Content uploaded by Chiara Fontana
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Chiara Fontana on May 17, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
Post-Eurocentric Poetics: New approaches from Arabic,
Turkish and Persian Literature
May 21, 2018
AUB, College Hall - Auditorium B
The Center for Arts and Humanities
2
Post-Eurocentric poetics: new approaches
from Arabic, Turkish and Persian Literature
a conference organized by
Abdul Rahim Abu-Husayn
Hany Rashwan
Sponsored by
The Center for Arts and Humaniteis
Special thanks to
Professor Bilal Orfali
Louise Gallorini
Dean Nadia Cheikh
Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages
Rita Bassil and Rania Abou Salha
The drawing on the front cover represents Socrates and his Students, illustration from 'Kitab Mukhtar al-
Hikam wa-Mahasin al-Kilam' by Al-Mubashir, Turkish School, (13th c) – accessed through
https://aeon.co/ideas/arabic-translators-did-far-more-than-just-preserve-greek-philosophy
3
Post-Eurocentric poetics: New Approaches from Arabic,
Turkish and Persian Literature
Like comparative literature, comparative poetics as we know it today is
heavily informed by the norms of European literary theory. Yet the
postcolonial mandate has taught us to demand more than the traditional
Eurocentric mode. We rightly expect non-European literatures to be
included in the constitution of world literature, even when our knowledge
of the relevant literary theories informing these literatures is often
marginal at best. Amid a need for new understandings of the nature and
meaning of literary form, post-Eurocentric literary theory opens new
horizons for cross-cultural poetics. Incorporating premodern and pre-
European methods of practical criticism and literary interpretation, these
new areas of scholarship address the inadequacies of Eurocentric poetics
that become evident when these traditions are applied to non-European
literatures.
The conference engages with a range of approaches in Arabic, Turkish
and Persian cultures and were overlooked or misunderstood under a long-
established Eurocentric hegemony. It encourages scholars to reconstruct
the concepts of 'artistic' or 'poetic' language, by engaging with literary
concepts that have been marginalized due to their distance from the
European literary tradition. The workshop investigates how the three
cultures answered the influential question of Roman Jakobson: "poetics
deals primarily with the question, what makes a verbal message a work of
art?"
For example, Arabic balāgha devoted more attention to the poetic
definition, as a special use of the literary devices, inside many different
realms of reading texts. The creative interaction between the imagination,
poetic form, and eloquent content is the main essence of defining balāgha,
not the genre. The literariness of any text can be examined via the
presence of persuasive literary devices and the degree that the author used
4
them to serve different functions in delivering his intended message. In
Arabic balāgha, linguistics and poetics have to go together, as they
together comprise the literariness of a literary text.
The contributions will present and extend the indigenous poetics of
Islamic traditions, showing how literary figures and devices from these
traditions can advance our understanding of world literature in the
broadest sense of the term. The participants are also encouraged to avoid
the illogical divorce between the study of literary theory and its
application within literary works. The offered papers are encouraged to
incorporate and not to sacrifice the native literary terms that are used in
the studied languages, showing how these terms have been created or
developed and may explore how the conceptual practice of such literary
terms are similar or different to the Western counterparts.
5
Monday, May 21, 2018
AUB, College Hall, Auditorium B
7 :00 – 8 :00 : Coffee Break
8 :00 – 8 :30: Welcome and Introduction
Bilal Orfali, Chairperson of the Deaprtment of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages
Hany Rashwan, Andrew Mellown Postdoctoral Fellow, CAH, AUB
8 :30 – 10 :00: Panel 1, Arabic Balāgha: literary poetics
Alexander Key (Stanford University), Describing and Using Classical Arabic
Poetics
Emad Abdul-Latif (Qatar University), Towards a new methodology to verifying
Arabic Balāgha Terminology: Iltifāt as a case study
Hany Raswhan (American University of Beirut), Rethinking al-Jurjānī's literary
conditions of tajnis in relation to his NaZm theory
10 :00 – 12 :30: Panel 2, Medival Persian Poetics
Rebecca Gould (Birmingham University), A Persian Contribution to Global
Literary Theory: Shams-i Qays on the Controvertibility of Creation and
Interpretation
Leila Sayed Ghasem (University of Tehran), The Poetics of Taqdim and Ta'khir
(Preposing and Postposing) in medieval Persian prose: Bayhaqi's History as a case
study
Christine Kämpfer (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Not just another
khamsah:Dynamics of transmission in medieval Persian literature
Ferenc Csirkes (Sabanci University), Translating One’s Own Style ? The “Fresh
Style” in Safavid Persian and Turkic Poetry
12 :30 – 13 :30 : Lunch Break
6
13 :30 – 16 :00: Panel 3, Ottoman Literary Poetics
Veli N. Yashin (University of Southern California), Just One Native? Poetics of
Late-Ottoman Print Culture and the Thinking of Sovereignty
Marc Toutant (CNRS-Paris), Subsuming Turkic Poetics into the Literary Canon:
Two Central Asian Treatises about ‘Aruz
Murat Umut Inan (University of Ankara), Ottoman Poetics: Theories and Practices
of Poetry in the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World
Sooyong Kim (Koç University), Towards a Poetics of Continuity and
Translatability: the Case of Ankaravi’ Miftahu’l-Balagha
Aida Gasimova (Baku State University), Many Faces of The Qur’ān in Depiction of
the Face (Ḥurūfī Poetics of Nesīmī)
16 :00 – 16 :30 : Coffee Break
16 :30 – 19 :00: Panel 4, From Andalusī and Scilian poetics to modern
Arabic literatures
Ferial Bouhafa (University of Cambridge), The Qur’anic rhetorical challenge
within the scope of Peripatetic Rhetoric in Ibn Rushd’s thought
Enass Khansa (American University of Beirut), The Poetics of Affinity (ittisāq) and
the Question of Legitimacy in Andalusī Adab
Nicola Carpentieri (University of Connecticut), Qaṣīd Writing in Medieval Sicily:
Its Social Significance
Chiara Fontana (University of Rome), Exploring a pragmatic approach to the
rhetorical and metrical analysis of contemporary Arabic poetry: Naǧīb
Surūr’s Kalimāt fī al-ḥubb
Claire Savina (Université of Paris-Sorbonne / University of Oxford), Télémachus in
Egypt
7
Round table discussion
Program with abstracts
Panel 1 : Arabic Balāgha: literary poetics
Alexander Key (Stanford University)
Describing and Using Classical Arabic Poetics
Jahan Ramazani has said that some poetry can be “easier to describe later on.”
