Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq

This essay studies the Arabic-English Lexicon (1863-1893), a monumental dictionary of classical Arabic created by Edward William Lane (1801-1876), in order to discuss the constitution of Arabic as a cosmopolitan language. And it examines parenthetically the efforts made by novelist and newspaperman Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804-1887) to rejuvenate Arabic as a modern cosmopolitan language. The essay is particularly interested in the temporal dynamic of the cosmopolitan language. Because it is not connected to contemporary usage in a specific region, a cosmopolitan language – like literary Arabic – is able to maintain a dynamic connection between multiple historical eras. Its historical scope is viewed as a weakness by national language ideology, which promotes the mother tongue as the only viable literary language. The essay focuses on the celebration of the historical depth and richness of the cosmopolitan language by its champions and practitioners, like Lane and al-Shidyāq.

This article discusses the performative function of enumeration in Arabic prose. Bringing together a great variety of word lists from classical to modern prose (including the 1001 Nights, al-Tawḥīdī, al-Suyūṭī, al-Shidyāq, and Darwīsh), it unveils their often neglected importance to literature by drawing from an emerging scholarship on enumeration. Focusing on “enumerative games” (Mainberger), the article does not ask what the enumerated elements mean, but how the act of enumerating produces meaning. In the first part, the article discusses elements central to the poetics of the enumerative (including items, length, arrangement, and frame). In the second part it deals with the politics of enumeration in the example of al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fāriyāq (1855). The article seeks to provide a basic approach to enumeration and argues that enumerative games in literature perform acts of cultural politics.