Although poets like Adunis and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati used Sufism as part of their poetics in the 1950s, the interest in al-Niffari, Ibn Arabi, and al-Hallaj remained limited to images and lexicon. Both poets rarely explore the Sufi experience whereby the ego-self gets obliterated in the encompassing love of the Divine. Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim focuses on the Sufi as the enraptured lover, whose new being is regained through annihilation in the Divine Beatitude. Interrogating modern poetry on the base of the failure of poetics to capture a disembodied lexicon free from the material burden, Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim argues that Sufism can function as a liberating force in modern poetics. In his book-length study of al-Bayati, he interrogates the modern neglect of the metaphysical as a secular positioning that alienates poetics and stifles its potential for expansion in the transcendent. To sustain his advocacy of an intimate knowledge of the Sufi experience, Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim wrote Mutasawwifat Baghdad (Sufis of Baghdad) to demonstrate to writers not only the power of Sufi lexica, but also how a seemingly finite space engages a Sufi who nevertheless soars high in the infinite. In this presentation, I argue that Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim’s writing on Sufism brings an invigorating element in Iraqi intellectual thought that was dominated for long by secular politics.

A Genealogy of Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim’s Theorem It is almost impossible to draw a map of Arab intellectual thought without taking into account dynamic participants who contributed to the makeup of this thought. Writers and thinkers across the Arab region have been aware of each other’s cultural production, and on many occasions exchange ideas in meetings, correspondence, rejoinders, and letters to editors. In his book Mafhum al-Hurriyyah (The Concept of Freedom, 1983) the Moroccan intellectual and thinker Abduallah al-Arwi draws on Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim’s book Al-Hurriyyah wa al-Thawrah al-Naqisah (Freedom and the Imperfect Revolution, 1971). He argues that the latter’s thought reminds him of the young Karl Marx and his emphasis on freedom as a dynamic in revolution. Aziz al-Sayyid Jasims’s concern with freedom remains a constant throughout his writings. Even when he tries to elude censorship through historical writings or critical biographies, his preoccupation with freedom as central to the struggle for justice, remains prominent. His intellectual oeuvre displays a three-stage evolution: Marxism and nationalism, a shift from party politics and state pragmatics to individual freedom and democracy, and a move towards faith as the ultimate recourse in a world forsaken by God. This presentation situates Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim’s thought within a highly polarized, and then absolutist Iraqi system (1960-1968, and 1968-1990) and argues how difficult it was for Iraqi intellectuals to produce a sustained theorem under repressive hegemonic discourse.

In this lecture I wish to examine how romantic relationships between men and women are presented in the novels of the émigré Iraqi writer Ghaib Tu'ma Farman (1927-1990), the first author who succeeded in composing a novel in the modern sense in mid-twentieth-century Iraq. Among the issues that the lecture will address are the changes that occurred in the extent and the characteristics of the theme of sexuality and love between Farman's times (the 1950s and 1960s) and the preceding generation of writers, in light of the taboo on treating this subject that had been in effect in Arabic literature until his days. Our basic assumption is that among the Communist writers in Iraq there is a connection between ideology and style, with respect to the choice of linguistic register, as well as between these two factors and the way these writers dealt with topics of love and gender. This assumption will be tested by way of a textual analysis of Farman's novels and short stories, as well as through an inquiry into the rhetorical and thematic devices that he uses in order to violate the norms that were customary in the conservative society from which he came. A number of books and papers have been written on Farman, but so far no one has dealt systematically with how he treated the topics of love and gender in his oeuvre as a whole. The present study's contribution consists of using his works as a prism in order to examine this tripartite connection in his writings, to wit, the combination of political and social ideology, language, and issues of love and gender.

Known simply as the “Poets of the South”, the members of Shu‘arā’ al-Janūb, including ‘Abbās Bayḍūn, Shawqī Bizīʿ, Muḥammad ʻAlī Shams al-Dīn, Jawdat Fakhr al-Dīn and Ḥasan Abdallāh, are credited with giving voice to the underrepresented southern borderland of Lebanon that had been shrouded by Israeli occupation for over two decades until its liberation in May 2000. In an attempt to find a language of memory distinct from dominant urban-centered narratives, this counterhegemonic school of poets proposed alternative memories of war and occupation in South Lebanon reminiscent of Iraqi poetics of resistance. While the poetry of Shu‘arā’ al-Janbūb culled its commemorative language purposefully from the lexicon of the nasīb with a rhetoric that initially appears conservative, it latently transforms the classical Arabic tradition of contemplating ruins into a contemporary struggle against forced migration, war, and oppression. As ‘counterhegemonic emergent forms’, this school of poetry can arguably be viewed as Gramsci’s transformative agents by reinvigorating the discourse on the south. Part of the larger project of this subaltern movement of poetry was an attempt to carve a space of memory with the south inhabiting a central as opposed to liminal position within the nation’s memorial landscape. My intent in this paper is to trace the engagement of these South Lebanese writers with their Iraqi literary counterparts by examining the influence of Iraqi Marxist sensibility on Shu‘arā’ al-Janūb, who although engaged in albeit different cadre of struggle, nevertheless with recourse to tropes, rituals, mythological and otherwise, stemming from Iraq’s Najaf region. In doing so, this paper attempts to account for a largely understudied genealogy of resistance literature that crosses literary and poetic borderlines and simultaneously highlights the comparative poetics of this rural periphery—South Lebanon—which arguably comprises a significant yet understudied narrative strand in contemporary Arabic poetics.