Modern Arabic Literature directly after that of the Abbasid period and an extra volume on Andalusian literature. In the introduction to the sixth volume, Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, its editor, Roger Allen, insists that the so-called period of decadence (casr al-inhit at) is far from being void of signicant literary production.58 Since these centuries, from the so-called Golden Age of Islam and Arab civilization until the advent of modernity, have been left unstudied, it is still impossible to attempt to dene these centuries in literary terms, thus the somewhat charged notion of the postclassical period. Another way of looking at this period, which suffers from terminological and categorical problems as all middle periods do, is to open it up to the perspective proposed here.59 With the rise of the Ottoman Empire (13001922) and the Safavid empire (15021722), followed by the Zand and Qajar dynasties and the rise of Persian and Ottoman as imperial languages, Arabic literature maintains a privileged status in certain areas of religious sciences and in high culture. But it became associated with a literature of the past, whereas Ottoman and Turkish literatures developed as rivals. Addressing this period from the perspective of globalization offered here would provide, I believe, a greater readiness to perceive the varying rhythms and shifts of center and inuence within the region of concern here. Similarily, the widespread perception that modern Arabic literature is predominantly an offspring of imitated Western literature adds to the view that cuts off continuity with earlier traditions and renders any aesthetical and historical evaluation of that premodern period even more

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difcult. In the same vain, attempts to retrace indigenous literary genealogies, such as the maq am at form of an Bad Kc al-Zam an al-Hamadh an K (9681008) or al-Har Kr K (10541122) of the classical period as precursor to the short story, stop short at retracing those lines through the long postclassical period.

VIII. Sources of InspirationOf Jinnis and the Genius

I referred earlier to the genius loci in its spatial aspect and as a social and material condition for mutual literary inspiration of different literary traditions, merging into distinct features of a place or region. At the end of my contribution, however, I seek to invoke, if briey, another quality of 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 intensied search for meaning and certainties did not restrict itself to the revival of religion as faith and object of study, but stimulated debates about the edifying nature of literature. After the setbacks and insights of postcolonial and postmodern criticism, a critical revision of parameters and methodologies is required that advances the possibilities of universal ideas without giving in to all too handy and reassuring certainties. Matters that have been dismissed as purely driven by ideology, such as questions of virtue, truth, and objectivity,60 but also of canonicity, beauty, and universalism,61 may nd in literary studies 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 classical tradition always trusted more in the medium of adab and its potential for truth and value than it trusted in philosophy (falsafa). Returning to these questions seems to be an adequate way for discerning criteria of literary history in the global. One of the lessons we learned from modern literary history, which institutionalized the idea that literature and its history captures the spirit of a people, is that a literary history without inspiration remains a catalog, a repertoire at best. Stripped of its national frame of reference, however, this idea reaches far back to earlier registers of literary history and signals ways to go in the future. The association of literature and spirits 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 text of Islam, and, moreover, goes back to the occasion of revelation itself. Central to the motive of the Prophets honesty and authenticity are the repeated Quranic rejections asserting that Muhammad is not a sooth-

