Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert STRUCTURE AND MEANING IN MEDIEVAL ARABIC AND PERSIAN POETRY This is the first comprehensive and comparative study of compositional and stylistic techniques in medieval Arabic and Persian lyric poetry. Ranging over some seven centuries, it deals with works by over thirty poets in the Islamic world from Spain to present-day Afghanistan, and examines how this rich poetic tradition exhibits both continuity and development in the use of a wide range of compositional strategies. Julie Scott Meisami discusses a wide range of key topics including the use of rhetorical figures, metaphors and images, and the principles of structural organization within lyric poetry. She provides detailed analyses of a large number of poetic texts, to reveal how structural and semantic features interact to bring meaning to the individual poem. The book also examines works by the indigenous critics of poetry in both Arabic and Persian, and demonstrates the critics’ awareness of, and interest in, the techniques which poets employed to construct these eloquent poems. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of pre-modern poetry and poetics, and Middle Eastern literature. Julie Scott Meisami, until recently Lecturer in Persian at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University, has published extensively on Arabic and Persian poetry and is the editor of Edebiyat: The Journal for Middle Eastern Literatures. Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION INTHEMIDDLEEAST Series editor: Ian R. Netton University of Leeds This series studies the Middle East through the twin foci of its diverse cultures and civilizations. Comprising original monographs as well as scholarly surveys, it covers topics in the fields of Middle Eastern literature, archaeology, law, history, philosophy, science, folklore, art, architecture and language. While there is a plurality of views, the series presents serious scholarship in a lucid and stimulating fashion. Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert STRUCTURE AND MEANINGINMEDIEVAL ARABIC AND PERSIAN POETRY ORIENT PEARLS Julie Scott Meisami Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert First published in 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group # 2003 Julie Scott Meisami All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-22055-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-27545-4 (Adobee-ReaderFormat) ISBN 0–7007–1575–4 (Print Edition) Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert This book is dedicated to the memories of two great teachers and dear friends – Elroy J. (Roy) Bundy and Tawfiq Sayigh – who taught me poetry, and who never grudged either their time or their talk Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert CONTENTS Preface ix 1 Introduction 1 Brief encounters 1 Grounds for comparison 5 Medieval literary theory 9 The search for unity 13 Poetry as craft 15 Theories of composition 19 2 Invention 23 Concepts of invention 23 Invention, imitation, and genre 26 Invention and genre in early Abbasid poetry 30 Invention and genre in the Persian ghazal 45 3 Disposition: The parts of the poem 55 Concepts of disposition 55 Beginnings 60 Transitions 75 Endings 90 4 Disposition: Larger structures 111 Segmentation: Proportion and balance 111 Amplification, abbreviation, and digression 130 The shape of the poem 138 vii Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert CONTENTS 5 Disposition: The Qas¯daı and its adaptations 144 ˙ Functions of the Nası¯b 144 ) Nası¯b and Hija¯ 155 Variations on the Qas¯ıda Form 162 ˙ 6 Disposition: Varieties of structure 190 Spatial and numerical composition 190 Other strategies: Letters, dialogues, narratives, debates 207 7 Ornamentation 244 Concepts of ornament 244 ( Ornament and structure: The five figures of badı¯ 246 Ornament and structure: The maha¯sin al-kala¯m 269 ˙ Ornament and structure: Other figures 282 8 Ornament: Metaphor and imagery 319 Problems of metaphor 319 Imagery and poetic unity 323 Image as argument 341 The poet and the natural world 347 Earthly Paradises? 355 Esoteric imagery 388 9 Conclusion: The coherence of the poem 404 Word and image: A privileging of styles? 404 Concluding Remarks 427 Notes 431 Bibliography 478 Index 502 viii Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert PREFACE This book has been a long time in the making. It was begun many years ago, in the context of a discourse about Arabic and Persian poetry which has since moved on to ask other questions, and to question the original questions. Having been begun as research into problems of poetic structure, it has – in the course of major upheavals, a transatlantic move, and various other pressing projects – often been relegated to the back burner, where it finally reached a point when simple rewarming would not do. Consider this, then, a rehashing; some new ingredients have been added (notably the chapters on rhetorical figures, metaphor and imagery), but many of the old ones have been retained, because I remain convinced that there is still much worth saying about them. For there is still considerable resistance to the notion that Arabic and Persian poems are not merely “coherent” in a general sense, but carefully structured. Has enough work been published to provide evidence of the principles of structural organization? Many more studies exist now than when I first began the research that would ultimately lead to this book; but they are still sparse. But surely (runs another argument) there are more interesting things we could be doing, more important questions we could be asking? Indeed there are; but until we have more than a handful of critical studies of individual poets, or of individual poems, we will not have a critical mass to work with. This is why this particular study is intended to be a broad one; but although it may not provide every detail about every poet, or every poem considered (as well as about many other poets and poems that have not been discussed here), it should furnish starting points for further investigation – investigation which would both apply and test the conclusions arrived at here. No single person can read every single poem by every single poet in both Arabic and Persian – not only what is available in print, but what remains in manuscript, the study of which would require several collective lifetimes; but someone might, on reading this book, find a particular poet interesting, and go on from there. I hope so. But why study structure at all? Can’t we just assume that poems are structured, and get on with it? There are two answers to this. One, is that not everyone, even now, assumes that this is the case; the extant studies, in general, seem to waffle, assuming that there is this kind of poem, or that kind of poem, ix Facebook : La culture ne s'hérite pas elle se conquiert PREFACE but no general principles are involved of which poets, critics and audiences are (in varying degrees) aware. The other is perhaps less self-evident (though it should be): structure does not just keep the poem from falling apart, or the audience from losing track; it is, rather, a means by which the poet conveys meaning.( Debates over the relative merits of wording (lafz) and “meaning” (ma na¯) ought not to confuse us; they are means to the same˙ end. The river is never the same river, and the poem is never the same poem: every change in wording, order, structure, changes the meaning, and that meaning is unparaphrasable, unreduceable to “content”, “idea”, “message”. The medium – the words used, their arrangement, rhetorical embellishment – is the message. One way to study structure is through the close analysis of texts. The study of medieval Arabic and Persian poetry has been complicated by the fact that, traditionally, this close analysis has largely been in the hands of philologists, and to a lesser extent of historians, who have viewed the poetic tradition as a collection of autonomous texts to be mined primarily for philological and/or historical, rather than literary, data, and as located within a generalized “world- view” (or expressive of a specific “mentality”) which accounts for the peculiarities (or shortcomings) perceived in the texts themselves. Those who have begun with the views of medieval critics of poetry, and have extrapolated these onto poetic practice, have often taken the critics’ statements at face value, or have argued that they failed to see what was happening in the poems. Composing poetry and criticizing it (as many of the medieval critics have remarked) are quite different activities, with quite different goals. Others, in reaction to the philologists (but, in some senses, their heirs), have focussed on texts from a synchronic standpoint, divorcing poetry from its historical and literary contexts in order to determine, “objectively”, how poems are formed – as if poems were formed in a vacuum.