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2018
Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head, Eds., The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Book Revew The City in Arabic Literature Classical and Modern Perspectives2022 •
While most current scholarship in the field of Arabic literature focuses solely on premodern or modern perspectives, Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head's edited volume brings together contributors to explore city tropes in both classical and modern Arabic literature in the form of "an evolving continuum" (viii). With 16 chapters and 15 illustrations, this thought-provoking collection presents readers with a rich, approachable, and fascinating study of the city as represented in "more traditional literary genres, like the maqāma, poetry, and more recently the novel" (ix). Moreover, the volume's publication is certainly timely: Interest in studies of cityscapes in Arabic literature continues to grow, not only because of the significant Middle Eastern, North African, and Andalusi histories, cultures, and civilizations they represent, but also as a result of the current geopolitical climate in the Arab world, and the often uneven and conflictual relationship between the Global North and Global South. Consequently, the need for interdisciplinary comparative scholarly works such as this, accessible to both general readership and specialists, cannot be overstated. This volume stands as an innovative collective work in Middle Eastern and North African Studies, comparative literature, and Arabic studies. In co-editing this collection, Hermes and Head draw from their substantial knowledge of Arabic literary tradition and their extensive work on the "place of the city within the Arabic literary heritage" (ix). Hermes is the author of The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture, Ninth-Twelfth Century AD (The New Middle Ages), published with Palgrave-Macmillan in 2012, and Of Lost Cities and the Poetic Imagination in the Premodern and Precolonial Maghrib: 9th-19th Centuries AD, a forthcoming monograph with McGill University Press. He is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the poetics and aesthetics of Arab cities. Head has published extensively on social, cultural, and political issues about urban space, identity, exile, transgender issues, sociopolitical revolutions, and the poetics of inversion in the Arab world, and has examined the pedagogy of teaching Arabic literature in translation. She is currently studying a host of Moroccan prosaic texts, genres, and styles from the 19th to the 21st century. Hermes and Head's collection fosters an understanding of the evolution that the Arabic literary tradition has seen since the 7th century and traces the development of the literary representation of cities
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
Zayde Antrim's Review of The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)2018 •
This compelling volume of sixteen chapters covering the seventh to the twenty-first centuries is a major contribution to the literature on cities in Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern studies. The erudition behind the chapters is undeniable, but they are all admirably concise and accessible, making it possible to read the volume cover to cover in just a few sittings. Indeed, this is just what I recommend doing. The chapters move along briskly, overlap, connect, circle back, and defy any easy periodisation or chronology. The editors, Nizar Hermes and Gretchen Head, should be commended for their innovative vision for the volume: "We set out determined to view the entirety of the [Arabic literary] tradition as an evolving continuum and to create a collection relevant to scholars of both classical and modern Arabic literature. While our original vision for the volume saw it as consisting of eight chapters chronologically within the premodern period and eight chapters chronologically within the modern, it turned out that many of the contributors to this collection declined to strictly differentiate between the premodern and modern of their own accord. As a result, a significant number of the chapters gathered here move fluidly between periods…" (p. ix)
Within the framework of contemporary critical studies on the image of the city in modern literature , it is crucial to critically examine the city motif disseminated in Arabic and Iraqi poetry, particularly the poems of the pioneering poet Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati in order to emphasise major city motifs rooted in modern Iraqi literature and culture. In addition to a critical investigation of the major aspects of the Iraqi city, it is also imperative to examine the socio-political trajectories integral to the image of contemporary Arab cities particularly Baghdad. Unlike their Euro-American counterparts, the Iraqi city poets , particularly Al-Bayati, live in preindustrial, non-productive and consumptive cities, dominated by police and military establishments. Therefore, the Iraqi city poets give priority to issues such as political corruption, human rights violations, economic exploitation, decadence , moral bankruptcy, prostitution, poverty, injustice and related local issues endemic of life not only in Iraq but also in the capital cities of the Arab world. While discussing the attitude of modernist poets toward the city in "The Crisis of Language," Richard Sheppard, argues Many of the major modernist poets had come into eadlong conflict with the antipathetic institutions of the rising industrial city. This conflict is seen in "The WasteLand", where Eliot's New England sensibility expresses its alienation from the modern mass city" (Sheppard 1987: 330). Like Eliot , many Arab poets have expressed their hostility toward Arab cities in general associating them with alienation, poverty, oppression and political corruption. Salma Jayyusi in Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry points out that although "The Waste Land" is not a poem of despair it "stresses the living death of the crowd in the unreal city (Jayyusi 1977: 724). Explicitly, many Arab poets imitate or even copy Eliot's vision of the modern city ignoring the differences between the Euro-American metropolis and the Arab cities. Others have approached the city motif from different perspectives according to their political ideologies and exilic experiences. The city analogy in Arabic literature , has been part and parcel of the modernist tradition ever since Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab in "Jaikur and the City" poured out his invective against the city in the fifties, describing its streets as "coil of mud " which " bite into my heart," and moaning : "my right hand: no claw to fight with on the streets of the city, no grip to raise up life from the clay"(Cited in Gohar
2018 •
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World
The Maqāma Genre and the History of an Islamicate Literary Form2022 •
Subverting the conspiracy theory advocated by some Arab critics who claim that the establishment of modern Arab cities was threatening to the Euro-American project of cultural, political, economic and military colonization in the Middle East, the paper explores the image of Beirut in contemporary Arabic literature-particularly in the poetry of Khalil Hawi, Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish-in order to investigate several issues of trans-cultural and geo-political significance. The paper argues that there is no similarity between the Arab city and its western counterpart, where human relationships are disrupted by the intervention of the machine and where the poet witnesses the collapse of human relationships. It is obvious that the Arab city does not have the complicated technology or industrial infrastructure which would dehumanize the poet or put pressure on his psyche and consciousness as in the West. Therefore, it is significant to argue that in Arabic literature, there are no city poets in the western sense because Arab cities unfortunately failed to create poets like Eliot, Baudelaire, Pound, Whitman, Ginsberg, and others. However, the Arab city has other oppression mechanisms such as persecution, torture and denial of human rights. These elements are sufficient to generate hostility on the part of the poet toward the city and its dwellers.
Ibn Rashīq’s popularity in the Arab world as one of the most distinguished classical Maghribi poets owes much to what is often called in Arabic school textbooks “Nūniyyat Ibn Rashīq fī rithāʾ al-Qayrawān,” or simply “Nūniyyat Ibn Rashīq.” Ibn Rashīq composed his city-elegy, the nūniyyah while living in exile to lament the destruction (kharāb) and desolation (khalāʾ) of Qayrawan in the wake of the Hilālī sacking of the city in 1057 CE. A full English translation of Ibn Rashīq’s printed and standardized nūniyyah follows an introductory essay that enumerates salient linguistic and rhetorical features, and offers a manuscript and publication history for the poem. The essay pivots around the lack of elegiac and nostalgic representation of Qayrawan’s once majestic ‘cityscape’ and iconic worldly buildings in the nūniyyah, finding the mnemonic and nostalgic focus of the Maghrib’s most renowned city-elegy to be rather the loss of the city’s fuqahāʾ (Islamic scholars or jurisprudents).
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