Poetic standards in Arabic literature have often been set against an idealized model. This model shifts depending on place and time. During the Abbasid era, pre-Islamic poetry was held up as the ideal example against which the new Abbasid poets were measured. In the early Ottoman era, the central Levant (al-Mashriq) was given precedence over the Western peripheries of the Maghreb. During the Nahda (Awakening) of the 19th century, the classical tradition as a whole and its genres were held up as models to be emulated, but also reinvented. The three papers of this panel will focus on how poets or authors were evaluated with respect to the “standard” in these three different moments in the history of Arabic literature. By doing so, each of the three speakers will identify the poetic standards of the period and show how deviation from this standard was either incorporated or dismissed as poetically valid. The panel will provide the rare opportunity to read these moments in relation to one another.

Jeson Ng, in “Between Poetic Theft and Poetic Beauty: Intertextual Tensions in al-Mutanabbī,” looks at al-Mutanabbi (d. 965 CE), one of the most discussed poets of the Abbasid era and studies how his innovations and imitations of earlier poets were assessed by his contemporaries. Audiences were divided into supporters and detractors, each the equal of the other in their conviction about the merits and flaws of al-Mutannabi’s corpus. By focusing on two major literary critics, al-Qāḍī al-Jurjānī (d. 1001) and al-Thaʿālibī (d. 1039), Ng argues that they assess him as stradling the fine line between the old and the new, both beholden to the long-standing pedigree of the ancients and boldly challenging in his modern age of linguistic wit and flourish. In so doing, Ng argues that they contend with the primacy of utterance (lafẓ) over meaning (maʿnā) and the necessity of verisimilitude, getting at the fundamental stakes of what makes poetry good. Through this close analysis, Ng will contribute to the existing scholarship (e.g., Harb, Stetkevytch, Fakhreddine) with a more fine-tuned focus on the medieval treatment of a single pivotal poet.

Hasan Alsulami, in “Mashriqi and Maghrebi Poetics in the 17^th-Century: ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Fishtālī’s Entry in Six Biographical Anthologies,” focuses on a 17th-century poet from the “periphery” and studies how he was represented in biographical anthologies from the central regions of the Levant, namely those of Shihāb al-Dīn al Khafājī (d. 1659), al-Muḥibbī (d. 1699), and Ibn Maʿṣūm (d. 1709). He will in turn compare these entries to his representation in three major Maghribi biographical anthologies by Aḥmad al Maqqarī (d. 1632), Aḥmad ibn al Qāḍī (d. 1617) and Ibn al-Ṭayyib al-Qādirī (d. 1773). He will examine al-Fishtālī’s entry in each work separately, paying attention to not only the way in which an anthologist/biographer depicts him, but also what poetic examples he cites. In other words, to what extent are they different in terms of presenting the poet and selecting his literary composition? And what does this tell us about the books' poetics? Alsulami’s paper will shed light on an understudied so-called “post-classical” period in pre-modern Arabic literature, bringing to light new standards of poetic beauty that are spatially oriented rather than temporally bound.

Finally, Xena Amro, in “MUMMIFYING THE DECAYED BODY OF LITERATURE? AL-MUWAYLIḤĪ AND AL-MAQĀMAH,” takes us to the world of the late 19th/early 20th century by focusing on a literary work by Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī entitled Fatrah min al-Zaman, serialized between the years 1898 and 1902 and later collated and published in a book titled Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām in 1907. In this work, al-Muwayliḥī simultaneously resurrects the heritage of the late 10^th century Maqāmah form and the personage of a deceased Pāshā. In doing so, the “appropriation” of the heritage of al-Maqāmah in the form of the resurrected Pāshā becomes a counter-trope to the traditional art of mummification. Rather than preserving the form undisturbed, al-Muwayliḥī wakes the decayed body of this genre of literature, not to revive it but to transform it. Through resurrection – not mummification – al-Muwayliḥī critiques as well as liberate classical Arabic literary theory. While al-Muwailihi has received little scholarly attention relative to other Nahda authors and has been characterized as mundane and conservative, Amro argues the opposite here. Muwailihi is far from a mundane revivalist: the “archives of time,” which are the narrator’s words in the first episode, travel through a “three-way mirror,” from the graveyard to prison to the museum, reflecting his multifaceted approach to the philosophy of death and traditions.