Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350-1850.

Beard, Michael

Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350-1850. Edited by JOSEPH E. LOWRY and DEVIN J. STEWART. Mizan. Studien zur Literatur in der islamischen Welt, vol. 17,2. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2009. Pp. vii + 431. [euro]68.

There is an awkward stage in the life of Arab culture when a brilliant early career gives way to a decline in energy and imagination. It becomes sullen and uncommunicative, exhausted, interested only in fashion, and assumes a style characterized by cliches, restatement, and excessive ornament. That is the traditional narrative. The introduction to this anthology lists some of the terms that the critical tradition has used to characterize that period: "steady decline," "absence of creativity," conventionality, loss of vigor, a period whose poetry is characterized by "empty panegyrics," "celebrations of trivial occasions," a period whose literature is lifeless, passionless, conventional, and hackneyed. The editors add that H. A. R. Gibb's Arabic Literature: An Introduction (1963) makes the point in the table of contents, organizing his chronology in a comical sequence: The Golden Age (A.D. 750-1055), The Silver Age (A.D. 1055-1258), and The Age of the Mamluks (A.D. 1258-1800), "Mamluk" being evidently a synonym for "Brass Age."

This work, the second volume in the series "Essays in Arabic Literary Biography," deals with exactly that period. It cannot help but address the issue. The decadence paradigm is, as the editors acknowledge, an unexamined opinion, imposed on us without proof. We may accept it out of inertia, or we may sense that its purpose is to flatter the European observer, a self-serving ideology: "The trajectory of decline exhibits a clear inverse correlation with a traditional periodization of pre-modern and modern European history that suggests ascendancy: dark ages, middle ages, renaissance enlightenment, industrial revolution, modernity, and so on. The narrative of decline is thus more the triumphalist self-narrative of the conquerors and colonizers. ..." With balance unusual on such occasions, the editors add, "On the other hand, the decline paradigm was also employed by indigenous writers to describe the trajectory of their own cultural history" (p. 8).

The decline thesis is questioned widely. (It was the subject of a conference at Washington University in St. Louis in October 2010.) The issue is unavoidably on the reader's mind, but what attracts notice is something else: the volume's consistent intelligence and the depth of its scholarship. It is a reference work of thirty-eight biographical essays, each on a literary figure from the five hundred years in question. The contributors are the major voices in the field. The entries represent a wide spectrum of historical moments and geographical settings, with a preference for unfamiliar figures. (The introduction explains that Ibn Khaldun, d. 1406, and al-Magrizi, d. 1442, are absent because they were already well studied.) The choice of biographies demonstrates a centrifugal process in Arabic culture, a response to political decentering (e.g., "the disappearance of the Arab ruling class," p. 6) and to the spread of Islam and of Arabic culture across geographical and class boundaries (that same process whereby Latin spread across Europe in late classical times or English across the globe in the twentieth century). Thirty-eight entries may seem a small, selective number, but there is still a sense of plenitude. The reader does not miss Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi. There are Christian writers (Jirmanus Jibril Farhat, d. 1732; Makariyus Ibn al-Za'im, d. 1672; and his son Bulus, d. 1669), writers in India (Azad Bilgrami, d. 1786, who migrated to India from Iraq), and representation from the very far east, Shams al-Din al-Samatra'i, "The Sumatran," d. 1630, who wrote in Malay as well as Arabic. Among the biographies of individuals is an entry on the Banu Hilal (by Dwight Reynolds), a tribe whose migration to North Africa has some historical significance ("they are now widely seen as having been crucial to the assertion of Arab culture and language beyond the coastal littoral into the hinterlands and the mountainous regions," p. 79), but which attained notoriety through the Sirat Bani Hilal, the epic that spread widely through the Arab world in the period of the anthology. The reader who (like this reviewer) comes to this collection in ignorance may be surprised to find that Shaykh al-Nafzawi, known as the author of the widely read Perfumed Garden seen so frequently in remainder bins in the Burton translation, really existed (d. 1440). If we have a taste for the big names, we have an observant ten-page life of Ibn Battuta (d. 1368?).

