Essays in Arabic Literary Biography II: 1350–1850 Edited by Joseph E. Lowry and Devin J. Stewart

2009 Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden

ISSN 0938-9024 ISBN 978-3-447-05933-6 Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Wolfhart P. Heinrichs ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿABBĀSĪ (al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Raḥīm)...... 12 Th. Emil Homerin ʿĀʾISHAH al-Bāʿūniyyah...... 21 Devin J. Stewart Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad al-ʿĀMILĪ ...... 27 Julia Bray Dāwūd ibn ʿUmar al-ANṬĀKĪ ...... 48 Peter Gran Ḥasan al-ʿAṬṬĀR ...... 56 Michael G. Carter ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn ʿUmar al-BAGHDĀDĪ ...... 69 Dwight F. Reynolds BANŪ HILĀL...... 77 Shawkat M. Toorawa Āzād BILGRĀMĪ ...... 91 Ralf Elger Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-GHAZZĪ ...... 98 Michael Cooperson ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-GHUZŪLĪ...... 107 Beatrice Gruendler IBN ABĪ ḤAJALAH ...... 118 Marina A. Tolmacheva IBN BAṬṬŪṬAH ...... 126 Devin J. Stewart IBN ḤIJJAH al-Ḥamawī ...... 137 Erik S. Ohlander IBN KATHĪR ...... 147 Cynthia Robinson Lisān al-Dīn IBN al-KHAṬĪB ...... 159 Joseph E. Lowry IBN MAʿṢŪM ...... 174 Contents vi

Thomas Bauer Jamāl al-Dīn IBN NUBĀTAH ...... 184 Livnat Holtzman IBN QAYYIM al-JAWZIYYAH ...... 202 Arnoud Vrolijk IBN SŪDŪN ...... 223 Dwight F. Reynolds IBN ZAMRAK ...... 229 Kelly Tuttle al-IBSHĪHĪ ...... 236 Kristen Brustad JIRMĀNŪS Jibrīl Farḥāt ...... 242 Geert Jan Van Gelder Shihāb al-Dīn al-KHAFĀJĪ...... 251 Hilary Kilpatrick MAKĀRIYŪS Ibn al-Zaʿīm and BŪLUS Ibn al-Zaʿīm ...... 262 Maribel Fierro (in collaboration with Luis Molina) al-MAQQARĪ ...... 273 Christopher Melchert MARʿĪ ibn Yūsuf ...... 284 Elias Muhanna Ilyās al-MAWṢILĪ ...... 295 Ralf Elger Muḥmmad Amīn ibn Faḍl Allāh al-MUḤIBBĪ...... 300 Lois A. Giffen al-NAFZĀWĪ ...... 309 Thomas Bauer al-NAWĀJĪ ...... 321 Maaike Van Berkel al-QALQASHANDĪ ...... 331 Everett K. Rowson al-ṢAFADĪ ...... 341 Anthony H. Johns Shams al-Dīn al-SAMAṬRĀʾĪ ...... 357 Humphrey Davies Yusūf al-SHIRBĪNĪ ...... 371 Nelly Hanna ʿAbd Allāh al-SHUBRĀWĪ ...... 376 vii Contents

Aaron Spevack Jalāl al-Dīn al-SUYŪṬĪ...... 386 Kenneth L. Honerkamp al-Ḥasan ibn Masʿūd al-YŪSĪ ...... 410 Monique Bernards Muḥammad Murtaḍā al-ZABĪDĪ...... 419

