Arabic Literary Thresholds Arabic Literary Thresholds Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship Edited by Muhsin al-Musawi LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009 Originally published as Volume 38 no. 3 (2007) and Volume 39 no. 1 (2008) of Brill’s Journal of Arabic Literature This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arabic literary thresholds : sites of rhetorical turn in contemporary scholarship / [edited] by Muhsin al-Musawi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17689-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Arabic literature—History and criticism. I. Musawi, Muhsin Jasim. II. Stetkevych, Jaroslav. III. Title. PJ7510.A75 2009 892.7’09—dc22 2009021768 ISBN 978 90 04 17689 8 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. 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Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands In Homage to Jaroslav Stetkevych: the man who made “the mute immortals speak.” CONTENTS Arabic Literary Thresholds: Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship Muhsin al-Musawi ......................................................................... ix Rewriting Literary History: The Case of the Arabic Novel .......... 1 Roger Allen Abbasid Popular Narrative: The Formation of Readership and Cultural Production ...................................................................... 17 Muhsin al-Musawi Al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and the Poetics of ʿAlid Legitimacy Elegy for al-Ḥ usayn Ibn ʿAlī on ʿĀshūrāʾ, 391 A.H. ................................... 53 Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych Early Islam—Monotheism or Henotheism? A View from the Court ......................................................................................... 85 Samer M. Ali Literary Hybridization in the Zajal: Ibn Quzmān’s Zajal 88 (The Visit of Sir Gold) ................................................................... 111 James T. Monroe “On the Battleground:”Al-Nābulusī’s Encounters with a Poem by Ibn al-Fāriḍ ............................................................................... 143 Th. Emil Homerin Return to the Flash Rock Plain of Thahmad: Two Nasībs by Ibn al-ʿArabī ......................................................................................... 207 Michael Sells Poetry and Architecture: A Double Imitation in the Sīniyyah of Aḥmad Shawqī .............................................................................. 219 Akiko M. Sumi viii contents Metapoetry between East and West: ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and the Western Composers of Metapoetry—A Study in Analogies ....................................................................................... 273 Aida O. Azouqa “In a Language That Was Not His Own”: On Aḥ̣lām Mustaghānamī’s Dhākirat al-Jasad and its French Translation Mémoires de la Chair ............................................... 311 Elizabeth M. Holt Curriculum Vitae: Jaroslav Stetkevych .......................................... 331 Index .................................................................................................... 337 ARABIC LITERARY THRESHOLDS: SITES OF RHETORICAL TURN IN CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARSHIP Muhsin al-Musawi Preface This Festschrift of essays dedicated to Jaroslav Stetkevych is not merely a compilation of articles in honor of a formidable scholar and sharp critic in our field of Arabic literary studies. This volume has a purpose- ful bent of its own expressed through a complementarity that brings individual texts together to form a coherent body of thought which we may refer to as “rhetorical turn”1 in Arabic studies. These articles com- plement each other in method and vision in their search to go beyond stock applications and premises. Confronting some established pro- cesses and regimes of truth, they try to assert a sense of validity and presence to different pursuits. The range of topics covered is extensive: e.g., the politics of translation; important figures often overlooked by official discourse such as al-Sharīf al-Raḍī and his poetics of ʿAlid legiti- macy and Ibn Quzmān and his place in the lively Andalusian literary tradition; Sufi encounters that have not yet come to the foreground; the function of popular literature and urban narrative in terms of means of production; the role of assemblies in the legitimization of literary genres; poetry and architecture in Andalusian life; and the exchange among cultures and languages from native perspectives. Taken together these essays question the bases for institutionalized discourse and offer alternative interpretations of the relation between premises and beliefs in discussions on history, nature, reason, tradition, and the role of social agency in endowing literature with authority. These articles tend not to legitimize a tendency or a figure but rather to render a demystified literary terrain where subcultures and excluded or marginalized practices come to the foreground. In this volume litera- ture stands at a number of thresholds where there is always suspense, 1 For more on the concept see Herbert W. Simon, ed. The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. Simon’s introduction. x muhsin al-musawi hesitation and possible revival. Building on literary traditions, these essays endeavor to salvage meaning from either the wreckage or trea- sury of the past. The present is looked upon as a stage where texts and languages compete with each other, sustain a dialogue, or diverge in directions that resist compartmentalization and subservience to well- established schools of thought. Indeed, these articles take their lead from Jaroslav Stetkevych’s liter- ary endeavors in more than one sense. While some contributors were once his students, his colleagues as supporters and advocates have not escaped his polemical but rigorous address. Stetkevych critiques a “regime of truth” which Orientalism has long established as the sole custodian of Arabic literature, a custodian whose influence penetrated the thought and practice of many nahḍah intellectuals and scholars including Ṭāhā Ḥ usayn. Modern Arabic scholarship made significant use of this regime of thought, often betraying enormous cultural depen- dency and adhering to many of its premises and methods without suffi- cient questioning and analysis. The nahḍah intellectual and those who inherited this tradition adopted the Orientalist discourse, which, in line with the Enlightenment and its own legitimization processes, paid no or negligible attention to popular literature, Sufi writings and non-official attitudes and figures. Without the types of revisions for which Stet- kevych argued, folk traditions and practices that once made up the cultural milieu of urban centers would have remained backstage liter- ary pursuits. While I address here only a tendency for which there are certainly many exceptions, it is enough to remember too that Jaroslav Stetkevych, whose self-critique of a profession set the tone for this rhe- torical shift, was a student of the prominent Orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb. And Gibb himself proved open to modern literature, deeply inter- ested as he was in interrogating wholesale premises and stipulations. It is almost impossible to speak of Orientalism nowadays without referencing Edward Said’s groundbreaking book, Orientalism (1978). This seminal work forged a new path in cultural studies and initiated a serious paradigm shift within the social sciences. Even the book’s opponents must confront its irritable ghost that reads between the lines and questions platitudes and stereotypes. However, Edward Said was focused then on representations of a so-called Orient, all provided, promoted, and disseminated through scholarship, travelogue, essays, reminiscences, memoirs, poems and other forms of narrative, including descriptive works and paintings, and all conveying a “Western” projec- tion of an East or monolithic Orient stretching from Morocco to Tur- arabic literary thresholds xi key. The “eye of the beholder” becomes entrapped in its own visions, obsessions, desires, and whims while scholarship itself either declines to question these or keeps itself preoccupied with “difference” as an enlightenment demarcation criterion. Said is without doubt critical of Orientalist scholarship and its regimes of truth, pointing out its sub- stantial dissemination of racist paradigms of difference. Preoccupied in his book with Western phenomena of serious consequence, Said was not concerned with a critique of “Orientalist” scholarship as voiced by its insiders. Towards the end of his life, Edward