What does this mean for Classical Arabic Poetics? What can the set of literary
critical practices that we have today in Arabic and European languages (which
fill in as genealogies behind our use of the label "poetics") offer to Classical
Arabic? Conversely (perhaps more importantly?) what can Classical Arabic
offer contemporary literary criticism? This paper will seek to do two things:
experiment with the use of the English term "formalism" to describe Classical
Arabic Poetics; and experiment with the use of Classical Arabic literary critical
tools to describe a selection of contemporary poetry in Arabic and Persian.
Emad Abdul-Latif (Qatar University)
Towards a new methodology to verifying Arabic Balāgha Terminology: Iltifāt
as a case study
The Arabic rhetorical terminology suffers various problems; such as having
multiple terms that refer to one concept and multiple concepts that have one
term. These problems cause vagueness and misunderstandings in many modern
and contemporary studies. This paper aims to decrease the possibility of both
vagueness and misunderstanding through suggesting a comprehensive
methodology to verify Arabic balāgha terminology. This methodology consists
of three procedures: (1) identifying and analyzing the various concepts that one
term refers to; (2) identifying and analyzing the different terms that refer to one
concept; and (3) exploring the various relations between concepts and terms. I
will apply these procedures to the term Iltifāt and the concept of ‘shifting among
first, second and third pronouns.’ The paper shows that the Arab classical
rhetoricians used the term Iltifāt to refer to ten different figures, styles and
stylistic features. Similarly, they used seven different terms for one concept. I
will investigate the reasons behind this terminology disorder and argues for the
necessity of a contextual dictionary of Arabic balagha.
8
Hany Raswhan (American University of Beirut)
Rethinking al-Jurjānī's literary conditions of tajnis in relation to his NaZm
theory
Tajnis or jinās is one of the significant phonetic and semantic beautifiers in
Arabic balāgha tradition and has been widely used in poetry and literary prose
from the earliest beginnings of the Arabic language to the current day. Ibn Al-
Muʿtazz (d. 908 AD) defines Jinās simply as two similar words in which their
letters resemble each other. The majority of balāgha studies, both medieval and
modern, devote a separate section to this balāghical feature, as one of the most
critical parts of ʿilm al-Badīʿ (semantic and vocal ornamentation). The paper
sheds new light on the conditions of tajinās
that the Persian Arabist al-Jurjānī
(d. 1078-9 AD) offered for literary critics and writers to master the employment
of this literary device.
Panel 2 : Medival Persian Poetics
Rebecca Gould (Birmingham University)
A Persian Contribution to Global Literary Theory: Shams-i Qays on the
Controvertibility of Creation and Interpretation
Among the triumvirate of major Persian contributions to literary theory, the
Compendium on the Rules of Persian Poetry (al-Muʿjam fi ma’ayir ashʿar al-
ʿajam, c. 1232-3) by Shams-i Qays al-Razi offers the most systematic and
comprehensive elaboration of Persian poetics. This presentation focuses on
Shams-i Qays’s account of literary appropriation (sariqa) with attention to its
implications for the relation between poetic creation and the interpretation of
poetry. As I trace Shams-i Qays’s fourfold presentation of literary appropriation
and bring it into comparison with the reader-response approach developed by
the Konstanz school, I argue that Persian literary theory advances a powerful
argument for the controvertibility of creation and interpretation, and of the poet
and the critic, that Comparative Literature as a discipline would do well to
engage with.
9
Leila Sayed Ghasem (University of Tehran)
The Poetics of Taqdim and Ta'khir (Preposing and Postposing) in medieval
Persian prose: Bayhaqi's History as a case study
The history of Abolfazl Bayhaqi (995-1077) narrates 60 years of Ghaznavid rule
(1019-1077). Although much of the book lost, it is still the most important
historical source of the Ghaznavids, and one of the major Persian prose
masterpieces. The literariness of Bayhaqi's history has always been a matter of
contestation. The Persian literary tradition and primary sources have been
shaped around poetry. Persian medieval prose, including Bayhaqi's history, has
traditionally not been interpreted from a rhetorical point of view. Persianists
must investigate how Bayhaqi's verbal message affects readers as a work of art
and consider how the irrefutable aesthetic of this work is relatively unaffected
by figures of speech and emotive language. The present paper sheds a new light
on the aesthetic of medieval Persian prose, Behyaqi's history in particular. To
this end, it engages with Jurjani's concept of nazm which reveals the poetic of
syntactic structures, including taqdim and ta'khir (proposing and postponing).