Glossary of Selected Terms ...... 429

Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, 1350-1850 Introduction

JOSEPH E. LOWRY and DEVIN J. STEWART

This volume contains biographical essays on Age,” “The Age of Expansion,” “The Golden thirty-eight Arabic literary figures who lived Age,” “The Silver Age” and “The Age of the between 1350 and 1850, a period of time almost Mamlūks,” this last covering five and a half uniformly dismissed by scholars of Arabic lit- centuries, from 1258-1800. Gibb locates decline erature as lacking in literary achievements. This early indeed: “the output was enormous…, but negative judgment is so overwhelming and per- the qualities of originality, virility, and imagina- sistent, and the terms in which it is expressed so tion, weak from the first, die away completely provocative, that a brief survey of a few key by the sixteenth century” (142). Gibb was pronouncements seems appropriate. echoing a conclusion found earlier in the century. In the 1992 volume on Modern Arabic Lit- In his pioneering A Literary History of the Arabs, erature in the Cambridge History of Arabic Lit- first published in 1907, R. A. Nicholson, a gifted erature the editor writes in his introduction that scholar and translator, glumly finds that the pe- “The Arabs had started their steady decline early riod in Arabic literary history stretching from in the sixteenth century” (at 2; for full references the Mongol invasions (mid-13th century) to the see the Bibliography). Although “historians of early twentieth century “forms, one must admit, literature may have exaggerated the decline, the a melancholy conclusion to a glorious history” period is no doubt characterized by the absence (442). of creativity and loss of vigour;” it is an “age of Even now, the view of the period in question commentaries and compendia.” Worse yet, by as sterile and dull persists. Robert Irwin, the the eighteenth century, Arabic prose writing learned compiler of the recent Penguin anthol- exhibited “an excessively ornate, artificial type ogy of classical Arabic literature (1999), though of style,” literary work altogether “lacked seri- recognizing that the problem is not free from ousness,” and those who “cared for content… nuance, notes that “there does appear to have employed an undistinguished… style… devoid been a decline both in quantity and quality of of literary merit.” Themes in creative writing original writing in that period,” “[h]orizons were “conventional;” poetry, for example, con- seemed to have shrunk” and Arabic poetry and sisted of “empty panegyrics,” “celebrations of fiction were “mostly conventional and back- trivial social occasions” and “lifeless and pas- ward-looking” (448). sionless love poems.” Unsurprisingly, then, the Clearly, the time has arrived for a reassess- “Ottoman period marks the nadir of Arabic lit- ment. erature,” the “literature of an exhausted, inward- It is true—cultural generalizations aside— looking culture.” Incredibly, this dismissal of that difficulties confront the student of late pre- over four centuries of Arabic literature repre- modern and early modern Arabic literature. The sented progress in the field. majority of works from this period remain a vast Three decades earlier, the great Arabist Sir and mostly unexplored and unedited corpus, a Hamilton Alexander Roskeen Gibb divided his situation that both results from and reinforces Arabic Literature into chapters on “The Heroic scholarly inertia. In addition, a dearth of secon- Introduction 2 dary literature remains both a cause and an ef- Arabic writing more generally, came to be culti- fect of the field’s failure to examine the litera- vated, studied, patronized and produced on a ture of these centuries. A small number of sur- massive scale. veys in Arabic, the very recent (2006) volume of Rule by Arabs, coupled with an Arabic the Cambridge History of Arabic literature on scripture—the Qur’an, which served as the the so-called “post-classical period,” a short basis of the emergent religion of Islam and so study by C. E. Bosworth (1989) and a few scat- provided substantial ideological justification tered articles are nearly all that is currently for Arab rule—led to the privileging of Arabic available. In general, the literature and literary as a vehicle of literary expression. The divine history of this time remain poorly understood, status of the Qur’an, a nearly unmediated re- although the study of the period’s social history cord of God’s speech in Arabic, reinforced the has begun to make advances. Finally, of particu- perception of Arabic as the language of pres- lar note are the ideological factors that have tige (the Qur’an itself tells us that it is an Ara- negatively conditioned modern Western scholar- bic Qur’an, in a clear Arabic tongue); the ly attitudes to Islamic cultural production gen- Arabs’ political success reinforced its status as erally in the late pre-modern and early modern the language of power. periods. Thus, Arabic, seen as the exclusive, or at These points, and others, conspire to make least superior, medium of divine communication this introduction emphatically provisional. to humanity, became a marker of social status, Nonetheless, the essays that make up this vol- and a wide range of persons of diverse interests, ume aim to provide the kind of historical, bio- backgrounds, religious affiliations, cultural ori- graphical and analytical detail that has been entations and so on learned and cultivated the largely absent from earlier studies and that could Arabic language. Ambitious members of non- form the starting-point for a more measured and Arabic speaking subject populations could hard- better-informed reading of the texts themselves. ly pursue their material interests without know- Whether the resulting picture will lead to a re- ing Arabic, and of course it was to the advantage vised view of the aesthetic qualities of the litera- of elites and those who aspired to serve them to ture of these centuries is unclear (it well might). promote Arabic as uniquely pure, rich in expres- Yet the attempt in this volume to survey authors’ sive possibilities and, crucially, as an idiom ap- literary production, situate it in local and also in propriate to a learned and eloquent ruling class. larger contexts and identify the factors that It thus became not only important to read and conditioned the literature produced by individual write Arabic well, but also to be able to speak it writers during these centuries is long overdue. eloquently; conversely, infelicitous expressions and solecisms betrayed the social climber as Beginnings awkward and unworthy of advancement and reward. That social pressures and material incen- The wider world might never have come to tives were connected with the mastery of Arabic know about Arabic literature but for the can be seen in the roles played by many ethnic appearance in the early seventh century of a new Iranians in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries Abrahamic faith—Islam—that mobilized the in the development of Arabic literary style and inhabitants of Arabia. Arabic-speaking tribes- in the founding of the fields of Arabic grammar men poured out of the Arabian Peninsula and and lexicography. It is ironic that these persons adjacent territories spreading, by the mid-eighth helped to establish the ‘pure’ Arabic of the century, from Spain to India. With the estab- Arabs and of Arabia as the standard of correct lishment of an Arabo-Islamic state ruled by usage and thereby enhanced the ideologically caliphs—first in Medina under the so-called driven privileging of the Arabic language in Rightly Guided or Orthodox Caliphs (632-61), connection with Arab rule. then in Damascus under the Umayyads (661- Of particular importance to the development 750) and finally in Baghdad under the Abbasids of Arabic literature and Arabic writing more (750-1258)—Arabic literature, and all manner of generally was the encouragement of the early

