This paper analyzes how the split timescapes of Arabic popular epics, or sīras, project an uncanny vision of the pre-Islamic past in order to displace the present and envision the future. The sīras are commonly understood to have two primary temporal layers: the context of narration, framed in text through refrains such as qāla al-rāwī (“the narrator said…”), and the setting of the tale itself. Several sīras, including tales of ‘Antara ibn Shaddād, Yemen’s Tubba‘ dynasty, and Hamza ibn ‘Abd al-Muttalib, moreover, have been described in secondary scholarship as rendering these figures “proto-Muslim'' in what is often presumed to be an editorial concession to contemporary sensibilities. Heroes evince pious attitudes even prior to the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, though not under the label of hanīfiyya as found in traditionist sources. It is notable, then, that these heroes often contend not only against the constellation of moral ills implied by jāhiliyya–polytheism, sexual vice, corruption of authority, consumption of intoxicants–but also against ills that have endured into the narrator’s present, particularly the paradox of Islam’s universal promises being distributed unevenly along lines determined not by faith, but by birth and circumstance. What critical work might this dual projection of both godfearingness and its worldly hindrances onto a maligned past do? I answer this question by thinking in reverse, reading jāhilī heroes not as preternaturally enacting Islam’s morals and precepts in pre-Islamic times, but as confronting the ongoing societal dilemmas of the audience’s Islamic context as if they are long past. Following the epics themselves, I focus particularly on dilemmas of hierarchy and exclusion along lines of class, gender, and racialized kind. In view of Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterization of space and time as co-constituted through genre, as well as Charles W. Mills’ articulation of the “chronopolitical” power that actors claim and exercise in narrativizing what time means for whom, I argue that a series of popular epics fashion a “jāhilī chronotope.” In so doing, the texts present a moralized portrait of time as at once progressive and cyclic, with successive generations of heroes necessary to continuously mobilize the gains made by their forebears towards further piety, expansion, and cohesion within the Muslim community. Reading these texts’ approaches to time as inventive and directed rather than blandly conciliatory, I demonstrate that ‘Abbasid- and Mamluk-era folk cultures participated in these eras’ broader discourses of temporality, advancement, and aspiration.

The Abbasid Golden Age has been under scrutiny for some time: was it a product of the 19th-century nahḍa, or was it truly a golden age? This question is usually answered by either analyzing Abbasid literature (e.g., S. Stetkevych) or by analyzing nahḍa discourse (e.g., M. Cooperson). In this paper, I propose a different approach to tackle this issue. How did post-Abbasid but pre-nahḍa litterateurs view the Abbasid period? Did they read Abbasid literature? Was it unparalleled in their eyes? I discuss the Ottoman-era poet Manjak Bāshā’s (d. 1080/1669) muʿāraḍāt (s. muʿāraḍa, emulation/imitation) of the Abbasid poet Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī’s (d. 357/968) Rūmiyyāt (Poems on/of Rūm). Abū Firās wrote his famous Rūmiyyāt while imprisoned by the Byzantines (the people of Rūm); Manjak Bāshā finds in these poems fodder—motifs, affects, maʿānī—to convey his own estrangement from the lands of Rum. Of Turkish origin but born and raised in Damascus, he moves to Istanbul to seek patronage, but he fails. While in Istanbul, he feels estranged, uprooted, even “imprisoned,” and so writes poems echoing Abū Firās’s Rūmiyyāt. I argue that Manjak Bāshā is intimately familiar with—a close reader of—Abū Firās. What does this tell us about the role of Abbasid literature in pre-nahḍan Ottoman Syria? Is this a unique case of return to the Abbasid period in later literature? By way of conclusion, I zoom out of this example, and offer some preliminary observations about the role Abbasid literary production played in later periods, arguing for a certain degree of continuity in the literary tradition, as opposed to a break—a break that is usually attributed to a shift in the structures of literary patronage, the emergence of a new literary class, and the subsequent rise of new poetic styles. While these changes are undeniable, and left their mark on “postclassical” Arabic literary culture, I argue that “classical” Abbasid literature’s sway held firmly throughout Arabic literary history. Ultimately, this leads us to approach, with new eyes, the question of the “post” in “postclassical”: is it suggesting that later Arabic literature is supplementary or secondary to “classical” Arabic literature, or is it—or rather can and/or should it be—simply a convenient temporal marker?