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sayer (k ahin) but a prophet (ras ul) and that his message is not poetry (shicr) but divine message (ris ala).63 These repetitions occurring in the Quran, hadKth literature, and Islamic exegetical works are a clear token of belief in the presence and power of supernatural beings. After the rst revelation Muhammed received through the archangel JKbrKl (Gabriel), he initially feared being possessed by jinn, examples of which were many at his time.64 The belief in these beings predates Islam and points back to heathen Arabia. Corresponding to ideas of the Greek daemon, there existed the widespread view that humans are or can be possessed or charmed by jinn. The presence of the jinn, a collective noun of the singular jinnK , refers to a specic class of beings made of white re (gh ul, ifrKt, ruh, shayt an, and so on). They can be companions and a source of inspiration, but they are not necessarily benevolent.65 The Quran left scholars and poets in a vexed situation. The Quranic disclaimer that, despite a certain resemblance, the Quran is not poetry and that its source of inspiration is of a different, divine nature, however, had consequences for poetry. If with the advent of Islam, poetry comes into question, the situation is far from being univocal, with one hadith or sura being cited to prove the opposite view of another. Poetry gets cast as falsehood and magic, being associated with soothsaying and myth, yet it remains the sole linguistic and historical source for that language in which the Quran was revealed, Arabic. The theological doctrine of the inimitability of the Quran (icj az al-qur an) declares the divine text as a matchless miracle of aesthetic expression. Early on, though, the theological dogma provoked satirical responses by poets who contested, through proof of their poetry, the dogma and, consequently, that revealed truth is 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 22427), still poses the ground for controversial interpretation as to whether and to what extent the Quran condemns literature as such. The linguistic ambiguity of verses 22427 has opened a wide eld for speculation.66 What is of relevance, however, to the present argument is the fact that poetry did not vanish after the Quran. On the contrary, as has been discussed above, poetry became the major form of artistic and edifying expression. The competition of spirits, those benign ones that inspire prophets and so Muhammadbut down on Muhammad came the spirit of faithfulness (nazala bi-hi al-r uhu al-am Knu), in the clear language of Arabic (bi-lis an c arab K mub Kn) (sura 26, 193 and 195)and those that inspire poets and soothsayers seemingly demarcate a clear line of division between the sacred and the profane. That this division is not so easily upheld has been tested time and again by Arab poets who negate the separation and the two kinds of inspiration, one occasioned by the spirit (r uh) to

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descend on prophets and one by jinn, demons, or shayat Kn (devils) to come 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 ages the animated world of the jinn was more actual, authors of the modern age, such as the modern Egyptian poet Shukr K al-Aqq ad (18891964), 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 sherman reseals the mocking jinnK in its bottle. 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 plotted with his cunning and perdy.67 A positive attitude toward the jinn as a source of inspiration is found in the work of the Andalusian poet Ibn Shuhayd al-Andal usK (9921035), Epistle of Familiar Jinn and Whirling Demons (Ris alat al-taw abi wa-al- zaw ab K ). Ibn Shuhayd wrote the epistle as an ironic and self-condent rejection of the accusation of plagiarism put forward by the scholar and vizier, Ab u Bakr Yahya Ibn Hazm.68 This rejection develops, as James T. Monroe demonstrates, into a Neoplatonic treatise about the sources of poetical inspiration and the essential beauty of poetry. In the scene that depicts the rst encounter of the narrator, or the poetic genius, with his familiar jinn, named Zuhayr Ibn Numayr from the tribe of the Ban u Ashjac of the jinn, the jinn K advises the narrator to call him whenever he is in need of inspiration and to recite the following lines:
Come Zuhair of love; O mighty one such that when memories remember him he comes to them. Should mouths ever express their remembrance I imagine that I am kissing her mouth. For I conceal the abodes of those who remember, even though sand dunes are far from my abode, with a love for their love.69

In Arabic, the three hemistiches are an artful play with the multiple meanings of the verb dhakara (to mention, to remember, to name) used as verb and substantives, conjuring the presence of the jinn K as the beloved.70 Rejecting an aestheticism that is founded entirely on rhetoric, Ibn Shuhayd alludes to the jinn K as joining the poets intellect and imagination with the realm of the divine, that is the realm of God, the Quran, and eloquence. The depiction of the poets journey, during which he visits, with the help of his jinnK, the jinn of the great Arab poets and writers of the past, evokes a powerful image and sense of the timeless presence of the poetic genius. The epistle, then, apart from its