3 Introduction

Abbasid ruling elites, who patronized the explo- The Arabic literature of later periods was, of ration of the Arab and Arabian past and its lit- course, subject to the same kinds of forces, but erary remains, the linguistic study of the Qur’an, in much different combinations, proportions and Arabic linguistics and lexicography more gen- alignments, and with much different conse- erally and the elaboration of religious sciences in quences. To make sense of post-Abbasid litera- Arabic. They also contributed to the study of ture, these differences must be understood. ancient Greek, Iranian and Indian philosophical, By the second half of the fourteenth century, scientific and wisdom literature and funded where the essays in this volume begin, the con- translations from these languages, sometimes text of Arabic literary production, and of Arabic through Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic), into Ara- writing more generally, had undergone funda- bic. This translation movement also contributed mental transformations. These developments re- greatly to the development of a learned and sulted in part from vastly changed geo-political technically sophisticated Arabic prose idiom. To circumstances and important innovations in the this emergent literary language bureaucrats of development of religious institutions, both of Iranian heritage also contributed. As chancery which altered the social and economic contexts secretaries, they enriched Arabic prose by trans- in which literature was produced. mitting the legacy of Persian statecraft in Arabic Of special significance was a fundamental and developing an effective, edifying and change in the ethnic composition of the ruling aesthetically ambitious prose style in their offi- elites, which decisively altered the environment cial correspondence. for the patronage of Arabic writing. A series of The Abbasid caliphs themselves were often mass migrations of Turkish and Mongol peoples direct patrons and consumers of the most so- into the central Islamic lands in the eleventh, phisticated works of belletristic literature, most thirteenth and fifteenth centuries resulted in the famously of panegyric odes in which poets of domination of Arabic-speaking (and other) pop- legendary talent made highly innovative uses of ulations by Central Asian groups for many cen- pre-Islamic poetic forms and images. Caliphs, turies. These originally nomadic migrants ac- ministers, and merchants of enormous wealth, quired political power across wide swaths of the entertaining themselves in sumptuous palaces Muslim world: Iran, Iraq and Syro-Palestine in and mansions by employing a vast array of intel- particular, but also Egypt, Anatolia and even lectuals and litterateurs, have long attracted the India. The domination of Muslim societies by gaze of historians of Arabic literature. Indeed, Central Asian peoples and the process of their the pre-modern Arabic literary tradition itself assimilation culminated in the three great abso- glorifies the refined literary culture of this period lutist empires that rose to prominence in the in countless anecdotes that portray the wit and early sixteenth century: the Ottomans (late 13th wisdom of the producers of such literature and century to 1924, Anatolia and Arabic-speaking also their generous, receptive and, occasionally, regions), the Safavids (1501-1722, Iran) and the even gifted patrons. Justifiably, scholars con- Mughals (1526-1858, India). tinue to view the early Abbasid period (from ca. The Turks and Mongols, nomadic and often 750-1000) as a foundational epoch in the history of pagan (or at least eclectic) background, pos- of Arabic literature—eloquent testimony to the sessed neither strong claims to legitimacy of capacity of Abbasid literature to convince us rule in Islamic terms nor, initially, ties to local even today of the precedence of its ruling and constituencies. In many instances, however, cultural elites. these political deficits were remedied by forging alliances with local scholarly-religious elites, especially through the patronage of reli- Change gious institutions such as mosques, law col- The factors that made Arabic literature into leges (madrasahs) and other establishments of world literature in the early Abbasid period re- religious study, worship and contemplation. sulted from a particular convergence of power, Sponsorship of such institutions lent visible, politics, wealth, religion, culture, and language. symbolically effective support to the bearers of

