Baṣrayaātha: Self-portrait as a City

Basrayatha, Muhammad Khudayyir’s innovative book, is both a personal memoir and a cityscape of Basra, Iraq. In it the author created a model city called Basrayatha, which is both based on but also serves as a mirror and critique of the actual city of Basra. This model then took on a life of its own and appeared in other works by Khudayyir. The book can be enjoyed at face value but is best understood with reference to his many critical writings. The work’s blend of influences from the visual arts, local history, and stories about the storyteller is rather special if not unique in Arabic literature.

Translating Cairo’s Hidden Lines: The City as Visual Text in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro

An examination of the visual language used in Magdy El Shafee’s 2008 graphic novel, which narrates an Egyptian computer programmer’s frustration with a rigged political and economic system in late-Mubarak-era Egypt, and his discovery of official corruption. In Metro, Cairo serves both as an urban canvas for text that visually assaults the reader and as a grid that organizes and reinforces the novel’s thematic elements. This essay analyses how Metro employs a language of verticality to emphasize the disparity between the powerful and powerless. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the map as offering an “infrared,” abstracted knowledge of a city, this essay also examines the running motif of Cairo’s Metro stations as a symbol of the city’s hidden lines of power, a horizontal network of connections and corruption.

Of Cities and Canons in an Age of Comparative Consumption

In Warraq al-Hub (2002; Eng. Writing Love: A Syrian Novel, 2012), Khalil Sweileh evokes the ever-present authorial angst of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” redeployed within the context of a troubled postcolonial, local and global politics of representation, translation, and comparative consumption. In this avant-garde novel, Sweileh articulates a complicated set of anxieties and fears that paralyze the creativity of the author, threatens to consign his literature to the ghettoes of translated world literature, and ultimately halts the beginning of his narrative. In the old city of Damascus, the urban and the literary, authorial mapping and spatial mapping intersect to draw a picture of a city and a literary terrain paralyzed by fear. By aligning the anguish of unrequited love with the universal angst of writing, Sweileh is able to tap into local and global aspirations and anxieties. Writing Love is a novel that positions itself in between the Arab and Western Worlds as it attempts desperately to initiate a “planetary” dialogue characterized by love. However, this endeavor is condemned to failure because it is haunted by the ghosts of global and local literary predecessors, by the authoritarian State’s repressive regime, and by the translation market’s rules of comparative consumption.

“Woe is me for Qayrawan!” Ibn Sharaf’s Lāmiyya, the Plight of Refugees and the Cityscape

Ibn Sharaf al-Qayrawānī (d.1067) is one of the literary icons associated with Qayrawan, the famed medieval Maghribi capital city which he fled in the wake the Hilālī invasion and sacking in 1057 CE. This chapter pivots around Ibn Sharaf‘s lāmīyya, the finest and most moving of a plethora of city-elegies he penned in exile to lament the destruction of his beloved home city. It offers a close reading of the lāmīyya’s elegiac/nostalgic verses and explore some of its most salient linguistic and rhetorical features. It also discusses the elegiac and nostalgic representation (or lack thereof) of Qayrawan once majestic ‘cityscape’ and its iconic buildings.

Between Utopia and Dystopia in Marrakech

This chapter considers the literary culture of Morocco from the first half of the 20th-century, where the example of Ibn al-Muwaqqit reveals some of the aesthetic consequences of the country’s encounter with modernity. It interprets the contrast between Al-Muwaqqit’s early rhetorical staging of his hometown of Marrakech in his Sufi biographical dictionary Al-Saʻāda al-abadīyya fī al-taʻrīf bi-mashāhīr al-ḥaḍrah al-Marrākushiyya (Eternal Happiness in the Identification of Marrakech’s Notables) published as a lithograph in Fez in 1918, and the satiric al-Riḥla al-Marrākushiyya (Travels in Marrakech), a text that speaks against Morocco’s indigenous genres, published in 1930 by a press in Cairo. It ultimately suggests that the difference between these two texts is linked to the shift in orientation from Fez to Cairo, pointing to the need to consider patterns of circulation within the Arabic speaking world rather than only those between East and West.

In Memory of al-Andalus: Using the Elegy to Reimagine the Literary and Literal Geography of Cordoba

This chapter examines the manifestation and transformation of the genre rithāʾ al-mudun, the city elegy, in the works of Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) and Ibn Zaydūn (d. 1071), both eleventh-century Andalusian writers, who experienced the disintegration of their homeland, the city of Cordoba, The rithāʾ al-mudun genre is traditional in form and style, utilizing a series of stock tropes and patterns for a twofold purpose: as a medium for one’s mourning while simultaneously immortalizing the lost city as remembered by the poets.

Local Historians and their Cities: the Urban Topography of al-Azdī’s Mosul and al-Sahmī’s Jurjan

From the third/ninth century onwards, the writing of local histories in Arabic flourished across the Islamic world. A great number of these works dealt with the history of individual cities and this chapter examines how they depicted those cities. Did they tend to portray cities as topographical landscapes or as social communities? If the former, what aspects of urban topography were they most interested in? If the latter, were the communities presented as cohesive or diverse? This chapter addresses these questions by comparing two works: Abū Zakariyya’ al-Azdī’s (d. 334/946) history of Mosul and Ḥamza al-Sahmī’s (d. 427/1035-36) history of Jurjan. It seeks to demonstrate that local historians thought very carefully about how to invest cities and their topographies with socially relevant meanings.

The Mamluk City as Overlapping Personal Networks

This chapter analyses the ways in which the biographical dictionaryAʿyān al-ʿAṣr wa-Aʿwān al-Naṣr by Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363) reflects the Mamluk city. Rather than being arranged by location or occupation, the dictionary is organized by name and is specific to the author’s lifetime. An individual’s movements and social interactions as traced in the dictionary reveal the city during the Mamluk period to be almost portable. Instead of defining the city as a place, the dictionary shows the city to be an extension of people and their networks. It shows that success in the city is linked to successful networking and successful networking in turn creates links among cities and encourages the movement of people.

Citystruck

The urban setting of much premodern Arabic literature is the predatory city, where every interaction is eroticized and where the vulnerability of non-elite women and young men is a common poetic topos. This article suggests that previous attempts to read this body of literature have sympathized too closely with the subjective perspective of these texts, abstracting the encounters that are depicted and accepting the rhetorical veneer of eroticism, and suggests that another interpretation, that of the predatory city, would produce a more complex and radical analysis.

The Untranslatability of the Qurʾānic City

Many 20th-century translators of the Qurʾān, including Marmaduke Pickthall (1930), Yusuf Ali (1934), and Muhammad Asad (1980) use words like “city” and “village” in translating terms like “balad” (68:1), “qarya” and “madīna” (27: 34,48).The chapter addresses to what extent the English equivalents are indeed equivalent to or commensurate with the originary and classical understandings of such term. The main aim of this chapter, however, is not to pinpoint morphological anachronisms or locate the erroneous categorizations of equivalence theory in translation, but rather to investigate the complex imbrications and contextual nuances of the so-called “city” in the Qurʾān.