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defense of the active poetical imagination, reveals another elementary aspect of literature, its sources of inspiration, and poetic genius. For it is an attribute and a peculiarity of literature, as of art, that its presence does not depend on (institutionalized) mediation alone. The transhistorical presence of literature is channeled through cultural mechanisms of memorizing, canonizing, and interpreting, but also through the act of visiting, consulting, and reading. Yet literary history does bestow broader meaning upon a work, exploring the possibilities of literature and situating it in its civilizational context. Arabic literary tradition, as we have seen, invested much energy in dening the possibilities and the limits of literature. After the paradigmatic changes in the eld of historiography, after postcolonial and postmodern criticism, totalizing theories have rightly lost their attractiveness. The plenum of documents and narratives, as Hayden White calls it, which establishes historically possible narratives, nds itself inseparably tied to 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 history between Goethes futuristic idea of a Weltliteratur as a vision of the harmonious melding of the worlds best literatures into a great synthesis, and the hegemonic incorporation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the great Mesopotamian epic of the third millennium BCE, as a source of Western tradition.71 Literary histories that trace historical transgurations and possibilities 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 seinen Bereich ziehn und darf sich erst in der Neuzeit, die auch die Islamwelt der europischen Kultur immer mehr angleicht, auf die Wortkunst im engeren Sinne beschrnken. 3 . . . von den Ufern des Pontus bis nach Zanzibar, von Fez und Timbuktu bis nach Kasgar und den Sundainseln. 4 For a summary and insightful discussion on the possibilities and limits of the concept from a global perspective, see Jhann P. rnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions 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 reection on the usage of terms in the eld of Islamic civilization, see Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), 370. 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: With Special Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1990). 8 For a summary discussion on the development of adab, see Pellat Charles, Variations sur le Thme de ladab, Correspondance dOrient, tudes 56 (1964): 1937; Fhndrich Hartmut, Der Begriff adab und sein literarischer Niederschlag, in Orientalisches Mittelalter, ed. Wolfhart Heinrichs and J. Christoph Brgel (Wiesbaden: AULA-Verlag, 1990), 32645; S. A. Bonebakker, Adab and the Concepts of Belles-Lettres, in Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1990), 3148. 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), 97120. 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 Canonization, ed. A. van der Kooij and K. van den Toorn (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1998), 191228; reprinted in The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography, ed. Aziz Al-Azmeh (Budapest: Central European Univ. Press, 2007). Kkh al-naqd al-adabi inda al-Arab (Beirut: Dar al-Amanah, 1971). 12 See Ihsan Abbas, T ar See also Gibb, Arabic Literature: An Introduction (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1926; rev. ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) and Wolfhart Heinrichs, Arabische Dichtung und griechische Poetik: 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 different kind 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, T ar Kkh al-adab al-carab K (Cairo: Dr al-Marif, 1960), 1:710. 16 Ibn Khald un, T ar Kkh al-callama Ibn Khald unKitab al-cibar [Book of Advice] (Beirut: D ar Kit ab al-lubn aniyya, 1960), 2:1070. 17 Ibn Khald un, Kit ab al-cibar, 2:1055. 18 Ibn Khald un, Kit ab al-cibar, 2:1056. 19 See, for instance, Kamal Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjanis Theory of Poetic Imagery (Warminster, UK: Aris and Philips, 1979) or Wolfhart Heinrichs, Takhyil and its Traditions, in Gott ist Schn und er liebt die Schnheit, ed. Alma Giese and J. C. Brgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), 22747. 20 Ibn Khald un, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, ed. N. J. Dawood, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), 411 (hereafter cited in text). 21 Jurji Zayd an, T ar Kkh 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: American Univ. 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 Zayd an edited, the Cairo-based al-Hil al. 25 According to his own account in al-Hil a l 9 (1894). 26 Zayd an, T ar Kkh adab, 1:8. 27 Zayd an, T ar Kkh adab, 1:14. 28 Zayd an, T ar Kkh adab, 1:14. 29 Zayd an, T ar Kkh adab, 1:15. 30 See Zayd an, T ar Kkh adab, 3:283. 