Introduction 4 religious tradition, promoted ties to local net- bureaucrats had become partly incorporated into works of civilian notables, and also induced the the larger group of clerically trained profes- scholars to become dependent on the interest sionals. Thus, the class of the literate elite as a and largesse of the alien rulers. Institutions of whole had become more homogeneous because learning provided employment opportunities of a shared educational background, but also for teachers of the religious sciences and ancil- more diverse because of the substantial increase lary subjects as well as stipends for their stu- in its numbers. dents—all such study began with a thorough The late pre-modern rise in the numbers of grounding in Arabic language and literature as scholars was probably also accompanied by an a propaedeutic to the fuller study of the Qur’an, increase in literacy, entailing a heightened famil- Islamic law and other subjects. Support of iarity with the literary canon. There was also an these institutions and their curriculum was a associated growth in economic opportunities for hallmark of Muslim rule in this period, begin- this “civilian elite,” and it is perhaps useful to ning especially under the Turkish Seljuqs in think of them, in the late pre-modern period, as a Iraq and Iran (1040-1194) and continuing un- kind of upwardly-mobile upper-middle social der the Turkish Zangids in Mesopotamia stratum. These developments, in conjunction (1127-1251), the Kurdish Ayyubids in Egypt with the changed environment for patronage and and Syria (1169-1250s), the Turkish and Cir- the expansion and support of educational institu- cassian Mamluks in Syria and Egypt (1250- tions, meant that the ʿulamāʾ became primary 1517), and thereafter under the Ottomans (who bearers, producers and consumers of Arabic overthrew the Mamluks in 1517), the Safavids literary culture. The (comparatively) narrow and the Mughals. Thus, the focus of patronage literary elitism of the early Abbasid period was shifted from the courtly and occasionally even replaced by a wider diffusion of learning, and an qualifiedly ‘secular’ contexts of early Abbasid increased range of tastes, interests and abilities. times to institutions that regularized the pro- Although courtly litterateurs did not cease to duction and reproduction of religious know- exist, literature ceased to be the exclusive pre- ledge, the foundation of which was the study of serve of courts and became more often a means Arabic. of communication among the educated, even The proliferation of educational institutions though mastery of the literary codes and canon and opportunities both contributed to and re- remained a potentially important means of ac- flected the growing numbers of professional quiring and differentiating status within the religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ, ulema) from the scholarly community. eleventh century on. These intellectuals, in- Increasing bureaucratization and attendant cluding most of the writers studied in this vol- careerism, especially in the context of the com- ume, worked not only as clerics, mosque offi- paratively well-organized absolutist states of the cials, teachers of language and literature and sixteenth century and after, sharpened the com- professors of the religious sciences, but also in petition for civilian posts. At the same time, government as chancery secretaries, judges, scholars enjoyed considerable lateral profes- notaries and even as advisors to and personal sional mobility, and those who had marketable envoys of high government officials. In these skills or were particularly good at self-pro- latter, governmental capacities they were often motion, or both, could successfully offer their responsible for drafting official documents and abilities in lands far from their places of birth. correspondence, in which, as under the early Arabic, a language of international scholarly Abbasids, a fluid prose style, frequent and appo- exchange, enabled scholars to travel enormous site literary allusion and fine penmanship were distances in pursuit of learning, employment and val-ued. The early Abbasid chancery secretaries, patronage. Itinerant scholars were crucial for the however, had remained culturally, socially and spread and cultivation of Arabic learning in the intellectually distinct from those engaged in the centuries covered by this volume, especially study of the emergent religious sciences. In the outside the dominantly Arabic-speaking lands. late and post-Abbasid world these literate Arabophone scholars traveled to Istanbul, Isfa-

5 Introduction han and Delhi, and to lesser centers of political luk and Ottoman times. gravity, to seek employment or official approval Thus, Sufism, in conjunction with the inter- and reward for their various projects. Those nationalization of scholarly and intellectual ca- projects did not always involve belletristic litera- reer opportunities, along with the far-flung ture in Arabic, yet a result of successful pursuit routes followed by Muslim traders, contributed of patronage could often lead those scholars to to the spread of Islam, and with it of Arabic, into become, directly or indirectly, teachers of the Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and other Arabic literary tradition in the broad sense. non-Arabophone regions. Consequently, a wide Some enterprising scholars traveled even further range of Arabic words and phrases became cur- afield, to Southeast Asia, South India, sub- rent in vernacular Islamicate languages and liter- Saharan Africa or even China, and brought with atures. them knowledge of Arabic literary traditions Although the history of Arabic literature is while working as teachers, civil servants, judges, closely connected with the religion of Islam, or professors of religious law. many important writers of Arabic were non- Various social networks contributed to the in- Muslims. Christians played a key role in the ternationalization of the labor market for the early Abbasid translation movement, and Jews educated, including private associations that in Arab lands developed a distinctive Arabic filled the gaps left by inherent limitations in the literature written in Hebrew characters (Judaeo- power of pre-modern states. Sunni jurists, for Arabic). In the period covered by this volume, example, were affiliated with one of four com- Arabic writing by Christians, especially by cler- peting professional associations (sometimes re- ics—as opposed to writing in the liturgical lan- ferred to as ‘law schools,’ madhāhib, sg. madh- guages of Syriac and Coptic—seems to be on hab) that, among other things, facilitated cross- the ascendant, as exemplified by the careers of border travel, education and employment (they several of the authors studied here. This devel- have been likened to guilds). opment continued and bore in important ways Equally or even more important were the Sufi on the Arabic literary culture of the late nine- orders (ṭuruq, sg. ṭarīqah), which played an in- teenth and early twentieth centuries. creasingly central role in many areas of social life Finally, it should be noted that there is also in the Muslim world in the late pre-modern period now some evidence that the general increase in and to which many of the authors studied in this literacy encompassed an emergent class of arti- volume belonged. Although these orders served a sans and merchants—apart from scholarly pietistic function—ostensibly putting their adher- elites—who began both to consume and to pro- ents in contact with an unbroken spiritual, char- duce works of literature. This trend makes itself ismatic lineage stretching back to the Prophet felt in certain Mamluk-period literary works and Muḥammad—they also functioned as, or in tan- continues to evolve throughout the Ottoman dem with, social and commercial networks and period—though it must be emphasized that re- generated significant cultural activity, including search on the social background to the produc- Arabic writing of various kinds. The international tion and consumption of literature in these peri- character of these orders led them to play a spe- ods is at a very early stage. Still, it seems that cial role in the spread of Arabic learning and also Arabic literature acquired a much broader social in the production of texts that aimed partly to base in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods than it satisfy aesthetic goals in the context of worship had had earlier. and theological speculation. Mystical poetry in Arabic (as in Persian and other Islamicate lan- Arabic literature, 1350-1850 guages) was a conspicuous site of literary play, and the dense field of imagery and allusion in the During the centuries covered by this volume, writings of the Sufis was equally at home in Fez Arabic was being written from Central Asia to (North Africa) or Aceh (Sumatra). Sufi instruc- the southern tip of India, from the Balkans to tion and social affiliations may also have contri- Ghana and Zanzibar and from Morocco to buted to the general increase in literacy in Mam- Sumatra, furnishing a vast array of regions, cul-

