Arabic Literature

Arabic literature, the body of written works produced in the Arabic language.
The tradition of Arabic literature stretches back some 16 centuries to unrecorded beginnings in the Arabian Peninsula. At certain points in the development of European civilization, the literary culture of Islam and its Arabic medium of expression came to be regarded not only as models for emulation but also, through vital conduits such as Moorish Spain and Norman Sicily, as direct sources of inspiration for the intellectual communities of Europe. The rapid spread of the Islamic faith brought the original literary tradition of the Arabian Peninsula into contact with many other cultural traditions—Byzantine, Persian, Indian, Amazigh (Berber), and Andalusian, to name just a few—transforming and being transformed by all of them. At the turn of the 21st century, the powerful influence of the West tended to give such contacts a more one-sided directionality, but Arab litterateurs were constantly striving to find ways of combining the generic models and critical approaches of the West with more indigenous sources of inspiration drawn from their own literary heritage.

Context

The Arabic literary tradition began within the context of a tribal, nomadic culture. With the advent and spread of Islam, that tradition was carried far and wide during the course of the 7th to the 10th century. It initially sought to preserve the values of chivalry and hospitality while expressing a love of animals and describing the stark realities of nature, but it proceeded to absorb cultural influences from every region brought within the fold of “Dār al-Islām” (“Abode of Islam”). Early contacts with the Sasanian empire of Persia (present-day Iran) led to a noisy but fruitful exchange of cultural values. The foundation in 762 of Baghdad, built expressly as a caliphal capital, brought about further expansion to the east and contacts with the cultures of India and beyond; one of the results of such contact was the appearance in the Middle East of the world’s greatest collection of narrative, Alf laylah wa laylah (The Thousand and One Nights). In that same capital city was founded the great library Bayt al-Ḥikmah (“House of Wisdom”), which, until the sack of the city by the Mongols in 1258, served as a huge repository for the series of works from the Hellenistic tradition that were translated into Arabic. Al-Andalus became to the rest of Europe a model of a society in which the religions and cultures of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism could work together and create a system of scholarship and teaching that could transmit the heritage of older civilizations and the rich cultural admixture of Andalusian society. Western science, mathematics, philosophy, music, and literature were all beneficiaries of this fascinating era, of whose final stages the fabulous Alhambra palace complex in Granada, Spain, remains the most visible token.

By the 10th century, the political fragmentation of the larger Islamic community was evident in the existence of three separate caliphates: that of the ʿAbbāsids in Baghdad, that of the Shīʿite Fāṭimids in Cairo, and that of the Umayyads, in Spain at this time after having been earlier removed from power in the eastern regions by the advent of the ʿAbbāsids. Ironically, this fragmentation worked to the advantage of literature and its practitioners; the existence of a continuing series of petty dynasties provided ample opportunity for patronage at court, which was the primary means of support for poets and scholars. However, literary production and creativity were inevitably marked by the ongoing series of Crusades, carried out by Christians from western Europe, the Mongol invasions and later those of the Turkic conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the fall of Granada in the Reconquista in 1492, and the fall of Cairo to the Ottomans in 1517. It has been customary in surveys of the Arabic literary tradition to write off the era between 1258 and 1800 by declaring it a “period of decadence.” However, a more nuanced analysis of the situation would acknowledge the political turmoil that characterized many regions and periods and would also suggest that a degree of caution is needed in applying Western criteria for literary evaluation to a period in which the aesthetic yardsticks were clearly different.
The nature of “the modern” in the context of Arabic literary history involves twin processes: first, renewed contacts with the Western world, something that was considerably accelerated by European imperial incursions during the 19th century, and, second, a renewed interest in the classical heritage of the Arabic language and Islam. Particularly in analyzing the earlier stages in the process known as al-nahḍah (“renaissance”), Western historians have for a long time placed much more emphasis on the first of these factors. It is certainly true that the 19th century witnessed a vigorous translation movement that introduced to the readership of Arabic literature examples of genres such as the novel, the short story, and the drama. All these genres were subsequently produced within the literary milieu of Arabic, although the chronology and pace of that process varied widely in different regions. However, as Arab literary historians endeavoured to trace the development of a modern literary tradition in different regions and as creative writers themselves strove to find indigenous sources of inspiration and modes of expression, a perceived need to incorporate the second category mentioned above—that of the linkage between the classical heritage of the Arab past and the creativity of the present—became more pressing and led in many regions to a reexamination of the balance between these two forces.
At the turn of the 21st century, the Arab creative writer operated at a local level within a social environment that, more often than not, constrained freedom of expression and indeed subjected literature to strict forms of censorship. Many prominent Arab authors spent large segments of their life in exile from their homelands for political reasons. More broadly, the confrontation between secularism and popular religious movements, which might in the best of circumstances provide for a fruitful interaction of opinions, instead—because of local, regional, and global factors—created an atmosphere of tension and repression that was often not conducive to creative thought. This confrontation also prompted Arab litterateurs to view the global environment with considerable circumspection.

