The goal of this panel is to provide a forum in which to trace the conceptual, aesthetic, and semantic engagements Arabic literature has with classical genres and classical texts. Taking a fresh look at how new theoretical approaches to classical texts might be exciting but what is even more exciting, as the prospective panelists show us in many ways, is the application of and engagement with classical texts afresh in the modern period.

Yaseen Noorani begins by discussing how the rise of modernism in Arabic poetry (e.g. Adunis) and fiction (e.g. Gamal al-Ghitani) in the 1950’s and 60’s involved the appropriation of specific Sufi texts and figures and their alignment with the formal techniques of modernism in a manner explicitly inimical to religious and rationalistic domination while voiding this Sufism of its devotional content. The effect was the placement of Arabic literature, in the form of Arabic modernism, at the center of world literature alongside other avant-garde movements. This aesthetic ideology, therefore, constitutive of world literature’s normative structure – the imperative of reënchanting the modern world through the artistic reunification of the spiritual and material – both enabled and is illuminated by the aestheticization of Sufism in Arabic modernism.

Engaging the conception of aesthetic ideology forward, Lubna Safi works with the notion of the poet as seer. The Moroccan poet-critic Muhammad Bannīs declared that “for the sake of the eye, writers, poets, and thinkers flee from the oppression and tyranny of those who cannot bear to see what cannot be seen (ru’yat ma lā yurā).” In his phrasing, Bannīs recalls tenth-century critic Abdelqahir al-Jurjānī’s characterization of takhȳil, which locates the poem’s ability to transform its recipient by “making one see as if before the eyes.” This attention to vision in premodern Arabic poetics culminates a long history of the poet as seer, which began in pre-Islamic poetic rites and was reintroduced in modernist writings by figuring the poet as a possessor of vision in a moment when literary renewal was at forefront of rethinking collective cultural struggle. Initially put forth in a 1979 manifesto titled Bayān al-Kitāba (Writing Manifesto), Bannīs’s idea of kitāba sought a renewal of vision by attending to the eye through orthographic practices within the poem. By examining the classical qaṣīda’s nasīb, particularly the two tropes that evoke varying planes of past acts, words, and feelings—the aṭlāl (the campsite ruins) and the ṭayf al-khayāl (the phantom of the beloved)—gives us a framework for understanding erasure writing. Ultimately, kitābat al-maḥw, explores these tropes as modes of “seeing what cannot be seen” and offers from this a model for engaging the past as multiple and open in the present.

Following up on these questions of writing practices as technique, Rama AlHabian will explore looks closely at al-Yāziǧī’s 1855/56 maqāmāt collection Maǧmaʿ al-baḥrayn (The meeting of the two seas), where he closely emulated—but adapted—the classical maqāma collection by al-Ḥarīrī of Basra (d.1122). Specifically, considering the functions of two interconnected categories that figure in al-Yāziǧī’s work. The first is ʿaǧamī: a contrastive ethno-linguistic form of group identification that was historically used by early Arabo-Muslim scholars of language as a boundary-setting tool between Arabs and their linguistic others. Second is the more style-sensitive sub-category of rakāka: encompassing the linguistic issues around ‘correct’ writing style, the orthography of words, acceptable forms of rhyme and metaphor, and vowel placement according to the rules of Arabic grammar (Rana Issa). Ultimately, seeking to explore al-Yāziǧī’s take on Arabic’s heteroglossic condition, in which varieties of the spoken registers and a standard written form exist distinctly, but integrally, within the language.

Finally, moving from the sounds of playful errors to synesthesia, Ula Aweida, examines Bashshsār b. Burd Love Poetry in light of the modern phenomenon of synesthesia showing how modern theories can shape the semantic meaning of poems that were written in the second century of Hijra, and whether this theory aligns with or contradicts what was stated in ancient Arabic literary criticism. Aweida shows the importance of examining linguistic relationships in poetic texts, as well as the aesthetic and sensory techniques that the poets employed to embody their ideas in their poems, highlighting the importance of integrating classical and modern theories in studying Classical Arabic poetry.