Introduction 6 tures and peoples with a scholarly, literary and dwindled with the disappearance of the Arab liturgical language. In most of these regions, ruling class. Making one’s living as a court poet however, Arabic had to compete with other lit- in the Arabic-speaking world ceased to be viable erary languages, such as Persian, Turkish, Urdu in the way it had been in the Umayyad and early or Malay. The waning of Abbasid rule in the Abbasid periods. ninth and tenth centuries and after led to the rise During this period three developments in of local centers of political power, patronage and poetry are of special note: First, new poetic cultural activity. Non-Arab rulers, outside forms come into being, or gain in popularity. Arabophone lands, began to patronize literature Among these are two strophic forms, the in their own languages. The appearance of muwashshaḥ and the zajal, that migrated from Islamicate vernacular literatures, beginning in Muslim Spain. Granada, the last outpost of Mus- the tenth century with Persian literature, spread lim rule and cultural life in Spain, had fallen to to other regions, with Turkish, and later, Urdu, the Christian reconquest in 1492. Although Swahili, Malay and other languages, all of Muslims were not officially expelled from the which came to be written in the Arabic script. Iberian peninsula until 1609, large numbers of Persianate forms of cultural expression, espe- them had already begun to migrate from Spain cially in literature, enjoyed the special favor of to North Africa, Egypt and Syria in earlier cen- the Turkish and Mongol ruling elites and left a turies, and Andalusian immigrant communities particularly deep imprint on Turkish and Urdu in North Africa continued to cultivate their re- literature. Bi- and even trilingualism were not gional literary, musical and other cultural tradi- uncommon; Persian and Turkish authors could tions, maintaining a distinct identity. be assumed to know Arabic and might them- Second, much poetry came to be self- selves compose literary, scientific or religious referential or self-consciously intertextual, refer- works in it. Simultaneously, such authors, when ring to earlier well-known poems, elaborating on writing in their vernaculars, were affected at such poems by the use of specific forms invol- many levels by the omnipresence of the Arabic ving complex (and playful) methods of quota- religious and literary tradition, leading to a tion or variation, displaying virtuoso deploy- complex, multi-lingual intertextuality. During ments of rhetorical devices, and so on. Various this supposed period of decadence, it is therefore poetic techniques also developed to highlight appropriate to speak of a flowering of Islamicate intertextual relationships between newer and literatures in languages other than Arabic, fre- older poems, such as the takhmīs (quintain) a quently in subtle and intricate dialogue with form that incorporated a pre-existing poem into Arabic literary forms and genres. a larger poetic elaboration using variations of the As in the earliest phases of Arabic literary underlying poem’s rhyme-scheme. Also, poems history, poetry remains the prime vehicle of that seek to demonstrate the entire catalog of artistic literary expression in this period. The rhetorical devices collectively termed badīʿ ap- qaṣīdah, the polythematic ode that existed since pear (such a poem is called a badīʿiyyah, a pre-Islamic times, continued to be composed, “badīʿ-poem”). These formal innovations con- but many developments had taken place in re- tinue trends that were begun under the Abbasids. gard to poetic form and practice in the inter- Third, and related to the first development, so- vening centuries. In Abbasid times, the qaṣīdah called colloquial forms emerge, in which spoken had evolved, with the pressures and opportu- (as opposed to formal, written) Arabic is em- nities of patronage, into the panegyric form par ployed to varying degrees. The zajal, for example, excellence, though shorter poems were also can employ a refrain in the colloquial language. common, and monothematic poetry was com- Other forms seem to have been more strictly col- posed on themes of love, asceticism, wine, hun- loquial, such as the dūbayt (named using the Per- ting, nature and so on. However, the opportun- sian term for “couplet”), the qūmā, the kān wa- ities for poets to have their grand panegyric odes kān or the mawwāl. By the fourteenth century, the publicly performed, patronized and appreciated existence of colloquial, or mixed formal- by the ruler and an audience of cognoscenti had colloquial poetic sub-genres had become a topic

