Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350-1850
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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