Mining the Arab cultural and intellectual past was part of the project of the Nahda during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, the aspects of Arab cultural and literary history that were emphasized, omitted, or critiqued by various Nahdawi intellectuals demonstrates the spectrum of political agendas in their present. Furthermore, the present scholarly emphasis within the Nahda has been on the Eastern Mediterranean, excluding the eastern Arab lands of Iraq, and even during the Nahda, Iraqi intellectuals sensed a cultural preference toward the economic hubs of Cairo, Beirut, as well as the Ottoman imperial capital, Istanbul. This paper examines two engagements with time in the Iraqi Nahda, both made possible because of its connection to the discourse of the Eastern Mediterranean but also due to its physical distance from it and social composition. The first engagement is the Baghdadi M. Fahmi al-Mudarris (Müderris-zâde Mehmed Fehmi) and his translation of Arabic literary history into Ottoman Turkish during lectures given at Darü’l-funûn in Istanbul in 1913. Al-Mudarris was not only translating pre-modern Arabic poetry and prose, but also, since he was basing his discussion of these texts on other Nahdawi framings, like those of Jurji Zaydan, Sulayman al-Bustani, and Louis Cheikho, he was translating the Nahda discourse into Ottoman Turkish. In particular, I focus on his acceptance of the “Semitic Wave Theory,” and this historical linguistic theory about pre-Islamic Arabian migrations spreading the Arabic language takes on new meaning in the Ottoman Empire of the 1910s, especially when exposed to a new, non-Arab audience, in Ottoman Turkish. The second engagement is the perception of temporal stagnation as reflected in the neoclassical poetry of Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi and Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi. While Ottoman bureaucrats sent to the Iraqi provinces complained about its backwardness and the lazy inhabitants, the Iraqi Nahdawis performed a more nuanced complaint of stasis. After having visited eastern Mediterranean cities, witnessing what Baghdad lacked, and recognizing the Ottoman administration was to blame for that, al-Rusafi and al-Zahawi composed verses that invoked periodizations of past golden ages and possible resurrections of greatness. Their political critique in the form of lamenting the present stagnation also underscores what it means to be out of time. Al-Mudarris, al-Rusafi, and al-Zahawi’s turn to translating a historical narrative and portraying political critiques as temporal stagnation reflect the broader Nahdawi interest in modern historicism, but also reveal the dis/location felt by Iraqis within the same discourse.

While the concept of shuʿubiyya originally referred to the cultural and political rivalry between Arabs and Persians in the ʿAbbasid era, the term reappeared as a critical paradigm of racial, sectarian, and ideological conflict in modern Iraqi cultural politics. This modern discourse of shuʿubiyya effectively blurred the lines between the racial historical rivalries of Arabs and Persian and the ostensibly “modern” rivalries of sectarianism and nationalism. This paper analyzes the difference between classical and modern modes of shuʿubiyya to ask how and why an idea so strongly rooted in classical history emerged as a critical marker of competing visions of modernity. I argue that the modern shuʿubiyya inscribed quintessentially “modern” values into the historical literary and cultural debate. Moving beyond the chauvinist arguments about the respective merits of different racial and ethnic groups, modern shuʿubiyya invective instead made secular visions of patriotism into core paradigms of communal and ideological conflict. The twentieth-century shuʿubiyya revival has been previously analyzed in both Arabic (ʿAbd al-Hadi al-Fukayki) and English (Sami Hanna and George Gardner), but this paper will change the scholarly debate in three important ways. First, at the theoretical level, by adopting Ussama Makdisi’s critical interrogation of the secular/Islamic dichotomy in his vision of the “modern ecumenical frame” in the Arab world, I show that the shuʿubiyya debates aimed to challenge rather than reinforce primordial racial and sectarian conflicts. Second, at the methodological level, by moving beyond the domain of political rhetoric and sloganeering and toward the domain of poetry, literature, and art, I show that the shuʿubiyya debates were not simply empty tactical maneuvers of partisan politics but instead represented deeply personal efforts to interrogate individual and community relations to modernity and progress. Third, at the historical level, by thinking through the global and comparative implications of the modern shuʿubiyya debates in the context of the Cultural Cold War, I show how the conflict between communism and anticommunism made shuʿubiyya a critical fulcrum in the modern evolution from racial/national to religious/sectarian conflict. The paper draws from a range of historical sources, including literature and art, newspapers and magazines, and archives and memoirs about the shuʿubiyya debates between the late 1920s and early 1960s. Ultimately, my analysis of these sources allows me to show how ideas of lineage and culture so central to the original shuʿubiyya debates were occluded, distorted, or transformed in the ecumenical frame of Arab modernity.