The Weaving of words approaches to classical Arabic prose

The Weaving of words approaches to classical Arabic prose

The object of this collection of essays is to present various approaches to the evolution of Arabic prose in the Abbasid age when the art of writing reached the climax of artificiality under the influence of several cultural factors. While poetry always had the virtue of being the essence of verbal arts among Arabs, prose, for a long time, maintained its role as a major vehicle for transmitting information, presenting historical or scientific material or elaborating theological issues. However, as time passed during the Abbasid age, with all the social and cultural changes it involved, prose was gaining merits similar to those that poetry manipulated in Arabic literature for centuries. The essays focus on types of prose in Arabic literature which evidently demonstrate certain artistic features that can be classified within the framework of rhetoric. This applies to both form and theme. In this volume, the editors are interested in presenting some aspects that pertain to the evolution and the progress of artistic prose, not only as a transmitter of knowledge and information, but also as a genre which was chosen and seen, intentionally, by the authors as a means for achieving a specific purpose through specific stylistic and thematic effects.

Table of Contents

• Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ’s Kalīla wa-Dimma and Boccaccio’s On Poetry: a hybrid poetics and avant-garde hermeneutics — Marianne Marroum   
• Short stories in classical Arabic literature: the case of Khālid and Umm Salama — Jaako Hämeen-Anttila             
• Literary criticism as literature — Geert Jan van Gelder    
• Love in the time of pilgrimage or A lost maqāma of Ibn Durayd? — Philip F. Kennedy            
• Tawqīʻ (Apostille): royal brevity in the pre-modern Islamic appeals court — Beatrice Gruendler        
• The aesthetics of pure formalism: a letter of Qābūs b. Vushmgīr — Everett K. Rowson         
• Rhetorical values in Buyid Persia according to Badīʻ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī — Vahid Behmardi
• The art of entertainment: forty nights with Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī — Lale Behzadi             
• The art of the muqaddima in the works of Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʻālibī — Bilal Orfali   
• The double entendre (tawriya) as a hermeneutical stratagem: a ‘forensic maqāma’ by Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim b. ʻAli al-Ḥarīrī — Angelika Neuwirth.          

Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references.

Series    Beiruter Texte und Studien, 0067-4931 — Bd. 112, Beiruter Texte und Studien — Bd. 112

Language: English
ISBN: 9783899136784
2009, Paperback, 217 pages, 17.0 x 24.0 cm