The paper first examines the status of syntax in Persian grammar and balāgha.
Then 3,000 clauses from Bayhaqi's History annotated with a part-of-speech
tagging scheme and findings are described under two categories of preposing
and postposing of the main and secondary sentence constituents. With reference
to the context of situation (iqezāy-i hāl) in cited instances, we will demonstrate
how syntactic variation affects the delivery of Bayhaqi's intended message.
Christine Kämpfer (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Not just another khamsah:Dynamics of transmission in medieval Persian
literature
Classical Persian literature encompasses 500 years but until now Western
research has focused mainly on exceptional poets like Ferdowsī and Nezāmī,
whereas poets of the second row are being overlooked. Scholars have tried to
reconcile and organize Persian literary history by means of Western concepts,
for example periodization and genre distinctions. But one cannot evaluate
Middle Eastern literatures by European standards and as a consequence these
approaches have led into stagnation and classical Persian literature is seen as
merely one-dimensional and ahistorical. To overcome this deadlock we need a
new approach for studying classical Persian literature based on what its output
offers to us. We have to look at Persian medieval literature as one continuous
and self-contained tradition that has its own dynamics for self-preservation. Like
10
other Middle Eastern literatures the Persian literature is heavily influenced by
the concept of sariqa which Western scholars have interpreted as epigonism,
especially concerning the khamsahs written after Nezāmī. But what if we
change this paradigm-of-decline and see the khamsah-navīsī more as a dynamic
for the transmission of literary tradition?
In this case, the khamsah of Khvāju Kermānī which was written in the 14th
century is of particular importance, especially his romantic epic “Humāy-u
Humāyūn”. On the basis of “Humāy-u Humāyūn” this paper wants to illustrate
how Khvāju adapted the concept of Nezāmī’s model and how his khamsah
transmits the literary tradition.
Ferenc Csirkes (Sabanci University)
Translating One’s Own Style? The “Fresh Style” in Safavid Persian and
Turkic Poetry
Discussing the relation between Turkic and Persian as poetic languages in the
Persianate context, the paper concentrates on how the tazah-guyi (‘Fresh
Style’), misnomered in scholarship as the “Indian Style,” featured in the works
of a number of poets in Safavid Iran who wrote in both Persian and Turkic. I
analyze whether certain poems written in Turkic by such outstanding poets of
the seventeenth century as Saʾib-i Tabrizi (1592-1676), Vahid-i Qazvini (d.
1699), Vaʿiz-i Qazvini (d. 1678), or Murtazaquli Khan Shamlu, go back to or
can be derived from Persian models or whether they are paraphrases (naziras) of
Turkic poems by Mir ʿAli Shir Navaʾi (1441-1501) and Fuzuli (d. 1556), the
two most paradigmatic poets for the Safavid Turkic literary tradition. In other
words, did the aforesaid Safavid poets recycle or recast some of their Persian
poetry or did they look to Turkic models? The question is particularly
interesting as each of these Safavid poets wrote most of their works in Persian,
the language of choice in Safavid Iran, and only on occasion in Turkic. Aside
from Persian, the Turkic literary tradition also had a continuous presence in Iran,
though the practice of tazah-guyi in Safavid Turkic poetry seems much more
sporadic than either in Persian or in Ottoman Turkish, most probably because
the heavily intellectualizing, artistic tazah-guyi was written for a more urban,
“middle class” audience, which was Persophone in Iran, whereas Turkic poets
tended to follow the poetics of the previous Timurid-Turkmen period. On one
hand, I attempt to transcend modernist-Orientalist narratives about “originality”
and influence, which assign an inferior position to the receiving culture in a
cultural exchange – in this case Turkic following Persian poetics. On the other
hand, I also take issues with nationalist paradigms that tend to disregard the
11
relationship between the prestigious Persian literary tradition and Turkic coming
in its wake. On a more general level, therefore, I will chart venues as to how to
conceptualize the history of a Turkic literary tradition in Iran, and more broadly,
the relationship between vernaculars and “Classical” literary idioms in a
Persianate context.
Panel 3 : Ottoman literary Poetics
Veli N. Yashin (University of Southern California)
Just One Native? Poetics of Late-Ottoman Print Culture and the Thinking of
Sovereignty
Approaching the literatures of the Arabic renaissance (al-Nahda) and the
Ottoman reform (Tanzimat) from within the broader context of the material and
discursive transformations of the Ottoman nineteenth-century, I argue in this
paper that the advent of late-Ottoman print culture and its contentious public
sphere uniquely impelled the elaboration of sovereignty as a political and poetic
problem. Articulations (and renunciations) of poetic subjectivity and literary
sovereignty, in the works of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Ibrahim and Muhammad
al-Muwaylihi, Namık Kemal, and Beşir Fuad, figure as textual events that not
simply inform, but give form to critical reformulation of political
sovereignty. The emergent discursive sphere at the ends of empire in more than
one language, where “modern literature" emerges as a practice of political
philology, may thus give us a glimpse of a thinking of (literary) sovereignty
(before the nationalization of literature as a philological world-system) —a
sovereignty that is not one, since it does not depend on a single “native.”