31 Zayd an, though, provides a list of books in Arabic, English, German, and French, which he consulted for his history. T ar Kkh adab, 1:1213. 32 This is the intermediary period before the age of the footnote and after the age of manuscript 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 Kngliche Hof-und Staatsdruckerei, 185056). 36 On the beginnings of the study of Arabic literature, see Gustave Edmund von Grunebaum, Zum Studium der Arabischen Literatur im Westen, in Kritik und Dichtkunst: Studien zur arabishen Literaturgeschichte (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1955), 716. 37 Translated from the Hungarian original of Ignc Goldhizer as A Short History of Arabic Literature, ed. and trans. Jzsef Somogyi (Hyderabad, Ind.: Islamic Culture Board, 1958). 38 An exception is Roger Allens The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Developments of Its Genres and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), which, as the title poignantly indicates, avoids the concept of a history. 39 Boutros Hallaq and Heidi Tolle, eds., Histoire de la littrature arabe moderne, vol. 1, 18001945 (Arles, Fr.: Sindbad, 2007). 40 See in this regard the introduction to Heinrichs and Brgel, Orientalisches Mittelalter. 41 On the career of this concept, see Aijaz Ahmad, Literary Theory and Third World Literature, in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). 42 Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 1: 45, 4850, 109. 43 For the various aspects (Greek, Persian, Jewish, Christian, and Aramaic), see the four articles by Carsten Colpe in Orientalisches Mittelalter, ed. Heinrichs and Brgel, 31141. 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 Husayn in the early twentieth century, as to whether pre-Islamic poetry is at all authentic shall not interest us here. Taha Husayn, Fi al-shic 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 in situating the tradition of Arabic science with reference both to the place that this tradition occupies in the general history of science and to its place in the civilization where it emerged 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, in Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Ashtiany, 3148. 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), 398419. 52 Von Grunebaum, Avicennas Risla l-ihq and Courtly Love, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 11, no. 4 (1952): 238. 53 See Hayden White, Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality, Rethinking History 9, nos. 23 (2005): 14757, esp. 152, 156. 54 Jabra Ibr ahKm Jabra and Abdalrahm an MunKf, Alam bi-l a kharK ta (Beirut: al-Muassasah al-`Arabiyah lil-Dirasat wa-al-Nashr, 1982). 55 White, Introduction, 147. 56 Aziz Al-Azmeh, The Times of History: 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 The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (19892007). 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), 123. 59 On this topic, see Randolph Starn, Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Decline, History and Theory 14, no. 1 (1975): 131. 60 For instance, Terry Eagleton insists that in the face of the economic forces of the global 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 Edward Said, Globalizing Literary Study, PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 6468. 62 Some years ago Stephen Greenblatt made the same allusion. Stephen Greenblatt, What Is the History of Literature? Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 46180. 63 See, for example, They say: Thou art only one of those bewitched (min al-musaharriyuna) and think you are a liar (Quran 26:18586). 64 On this complex, see Michel Zwettler, A Mantic Manifesto: The Sura of the Poets and the Quranic 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 Encyclopaedia of the Quran, and Ignaz Goldziher, Abhandlungen zur Arabischen Philologie (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1896), 1:10717. au yatabic uhumu al-ghwn) translates, depending 66 The sentence in question (al-shucar on the contextual interpretation, as either the poets are followed by demons or the poets are followed by those who have gone astray, obviously leaving several options for interpretation. 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. Monroes introduction to Ris alat at-taw abi wa z-zaw abi, The Treatise of Familiar Spirits and Demons by Ab u Amir ibn Shuhaid al-Ashjac, al-Andalus K , trans. Monroe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1971), esp. 3840. 69 Monroe, Risalat, 52. 70 A variant and suggestive translation is given by Suzanne Pinckney Stetchkevych, Poetic Genius and Poetic Jinni: The Case of Ibn Shuhayd, International Journal of Middle East Studies 39 (2007): 333. 71 As happened in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. See Wal S. Hassan, World Literature in the Age of Globalization: Reections on an Anthology, College English 63, no. 1 (2000): 41.