Medieval Arabic-Islamic Poetics: The Transformation of the Amatory Prelude Sahar Ishtiaque Ullah Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 Copyright 2017 Sahar Ishtiaque Ullah All rights reserved ABSTRACT Medieval Arabic-Islamic Poetics: The Transformation of the Amatory Prelude Sahar Ishtiaque Ullah The dissertation investigates the medieval poetics of the amatory prelude beginning with the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah – or The Mantle Ode – by the poet Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294). Poets expanded the trope of the abandoned ruins to include urban space; incorporated sacred beloveds as poetic beloveds; and foregrounded the self-conscious authorial voice within the prelude. The first chapter locates the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah within the larger Arabic poetic legacy that extends to the ancient pre-Islamic period. The second chapter considers the discursive formation of sacred poetic beloveds, such as the Prophet Muhammad, incorporated among the repertoire of the amatory prelude’s classical and ancient poetic beloveds. The third chapter analyzes the authorial voice and role of the lyric “I” in the preludes of Shaʻbān al-Āthārī (d. 1425) and ʻĀʼishah al-Bāʻūniyyah (d. 1517) who pay homage to their literary predecessors including Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 1235), al-Būṣīrī, and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 1349) by mirroring their metrical composition. The fourth chapter interrogates the intersection of poetics and literary criticism in the medieval Arabic-Islamic devotional invocation that is the hallmark of medieval prolegomena. The preludes within the genre of instructive poems on rhetoric known as the badīʿiyyāt encapsulated literary criticism’s definition of “ingenious beginnings.” Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 1362) demonstrates this intersection in his prose introduction to al-Ghayth al-Musajjam fī Sharḥ Lāmiyat al-ʿAjam. I conclude by returning to modern iterations of al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīdat al-Burdah in literary texts in order to further challenge and raise questions about the discontinuity of medieval Arabic poetics in modern culture. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments..………………………………………………………………..…ii Dedication..………………………………………………………………..…………iv Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1 Prelude Campsites: Space and Time in Performative Remembrance……….……….38 Chapter 2 Prelude Beloveds: The Prophetic, the Divine, and the Cursed………………….…...87 Chapter 3 The Subjective Prelude: Reading the Authorial Voice……..………………………147 Chapter 4 The Pedagogical Prelude: The Intersection of Poetry, Criticism, and Literary Style………..………………………………………………..……………………...195 Conclusion The Burdah as Aṭlāl: Medieval Poetic Continuity in Modern Arabic Literature?...…..………………………………………………………………….....245 Bibliography………..……………………………………………………...………273 Appendix………..………………………………………………………………….297 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To Dr. Muhsin al-Musawi and my dissertation committee, thank you for sharpening my questions of literary scholarship. To Dr. Moustafa Fouad and Dr. George Saliba, thank you for revealing to me the deep ocean that is the Arabic language. To anyone who taught me a single Arabic letter, thank you for leading me to its shores. To the mashayikh, and especially Abdallah Adhami, thank you for generously allowing me a view of your minds’ Syrian, Egyptian, Tunisian, Yemeni, Moroccan, Gambian, Senegalese, Turkish, and Indian libraries. To my Azhari teachers, thank you for showing me that if you have love and learning, you will never be impoverished. To all my students, thank you for teaching me what makes being a scholar-teacher worthwhile. To Dr. Isabel Geathers – thank you for exemplifying the transformative power of a brilliant woman of color in the halls of academia. To my colleagues, especially Dr. Noemie Ndiaye and Dr. Jennifer Rhodes, thank you for modeling ambition with integrity and endurance. To the OAD Research Collective, thank you for challenging me to clarify and sharpen my style of poetic analysis. To the Writing Center, and especially Jason Ueda, thank you for creating a community of writers and your invaluable feedback. To Zachary Ugolnik, thank you for your writing consultations as we combed through the work. To the Heyman Center for the Humanities, thank you for supporting me in the final months of my revisions. To my friends Kamilah A. Pickett and Tyson Amir – thank you for reflecting back to me in clear terms what this is all really about. To the people who brought me ii food and medicine, who accompanied me to the hospital, who gave me company and advice in hours of need, who assisted in finding housing and moving over the last seven and a half years – thank you for acknowledging and supporting the human side of intellectual life. And to my family – especially Adnan, Mom, Dad, Duff, Sana, and Anu – thank you. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for celebrating me when I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I love you and hope this makes you proud. iii DEDICATION In memory of our absent beloveds iv INTRODUCTION The presence of poetry about love is a prevailing phenomenon of the human experience; the specifics of its images, symbolic registers, rhythm, and rhetorical style, however, are shaped and changed according to shifting contexts. Hence, the objects and subjects of love as well as its role and direction are not stable matters. Sappho of Lesbos, the seventh century B.C. ancient Greek poet, is reported to have composed the following verses in the fragments that remain of her poetry: Some men say an army of horses and some men say an army on foot And some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing On the black earth. But I say it is What you love.1 Although very little is known about her, the images Sappho invokes most likely constituted the experience of warfare in the ancient world and thus her context. The multi-layered poetics of the fragment speak also too audiences and of their communities.2 The poet lists images of ancient war – horses, an army, and ships – that others have articulated as objects of beauty and desire. The claim that these are “the most beautiful thing[s]” is indicative of a discourse rooted in a larger martial and material culture that informs values, which in turn inform what is desired. The interpolation of the poet at the end, “But I say it is/What you love” is an argument about the relationship between love and the aesthetic values attributed to the desirable 1 Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 27. 2 See Stein Haugom Olsen, “What Is Poetics?” The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), 26. 105 (1976): 338–351. 1 object. The poet’s argument is rhetorically effective because it demonstrates knowledge of other traditions before offering a poetic departure from them. In Arabic literature, the qaṣīdah or ode repeatedly begins with the poetics of love and longing and that familiar ancient figure of the lover contemplating a beloved. Beginning in such a manner becomes a well-known poetic convention referred to as the nasīb or amatory prelude in which the poetic voice is that of the lover addressing an absent beloved. The hallmark for beginning the ancient qaṣīdah or Arabic ode, the ancient nasīb remains a literary convention after the advent of Islam in the seventh century and well into the modern period.3 Moreover, the nasīb is not only a site of continuity but also innovative transformation that reflects the poets’ changed language, new patrons, and audiences’ shifting engagement with the theme of love and longing in relation to time, space, and the figure of the poetic composer. For this reason, and especially if we accept Jerome W. Clinton’s argument that the nasīb can generate the meaning of an entire poem, the amatory prelude represents a fertile site of poetic analysis and inquiry even if exceptions to the presence and absence of this convention develop over time as different genres of Arabic poetry emerge over a millennium.4 3 See See ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muslim ibn Qutaybah, Kitāb Al-Shiʻr wa al-Shuʻarāʼ: Wa qīla Ṭabaqāt al-Shuʻarāʼ (Bayrūt: Dār Ṣādir, 2005); also see Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa al- Shuʿarāʾ: Introduction to the Book of Poetry and Poets, trans. Arthur Wormhoudt (Oskaloosa, IA: William Penn College, 1973). For another translation, see Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 71–140. 4 See my article "Postclassical Poetics: the Role of the Amatory Prelude for the Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters," The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 3.2 (2016): 203-225. 2 Newly developed genres of Arabic poetry emerged after Islam from the first/seventh century and onward that incorporate the poetics of the nasīb. Among these genres are forms of Arabic devotional poetry including al-Madā’iḥ al- Nabawiyyah or panegyrics dedicated to the Prophet Muḥammad; Sufi poetry like the khamriyyāt or wine odes in the tradition of the early ʻAbbāsid period;5 and the musical muwashshaḥāt or strophic poetry.6 Arabic devotional poetry is composed as love poems and arguably more widely circulated among a much larger public than courtly poetry. The result of their success is that centuries-old poetry lives on in oral recitations, musical compositions, visual representations, and performance art in varied spaces until today including among non-Arabic speaking Muslim regions and communities in Indonesia, India, Nigeria, and Albania. For example, while searching for the text of poetry written by sixteenth-century Damascene poet and scholar ʻĀʼishah al-Bāʻūniyyah (d. 923/1517),7 about whom very little is known in the North 5 The medieval Sufi khamriyyāt are preceded by and modeled after the non-Sufi wine poetry such as that of Abū Nuwās (d. 199/813), Muslim ibn al-Walīd (d. 208/823), and other wine poets. 6 On a medieval study of the development of the Andalusian muwashshaḥāt, see the Egyptian scholar Ibn Sanā' al-Mulk’s (d.