Marc Toutant (CNRS-Paris)
Subsuming Turkic Poetics into the Literary Canon: Two Central Asian
Treatises about ‘Aruz
In the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, tuyugh is defined as a
prototypically Turkic poetic form. Admittedly, for modern philologists
approaching the genre the tuyugh is above all a Turkic creation. Its
characteristics are to be sought in popular Turkic verse that is as little influenced
as possible by the foreign and literary canons of Arabo-Persian prosody. The
12
Medievals have however approached the genre from a distinct perspective. The
first formal definition of the tuyugh was advanced by the Timurid poet Mīr ‘Alī
Shīr Nawā’ī at the end of the fifteenth century. In his Mīzān al-auzān, a treatise
of prosody composed in Central Asian Turkish, the tuyugh is described only in
terms of Arabo-Persian prosody. Nawā’ī subsumed it into the literary canon
under the rubric of the ramal meter, replacing its original syllabic specification
by a metrical specification within the Arabo-Persian ‘aruz system. Apparently,
due to his commitment to the emergence of Turkic as a valid literary medium,
the Timurid poet did not maintain two separate systems. Rather, the tuyugh was
formulated in terms of the more prestigious literary medium, Persian. In his
memoirs, Babur (1483-1530), the founder of the Mughal Empire, criticized
Nawa’ī’s work on metrics, writing that it was full of mistakes. He himself
composed a treatise that includes more details than his predecessor’s Mīzān al-
auzān, and which is all the more important in that it contains a description of
Turkic poetic forms absent from the latter’s work. However, does this treatise
call Nawā’ī’s way of proceeding into question as far as the Turkic genres are
concerned? What does a comparison between these two works tell us about the
way Central Asian authors of the 15th and 16th centuries used treatises of
prosody to integrate Turkic literary genres within the more general framework
of Arabo-Persian poetics?
Murat Umut Inan (University of Ankara)
Ottoman Poetics: Theories and Practices of Poetry in the Sixteenth-Century
Ottoman World
In my paper, I will take up the question of how poetry was conceptualized and
practiced in the Ottoman world by focusing on the work of poets and literary
critics of the sixteenth century, a century that not only marked the flourishing of
a literary culture where writing and reading poetry enjoyed popularity but also
witnessed an increase in writings on poets and poetry. The paper consists of two
parts: in the first part, I will explore understandings of and approaches to the art
of poetry and poetry writing with reference to the works of major figures of the
century including Cafer Çelebi (d. 1515), Lamii Çelebi (d. 1532), Süruri (d.
1562), Aşık Çelebi (d. 1572), Latifi (d. 1582), and Mustafa Ali (d. 1600). In
mapping out the various strands of Ottoman poetics, my emphasis will be on the
ways in which it is informed and framed by the Arabic and Persian poetic
tradition. In light of this general discussion, in the second part I will focus on the
ways and contexts in which poetry was studied and practiced. In particular, I
will look at how Ottoman poets engaged with the formal and thematic aspects of
13
Arabic and Persian poetry as part of their training. I will conclude by
highlighting, on the one hand, the multilingual and multi-literary underpinnings
of Ottoman poetics and, on the other, the role it played in the making of a
literary culture modeled after that of Persia and the Arab lands.
Sooyong Kim (Koç University)
Towards a Poetics of Continuity and Translatability: the Case of Ankaravi’
Miftahu’l-Balagha
Ankaravi’s Miftahu’l-Belaga, from the early seventeenth century, is perhaps the
most significant Ottoman work on rhetoric prior to the Tanzimat era. The Miftah
is a Turkish adaptation of al-Qazwini’s classic Arabic work that drew also on a
popular Persian adaptation. Moreover, as Christopher Ferrard suggested some
time ago, it belongs to a small corpus of writings that constituted an alternative
tradition to rhetoric, one not part of the medrese curriculum. Yet unexplored is
the very context in which Ankaravi’s Miftah was produced. This paper
addresses that by situating his work in relation to literati concerns of the time,
especially to the question of linguistic indigeneity. The work, I argue, represents
an attempt at a poetics of continuity and translatability aimed at a wide local
audience.
Aida Gasimova (Baku State University)
Many Faces of The Qur’ān in Depiction of the Face (Ḥurūfī Poetics of
Nesīmī)
The paper deals with the poetry of ‘Imāduddīn Nesīmī (d. 820/1417-18) -- one
of the prominent figures of Medieval Azeri Turkic literature. Although his
poetry testifies the variability of philosophical thoughts, his name associates
with Ḥurūfī teaching; the poet was a follower of Faḍlullāh Astarābādī (d.1394)
and passionate agitator of Ḥurūfism. First, a brief account of Nesimi’s
biography and poetry will be provided. The second section will be devoted to
Nesīmī’s usage of the names of the Qur’an (The Qur’ān, Muṣḥaf, Furqān, Lawḥ
maḥfūẓ, Umm al-kitāb, Nūr among others) in depiction of the face which is the
most important aspect of speculations in Ḥurūfī thought for exemplifying
‘motherly knowledge’. I argue that although all the names of the Qur’an
designate the same book, slight differences in their essential and functional
meaning are clearly seen in glorification of Beauty’s face. A special attention
will be given to the importance of the skin in the poetry of the skinned poet.