7 Introduction treated by literary theorists; their interest in this In such cases, a classic work of literature would topic shows that such poetry had gained a mea- provide the pretext for the creation of an entirely sure of acceptance among the educated elites. new text with attendant possibilities of intertex- The increased importance of so-called collo- tual play and thematic expansion in unexpected quial forms more generally, not only in poetry, directions. Such forms, which celebrated and is shown by the emergence of oral epics such as also exploited the well known literary works of the Banū Hilāl cycle of tales, the 1001 Nights, earlier centuries, resembled the new poetic popular romances involving folk heroes, and forms that depended on quotation and allusion to even the conspicuous deployment of a more earlier poems. It has been noted that the base relaxed register of Arabic in historiographical texts used for such literary commentaries were writing, beginning especially with some of the frequently those of authors who post-dated the historians of Mamluk Egypt and continuing into ‘golden age’ of Abbasid literature. This may the Ottoman period. In the Abbasid context, suggest a shift in literary sensibilities, at least in writers of Arabic had problematized the rela- the Mamluk period. Outside the context of bel- tionship between colloquial Arabic and formal, letristic literature, recent scholarship on Islamic written Arabic with a view to privileging the theology, philosophy and law in this period has latter and criticizing the former as a deviation identified the use of commentaries on earlier from the classical norm. The acceptance and works as the primary method of recording con- cultivation of colloquial and semi-colloquial temporary doctrinal innovation. literature in the late pre-modern and early mo- The professional literature of the upper eche- dern periods reflects, by contrast, a broadening lons of the scholarly elite—law, theology, of literary markets, tastes and abilities consistent grammar, formal historiography and especially with the horizontal and vertical expansion of the biographical works on the careers of religious class of literate professionals, and also with the scholars—continued to be written and remained increasing capacity of other social strata to be- important branches of official academic writing. come consumers of literature. Because the literature of these centuries, On the surface, prose forms exhibit more sta- whether poetry or prose, was mostly produced bility in the late pre-modern and early modern by and for the class of literate professionals, it periods. However, anthologizing—an important served the internal communications needs of this literary activity in Abbasid times—becomes class (as emphasized by Thomas Bauer, 2005). more than the process of collecting apposite The social gulf that had previously characterized anecdotes and evolves into a virtuoso art. An- the relationship of producer (litterateur) to con- thologies themselves display innovative formal sumer (royal patron) had therefore narrowed developments, and other genres (even travel considerably, and one might speculate that an literature, for example) are treated by their important social function of much of the per- authors as opportunities for anthologizing. Such iod’s literature was to reinforce class solidarity works are not mere repackagings of the literary among the ranks of scholars, notwithstanding tradition, but innovative manipulations of that the intense competition for status, positions and tradition in ways that appealed to contemporary material advancement within that class. developments in literary taste and sensibilities. Where the Abbasid authors had sought with Decadence, decline and doubts their compilations to distill a canon from raw materials (a project connected with the ideologi- No account of the background to late pre- cal foundations of Abbasid rule), late pre- modern and early modern Arabic literary pro- modern and early modern anthologists rein- duction would be complete without a brief dis- terpreted the canon in ways that appealed to an cussion of modern scholarly attitudes toward expanding readership. this time period. The paradigm of decadence and Commentaries provided a similar opportunity decline with which previous scholarship has for displays of wit and erudition and could approached the literature of these centuries, and themselves tend in the direction of an anthology. which, in an ironic way, lends the period in

Introduction 8 question a kind of negative coherence, has been querors and colonizers, and it enables and pernicious. The quotations with which this in- makes durable interpretations such as that of troduction began show how entrenched such Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt as a long- attitudes are. The alleged period of decline co- overdue awakening—of the conquered and vers a temporal span defined variously as lasting colonized. This point can be put differently: three, four, six, or ten centuries. The beginning The West, in such narratives, styles itself as the of this period is assigned to diverse historical sole agent of historical progress; others play moments: the fall of Baghdad to the Buwayhids the role of bystanders or passive recipients of a in 945, to the Seljuqs in 1055, or, most spectacu- modernity created elsewhere. This narrative larly, to the Mongols in 1258; or it is assigned to does not accommodate the possibility of mul- the period of Ottoman control over the Middle tiple centers, let alone of alternative (and above East, beginning with their conquest of Syria and all non-Western) models of progress and mo- Egypt in 1516-17. The end of the period comes, dernity. according to most previous scholarship, with the On the other hand, the decline paradigm was influence of the modern European national lit- also employed by indigenous writers to describe eratures, especially French and then English, on the trajectory of their own cultural history in Arabic literature—the roles of German, Italian, these centuries. The age of decadence (in Arabic Russian, and Spanish literature were more lim- ʿaṣr al-inḥiṭāṭ) is opposed to the renaissance or ited. By the early twentieth century, the deca- awakening (Arabic nahḍah) that is claimed to dence is itself thought to be in decline. European characterize cultural production in the late nine- works had been translated in large numbers, and teenth and early twentieth centuries. It is perhaps works modeled on them had been produced in surprising that, in an age of incipient nationalism Arabic. New genres thought to be based exclu- and confrontation with colonialism, such dubi- sively on European models—the play, the short ous binary oppositions should become domesti- story, the novel, free verse—gained increasing cated. An archaeology of the notion of deca- prominence on the Arabic literary scene. dence or inḥiṭāṭ as it evolved in Arab thought A linchpin of the ‘decline thesis,’ at least as has hardly been undertaken (Albert Hourani’s it is mapped onto the Arab world, is Napole- now classic Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age is on’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. This event is a beginning, but is also invested in the tradi- often taken as a convenient marker for the be- tional decline paradigm). One might speculate ginning of the end of the decadence, a water- that the notions of decline and renaissance shed in Arab cultural history, after which a appeared useful to Arab nationalists who wished native confession of general cultural and tech- to attribute cultural stagnation to the long period nological stultification, if not backwardness, of Ottoman rule in Arab lands. It also seems leads to the studied emulation of European likely that indigenous elites used the projects of models in all domains of cultural activity. Na- ‘Westernization’ and ‘modernization’ to pursue poleon’s invasion is portrayed as a beneficial their own local political agenda; presenting kind of shock treatment, a desperately needed themselves as enlightened reformers, they were external stimulus that prods a reluctant, ex- able to draw on Western discourses and re- hausted and inward-looking civilization to- sources in the service of that agenda. wards progress and modernity. On the one hand, the self-serving nature of This volume this narrative seems obvious: The trajectory of decline exhibits a clear inverse correlation with The consequences of the paradigm of deca- a traditional periodization of pre-modern and dence and decline for the study of Arabic lit- modern European history that suggests ascen- erature in the five centuries covered by this dancy: dark ages, middle ages, renaissance, volume have been disastrous, leading, at the enlightenment, industrial revolution, modernity, least, to the wholesale dismissal of the period’s and so on. The narrative of decline is thus more literature. Thus, given the state of the field, this the triumphalist self-narrative of the con- introduction can only indicate in a very general

9 Introduction way some aspects of the context in which Ara- term ‘literature’ has been given a wide con- bic literature was being written during this struction in this volume. time. Numerous issues remain to be explored. The pressures of publication, previous com- This introduction has focused mostly on the mitments and heavy workloads conspired to Arabic-speaking lands under Mamluk and keep a few originally planned subjects from Ottoman control. The portrayal of specific appearing in this volume: The great jurist trends and features of the context in which Shams al-Dīn al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497) was a literature was produced is mostly based on member of an important scholarly family and a conditions obtaining during the Mamluk period, major writer of the late Mamluk period. Aḥmad conjecturally extrapolated into Ottoman times Bābā al-Timbuktī (d. 1627), an important scho- (and, for that matter, the whole presentation is lar of Arabic and Islamic studies active in the heavily indebted to the important 2005 article scholarly center of Timbuktu and Morocco, of Thomas Bauer on Mamluk literature). This exemplifies the geographical scope of Arabic account has therefore likely privileged devel- writing and culture in this period. ʿAbd al-Ghanī opments in provincial capitals, especially Cairo al-Nābulusī (d. 1731), an unusually prolific wri- and Damascus, and ignored important centers ter, scholar and mystic, was a key Syrian intel- of Arabic writing such as North Africa, Ana- lectual in the Ottoman period. Muḥammad ibn tolia (and other Ottoman provinces, in ʿAlī al-Tahānawī (d. after 1745), an Indian Southeast Europe for example), Iran, India, scholar whose dense thesaurus of technical sub-Saharan Africa, and even Southeast Asia. terms from the Islamic intellectual tradition No doubt there are critical regional differences remains an important source for modern scho- that require a fuller exploration. Ideally, deve- larship, provides yet another example of the lopments should be traced more fully into the vigor of the Arabic literary and intellectual Ottoman period, and the crucial developments tradition in India in the seventeenth through within that period portrayed in more detail (the nineteenth centuries. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al- pioneering studies by Gran [1998, orig. 1979] Jabartī (d. 1825), member of a prominent scho- and Hanna [2003] are an important beginning). larly family of eighteenth-century Egypt, Deciding on which authors to include was chronicled Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and particularly challenging. A conscious and rea- was also friend and colleague to several figures sonably successful effort was made to have an who appear in this volume. even distribution of authors across the late In the course of planning and preparing this fourteenth through early nineteenth centuries. volume, additional figures who might have been Because authors of the fourteenth and fifteenth included suggested themselves, often as a result centuries are somewhat better studied, it was of reading the contributors’ essays. These in- decided to leave out a few more well-known clude, to name only a few: Mughulṭāy (d. 1362), figures, such as the two towering figures in a prolific Cairene author who wrote in many Arabic historiographical writing, Ibn Khaldūn different genres; Ibn ʿArabshāh (d. 1450), multi- (d. 1406) and al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442). An even lingual historian, belletrist and confidant of an geographical distribution of authors across Ottoman sultan; Aḥmad ibn Muṣṭafā Ṭāshköprü- Arabic-writing cultural areas was more diffi- zādah (d. 1561), Ottoman religious scholar who cult to achieve, and North Africa (especially) wrote several works including a biographical and sub-Saharan Africa deserve more space. In dictionary of Ottoman-period scholars; Darwīsh addition, a slight shading in the direction of ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭāluwī (or Ṭālawī, d. 1605), belletristic literature was attempted, but not a Syrian literary figure of the early Ottoman always easy to sustain, since so many authors period who compiled an important anthology; wrote in many different genres. That fact, and Ḥājjī Khalīfah (Kātib Čelebi, d. 1657), coupled with the importance of religious scho- Ottoman bureaucrat and writer whose biblio- lars to intellectual and literary life, has possibly graphical dictionary, the Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan skewed the subjects of these studies in the di- asāmī al-kutub wa’l-funūn (The Alleviator of rection of academic figures. In any event, the Conjectures about the Names of Books and

