Misunderstood

The article argues the elasticity and continuing relevance of philology, and orientalist philology in particular, by considering two textual threads where philology and orientalism intersect. It reads twentieth century scholarship on a medieval Andalusian poetic form, the muwashshaha, against the genealogy of a modern text that negotiates between Arabic and western cultural spheres ? the blues standard ?(Don?t Let Me Be) Misunderstood? ? in order to evaluate philologists? responses to the medieval past and to the need to explicate and defend the relevance of the philological project to modernity. In particular, it engages the peculiar difficulties that face orientalist philology in the present moment, and contributes to the construction of a self-conscious philology able to articulate its relevance both to contemporary intellectual history and to its own disciplinary history.