In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

217 Notes no t e s t o t h e i n t roduc t ion 1. For relevant discussion, see Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, pp. 8–­ 15. I use the terms Western, Eastern, and Orient with a full appreciation of the fact that they are imperfect constructions and unstable containers. To avoid distracting the reader, I have chosen not to encase them in scare quotes throughout the text. The analysis I provide of American Orientalism over the course of the book puts terms such as Western, Eastern, and Orient under enough duress to disturb any sense of their being transcendental markers of cultural identity or even of geography. 2. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, p. iv. 3. For the most recent work on transnational approaches to American literature, see Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, eds., Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature; and Caroline Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies; and Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts, Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Literature. 4. Important work is being done in this direction by Anouar Majid. See We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities. 5. Much has been written about the influence of Judeo-­ Christian ideologies on the discursive creation of the United States, and an understanding of the figure grounded in Judeo-­ Christian texts has informed many interpretations of American culture. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad; Giles Gunn, Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination ; R. W. B. Lewis, Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition; F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness; Kenneth Murdock, Literature and Theology in Colonial New England; David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. 6. Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life, p. 5. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. Wail Hassan, introduction to Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, by Abdelfattah Kilito, p. x. 218 Notes 9. For the turn toward global approaches to American Studies, see Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time; and Dimock and Buell, Shades of the Planet. 10. Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, p. 87. 11. This condition is attested to by the fact that both al-­ Jurjani and al-­ Ghazali were native Persian speakers but wrote their main works in Arabic. 12. For discussions of al-­ Jurjani’s significance in regard to his categorization of figurative language, see Michiel Leezenberg, Contexts of Metaphor; and Kamal Abu Deeb, Al-­ Jurjani’s Theory of Poetic Imagery. Also useful is the commentary in Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, especially chapter 2. For the text of Asrar al-­Balagha, see the excerpt in Vincente Cantarino, Arab Poetics in the Golden Age, pp. 157–­ 76, and the complete translation in Abd al-­ Qahir Al-­ Jurjani, Kitab Asrar al-­Balagha, translated by Helmutt Ritter. For the original Arabic, see Abd al-­ Qahir al-­ Jurjani, Asrar al-­Balagha, edited by Al Imam Al Sheikh Mohammad Abdo and Mohammad Rashid Ridah, or the version edited by Mohammad Abdul Mu’nem and Abdul Aziz Sharif (Beirut: Dar al Jeel, 1991). 13. Abu Deeb writes that “this fundamentally new concept of the relation of the image to poetic creation and composition is manifested in the fundamentally different approach to the analysis of the nature of the image adopted by al-­ Jurjani. Departing from the methods of the rhetoricians, he devotes his time and energy to trying to discover how an image operates in a poetic formulation, rather than producing logical or rhetorical definitions” (Al-­ Jurjani’s Theory of Poetic Imagery, p. 66). 14. Al-­Jurjani, Asrar al-­Balagha, pp. 116, 118. Adonis, Introduction to Arab Poetics, p. 46. 15. See Baha’ al-­ Din Khorramshahi, “Ta’wil”; and Maulana Syed Abu A’la Maududi, The Meaning of the Qur’an, pp. 14–­ 15. 16. This translation is from Rashad Khalifa, Qur’an: The Final Testament. There are, of course, other translations which emphasize that only God knows the secret meaning of these verses, by marking a break after “only God knows the true meaning of these verses.” Abdullah Yusuf Ali provides a good example of an alternative translation that changes the meaning of the passage: “He it is Who has...

Share