Introduction 10

Fields of Endeavor), remains a major source for generously offering a home to this briefly or- modern scholarship. phaned volume. Professor Guth was also very These twelve names, to which more could generous in responding to many queries about be added, already form the potential nucleus of the preparation of the manuscript. Thanks are a supplement to the present work; it is to be also due to Professor Shawkat M. Toorawa hoped that scholars will take up the challenge. (Cornell University), co-editor, with Professor Michael Cooperson (UCLA), of the DLB vol- Format ume that was the first in this series of collected essays in Arabic literary biography (and the only This volume was originally conceived as one of one published as part of the DLB), for advice on a series of four volumes on Arabic literature, and assistance with the editing of this volume. under the general editorship of Roger Allen, to Professor Toorawa also generously agreed to be published as part of the Dictionary of Literary help with proofreading. Professor Nasser Rab- Biography (DLB), a major, multi-volume refer- bat (MIT) provided invaluable, expert guidance ence work on literary history. It was therefore on appropriate cover images. Professor Robert initially prepared using the editorial guidelines Morrison (Bowdoin College) advised on a mat- of the DLB. As a rule, DLB entries begin with a ter of astronomy. Dr. Jay Treat (University of chronological list of the author’s works, first Pennsylvania) provided technical guidance on editions of works, and translations (where appli- intricacies of word processing. Herb Wolfson, cable). These front rubrics are followed by a Esq., assisted with tracking down and licensing biographical essay. Bibliographical references images. Nick Harris (University of Pennsylva- come at the end. The text of a DLB entry is re- nia) assisted with bibliographical matters and quired to be organized strictly chronologically, proofreading. Robert Riggs (University of Penn- to focus on an individual author’s works in the sylvania) provided valuable editorial assistance context of the author’s biographical data, and to at the initial stages of this project. keep textual analysis to a minimum. References Of course, the contributors to this volume de- are not used, except for very occasional paren- serve high praise. They have put up with editori- thetical citations. Cross-referencing is facilitated al intrusions and delays, remained generous with by putting the names of subjects of entries in their expertise and research and shown remark- boldface type when they first appear in another able patience with their editors. Their outstan- entry. Because the entries in this volume were ding contributions have made this a most rewar- originally prepared according to this format, it ding volume to edit. For them is reserved the has been retained in its general contours, al- distinction of having made truly pioneering though considerable variation has been allowed contributions to the study of a rich but unjustly in the front rubrics of entries, in which authors’ neglected period of Arabic literature. works are listed. It should be noted that many of the contributors to this volume, left to their own devices, might have opted for a less homogeniz- SELECTED FURTHER READINGS ing organizational framework, one dictated more M. G. Zubaid Ahmad, The Contribution of Indo- by the material itself and by individual contribu- Pakistan to Arabic Literature (Lahore: tors’ own interpretive choices. Muhammad Ashraf, 1946); Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Acknowledgments Development of its Genres and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, The editors would like to express their gratitude 1998); to Professor Roger Allen (University of Penn- ––– and D. S. Richards, eds., Arabic Literature sylvania) for overseeing the series of essays in in the Post-Classical Period, The Cambridge Arabic literary biography in which this volume History of Arabic Literature (Cambridge: appears, and to Professor Stephan Guth (Univer- Cambridge University Press, 2006); sity of Oslo) and Harrassowitz Publishers for M. M. Badawi, ed., Modern Arabic Literature,