Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poetry, Public Performance, and the Presentation of the Past

Conclusion

189 Conclusion This book began in response to the need to place Arabic literature in conversation with the humanities, to make each more relevant to the other. From academics in the humanities (and from the educated public ), I have at times encountered a dismissal ofArabic literature’s value to learning and self-cultivation. Usually, however, academics and the educated public seek out Arabists to make the case for that value. More than a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville affirmed this impulse in American society. In his Democracy in America he argues that bustling democracies cannot abide the predictability of overly familiar forms, themes, and genres, noting in effect the link between aesthetics and power.1 While not dismissing the comforts of the familiar, de Tocqueville argues that democratic societies by their structure and character crave the novel, the new, the foreign, for these challenge expectations and sensibilities, thus questioning established powers and the order of the day and enabling new forms of influence and order to emerge in response to immediate demands. De Tocqueville was elaborating on an ongoing, nineteenth-century fascination in Europe and America with the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , the Thousand and One Nights, and the Gulistān of Saʿdī, as part 190 Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages of “the West’s” discovery of “the Orient,” which included astonishing new discoveries of antiquities from Ancient Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. New ideas and forms from “the East,” however orientalized , stylized, and performed, breathed new influence into an increasingly more cosmopolitan “West,” emerging since the late medieval period from regional isolation. In the following century, the same need for the unfamiliar spurred a hunger for the works of Kahlil Gibran and, most recently, the spiritual poetry of Rumi. Words from these literary masterpieces still adorn public buildings in the West and, in book form, continue to serve as gifts for graduation and other coming-of-age milestones. According to the editors of Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry, Gibran’s The Prophet was a bestseller during the twentieth century in America, second only to the Bible, and was the mainstay of its publisher , Alfred A. Knopf.2 The popularity of these works today suggests America’s continued need to reach out to the unknown and assimilate it. An argument can be made that the people and humanities of the Middle East have become an inextricable thread in the fiber of Western culture. Beyond reasons such as the romance of “the other” or the simple utility of language, Middle Eastern literatures give students access to nearly 450 million speakers, a booming youth culture, an emerging middle class and its markets, traditions of religious thought and practice, and, most relevant here, centuries of cultural heritage. It appears that the humanities in America and the self-cultivating public remain receptive to Middle Eastern literatures and scholarship. One challenge for scholars of the Middle East is certainly to support demand and to justify our value to our institutions or to society, but more important, our challenge is how to present and teach these cultures in a way that promotes an engagement with the other. My own response to that question in teaching and researching premodern Arabic literature is to employ methods of analysis from the broader humanities that already enjoy credibility and circulation, such as those from anthropology, folklore, Homeric studies, and performance theory. The aim is not to be trendy but to draw on those principles of analysis, as well as their currency (and familiarity) in academia, to makeArabic literature more accessible and engaging to a broader public. I interpret Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Thousand-andSecond Tale of Scheherazade,” mentioned in the Introduction, as an ex- ample of how not to teach or analyze literature. Poe presents a comichorri fic alternate ending for Shahrazad, where the king dismisses every single wonder presented by her with an annoying degree of nit-picking that enables him to avoid considering wonders altogether. Parodying an orientalist conceit of his time, Poe wryly presents the source of his newly discovered ending: Lo and behold, it is an “Oriental” text “scarcely known at all, even in Europe” called the Tellmenow Isitsoörnot .3 And the king echoes a false dichotomy between the true and the wondrous, as he refuses to consider the broader significance of the scientific as well...