The Qurʾān

The revelation of the Qurʾān to the Prophet Muhammad, beginning at some point early in the 7th century ad, is the foundational event in Islam. It separates the period before Islam (known as the Jāhiliyyah [“period of ignorance”]) from the Islamic era and provides the Muslim community with its most significant monument, the word of God revealed to humanity. Its message is conveyed in a language of great beauty, something that is regarded as an inimitable miracle. Its contents are the primary basis for the formulation of Islamic law and the designation of conduct by Muslims, both as individuals and as a community. However, beyond the Qurʾān’s central position within the Islamic faith, the aftermath of its revelation led to a lengthy scholarly process that traced its precedents and analyzed the Arabic language system; as such, its revelation also needs to be viewed as the event that marks the initial stages in the recording and study of the Arabic literary tradition.

The word qurʾān means “recitation,” illustrating a major difference between it and the sacred scriptural sources of Judaism and Christianity: the Qurʾān is primarily an oral phenomenon, something to be recited and intoned (the latter involving a highly elaborated skill known as tajwīd). The textual version of the Qurʾān was to become the focus of a vast repertoire of scholarship—devoted to the interpretation of the text and to the codification of the dogmas, regulations, and ethical prescriptions that it contains and the system of language that it represents—but from the beginnings of Islam to the present day the sounds of the Qurʾān have played a major part in the daily lives and practices of all peoples living within the dominions of Islam.

Revelation, compilation, and structure

Recite in the name of your lord who created— From an embryo created the human.

This opening verse from the 96th sura (chapter) of the Qurʾān is believed to be the first revelation to Muhammad (as translated by Michael Sells in Approaching the Qurʾan). God in the first person addresses Muhammad directly in the second person; those who listen to the revelations delivered in Arabic from Muhammad’s mouth are designated as “they.” During the course of Muhammad’s lifetime, these revelations were memorized and recorded in written form. This activity was carried out in Mecca until 622 ce and—following the Hijrah (the migration of Muhammad and his followers)—in the oasis town of Yathrib, later to be known as Medina, where Muhammad remained from 622 until his death in 632. But these revelations were not organized in any systematic fashion. It was only after Muhammad’s death, when many of those who had memorized the revelations were themselves dying, that the Muslim community realized the urgent need to establish a canonical version of the Qurʾān. That was achieved during the reign of the third caliph to rule after Muhammad’s death, ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān. Thereafter the text of the Qurʾān that had been prepared under ʿUthmān was declared the only authoritative version, and all variant versions were ordered destroyed.
Apart from the short opening sura, Al-Fātiḥah (“The Opening”), which is regularly used by Muslims as a prayer and at the conclusion of contracts (including that of marriage), the suras of the Qurʾān are arranged in order of length: the longest (Al-Baqarah [“The Cow”], with 286 verses) is second while a selection of very short suras comes at the end of the Qurʾān, with the six verses of Al-Nās (“The People”) as the final—114th—sura. These short suras belong to the Meccan period of revelation, while the lengthier suras are made up of collections of revelations from both the Meccan and Medinan periods.
Each sura begins with a listing of its title, the number of verses it contains, the venue in which its particular revelations were received, and its placement in the order of suras. This method of compilation allows for certain sections and narratives to be presented as unified wholes; for that reason, Yūsuf (the 12th sura, the Qurʾānic version of the Joseph narrative) has long been a favourite object of study by Western scholars. However, in the context of a history of Arabic literature, it is important to recognize that the Qurʾān’s oral origins and its modes of compilation led to the emergence of a text in which revelations from different periods are interwoven. As a result, revelations devoted to a single topic may be dispersed among several different suras. Since the Qurʾān plays such an enormously important role as a model for Arabic literary discourse, this feature of the text is of central importance.

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