Introduction to Classical Arabic Literature

1977 ◽  
Vol 97 (4) ◽  
pp. 609
Author(s):  
Sieglinde Kadhim ◽  
Ilse Lichtenstadter
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Classical Arabic

Towards the Reappraisal of Classical Arabic Literature and History: Some Aspects of Tāhā Husayn's Use of Modern western Criteria

1980 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Al-Nowaihi
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Fellow Citizen ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Classical Arabic

In modern Arabic scholarship, it would be difficult to find a hypothesis more implausible than that advanced by Tāhā Husayn in his fī‘l-’adab al-jāhilī. Yet it may be wondered whether any other book, written by a contemporary Arab, has had a comparable influence in changing the fundamental attitude of the Arab intelligentsia towards their classical literature and history. The unsoundness of the book's central assertion—that the bulk of pre-Islamic poetry was fabricated by Muslims, and portrays Islamic, rather than pre-Islamic, conditions and conceits—has been exposed by several critics, both native, in varying degrees of wrathful condemnation, and orientalist, with different approaches to conclusiveness. Of the latter, one at least, the late A. J. Arberry, had some pretty strong words to say, not of the Arab propagator of the fallacy, but of D. S. Margoliouth, who, in the same year 1926, had, as it happened, published identical views, supported by largely similar arguments. Said Arberry, introducing his stern refutation, “The sophistry — I hesitate to say dishonesty — of Professor Margoliouth's arguments is only too apparent, quite unworthy of a man who was undoubtedly one of the greatest erudites of his generation.” He went on to castigate Margoliouth's disregard of certain Qur'anic meanings and intentions of which “he must have been very well aware,” his “shocking misapplication of scholarship,” his “immodesty”, and the rest. Quite restrained criticism when compared to the diatribe which the Arab debaters poured on the heads of their fellow citizen and his presumed infidel mentor, but rather unusual in the serene Arcady of orientalism.

History in Adab Context: “The Book on Caliphal Histories” by Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (246/860-328/940)

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Toral-Niehoff
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Classical Arabic

In classical Arabic literature,adaband history are closely related. Collections such as al-Masʿūdī’sMurūj al-dhahab, Ibn Qutayba’sKitāb al-Maʿārifor theMuʿjam al-buldānby Yāqūt are proper hybrids of history andadab: History often includesadabapproaches, andadabregularly incorporates historicalakhbār. The multivolume encyclopediaal-ʿIqd al-farīd, “the Unique Necklace,” composed by the Andalusī Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (246/860-328/940) fits very well into theadabideal of cultural broadness. In addition to numerous historical anecdotes, theʿIqd al-farīdincorporates a lengthy and very peculiar monographic section on caliphal history, an early example of history inadab. These passages have received little attention in the study of early Arabic historiography so far; however, they definitely deserve a closer investigation.

scholarly journals Estrangement and Selfhood in the Classical Concept of Waṭan

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 16-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaseen Noorani
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Classical Concept ◽  
Subjective Meaning ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
Primary Love

The modern Arabic term for national homeland, waṭan, derives its sense from the related yet semantically different usage of this term in classical Arabic, particularly in classical Arabic poetry. In modern usage, waṭan refers to a politically defined, visually memorialized territory whose expanse is cognized abstractly rather than through personal experience. The modern waṭan is the geopolitical locus of national identity. The classical notion of waṭan, however, is rarely given much geographical content, although it usually designates a relatively localized area on the scale of a neighborhood, town, or village. More important than geographical content is the subjective meaning of the waṭan, in the sense of its essential place in the psyche of an individual. The waṭan (also mawṭin, awṭān), both in poetry and other types of classical writing, is strongly associated with the childhood/youth and primary love attachments of the speaker. This sense of waṭan is thus temporally defined as much as spatially, and as such can be seen as an archetypal instance of the Bakhtinian chronotope, one intrinsically associated with nostalgia and estrangement. The waṭan, as the site of the classical self’s former plenitude, is by definition lost or transfigured and unrecoverable, becoming an attachment that must be relinquished for the sake of virtue and glory. This paper argues that the bivalency of the classical waṭan chronotope, recoverable through analysis of poetic and literary texts, allows us to understand the space and time of the self in classical Arabic literature and how this self differs from that presupposed by modern ideals of patriotism.

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