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

Notes

Notes INtroductIoN 1. randel, “Lost in translation,” 16. 2. Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone, 12. 3. Ibid. 4. Herder, Against Pure Reason, 46. 5. Jayyusi, The Literature of Modern Arabia, 10. 6. For more on the importance of literary imagination in public life, see Nussbaum, Poetic Justice; rawls, A Theory of Justice; and Booth, The Company We Keep. While I would not subscribe to the Aristotelian notion that literature ought to adhere to principles of ethics, lest it corrupt the soul and society, I do agree with these authors that the act of interpreting cultivates ethics, empathy, and cognitive maturity. 7. the term tradition has many connotations and serves multiple uses, as Ben-Amos observes in his article “the Seven Strands of tradition.” In this study, I use it in three senses pertinent to the context: tradition as canon (selected ancestral knowledge considered authoritative), tradition as process (transmitted and transferred), and tradition as performance (summoned and reformed in performance). I propose to circumvent the supposed dichotomy 210 between tradition (stable) and performance (changing) by following Hymes’s lead, which stresses the importance of performance for the aesthetic enjoyment of tradition (“Breakthrough into Performance,” 19). As a matter of practice, I have systematically avoided four senses: tradition as mass (inherited baggage passively transmitted), tradition as culture (synchronically shared traits without link to the past), tradition as langue (an abstract but malleable code or a system of rules by which people generate cultural performances), and tradition as lore (short narrations). See also Glassie, “tradition,” for comments on tradition in contrast to “heritage,” “history,” and “culture.” 8. the oldest continuous literary traditions emerged from the great agrarian-trade imperial systems of the world that prospered along the major river valleys in the temperate zones of Africa and Asia. the two most comparable examples are the chinese (wenyan wen) and Sanskrit traditions, which are about a millennium older than the Arabic literary tradition. they differ from Arabic in other important ways, though. Both wenyan wen and Sanskrit have historically been considered distinct languages, not dialects or registers, compared to the vernaculars and colloquials of their respective social contexts . classical literary Arabic, however, figures as a dialect or register compared to various Arabic colloquials. the continuity of literary Arabic is worth noting, not for any argument of ethnocentric pride, but rather for the humanistic puzzle posed by a literary tradition that remains relatively comprehensible across three continents and over a millennium and a half. 9. throughout this book, several studies on the marzēaḥ (found in the Near East, beginning in 1400 B.c. at ugarit) and the symposion (found in ancient Greece) influence the course of the discussion. For the marzēaḥ, I have relied on Matthäus, “Greek Symposion and the Near East”; Beach, “Samaria Ivories, Marzeah, and Biblical text”; carter, “thiasos and Marzeah”; Bordereuil and Pardee, “Le papyrus du marzeah”; Ackerman, “A Marzeah in Ezekiel 8:7–13?”; and Greenfield, “Marzeah as a Social Institution.” For the symposion, I have relied on Murray, “Symposion as Social organisation”; Murray, Early Greece; Murray, Sympotica; Steiner, “Private and Public”; McNiven, “Watching My Boyfriend with His Girlfriend”; and Pope, “divine Banquet at ugarit.” Much of what we might consider Hellenic or Hellenistic was influenced by perpetual ties with the Near East during the Geometric period (900–700 B.c.) and Alexander the Great’s (d. 323 B.c.) expansion of empire eastward into the Middle East and central Asia, where major principles of social organization and ritual emerged in the fourth millennium B.c.—more than three thousand years before classical Greece. My aim in this book is to highlight Greek and Middle Eastern studies that illustrate the Notes to Page 4 211 interconnections between Greece and the Near East both after and before Alexander. See also Kuhrt and Sherwin-White, Hellenism in the East. 10. In this study, I use myth, mythology, and mythic to characterize a type of narrative or group of narratives that relate or allude to the activities of a culture ’s sacral figures.As one definition has it, “these narratives are the product of communal and (often) sacred impulses to sanction and reflect the cultural order existing at the time of their creation . . . [and] they arouse . . . largescale beliefs concerning either their veracity or meaningfulness” (Vickery, New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms). In addition, the category of myth is important in the realm of...