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date: 10 February 2025

Premodern Multilingual Arabo-Islamicate Poeticslocked

Premodern Multilingual Arabo-Islamicate Poeticslocked

  • Rebecca Ruth GouldRebecca Ruth GouldUniversity of London

Summary

Arabo-Islamicate poetics can be divided into three rubrics: philosophical aesthetics, balāgha (rhetoric, poetics, stylistics), and paratextual commentary. Philosophical aesthetics encompasses the writings of al-Fārābī Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, and Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, who creatively adapted the Aristotelian tradition to Islamic learning. Balāgha encompasses indigenous literary discourses and originated in an effort to delineate the aesthetic dimensions of the Qur’ān while using poetry to prove the Qurʾān’s inimitability (iʿjāz). The paratextual tradition encompasses commentaries, anthologies, and other forms of literary history.

The models of literary criticism first articulated in Arabic within these frameworks inspired multilingual poetics that spanned the Islamic world. Often alongside their work in Arabic, critics and rhetoricians writing in Persian, Hebrew, Ottoman, Chaghatay, and many other types of literature took Arabic genres and literary norms as templates for theorizing poetics in their respective literature. Hence, the scope of Arabo-Islamicate poetics is broader than the history of the Arabic language and encompasses a range of Islamic literary cultures, extending from Delhi to al-Andalus and from Baghdad to the Malay Archipelago.

Subjects

  • African Literatures
  • West Asian Literatures, including Middle East
  • Cultural Studies

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