Throughout the paper I argue that when using these names in depiction of the
Face in many cases the poet follows the principle of ‘whole for whole, part for
14
part’ structure; while the Qur’ān and its attributes-names denote the face as a
whole, as an embodiment of God’s Countenance (waḥdat), the names of sūrahs,
the āyats, personages or episodes from the stories of the Qur’ān stand for the
parts of the face (kathrat). Furthermore, the poetry in question demonstrates
characteristic to Islamic mysticism, eternal Unity between God, Man, Sacred
Writings (letters-ḥurūf) and the Universe. Therefore if in Lakoff’s theory, the
metaphor involves understanding one domain of experience, in terms of a very
different domain of experience, in Ḥurūfī poetry target domain and source
domain are not represented in the different sides of existence, but they are strata
of the One demonstrating the Union of beings.
Panel 4: From Andalusī and Scilian poetics to modern Arabic literatures
Ferial Bouhafa (University of Cambridge)
The Qur’anic rhetorical challenge within the scope of Peripatetic Rhetoric in
Ibn Rushd’s thought
In my presentation, I explore Ibn Rushd’s conceptions of the Qur’anic
challenge taḥadī, basing my analysis on corresponding discussions in the Short
commentary of Rhetoric, and his elaborative account of this matter in his
theological treatise Kashf al-Manāhij. My analysis will demonstrate how Ibn
Rushd conceived of the Qur’anic challenge advanced in theological discussions
within the scope of Aristotle’ Rhetoric. This understanding, I argue, adds a new
provision to Aristotelian rhetorical argumentation which requires practical
efficiency in delivering arguments. Such refinement can be taken as a blueprint
attesting to a cross-pollination between Peripatetic rhetoric (khaṭāba) and
Arabic rhetoric (balāgha).
Enass Khansa (American University of Beirut)
The Poetics of Affinity (ittisāq) and the Question of Legitimacy in
Andalusī Adab
This paper identifies the conception of literary poetics in medieval
Andalusī adab works, as a mediator of legitimacy, broadly conceived, and an
area where knowledge production negotiates a distinctly Andalusī
worldview. Thinking through processes of knowledge production as forms
of restoration, the paper examines the politics of selection (ikhtiyār), that
15
simultaneously coheres trajectories of knowledge and rulership within the
concept of “affinity” (ittisāq). This presentation examines the understanding of
poetics through the interplay of the literary and the political, in three adab works
produced in conversation with different political orders. These are: al-‘Iqd (The
Necklace), a twenty-five volume anthology compiled and written by Ibn ‘Abd
Rabbihi, in the fourth Hijrī century as al-Andalus transitioned from an Umayyad
emirate to a caliphate; Ibn Bassām’s al-Dhakhīra, an encyclopedic compilation
on knowledge production of the Sixth Hijrī century, with a local Andalusī focus
during the Ta’ifa kingdom period; and Ibn Sa‘īd’s al-Mughrib fī ḥulā al-
Maghrib in the seventh Hijrī century, a period which witnessed the decline of al-
Andalus and its urban centers.
Nicola Carpentieri (University of Connecticut)
Qaṣīd Writing in Medieval Sicily: Its Social Significance
The classical Arabic ode remained at the forefront of literary expression in
Medieval Sicily from the apogee of its Muslim period (10th c. CE) well into the
Norman era (11th-12th CE). Throughout the many upheavals that the island
witnessed during this long span of time, the qaṣīda remained an important
vehicle for social exchange, particularly within court environments. In a
previous essay, I have argued for the 'sociopoietic' value of the qaṣīda at the
Muslim and Norman Sicilian courts. The present paper elaborates on that idea
with a focus on the intertwinement between the aesthetic and performative
aspects of Arabic verse written in Sicily. My epistemological premise is one of
the most convincing interpretative keys for the nasīb advanced in recent years,
namely Michael Sells' treatment of semantic overflow. Sells' thesis has
successfully challenged former critical approaches which reduced the pre-
Islamic ode to a merely descriptive enterprise. I here apply Sell's argument to
Arabic poems composed in very different moments of Sicily's history, and
attempt to expand upon it. My main goal is to demonstrate how the language
and lore of the nasīb is intertwined, in these poems, with a performative charge
directed towards the crafting of social identities.
Chiara Fontana (University of Rome)
Exploring a pragmatic approach to the rhetorical and metrical analysis of
contemporary Arabic poetry: Naǧīb Surūr’s Kalimāt fī al-ḥubb
Modern linguistics theoretical work on al-balāgha (Fehri 1982; Moutaouakil
1982) rarely acknowledges how deeper inquiries on al-balagha and the Arabic
metrical forms might be essential in exploring the essence and expressive
16
qualities of Arabic poetics, along with its evolution and ontological framework
over the millennia. About a thousand years before Jakobson began exploring
poetics, the master of balāgha ‛Abd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī set out in Dalā’il and
in Asrār al-balāgha that it is impossible to criticize a literary text without an
initial inquiry into its full meaning. This inquiry proceeds from the observation
of the single word (al-kalima) to the semantic structure of the text (an-naẓm) so
as to reflect on how balāgha’s figurative forms give rise to a fully formed
literary text. Of course, the semiotic and non-formalist approach to the text’s
analysis employed by al-Ǧurǧānī and his followers, such as az-Zamakhsharī and
al-Qazwīnī, does not only apply to pre-modern texts but can also be applied to
contemporary ones.