This collection is a magnificent example of what historical and cultural scholarship can be. The format is so demanding (with an exhaustive bibliography of the writer's works, translations, biographies, and references) you wonder how an individual could master it, or, indeed, how many libraries you would have to visit to track down all those obscure works, rare editions, and manuscripts. (The bibliography of al-Suyug's works takes up more than seven pages.) It is a testimony to the science of biography in the Arab world, its sophistication and accuracy, how much information and judgment have survived. That wealth of information could have been a recipe for dry scholarship that simply recounts facts (the writer studied at this center of learning, was helped by that patron, went on the pilgrimage at such and such a date ...), but again and again we find the contributors speaking in a personalized, readable voice to make the account come alive. One of the triumphs of this collection is to create an interest in the subject among readers who were previously innocent of the period. Dwight Reynolds approaches Ibn Zamrak (d. after 1393) by the inscriptions from his poetry on walls and fountains at the Alhambra Palace (pp. 229, 233-34). In the entry on 'Ala' al-Din al-Ghuzuli (d. 1411 or 12), Michael Cooperson appends a critical interpretation of each selection of poetry cited ("In this poem, the three metaphors are broken up ...," p. 109). Spare summations of the subject's personality can refocus a world of detail: "Piety and greed," Marina Tolacheva writes, "mixed in Ibn Battutah's personality with vanity and desire for the good things in life" (p. 131); Devin Stewart on Ibn Hijja (d. 1434): "he was endowed not only with intelligence and talent but also with a colossal ego" (p. 142); "About places and dates he seems to have been almost obsessive," writes Everett Rowson on al-Safadi, d. 1363 (p. 344). Al-Khafaji (d. 1659), Geert Jan van Gelder observes, "is apparently unable to tell a story" (p. 258).

The best comment on the paradigm of decadence as this volume represents it is in the introduction, and it is admirably measured:

  Whether the resulting picture will lead to a revised view of the
  aesthetic qualities of the literature of these centuries is unclear
  (it well might). Yet the attempt in this volume to survey authors'
  literary production, situate it in local and also in larger contexts
  and identify the factors that conditioned the literature produced by
  individual writers during these centuries is long overdue. (p. 2)

One reason the judgment cannot be applied directly, out of our own taste or our sense of fairness, is that a definitional question still has not been articulated. What constitutes value in literature? What constitutes imagination? Can we consider dictionaries, philological commentary, commentaries on previous commentaries imaginative? How about travel writing? How about maqamat? Some contributors have taken it as part of their mission to make the argument prematurely.

Peter Gran introduces his biographical notice on Hasan al-'Attar (d. 1835) with a manifesto: "The material has so far confounded attempts to make of it a period of decline or a period in which one finds geniuses in a dark age" (p. 61). Thomas Bauer ends his biography predicting the future reputation of Jamal al-Din Ibn Nubata (d. 1366). It is protective and memorable:

  The twentieth century saw the nadir of 1bn Nubatah's posthumous fame.
  Popular, originally Western ideas according to which poetry has to be
  an immediate, unsophisticated expression of one's "true" feelings,
  the prejudice of Arab intellectuals, according to which innovations
  should be sought in the allegedly superior culture of the West rather
  than in the tradition of Arabic letters, and the colonialist idea of
  a period of stagnation and decline of the Orient during the period in
  question, led to near-complete neglect of Ibn Nubatah's prose and
  poetry. (p. 201)

Perhaps the most interesting comments on the paradigm of decadence are those cited by the subjects themselves. Van Gelder summarizes a letter from a1-Khafaji (d. 1659) to an unnamed friend: "The times are bad: noble people sink, the scum rises, floating like corpses on the sea's surface, as the ninth-century poet Ibn had said ..." (p. 253). Ibn Mdsum (d. 1708) argues the other side eloquently: " ... the lateness of the age does not preclude precedence in excellence. After all, the downpour comes after thunder, attainment after promise, and the arrangement of numbers grows the greater they become, and even increases" (p. 178).

There is a tantalizing unspoken narrative present in tactful hints. "The pressures of publication, previous commitments and heavy workloads conspired to keep a few originally planned subjects from appearing in this volume" (p. 9), naming five literary figures whose entries evidently never arrived. It is not common for editors to acknowledge the book this collection might have become, or to manage it without criticizing the no-shows. (Editors are rarely so forgiving.) As for the contributors who made the deadline, the concluding comment in Lowry and Stewart's introduction, right before the acknowledgments, gives the reader another glimpse of the editorial process: "It should be noted that many of the contributors to this volume, left to their own devices, might have opted for a less homogenizing organizational framework, one dictated more by the material itself and by individual contributors' own interpretive choices" (p. 10). If the unspoken conflict here between contributors and editors is as serious as I suspect, we can commend the process of negotiation as well as its scholarship.

MICHAEL BEARD

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA