The Arabic language has a rich history of literary criticism and theory, starting from the 8th century ce up to the 21st century. This literary criticism and theory engages with a poetic tradition that dates back to pre-Islamic times. The inquiry into literary quality was motivated by an interest in evaluating poetry, a general concern with eloquent speech, whether in verse or prose, and by the desire to articulate the beauty of the Quran. The transmission of Aristotle’s Poetics into Arabic also spurred interest in the poetic, particularly in Arabic philosophy. The study of eloquence crystallized into a standardized science by the 13th century ce, with branches focusing on (1) the role of syntax in literary beauty (the science of meanings); (2) simile, metaphor, and metonymy (the science of elucidation); and (3) rhetorical figures (the science of rhetorical figures). The aesthetic developed in the early criticism of the 9th and 10th centuries was concerned with articulating the merits of an idealized classical style of pre-Islamic poetry, from which the “modern” poets of the early Abbasid period diverged. This classically oriented aesthetic was dominated by a concern with the truthfulness and naturalness of poetry, typical of the style of the “ancients,” on the one hand, and the limits of unrealistic imagery and affected artificiality, which characterized the more ornate modern Abbasid style, on the other. This binary outlook shifted after the 10th century, however, to an aesthetic of wonder. A theory of aesthetic experience began to develop, therefore, which was based on the ability of poetic language to evoke wonder in the recipient. As a result, wonder-enhancing characteristics such as strangeness, the unexpected, and the rare became essential components of aesthetic judgment. Moreover, the ability of language to make meaning manifest in ways that allow for an experience of discovery and hence wonder, became the foundation of aesthetic inquiry in post-10th century Arabic literary theory.
Notable examples of macaronics, the insertion of foreign vocabulary into poetry, are attributed to the well-known eighth-century poet, Abū Nuwās, who experimented with mixing Persian in his Arabic poetry but whose motivation remains unclear. This article looks at a selection of his and other macaronic verses ranging from the seventh to tenth centuries and argues that Persian was inserted deliberately as a marker of a Persian identity, standing for the “foreign Other.” Far from being a sign of a pro-Persian shuʿūbī sentiment, the employment of Persian only reinforces the established hierarchy of the two identities in that period. By the tenth century, however, this hierarchy is cleverly flipped on its head in a macaronic poem by the popular Iraqi poet, Ibn al-Ḥajjāj. While many of the examples are comic and even obscene in character, this article shows that the employment of Persian in Arabic poetry was a deliberate practice with serious and meaningful implications.
Yugoslavia) revived linkages between religious and political identity that had been forged in the early post-Ottoman period. Irredentism became an important element in this quest leading to the bloodbaths of the 1990s. This decade was an important juncture for the Arab states as well. The First Gulf War, the new unipolarity in international relations, and concomitant globalization, coupled with impasses in the Palestine Question, further undermined the solidarity of Arab states, as the gap between popular sentiment and the regimes widened in individual countries. In Turkey, the global and regional dislocations coincided with the political and social ruptures that followed the military rule of the 1980s, including the Kurdish insurgency. The legitimacy deficit in the reconstituted political arena attenuated state authority everywhere and created political, moral and ideological vacuums into which religion moved as "the glue to hold society together" (p. 255). State, Faith, and Nation is an engaging and erudite book that will be as accessible to a general readership as it will be stimulating to students of the Middle East and the Balkans. The prose is readable, witty and provocative. Anscombe has digested several bodies of historiography and introduces some new insights from research in British and Ottoman archives. Many of us preach about bridging historiographies and moving beyond established nation-centric narratives. Anscombe accomplishes this masterfully.
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