Applying endogenous analytical tools from the Arabic literary, metrical and
rhetorical tradition, this paper argues that the perennial continuity/estrangement
relationship reflected in the aesthetic experimentation of Naǧīb Surūr (an
Egyptian experimental author who lived from 1932-1978) can in fact be tied to
his ancient cultural (literary) background. In order to illustrate these linkages,
we pursue an applicative-pragmatic approach to ‛ilm al-‛arūḍ and al-
balāgha, investigating the metrical and rhetorical forms that occur in Naǧīb
Surūr’s poetic work Kalimāt fī al-ḥubb (1966), according to the canonical
tripartition of Arabic rhetoric set-out by al-Qazwīnī and as-Sakkākī. In doing so
we uncover the possible experimentation and interplay that takes place between
ancient references and innovation, enabling us to reconstruct a more organic
criticism of the author’s work in a contextual framework.
Drawing upon several in-depth analytical examples, we would like to argue that
a culturally embedded, formal and rhetorical methodology not only allows us to
observe experimental aspects of contemporary literature from a cross-temporal
perspective but may also contribute to a paradigm shift (away from Eurocentric
analyses) in literary theory, allowing for a deeper exploration of the structure,
substance and evolution of both classical and contemporary Arabic poetics.
Claire Savina (Université of Paris-Sorbonne/University of Oxford)
Télémachus in Egypt
This paper explores Ṭahṭāwī’s literary piece ‘Mawāqi' al-aflāk fi waqā'i'
Tilimāk’. It proposes to read this text, presented as a translation of Les Aventures
de Télémaque de Fénelon, as a rewriting, a work aimed to renew with the Arabic
17
tradition of riḥla and Mirror for Princes. Most literary critics and historians have
seen in 19th Century Arabic translations produced in Egypt and Bilād al-Shām,
the so-called or so-described passive copying from Europe at his hight, the
quintessence of iqtibās (borrowing), Tilimāk’s Tahṭāwī offers, through the
exercise of translation as a means, a revival of classical Arabic genre (iḥyā’) and
sets a keystone of Modern Arabic literature. Engaging with a Post-Eurocentric
Poetics, I argue that in this case study, iqṭibās is a mere matrix for iḥyā’ and
tarǧama is its tool. By arabizing, transposing and putting in saǧ’, Les Aventures
de Télémaque, recognized for its language qualities and eloquence, used and
translated all over Europe and beyond in the 18th Century onwards to teach
French, Ṭahṭāwī acts the modernization of Arabic. Focusing for example on the
chapter 2 and 3 of the journey — in Egypt and Bilād al-Shām — we will
experiment what was presented in the 17th Century French original as a
anecdotic episode in a utopia in an exotic faraway land, is taken to the next level
of recognition in the Arabic version, creating, through the time continuum,
identification and guides the reader towards a feeling of nostalgia of Golden
Ages and political reflexions. Willing to look at translational choices not as an
error or a misunderstanding as Translation Studies have had the tendency to do
so since their creation, I propose to interpret them within the context of
Ṭahṭāwī’s political, literary — and religious (Tageldin, 2017) — project: an
essentially Arabic, if not Egyptian, performance of what could be read as a
French example of balāgha.
18
PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES
Alexander Key is an Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative
Literature in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford
University. His first book, Language Between God and the Poets: maʿnā in the
eleventh century, will come out in summer 2018 from UC
Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520298019. He is currently
working on comparative poetics, and exploring the options for a renewed focus
on formalism.
Emad Abdul-Latif is an Associate Professor at Qatar University. He studied
Arabic rhetoric and political discourse analysis at Cairo University (Egypt) and
Lancaster University (UK). He published six monographs in Arabic: Why do
Egyptians applaud? 2009; Strategies of Persuasion and Effect in the Arab
Political Discourse, 2012; Rhetoric and Cross-cultural Communication, 2012;
The Rhetoric of Liberation, 2013; Analyzing Rhetorical Discourse, 2014;
Political Speeches in Modern Times, 2015. His Against Rhetoric (2017) is an
edited book tackles the influence of Plato’s works on Arabic rhetoric. His list of
articles and chapters published in English includes: interdiscursivity between
political and religious discourses in a speech by Sadat: Combining CDA and
addressee rhetoric, Johan Benjamins, 2011; The Oralization of Writing:
Argumentation, profanity and literacy in cyberspace, Brill, 2017; and Arab
Political Discourse, Routledge, 2018. He wrote several entries to Oxford
Dictionary of African Biography and The third edition of Encyclopedia of
Islam. He co-translated many works into Arabic including The Oxford
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric.
Hany Rashwan earned his Ph.D. in Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial
Studies from SOAS (2016) and is currently an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellow at the American University of Beirut. Dr. Rashwan is the recipient of the
International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR) Research Fellowship in
2015. His research focuses on both Arabic balāgha (literary poetics) and
khitābah (oral public speech). His primary research interest is how to bridge the
two disciplines of comparative balāgha and comparative literature to
19
acknowledge the relationship between the 'poetic form' and its 'eloquent
content.' He has been recently offered a Research Fellow position at the
University of Birmingham to lead the Arabic balāgha strand. Global Literary
Theory (GlobalLIT) is a five years project that aims to reinvigorate the studies
of Islamic balāgha and khitābah in the Euro-American scholarship and to let the
studied cultures to speak for themselves without any automatic imposition of
Eurocentrism. Dr. Rashwan is currently finishing his book with AUC University
Press entitled: Literariness and Aesthetics of ancient Egyptian Literature: Arabic
Jinās in Post-Eurocentric Poetics.
Rebecca Gould is Professor of Islamic World and Comparative Literature at the
University of Birmingham. She is the author of Writers and Rebels: The
Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), which
was awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and
Cultural Studies and the best book award by the Association for Women in
Slavic Studies, and the translator of After Tomorrow the Days Disappear:
Ghazals and Other Poems Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press,
2016), and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central
European University Press, 2015). From 2018-2023, she is the Principal
Investigator for the ERC-funded project, “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus
Literatures Compared.”
Leila Seyed-Ghasem is a PhD graduate of Persian language and literature from
University of Tehran. She has been involved in Balagha thorough her studies,
particularly during completing her PhD dissertation entitled "The Rhetoric of
Syntactic Structures in Bayhaghi's History", when concentrating on Islamic
balagha traditions, especially Jurjani's Theory of Nazm and its equivalences in
modern linguistics. Her PhD dissertation was awarded as The Best Doctoral
Dissertation in Persian Language and Literature and was published in Iran, after
a careful revision. She has taught rhetoric and Persian classic literature at
university of Tehran. Also, she has studied Literary Geography as a new
interdisciplinary field and co-found a website on literary map of Tehran.
Christine Kämpfer is currently a PhD student and research assistant at the
Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) of Marburg University.
20
Her main research interest is medieval Persian epic poetry, more specifically,
how to find new approaches to its study. Her dissertation focuses on the Persian
poet Khaju Kermani (1290 – 1350) and examines the role of his romantic epic
“Humay-u Humayun” in the tradition of Persian literary history.
Ferenc Csirkés received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
at the University of Chicago and is currently an Assistant professor of History at
Sabanci University in Istanbul. Prior to that, he worked at Central European
University in Budapest and the University of Tübingen. Straddling literary,
intellectual and cultural history, as well as historical sociolinguistics on the one
hand, and Persian and Turkish on the other, his research focuses on the
interrelation of the politics of language, confessionalization and state building in
the larger Turko-Persian world during the late medieval and early modern
periods. He is currently working on two book projects, both of them building on
his dissertation. One is about the history of Turkic Literature in Safavid Iran; the
other one is an intellectual biography of Sadiqi Beg, a major Safavid painter and
litterateur.
Veli N. Yashin is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the
University of Southern California. He has earned his doctorate from Columbia
University in Arabic and Comparative Literature, and he is the winner of the
2013 Horst Frenz Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association.
Yashin's research and teaching focuses on modern Arabic and Turkish
literatures and more broadly engages the theoretical implications of the complex
entanglement between aesthetics and politics, between issues of cultural and
political representation. His work has appeared in the Yearbook of Comparative
Literature, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East,
the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Middle Eastern Literatures. He is currently
finishing his first book entitled Disorienting Figures: The Sovereign and the
Author in the Ottoman Nineteenth Century.
Marc Toutant is a member of the National Centre for Scientific Research
(CNRS) in Paris. His research focuses on Turko-Iranian interactions and their
contributions to Central Asian history and culture. He is the author of Un empire
21
de mots: Pouvoir, culture et soufisme à l’époque des derniers Timourides au
miroir de la Khamsa de Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Nawā’ī (Peeters, 2016), and co-editor of
Literature and Society in Central Asia: New Sources for the Study of Culture
and Power from the 15th to the 21th Century (Cahiers d’Asie centrale 24,
2015). He also teaches a course on Chaghatay language and another of
Comparative Grammar of the Turkic languages at the Institut National des
Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO-Paris).
Murat Umut Inan received his doctoral degree in Near and Middle Eastern
Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle and is currently assistant
professor of Ottoman and Persian Studies at the Social Sciences University of
Ankara, Turkey. His research and teaching interests focus on literary cultural
and intellectual histories of the pre-modern Islamic world. He is completing a
book manuscript on the reception of Persian literary culture in the Ottoman
Empire. His recent publications include an article entitled “Rethinking the
Ottoman Imitation of Persian Poetry” (Iranian Studies 50, no. 5) and a book
chapter entitled “Imperial Ambitions, Mystical Aspirations: Persian Learning in
the Ottoman World” (forthcoming in The Frontiers of the Persianate World: The
Reach and Limits of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, c.1400-1900, edited by Nile
Green, University of California Press).
Sooyong Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English
Language and Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul. His research
focuses on early modern Ottoman literature and culture, and his most recent
book deals with canon formation: The Last of an Age: The Making and
Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet (2018).
Aida Gasimova is a professor of Arabic Literature at Baku State University.
Her research interests cover a wide range of topics within Classical Arabic
Literature, Mental-Spiritual State of pre-Islamic Arabs, Qur’anic Symbolism in
Azeri Turkic Sufi Poetry. In 1998 she was awarded “Abdulaziz Saud al-Babtin’s
prize for grandchildren of Imam al-Bukhari”. In 2013 she was granted Open
Society Foundation’s Global Faculty award and held visiting scholarship at
Duke University. In 2016 she held Library research fellowship at California
22
State University, Sacramento. She is currently working on two projects
“Qur’anic Symbolism in Depiction of the Facial Features in Azeri Turkic Sufi
Poetry” and “Mental-Spiritual State of pre-Islamic Arabs”. She has numerous
academic publications in several languages (Arabic, Russian, English and Azeri
Turkic) including articles in prestigious peer-reviewed European academic
journals, among them “Qur’anic Imagery of the Curl in Classical Azeri-Turkic
Sufi Poetry”; “Qur’anic Symbolism of the Eyes in Classical Azeri Turkic
Poetry”, “Marginal Discourses of Arabic Poetry, A Case Study of the Baku
Manuscript, “Taj al-Lughah wa-Sihah al-Arabiyyah” by Abu Nasr Ismail ibn
Hammad al-Farabi al-Jawhari.
Feriel Bouhafa received her Ph.D. in Islamic studies from Georgetown
University. She has been the Lecturer in Islamic studies in the Faculty of
Divinity University of Cambridge since September 2017. Before Cambridge,
she was a post-doctoral fellow in the Philosophy department at Albert-Ludwigs-
Universität Freiburg where she joined the Research Project LIDIAC (an
interdisciplinary contribution to the history of ideas centered on the disciplines
of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in Arabic-Islamic culture 800-1100), funded by
the Excellence Initiative of the German state. She also held fellowships at
Georgetown University in Washington D.C and Qatar, Orient-Institut in Beirut
and the Center of Middles East studies at Harvard University. Her research
interests include Arabic philosophy and Islamic sciences.
Enass Khansa earned her Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from
Georgetown University (2015). In 2015-2016, Enass was the recipient of the
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Harvard University’s Real
Colegio Complutense (RCC), through which she joined the Santiago Cathedral
Project (Spain). In 2016-2017, she joined the Aga Khan Program for the History
of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard. She joined The American University
of Beirut’s Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages as an assistant
professor in January 2018.
Nicola Carpentieri is Assistant Professor of Arabic and chair of the Arabic and
Islamic Civilizations program at the University of Connecticut. His research
focuses on Arabic literature across the Mediterranean, with a special focus on
Sicily. Dr. Carpentieri received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies from
Harvard University in 2012. Subsequently, he held research positions at the
23
University of Manchester (UK) where he worked on the edition of the Arabic
commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms, and at the Autonomous University
of Barcelona, where his research focused on the poetry of court secretaries in
Muslim and Norman Sicily. He has published a number of articles on Arabic
literature, medicine and medical translations from Greek into Arabic, Arabic
into Latin and Persian into Arabic. His edited collection "Sicily, al-Andalus and
the Maghreb: Writing in Times of Turmoil" will appear next spring for Arc
Humanities Press/Kalamazoo. Dr. Carpentieri is also currently preparing a
monograph on the literary heritage of Muslim Sicily. His other interests include
Persian Literature, Islamic Art and Architecture and other aspects of Islamicate
culture, from medicine to music. Besides his academic interests, he is a non-
professional flamenco guitarist.
Chiara Fontana was recently awarded a PhD in Arabic Literature and
Linguistics at The Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis entitled “A
linguistic, rhetorical and metric analysis Nağib Surūr’s experimental works: the
'60s and '70s’ second nahḍa and the evolution of the literary text in 'āmmiyya
and fuṣḥā” (February 2018).After completing her educational training in Arabic
studies at Italian universities and higher education centers such as the Libyan
Academy in Italy, since 2014 she has held a number of teaching positions and
continued her scholarly activity and training at institutions in Tunisia, Egypt,
Morocco and Jordan. Her studies focus principally on Arabic rhetoric, prosody
and linguistics applied to literature, with the aim of enhancing literary forms
defined as subalterns such as theatre, popular poetry, and epistolary literature,
both in fuṣḥā and in ‛āmmiyya, according to holistic, culture embedded
methodological approach.
Claire Savina is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford. She is
working with the Oriental Institute on the « Translation and circulation of texts
in the 19th Century Middle East», a research project undertaken by Marilyn
Booth in 2015. She is now preparing the edition of the second volume produced
by the project: Circulating Texts in the 19th Century from the Eastern
Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea: Translation and Collaborative Writing in
practice.She is finishing her PhD in Comparative Literature and Arabic Studies
at the Paris-Sorbonne University and co-editing a volume ‘Words of Desire: The
Arabic erotica and its translations‘. Her dissertation, entitled « On a movement
towards the Other and Antoine Berman’s expectative horizons: a crossed
24
examination of literary translation from French into Arabic and from Arabic into
French, in the 19th Century. », interrogates the relationship to the Other, through
the crossed examination of literary translations made in the 19th Century, from
French into Arabic, and from Arabic into French. It engages with contemporary
translation studies and defines new concepts such as « self-exoticism », « in-
traduction » or performative translations. It tends to deconstruct, in a
contextualized analysis, notions of translation, adaptation, transposition and
rewriting, as well as ta‘rīb, tarǧama, iqṭibās and iḥyā', considering Studies
essential to the development of theory in Comparative and World Literature,
World Philology, Poetics and Translation Studies.